A fog inside Sylvie cleared. She knew that William’s survival required him to live his life on his own terms. Lying to himself, and lying to others, was a departure from solid ground, and Sylvie couldn’t be party to that. William had been right, since their first kiss, that this secret needed to be temporary, and Sylvie had known, since their first kiss, that she couldn’t go back to living without William. He had become oxygen that she needed to breathe. Sylvie just hadn’t been able to merge those truths, until now.
Kent was still walking the floor. “You’ll tell your doctor, William. I’ll tell Arash. Don’t worry, I’ll be casual about it. And he’ll be thrilled—he loves Sylvie. That will take care of the people you spend your days around. Sylvie.” Kent looked at her, to chart her progress. He nodded, seeing that she had caught up. “You have to tell everyone else.”
Sylvie nodded and said, “Yes, Captain.”
* * *
—
SHE TOLD THE TWINS together. She called them to her apartment on a sunny May afternoon. The window was open, and the air traveling inside smelled of spring.
Cecelia was wearing painting clothes—a pair of olive-colored overalls with many pockets for brushes and rags. She was working on a mural on Loomis Street almost around the clock. She would paint during the day but then leave her house again at two o’clock in the morning—Izzy safe with Emeline—and work on the wall until she wanted to sleep again. This was the first mural commission she’d received, from a local arts council, for which she could paint whatever she wanted. Sylvie stopped by to visit her sister on her way to and from the library each day. She knew Cecelia didn’t like to talk about a painting while it was in progress, so she just watched. The outline of a woman’s face and shoulders had appeared on the wall first. In the past week, as the woman was filled in, she’d begun to seem familiar to Sylvie. She looked proud and fierce. Sylvie wondered if the woman was Cecelia herself, or perhaps Emeline or Julia. Today she’d felt a shiver of worry that her sister might be painting her. Cecelia might be revealing Sylvie’s own true self on the wall. If the woman on the wall was Sylvie, then her love and unfurling would be on display for everyone to see. It was this possibility that had made Sylvie stop procrastinating, made her call her sisters and ask them to come over. The idea of being revealed by Cecelia’s brush was unacceptable; she needed to reveal herself.
“We knew something was coming,” Emeline said, “because you’ve been acting weird.” She’d come from the daycare, which meant she looked slightly sticky with jelly and Play-Doh.
“Are you gay too?” Cecelia said with a smile. She sat down next to her sister at Sylvie’s small kitchen table.
Sylvie shook her head. She thought, I wish that was my news. “Would you like water? Or”—she tried to think what she had in her cupboards—“crackers?”
“Spill it,” Cecelia said. “Em has a class tonight and Mrs. Ceccione is watching Iz, so I need to get home soon.”
Sylvie took a deep, gathering breath, as if she were about to dive underwater, and told them the contents of her heart. She started with taking William’s hand by the side of the lake and explained that she was alive with him, a whole circle with him, her whole messy self with him. “When we hold hands…” she said, but she hadn’t been able to finish that sentence with William, and she couldn’t now. Sometimes words were like pebbles thrown against a window, and what she was reaching for was the window itself.
Her sisters were quiet when she was done. There was faint traffic noise from outside. The squealing brakes of a bus.
“Oh, Sylvie.” Cecelia looked tired from lack of sleep, from holding her world together by herself. Izzy had discovered the word no, and the toddler woke up in the morning yelling it from her crib.
Emeline looked away from Sylvie. “Pick any other man on earth, and I’ll be happy for you,” she said. “Any other man at all.”
“I know,” Sylvie said. She hadn’t expected her sisters to be pleased, but their sadness was palpable, and it pressed against her like a heavy blanket. “If I could, I would.”
Emeline’s eyes were pleading. Sylvie remembered sitting with Julia and Emeline at Rose’s dining room table, begging their mother not to move away. Sylvie was the one with the unwanted news now. She was the one her sisters wanted to hold back.
“Julia’s been through so much,” Emeline said. “Can’t you just be friends with him?”
“Could you just be friends with Josie?”
Emeline tightened her lips. Shook her head. It had occurred to Sylvie that she and Emeline had made choices with similar stakes. Sylvie was sitting here breaking her sisters’ hearts because she couldn’t imagine life without William, and William couldn’t survive inside a secret. Emeline had muzzled her sexuality—not admitting it even to herself—until she’d met Josie. “I had to tell her I loved her,” Emeline had said. “Even if it killed me. And I thought it might.” This resonated with Sylvie: This moment felt like life and death. She was breaking open, but still breaking.
“How do you know he’s not with you because he misses Julia?” Cecelia watched her sister while she spoke; she always wanted the truth. “You look like her, you know. It’s unhealthy, Sylvie, isn’t it? It’s like you’re getting in bed with her marriage.”
Sylvie had nothing to say to this. In the beginning she did wonder, when she took off her clothes, if William was disappointed that her breasts were smaller than Julia’s, her hips less curvaceous. Had Julia been a better lover? Sylvie never asked William if he had these thoughts, because she didn’t want to hear the answers.
She was surprised to find that she didn’t feel defensive in response to her sisters; she wasn’t inclined to argue. She thought of the woman Cecelia was painting onto the three-story wall a few blocks away and how the outline was slowly filling with color and detail. Sylvie was filling herself in, discovering and showing her own colors. She could feel the sorrow emanating from her younger sisters like heat off their skin. Sylvie had known this wouldn’t go well. She knew Cecelia and Emeline loved William like a brother; they’d known him since they were in ninth grade. But this was hard news, and they weren’t thinking about William. They were thinking about their personal versions of the gleaming bridge that existed between the three sisters in Chicago and Julia in New York. Sylvie knew that Emeline mailed Julia newspaper clippings about available apartments in Pilsen. Cecelia continued to paint Alice and Izzy together. She took photographs of the canvases and mailed them to Julia, asking her which one she would like. Julia hadn’t chosen one yet.
“But if you do this,” Emeline said, and then paused, as if she were about to dive underwater too, “Julia and Alice will never move back home.”
The sun sank behind a cloud or a building, and the three sisters were draped in shadows. The gleaming bridge was crumbling to dust at their feet. Sylvie thought of her childhood dream and how Julia had complained to Sylvie that the novels she cited as depictions of great love were all tragedies. Sylvie, in her innocence, had insisted that the tragedy part was avoidable. It wasn’t woven into the romance. But she had been wrong.
“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
—