“Was I wrong to try to fix everything?” Julia laid Sylvie’s hand on her abdomen. The baby’s movements had become discernible in just the last few days.
Sylvie went quiet, because when the baby did move, the sensation was delicate and impossible to catch unless you were still. She had the thought that Julia’s small bump felt like a drum, but the percussion was inside the instrument. Sylvie felt something and was thrilled: bubbles, perhaps the waving of a tiny hand. “No,” she said. “You weren’t wrong.”
There were moments of quiet, when one sister or the other would almost fall asleep. Only once had they both slept deeply, and William found them curled around each other in the morning. Usually they slid in and out of rest. Sylvie clung to her sister in part because she felt unmoored at night. She was swallowed up by the sky and her blanket and the paper bags holding her clothes. In the darkness, Charlie was missing, and Rose glared in Sylvie’s direction with an anger she didn’t understand but that made Sylvie’s body tighten with guilt nonetheless. Sylvie knew that Cecelia cried at each milestone Izzy reached because she’d lost both her parents and the world her little girl was supposed to grow up in. Rose, brutally silent, two houses away from Cecelia and her granddaughter, was descending deeper and deeper into stubborn grief. The last time Julia had been to see her, Rose sent her away.
Sylvie was almost asleep when her sister said, “After the funeral, William asked to be excused from his teaching-assistant job for the rest of the semester—he told the department that he needed time with me because my father died.”
“That was nice of him.”
“But we need the money. I was counting on it, and he didn’t ask me before talking to his adviser. I’d rather William taught, anyway—this makes a terrible first impression. The professors there are going to think he’s lazy, or soft.” Julia said the word soft as if it was the most damning criticism she could think of.
Sylvie considered this. Her brother-in-law limped around the apartment and smiled at Sylvie to let her know that he didn’t mind her being there, although of course he must. She didn’t feel in a position to criticize him. “Did you tell him any of this?” she said.
“It’s too late to change anything. Will you do me a favor?”
This didn’t need a response, so Sylvie simply waited.
“Will you read his book? He calls it a work in progress. I nagged him until he finally let me read it, and I don’t know what to make of it. At all.” Julia looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “I’ve been avoiding having conversations with him, because I don’t know what to say. You’re the reader—you’ll see what he’s trying to do. And if it has potential to help him? Get a job after graduate school?”
This many question marks from Julia were unusual. We’re all unstitched, Sylvie thought. How much longer can this continue?
“Of course. I’ll read it tomorrow at the library. Or today, depending on what time it is.”
Julia kissed her cheek. “Thank you so much. You can’t tell him you read it, obviously.”
Sylvie tried to read her watch in the dark, a bubble of panic threading up her middle. What time was it? Was it close to dawn? With no sleep, the days took on the emotional cast—and the loud losses—of the night.
* * *
—
SHE STARTED READING AT a library table before her shift, and continued while eating a sandwich at lunch, and picked it up again on the bus on the way to class. Julia had handed her a physical mess: about two hundred typewritten pages held together with a rubber band, inside a paper bag. Sylvie’s first impression was that it was indeed a work in progress. Some chapters started and then stopped in the middle of a paragraph. There were question marks inside sentences, intended for William to answer at some point. There were footnotes filled with suggestions, ideas, and queries from William about what direction the material might go in.
It was ostensibly a book about the history of basketball, and it started in 1891 in Massachusetts, when Dr. James Naismith invented the game—using peach baskets as hoops—in order to keep off-season track athletes in shape during the frigid winter. The book jumped around according to what seemed like William’s whims, but still, it was roughly chronological. It covered the sport’s first league in 1898, Dr. Naismith’s thirteen rules, and the fact that until 1950 all the players and coaches in the official games were white. When the narrative broke off, William was in the middle of explaining the battle between the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association in the 1970s, when the two leagues fought for stars like Dr. J and Spencer Haywood. Interspersed with the history were the stories of specific games: A game in Philadelphia when Bill Russell battled the giant Wilt Chamberlain. A 1959 college game in which Oscar Robertson had 45 points, 23 rebounds, and 10 assists. The manuscript ended in the middle of game five of the 1976 finals between the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. The game went to triple overtime and was the longest finals game ever. William’s writing was solid—clean and unobjectionable—but Sylvie found herself little interested in the main narrative of the story; it was the footnotes and embedded questions that fascinated her. The footnotes seemed to be a conversation William was having with himself. He wrote things like:
Why am I so interested in Bill Walton’s injuries?
Am I just writing to catch up with the present day? Is that enough?
How could my father and so many other men in Boston hate Russell so much? I can’t even bear to write about what happened to his home there.
Where is the science on why these men grow so tall, when their parents are often short?
There’s no thread to this project.
This is terrible, I’m terrible.
Several times, William wrote: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Who am I?
Once, toward the end of the unfinished narrative, a footnote read: It should have been me, not her.
Sylvie reread the footnotes. They felt like an answer key for a different story, not the history of basketball they were attached to. What did It should have been me, not her mean? That statement couldn’t be connected to basketball, could it? Was the her Julia?