William shook his head. He had married out of fear, because he didn’t think he was capable of steering himself into adulthood. He’d needed Julia to be his parent more than his partner. He was ashamed of this, but it was true.
“I didn’t think I would ever find a man, other than my father, who truly understood me. Who would see the way I look at the world, what reading means to me, how I wonder about everything. Someone who would see the best version of me, and make me believe I could be that person.” Sylvie blinked several times, as if trying to hold back tears. Her hands were in fists at her sides. “I thought that type of love was a fairy tale. I thought that kind of man didn’t exist. Which meant I got to feel good about the fact that I had a dream and yet I could stay safe with my sisters.”
Sylvie gave him a long look, and William knew he was in terrible trouble. He wasn’t walking away—he was standing in fire. “I see all of you,” he said, but his voice was quiet.
“I know you do. I knew it was possible when I read your book. And when I held your hand.” She stopped.
He remembered Emeline saying, I’m in love.
“This can’t happen, Sylvie.” William spoke firmly now, from the center of the fire, to make this clear. I was married to your sister, he thought. He wished that when he’d first met Julia Padavano on the college quad, he’d walked away and left her alone. He’d known, even then, that there was something wrong with him; he just hadn’t known what it was or what to do. The eighteen-year-old Julia shone at him like a beacon, and he’d used her brightness to light the path in front of him. “I can leave Chicago,” he said, knowing even as he said the words that if he left the Padavanos, and the university grounds, and Arash, and the basketball team, he would break apart into pieces too small to be put back together. “Look,” William said, desperate now. “There must be other guys. Find another guy. Keep looking.”
“There is no other guy,” she said. “You’re the one.”
“I don’t deserve this.” He meant all of it: this moment, this woman in front of him, her hand in his, because she had crossed the room, and she was holding his hand now. Warmth rushed through him.
“Well, I do,” Sylvie said. And she leaned forward and kissed him.
Sylvie
December 1983–August 1984
The final day in the hospital, when Sylvie held William’s hand and admitted to herself that she loved him, she’d intended to keep the realization to herself. She would limit her contact with him. She would work extra hours at the library, take up new hobbies—what exactly, she wasn’t sure—to busy herself, and, starved of oxygen, the feelings inside her would go away. But that plan hadn’t worked. Nothing worked. The feelings seemed to only expand. In the library, Sylvie’s hands shook while she shelved books. She found she was unable to read, because if she turned her imagination on, she entered not the world of the novel but a room inhabited by William. Her eyes met his, and Sylvie and William silently told each other everything that mattered. She made herself go for long walks after leaving work, to tire herself out for sleep, but each night she climbed into bed and felt her invisible seams strain to the point of bursting.
On Christmas Day, when William surveyed every inch of her apartment except where Sylvie was standing, when his gaze surgically cut around her until she felt, again, like a ghost, she’d chased after him in the snow. She was angry. She planned—to the extent that she planned anything during the bus ride—to show up in his dorm and make him look at her. That’s all she intended to do. But in his presence, gazing at his sweet, sad face and the blue eyes that haunted her dreams, she wanted more. She wanted peace and the ability to lie in bed without feeling like she was going to explode. She wanted to speak the words manacled inside her. She wanted everything, because she could feel the walls they had both erected to hold back their desires, and she could sense the enormous beauty that lay on the far side of those walls.
When they finally kissed, in the middle of William’s tiny living room with snow falling outside, the pressure within Sylvie disappeared. Her body light, she experienced a new kind of joy and meaning. Sylvie thought, This is why we live. She and William held each other and talked: Sylvie into William’s chest and he into her hair. In between sentences and sometimes words, they kissed. Sylvie ran her hands across his shoulders, through his hair. She’d been wanting to touch him for so long that the pleasure almost ached through her, and the closeness of their bodies made it hard for her to concentrate on their conversation. She wanted everything at once. She’d been lonely and fractured since Charlie died. She’d been lying to Julia since she moved out of her and William’s apartment. The evening on the bench had opened William and Sylvie to each other, and she’d tried to run away from that connection, but her efforts to escape had throttled her. In his arms, she was able to breathe deeply for the first time in almost a year.
Neither of them bothered with punctuation, and neither worried that they might offend the other. They simply shared their feelings, which, on some level, each already knew. Sylvie told William how she had felt seen on the bench and had seen him too, in his footnotes, and he told her that he felt an ease with her, a wholeness, that he’d never felt in his life. “We can’t tell anyone,” she whispered, and he agreed. Sylvie told herself that they weren’t breaking the terms of William’s mantra, because there were no secrets between them. Their love and honesty would have to stay inside this room, but this room felt enormous after the confines of Sylvie’s body.
Sylvie imagined her father smiling in approval as she and William sidestepped labels and held each other in the shadows. She returned to his small set of rooms the night after Christmas, and almost every night after that. With William, Sylvie felt free to unfurl. She showed him the scenes she’d written about her life with her family when she and her sisters were young. She told him about the conversation with Charlie behind the grocer’s shop. She delighted in the fact that she could show and tell William anything that came into her head without worrying that he would misunderstand or think her strange. She recited the terrible jokes a library patron—an old man with Coke-bottle glasses—shared with the librarians every afternoon, and some of them were so ridiculous that she and William laughed until they had tears in their eyes. Sylvie was everything with him: silly, sad, inspired, contented in every cell of her body.
“Our relationship doesn’t feel like a relationship to me, anyway,” she said one evening, while he was watching a Bulls game on his small television. She had been sitting next to him, dipping in and out of a novel. The game was turned low, and the door was double-locked, to give Sylvie time to hide in the bathroom if anyone knocked. She slept in William’s room a few nights a week, which involved leaving before dawn and being quiet so William wouldn’t get in trouble.