“It sounds like you were successful, baby girl.”
That evening, they didn’t have their usual girls’ night, because Julia had a headache and needed to lie down. Alice ate popcorn with extra butter and used the remote to flip from one channel to the next. She put herself to bed, because her mother’s door was closed and she thought Julia might be asleep.
A half hour later, though, Alice’s mother opened the door to her room. “Are you awake?” she whispered from the doorway. Julia was wearing her nightgown, and her hair was down.
“Yes,” Alice said. “It always takes me at least nineteen minutes to fall asleep.” She kept track of this, out of curiosity. She had to think all the thoughts in her head before her body allowed her to sleep.
“I need to know…Are you feeling all right?” Julia said. “Are you sad about car accidents? Or”—she paused—“about anything? I need you to tell me if you’re sad.”
Her mother’s voice sounded so anxious that Alice thought, Am I supposed to be sad? She considered the question. “No,” she said, having made an internal inventory. “I don’t feel sad.”
“Wonderful,” her mother said, in her normal voice. “That’s wonderful. You go to sleep now, okay? I love you, baby girl.” And the door closed, and Julia was gone.
* * *
—
In middle school, Alice hit a relentless growth spurt. It felt like she and her body had been on the same path and then, one random day, her body headed in a different direction at full speed, and Alice was left wondering what was going on. She was always hungry, and Julia had to stock boxes of granola bars to get Alice from one meal to the next. Alice’s stomach would grumble so loudly in class that the kids around her would laugh, and she was mortified. She had stabbing aches in her thighs and lower back, which the pediatrician diagnosed as normal growing pains, but Alice, incredulous, thought, How can this be normal? The only thing that eased her discomfort was lying on the floor with her legs up against the wall, so that’s the position Alice was in most of the time when she was home from school. To her horror, bright-red streaks appeared on her back and upper arms—stretch marks—which the doctor said would fade but never completely disappear.
By the middle of sixth grade, Alice had passed her mother’s height: five feet four inches. Alice felt a new kind of sadness when this happened. Her body was galloping her away from childhood and away from her mother. Quickly, Alice was one inch taller than her mother, then three. She found she could reach items on the top shelf in their kitchen. She looked down at the top of her mother’s head and understood, for the first time, that her mother was just a woman. Julia wasn’t more special or stronger than anyone else, and clearly she would no longer be able to save Alice if she needed saving. If the house was on fire, Alice would have to pick up her mother and run, not the other way around. This reality made Alice feel panicked, and she had trouble sleeping for the first time in her life. She didn’t know what to do.
Alice was aware that her growing height discomfited her mother too. Julia often looked startled when Alice stood up out of a chair or entered the room. They shared a look that said, What is happening? The balance between them had been disrupted; now Julia had to look up at her middle-schooler when she spoke, and Alice looked down at her mother and thought, Can I trust you?
It was at this stage that Alice shifted her investigations from outside their apartment to inside. With this new awareness that her mother was flawed—because all people were flawed—Alice needed to learn Julia’s specific issues so that she could compensate for them when the time came. It occurred to her that maybe this was why a kid needed two parents and siblings. Brothers and sisters were helpful because they could check in with one another to confirm that a parental bad mood or overreaction wasn’t their fault. And in a two-parent home, if one parent’s frailties were revealed, the child could lean on the other parent. It was a backup system, and there was no backup system in Alice’s home. If something happened to Julia, Alice would be on her own. She made sure her mother went for a checkup with the doctor and suggested that they eat heart-healthy dinners, a comment that made Julia laugh, until she realized her daughter wasn’t joking.
When Julia was at the supermarket one day, Alice went through her mother’s closet and drawers. She felt no guilt about this activity. In her mind, this was important research, with life-or-death consequences. If Julia had a secret problem, Alice needed to know about it. She shuffled through items she expected to find: clothes, jewelry, makeup, and toiletries. Alice did find one interesting thing, during her search through Julia’s bedside table: an envelope with a few photographs inside.
The photographs were all at least fifteen years old, and they were of Julia and her sisters. There was a photo of the four sisters with their arms around one another’s shoulders; Julia and Sylvie looked like they were in their late teens. Alice was able to identify the different sisters because, on every visit to Florida, she pored through her grandmother’s photo albums, trying to commit the contents to memory. There was no space between the sisters in this picture; they were pressed together as if they were as comfortable with one another’s bodies as they were with their own. Sylvie’s head rested on Julia’s shoulder, and Emeline and Cecelia were pointing identical smiles at the camera. The sisters looked deeply similar, like they were four different versions of the same person. Alice had never seen her mother look that happy.