WHEN THE PHONE RANG ON that hot August morning, William had been gone for a day and a half. Julia was sitting on the couch with Alice in her lap. She was tickling the baby’s stomach. Alice gurgled when she laughed, and it was the best sound Julia had ever heard. It made Julia laugh too, every time. Julia carried Alice to the colorful blanket on the floor and laid the baby down. Then she picked up the phone next to the armchair, and everything changed.
Something inside Julia froze while she listened to Sylvie talk. The news that William had tried to kill himself was so enormous, she couldn’t take it in. Her hands went cold, and when she hung up the phone, she blew on them as if it were the middle of winter. She carried Alice from room to room, even though the baby hadn’t asked to be picked up. She visited each of the four windows in the apartment; she appeared to be looking for something, and yet she wouldn’t have been able to relay the weather outside or the time of day.
Cecelia and Emeline came to her apartment, and Julia told them that she needed time alone to think. They nodded, their faces grave. They’d all been shaken by the idea that William had wanted to leave them, to leave everything. His choice made them feel vulnerable; they’d never considered anything other than a natural death, and he’d pointed out another exit. The world felt scarier in the wake of what had almost happened.
The three women stood by Julia’s door for several minutes.
“How could he have done that?” Cecelia’s voice was hard.
Emeline rubbed her sister’s arm. “I don’t think it makes sense to be angry at him.”
“But,” Cecelia said, “I literally don’t understand how he could give all of this up. He was going to abandon Alice? There’s nothing more wrong in the universe.”
Julia listened to the twins talk the same way she’d listened to Sylvie on the phone. Everything was new to her now; it felt like her prior understanding of the world had been wiped away. She considered each sentence as if she were hearing words for the first time.
She said, “How could I not have known William was so unhappy?” Her husband’s lack of ambition, his unreliability, had turned out to be small symptoms in an ocean of darkness. Julia remained cold with fear. She had scared herself—how clueless she’d been—and William’s darkness terrified her. She had lain in bed, night after night, beside a man who didn’t want to live. Now, when she looked back at even the recent past, the memories were covered by shadows. Her own experience was a lie.
“He’s sick.” Emeline looked miserable. “Sylvie said he’ll probably need to be in the hospital for a long time.”
“Still,” Cecelia said. “No one should give up. It’s so selfish to do that. So wrong.”
Julia found herself nodding in agreement.
When the twins were gone, Julia became aware of her own anger. She felt like she’d caught it from Cecelia, as if the emotion were a cold. She walked from window to window again, her heart beating out questions:
How could William have done something as embarrassing as trying to drown himself in Lake Michigan?
Was life with me so unbearable that he had to not only leave me but kill himself?
Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?
Even though Julia had sworn off solving problems for the people around her, she still had all her skills at her disposal and could have helped. She could have at least stopped him from doing something so dramatic, so hopeless, so humiliating.
When Sylvie appeared later that night, Julia let her sister into the apartment but stayed by the front door again. She couldn’t bear long visits. She needed her home to be occupied by just her and her daughter.
Sylvie apologized. “I don’t know why I went with Kent,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I should have stayed with you.”
She wrapped her arms around Julia and Julia did the same, and the two sisters held tight for a long time, each leaning into the other’s body like buildings that required support.
“What do I do? Do I have to do something?” Julia said into her sister’s hair.
Sylvie had suggested, when she’d called from the hospital, that a mental breakdown erased the note William had written and the check he’d signed over to her. Was that true? Did Julia still have to be a wife, in a worst-case scenario, to a man she no longer recognized?
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “But I’ll find out.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, JULIA decided to deep-clean the apartment. She needed movement. She pushed the coffee table to the side and rolled up the thin living room rug. Wearing Alice in a baby carrier, she dragged the rug down to a massive laundry machine in the basement of the building and wrestled it into the drum. When the rug was clean, Julia pulled a small ladder out of the hall closet and used it to take down the curtains from the living room window. They’d used these curtains in the smaller Northwestern apartment too. They were magenta, made of a thick weave Julia had chosen in the early days of their marriage because the fabric felt grown-up to her. I was an idiot, she thought. A young idiot. She carried Alice and the curtains down to the basement and set the washer to an extra-long soaking time.
She had a hard time sleeping. When she tried to rest, she worried. Anything seemed possible after William had tried to drown himself in the lake she swam in as a child. She thought in if…then scenarios. If William’s hospitalization did somehow nullify the note he’d given her, then Julia would have to go to the hospital eventually and stay married. If she and William divorced—a preferable scenario—then he would still be Alice’s father. He would still want a role in their child’s life. Julia would have to find a way to protect Alice from whatever had sent William into that lake. If William spent time with Alice, then their daughter might find his depression contagious. Julia kept returning to the idea that it couldn’t be good for Alice’s happiness to spend time with someone who saw life as disposable. Life was opportunity, a chest of drawers to open, one after the other, and William had tried to hurl the chest out the window.
At three o’clock in the morning, Julia used the ladder to empty the top shelves of the kitchen cupboards. These shelves were filled with wedding gifts, items too impractical for regular use. A crystal bowl that was absurdly heavy. A set of china teacups, much too delicate to use in a house with a child. Miniature wineglasses, which were intended for some kind of old-fashioned after-dinner alcohol. Brandy or sherry—Julia couldn’t remember which. She filled the sink with soapy water and carefully cleaned each breakable piece, until the sun began to rise in the sky and Alice woke up.
Julia felt trapped: in her apartment, in the strange limbo of her marriage, in her own skin. She was waiting for William to call her, perhaps, and tell her he wanted her back and needed her now. Or for Sylvie to return with the same answer. She was waiting for some clarity on whether she had to be a wife or not. When Sylvie came to the apartment again, a little over a week after William had tried to kill himself, Julia’s younger sister looked so tired she seemed to have aged five years. Her hair was in a ponytail. The skin under her eyes looked bruised.
“Sit down,” Julia said, worried. “You look like you might faint.”
Sylvie shook her head. “William told me to tell you that he doesn’t want you to visit.”
Relief soaked through Julia, and she sank down into the armchair.
“He also said”—Sylvie’s voice was flat, like a correspondent reporting the news—“that he’s giving Alice up.”
“Giving her up?” This term didn’t make sense to Julia, and she thought she might have misheard. “What does that mean?”