Julia went into her room. She lay on her bed and watched Alice in her bassinet. Julia hated that Kent now knew that William had left her. He would think Julia was a victim, even though she wasn’t. He wouldn’t know she was wearing a nice dress. He wouldn’t know she’d done her hair and put on lipstick and called Professor Cooper. He might think she hadn’t been a good-enough wife. She was in the middle of these thoughts when she fell asleep.
When Julia woke, thick yellow light was pushing through the blinds, which meant it was late afternoon. She realized she must have slept for hours. Alice was awake in her bassinet, playing with her feet. Julia scooped her up and kissed her soft cheek. “You are literally the best baby in the world,” she said.
The apartment was quiet when she opened the bedroom door. “Sylvie?”
There was no response, so Julia carried the baby into the living room. She noticed a piece of paper on the coffee table and picked it up.
J—Kent has organized a search party. I have your extra key from the spaghetti pot, so I can let myself back in. I’ll be back soon, I promise.
A search party? The phrase felt needlessly dramatic. Julia shook her head, annoyed and still groggy from sleep. Why had Sylvie gone with Kent? Julia didn’t understand what her sister was thinking, and this had never been the case before. Even when Sylvie had skipped high school classes or kissed boys in the library, Julia understood her reasoning, even if she disagreed with it. But this morning Julia had told Sylvie that her husband left her, and her sister had left her too.
“Why would you do that?” she said into the silence.
Julia fed Alice and then laid her on a blanket in the middle of the living room floor. She walked into the kitchen, aware that she was hungry. She made a sandwich from what was in the refrigerator—tuna salad, lettuce, tomato—and put it on a plate. Julia hadn’t eaten since the day before, and she devoured every bite of the sandwich, licking her fingers at the end. When the sandwich was finished, Julia was still hungry, so she ate an apple all the way down to the core. She drank one of William’s beers that was in the refrigerator. Finally sated, she changed Alice’s diaper and then read her Goodnight Moon. “You’re such a good girl,” she cooed at the baby. Alice stared up at Julia. Her expression was mild, optimistic. She was four months old and had begun to shine love at her mother like a sun. When Julia walked into a room, Alice’s entire body would shake with excitement. Now she reached up to pat her mother’s chin, which was something she did for comfort while she nursed.
There were knocks on the door at six o’clock. Julia looked through the keyhole and then opened the door for Cecelia and Emeline, with Izzy in a stroller. Both women hesitated just inside the apartment, sizing her up. “You poor thing,” Emeline said. “You must be so upset.”
“It’s been a strange day,” Julia said.
“Sylvie didn’t say much on the phone,” Cecelia said. “She was in a hurry. From what I could understand, she seems very worried, far more worried than makes sense to me. I’m sure William is fine. Emmie and I are more concerned about you.”
Tears came to Julia’s eyes. “I appreciate that,” she said.
“I didn’t know things were so bad between you two. Was it because of how he was with the baby?” It was as if this news had turned back Emeline’s biological clock—with her eyes wide in her face, she looked like a child. “How could William leave you?”
Cecelia was studying William’s note, which Julia had handed to her. “I don’t understand any of this: him leaving you; Sylvie and Kent searching for him as if he’s lost. None of this makes sense.”
“I know,” Julia said. “This is unexpected, all of it, but it’s not…” She shook her head. “I can make it work. I’m still young, right? I have a college degree, thanks to Mom, and it’s the eighties, not the fifties. Alice and I will make a fresh start.”
“Bah,” the ten-month-old in the stroller said, and waved at her aunt. Julia crouched down and pressed her nose to Izzy’s, which made the baby chortle with pleasure. Across the room, Alice kicked her feet on her blanket, excited to see her cousin.
Julia felt better with the twins there. Sylvie had made her feel like there was a problem in addition to her husband walking out, and that had been disorienting. But Julia had her feet under her now; she knew that William had ended their marriage at the start of the night, and almost twenty-four hours later, Julia had caught up. They were both done. She believed she would be okay on her own, but to convince herself, she tried to imagine a possible day in a possible future. The future Julia was wearing a gorgeous business suit and sitting behind a modern black desk. Her hair was contained in a masterful bun. Her competence was on full display. I’ll be better than okay, she thought, and felt her face light up. I’ll be amazing.
She saw that Cecelia and Emeline looked concerned. They didn’t trust her optimism in this moment and thought it might be a warning sign of an impending collapse. Julia turned her attention to the baby blanket in the middle of the room. Cecelia had placed her daughter beside Alice, and Izzy was handing the younger baby a toy. Julia remembered the earlier version of herself that had gotten pregnant in order to place her baby beside this one on a sun-soaked blanket. The two babies were meant to be the magnet that drew all the grown-ups together, but in reality they had done the opposite. The babies had arrived, and the adults had scattered. Izzy had started something, the same way Julia had started something with her own birth, but what trajectory had Izzy hurled everyone on? Charlie died, Rose left, and now so had William. Julia didn’t blame the baby, of course; she felt a shot of love while gazing at the dark-haired, dark-eyed child.
“Have you called Mama?” Cecelia asked.
Julia looked at her sister, who had a streak of bright-yellow paint on her right hand, and knew that because Rose had abandoned Cecelia, she would always think of their mother first. “Not yet,” Julia said. “There’s nothing she could do but worry. I wish Sylvie was here, though. She’s acting so oddly.”
“What can we do to help?” Emeline was standing by the window. She was looking for Sylvie, or perhaps William, the same way, as a tiny child, she’d stared out the front window after school was dismissed, watching for her older sisters. “We could make you dinner? Do you want us to sleep here?”
Julia shook her head. She appreciated that Emeline and Cecelia had shown up for her, the same way she’d shown up for Rose in her garden when their mother’s heart was broken. But Julia’s sisters couldn’t take the next steps with her, even though pulling herself together had always meant pulling her sisters to her side. Now being strong meant standing on her own, with her child in her arms. This was a lonely position, even though it felt like the correct one. She was a grown-up, and a mother.
“If Mama was here,” Cecelia said, “she’d drag us all to St. Procopius to pray.”
This statement rang true. The four girls had gone to church and said rosaries for Rose, not God. There had been no way to know this while they all lived on 18th Place, because the church and their mother were so intertwined. Catholicism succeeded because it kept its parishioners feeling guilty and therefore in the pews every Sunday, but none of the Padavano girls had stepped inside St. Procopius since their mother moved away. The girls’ only genuine beliefs, growing up, had been in fictional characters and their games and one another.
When Julia was in middle school, a girl had accused her and her sisters of being a coven of witches. Julia hadn’t known what a coven was and had to look the word up. The definition had delighted her, and she’d hoped the girl was correct. The four Padavano sisters dressed up as witches for Halloween that year, and Charlie gleefully quoted Macbeth at them. Julia, in the height of her girlhood, with a pointed black hat on her head, knew that they were a coven of witches, at least to some extent. She, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline had a shared power, a fierceness.