“I think it means he won’t be her parent anymore. You’d be her only parent.”
Julia turned her head slowly and looked at Alice lying on her baby blanket. She was wearing a pink onesie and kicking her bare feet in the air like she was riding an upside-down bicycle. Her round cheeks were flushed with effort. Julia held the words in her mouth: give her up.
“He seemed to mean it,” Sylvie said. “He used the word ‘forever.’?”
Another word, held inside Julia: forever. She thought, Oh, thank God, though she hadn’t prayed since her father died. But still, the relief was so enormous that she thought again, Thank God.
Sylvie put her hand against the wall as if to steady herself. She looked like she’d been sleeping as little as Julia had.
“You should lie down on the couch in the nursery.” Julia found she didn’t mind the idea of her sister staying in her space now. She no longer needed to hole up with Alice. Julia had felt free after William left her, then trapped when he’d tried to die, and now she was free again. This freedom felt like falling backward onto a plush bed; it was decadent, delicious. “Please rest for a little while, at least,” she said, glad to have the chance to worry about someone other than herself. “You look like a ghost.”
Sylvie offered a thin smile. “I’m okay. I have to work at the library. I just wanted to tell you first.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“I wanted everything to be clear for you,” Sylvie said. “It was too confusing as it was, too unresolved, and I know you hate that. I wanted to know if he really wanted your marriage to be over.”
Julia considered her sister before her, who seemed to have unraveled with Julia’s marriage, with the almost-end of William. Sylvie was suffering in front of Julia now, as if she’d been caught in the gravity field of William’s depression and was unable to fully break free. It seemed to Julia that Sylvie was suffering on her behalf, in an effort to deliver clarity to her sister as a gift. Julia appreciated this. She loved Sylvie for this. But she wanted to make the suffering stop, before her sister was permanently changed: permanently sad and weary. “I need to help you,” she said. “I’ll make you eggs the way you like, before you go.” She took Sylvie’s hand and walked her into the kitchen.
After Sylvie left for the library with slightly more color in her cheeks, Julia put Alice in her stroller and went outside to run two errands. She found herself smiling while she walked, and her face felt oddly stretched, because it had been a long time since she’d smiled this fully. Julia was loose with relief that William wanted nothing to do with her. She hadn’t damaged him, and she wasn’t required to fix him. And, most important, he wanted nothing to do with their daughter. This was unfathomable to Julia—she could barely stand to be out of the baby’s sight—but it eliminated her biggest concern. William had chosen to give Alice up.
Julia decided she would speak to a lawyer as soon as possible, to make everything William had said legal before he could change his mind. She walked to the bank and deposited the check William had given her. Then she bought an answering machine for her apartment so she could manufacture some control over her life. She never again wanted to answer the phone not knowing what terrible news might lie at the other end of the line.
* * *
—
JULIA SPENT HER DAYS packing the contents of the apartment into boxes. This apartment had been intended for a different future, one that would no longer happen, and she needed to move. Julia had imagined a happy family here: a successful professor and a career woman with a perfect daughter. But that future had been doomed, without Julia’s knowledge. Now she felt embarrassed by her own foolishness, while she emptied closets. A new home was imperative so that she and Alice could start over.
One early October morning, the phone rang while Julia was pulling a sweatshirt over her head. It had gotten chilly overnight. She felt irrationally pleased by the drop in temperature, because it indicated a new season, and that meant a small step into her future and away from her disastrous past. When the answering machine clicked on, the caller hung up. The phone rang again immediately, though, and after the beep Rose’s voice said, “Julia Celeste Padavano, you better pick the phone up this instant. How dare you ask your mother to speak—”
Julia sprinted across the apartment, tripping over a box, righting herself, and climbing over a chair that was trapped between two boxes. Alice watched her from her spot on a blanket. First she was wide-eyed, and then she chortled, apparently thinking her mother was putting on a show for her amusement.
Julia was breathless by the time she picked up the phone. “Yes, Mama, I’m here!”
“Julia?” Rose sounded distrusting, as if perhaps the technology was imitating her daughter’s voice.
“It’s me.”
Julia could almost hear her mother nod and resettle into her chair on the narrow balcony. “Is it really you? I would have thought that my daughter would have called me if her husband walked into the lake.”
Julia had asked her sisters not to tell Rose what had happened, and they’d agreed. Julia had called her mother once since William had left, but she’d kept the conversation short and busy with questions about Rose’s life in Florida. Julia had wanted to buy time until the chaos settled, until she knew how to frame what had happened, until she had the strength to absorb her mother’s reaction. But a story this dramatic couldn’t be muffled for long, and the gossip Julia had feared must have ignited in Pilsen and spread all the way to Florida. “Well, obviously I’ve been upset, Mama. And busy—”
“You haven’t been busy. Don’t lie to me, young lady. Emeline tells Grace Ceccione everything, and Grace told me that you’ve barely left your apartment and you haven’t set foot in the hospital. And that you put Sylvie”—Rose said Sylvie’s name with the same incredulity with which she might have said Santa Claus—“in charge of dealing with William’s doctors. I couldn’t believe my ears.”
“Sylvie’s not in charge. You don’t under—”
Rose interrupted her. “You refused to go to the hospital. What was she going to do, leave him there alone, almost dead? William’s an orphan; you know that. He has no other family.”
Julia glanced down at Alice, who was lying on a blanket on the floor. The baby looked drowsy now, which pleased Julia. That meant her child wasn’t hooked up to her mother’s adrenal system. If she was, Alice would be crying right now. Julia wanted to cry.
“William left me, Mama, before he ended up in the hospital. We’re getting divorced. This has been a very hard time.”
“Don’t use that ugly, ugly word. I heard that William left you a note.” Rose said note in a dismissive tone. “Your husband is in the hospital because he’s sick, Julia. Have you spoken to him?”
“No,” Julia said. “He said he didn’t want me to visit. And, Mama, you won’t believe this, but he doesn’t want Alice to be his daughter anymore. He’s giving up his rights to her.”
She expected her mother to be horrified by this statement, but Rose sighed, a noise that sounded exactly like the sighs of Julia’s sisters. The blurring of the sound and the women made Julia rub her forehead. Her mother and sisters were all tied together in her mind and heart, but no one could make Julia trip over the cords that bound them like Rose.
“William’s not well,” Rose said. “No person in their right mind would say that about their child. It’s blasphemy.”