He sat on the side of the bed, ready for his body to be still. “I never wanted to be a professor.” He paused to see if there was a reaction, then went on. “I never told Julia that I was eating lunch in the Northwestern gym every day and that I was helping Arash with the basketball players. She had no idea how much time I spent in the gym. I didn’t tell her how unhappy it made me that she read what I was writing. That it was more a journal, more for me, than a book.” His head dropped lower. “I didn’t want to have a child.” He closed his eyes, sank into the deepest part of himself. “I didn’t tell her I had a sister.”
There was a gasp. “You had a sister?” Sylvie whispered this, as if the words were sacred, too important to be uttered at volume.
“She died when I was a newborn. From the flu, or pneumonia, maybe. It destroyed my parents. I think they were never able to look at me without remembering her.”
“Oh, William.”
He and Sylvie sat in the same stunned silence. They sat in the unthinkable—William never thought of it—loss that preceded all the other losses. He had never told anyone about his sister, and something blossomed out of the confession. When William closed his eyes, the little girl sat beside him. He had given her substance by telling her story. He was confident that his parents never mentioned her because they couldn’t bear to. If only three people remembered her short story and never spoke it aloud, she was erased from history. William was in this hospital to try to inhabit his own body, his own history. His sister was part of that, but she was also a person in her own right.
“What was her name?”
“Caroline.” He’d never said her name out loud before.
William felt the little girl beaming because she was the subject of so much attention. He could also feel the bright red and yellow color of the leaves outside the window and the heightened emotion of the woman across from him. He’d never had this level of molecular awareness before, never felt so much in a single moment. William had always evaded the pointed spears that emotions threw at him and been quick to smother any uncomfortable sensations. He had a hard time believing that other people were able to stand being alive if it came at them with this intensity.
“I couldn’t have told this to anyone else,” William said. “I don’t know why, but I had to tell you.”
Sylvie looked at him, and he knew they were both remembering that night on the bench, under the stars. She said, “Can I ask you a question?”
He nodded.
“In your manuscript, in the footnotes, you said something like It should have been me, not her. Was the her your sister?”
William stared. “I don’t remember writing that.” How was he still surprised by the secrets inside him? But it was the truth; he’d always known that his parents would have preferred him to be the one who died. “I imagine I meant my sister, yes.”
He looked at Sylvie’s open face, and he knew that he could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge him. He had told her every terrible thing inside him, and she was still holding a pen, ready and willing to write down more.
“I think that’s all,” he said. “Maybe you should tell all of this to Emeline and Cecelia too. These shouldn’t be secrets anymore.” William paused to take a breath. “I don’t think there’s anything else to add to the list. I wasn’t a good husband to Julia. She deserved much better.”
Sylvie shimmered in front of him, and that was how he realized he was crying.
When she was leaving—looking as exhausted as William, as if they had just run a marathon together—Sylvie stopped in the doorway. “You said you didn’t want to be a professor. Did you want to be a professional basketball player?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t good enough, even before the injury.”
“That must have been terribly disappointing,” Sylvie said, and he nodded.
* * *
—
WILLIAM KNEW HE HAD one more thing to say before Dr. Dembia would allow him to leave the hospital. She kept saying, “Just a few more days,” and he understood that he hadn’t said everything. He didn’t understand why he had to say everything, but there were rules to getting well, and he had to follow the rules. The doctor was pleased with the medication levels, and William no longer felt like he was hanging off the fender of a car that sped across town and then hurtled to a stop. His hands were no longer clammy, he could sleep at night, and there were moments of calm. He was learning the difference between calm and disconnected and was working to make his days more the former than the latter.
Arash visited and gave William a stern look. “Remember how I told you we keep tabs on our players?”
William nodded.
“Not everyone has good news to share when we follow up, and we try to help out when we can. You think you’re the first one who got in trouble? The coaching staff had a meeting about you.”
“Oh God,” William said, horrified.
“You brought value to our program when you interviewed the players this summer. I can’t guarantee you a job on staff. Obviously being here”—Arash frowned—“is a hurdle to overcome. But the university always needs resident advisers, and your doctor said you could handle the responsibility, so we’re going to get you a room in a dorm. That will cover your living expenses. We’ll see what happens from there.”
William found himself unable to speak. He’d been worrying about where he would sleep when he left here. He had very little money in the bank and no possibilities. The only option he’d been able to think of was to travel to Milwaukee and sleep on Kent’s floor, but that was problematic too, because Kent had a new girlfriend, a fellow medical student. She would understandably not be thrilled to have her boyfriend’s depressed former teammate taking up her space in the room.
“You pity me,” William said finally, and the words were sour in his mouth.
Arash shook his head, hard. “You’re depressed, not crazy. It’s not insane to be depressed in this world. It’s more sane than being happy. I never trust those upbeat individuals who grin no matter what’s going on. Those are the ones with a screw loose, if you ask me. Also, I’m not offering you a job. I’m offering a room.”
William’s brain clung to a new refrain, after the weeks in the hospital: No bullshit and no secrets. He could recognize both now, and when he reviewed what Arash had said, he knew it wasn’t bullshit. The coaches did track their players, and he had given value to the team in the past. The hours he’d spent listening to the boys explain how they’d been hurt meant something—to William, perhaps to the boys, and to Arash, in his mission to keep all the players strong and undamaged. The memory of those hours in the stuffy room—when so much else in his brain was water-damaged or frayed—remained intact, and it was a place William didn’t mind revisiting. When he considered this further, he realized it might be the only memory he had that didn’t cause feelings of regret or dismay. He had been helpful.
“Thank you,” William said.
When he walked the halls that day, he realized that he’d stopped feeling lake water against his skin. The cool liquid no longer tickled up his spine. He had a room to sleep in, which allowed him to believe, for the first time, that there would be a next step.
William wasn’t surprised that afternoon when Dr. Dembia said, “You never mention Alice.”
He was standing; he turned away to look out the window. This was what he needed to speak about. This was what he had to say in order to leave. This was what he had to know in order to start over. This was the last secret, which he could no longer keep.
He said, “I started getting darker—everything was getting darker—before she was born. It wasn’t because of her, but she showed up when nothing made sense anymore, and I had to keep turning off lights in my head to make it through the days. The thing was—” He stopped, looking for the right language.
“Yes?” the doctor said.
“Alice is a lamp. A bright lamp, from the moment she was born. She kind of shines. Looking at her hurt my eyes, and I was afraid to touch her.”
“You were afraid of her light?”
“No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.”
“So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.”
“I have to stay away from her, yes.”
Julia
AUGUST 1983–OCTOBER 1983