The two women didn’t speak while they maneuvered down the sidewalks. Neither of them could believe they were together. Sylvie wondered what this terrain was doing to her sister’s insides after more than twenty years away. She wondered how William had found the courage to go against her wishes and make a phone call that didn’t serve him at all. They passed Mr. Luis’s flower shop, where the front glass was so crowded with roses that the old man wouldn’t have been able to see, much less recognize, the two sisters. The air was thick with the flowers’ scent.
Sylvie had an interior map of Cecelia’s murals in the neighborhood and spotted one from the corner of her eye, on a side street. Next to her, Julia looked glassy-eyed and overwhelmed and didn’t appear to see it. The painting was of St. Clare of Assisi. Sylvie had seen the mural so often—every day, almost, since Cecelia had painted it—that she felt like the woman was real. More real than the sister next to her, who had appeared out of thin air, who had appeared out of her dreams. The saint felt like an old friend, and Sylvie had the urge to gesture at Julia and whisper to St. Clare: Look who’s here! But she didn’t; she kept walking, wondering if this moment could be true, while the giant woman stared in the sisters’ direction, as if from the dining room wall of their childhood.
Julia
October 2008
Julia felt unsteady on the sidewalk beside her sister; she had the odd sensation of being part of everything she saw. In New York, she walked on the sidewalks; here, she was scattered, like pollen, across the concrete. The hardware store; the small, crummy supermarket; Mr. Luis’s flower shop. The familiar cut of the buildings against the sky. Old ladies, who looked like her mother, pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk. She remembered the girl and the young woman she’d been when she lived in Pilsen; she’d been in such a hurry to succeed, which she’d believed required an ambitious husband and a house that she owned outright. She’d raced toward adulthood, because she’d always wanted to be in charge. Julia could remember her pleasure, as a young girl, in making her sisters line up in height order and follow her around the house.
Julia noticed one of Cecelia’s murals in her peripheral vision. It was a painting of Cecelia’s saint; Julia had first seen the image on Alice’s dorm room wall. The giant woman stared in Julia’s direction, and she sped up her gait. She didn’t want anyone peering into her soul. She didn’t know what was in there; she felt disrupted in every way. She led Sylvie into the Irish bar, which hadn’t changed except for the bartender, who looked impossibly young. The bartenders who had served Charlie had either retired or died. Julia ordered a Scotch and Sylvie ordered a Diet Coke, and they sat in a booth.
“I can’t drink alcohol on my medication,” Sylvie said in an apologetic tone. She looked older, but she still looked like Sylvie. The scattering of freckles, the slight green tint to her brown eyes. Julia felt boulders shift inside her. Looking at Sylvie was like looking in a mirror, and yet not at herself. This was the other part of her, the part that had been hidden for twenty-five years.
“I wasn’t planning to come here,” Julia said. “I told William I wasn’t going to.”
“I thought you hated me,” Sylvie said. “I never would have bothered you. I feel like I should apologize for William calling you.”
“No,” Julia said. “You should apologize for marrying him.”
Sylvie froze for a second, then said, “You’re right. I’m so sorry. I had no other choice.”
Julia took a long sip of the drink, which had been Charlie’s favorite. She wasn’t much of a drinker; when she drank, she usually chose white wine. The Scotch tasted like colors: red and orange and gold and white. She’d made many choices in her life. She believed in choices, if she believed in anything. Set a goal, and then work your ass off to get it. She hadn’t accepted that Sylvie had no other choice when Emeline said so decades earlier, and she didn’t accept it now. But she wasn’t angry about it either. She didn’t know what she was.
After William’s phone call, Julia had stopped being able to sleep. She cobbled together only a couple of hours per night. She gave taxi drivers the wrong address twice on her way to work. She also had the strange sense, from the minute she hung up the phone with William, that her shadow had gotten a mind of its own; a few times she caught it pulling away from her, as if it were trying to escape. After a week of sleeplessness, Julia felt like a Picasso painting—her eyes didn’t match, and her shoulders were at different heights. She did her best to act like herself, but she got so tired that she forgot what she was like. She forgot how to act and called in sick to work. She texted with Alice but didn’t speak to her on the phone, because she had lost faith in her voice.
“I didn’t want to go to work this morning,” Julia said. “So I got into a cab and went to the airport. I only have my purse. I thought, at three a.m., that maybe if I saw you, like William wanted me to, I could go back to feeling normal.”
Sylvie nodded, like this made sense.
“It’s only a two-hour flight,” Julia said. “And please don’t act like what I’m saying is reasonable. I know it’s not.”
“Oh please,” Sylvie said, and for a second Julia saw the Sylvie she used to know, the sister who wasn’t afraid to speak to her, who wasn’t cloaked in guilt. “What’s reasonable? I’m dying, for God’s sake.”
It occurred to Julia that maybe she felt terrible because Sylvie felt terrible. Was it possible that she was falling apart in New York because her sister was dying in Chicago? That there were invisible threads that connected them, which she had been unable to see and therefore unable to sever? Julia felt so confused and fatigued and out of her body right now that when she asked, “How do you feel?” it was like she was asking after herself.
Sylvie spread her hands and looked at them. “I thought I felt pretty good, until I saw you. I have headaches sometimes. I go to sleep at seven some nights.” She leaned forward. “Julia. Are you really here? Maybe I’m hallucinating because of my medication. I’ve imagined you with me for years, but this feels much more real.”
The bar had a low hum—it was midafternoon on a weekday, and the people in here were professional drinkers. No one was messy or loud. It was mostly older men, some of whom might have known Charlie. Every single person looked tired. The act of living had exhausted them. They didn’t know that Sylvie, who was middle-aged but looked younger, wouldn’t have the chance to tire of anything.
“I wish you were hallucinating,” Julia said. “My being here makes no sense.”
Sylvie looked around them, as if assessing what might be real and what might not. “I love this hallucination. Nothing this wonderful has happened to me in a long time.”
Julia sighed. “It’ll become real when you tell William and the twins that you saw me.”