Kent’s shoulders dropped. “She told you.”
William closed his eyes for a moment. He’d pictured Sylvie handing her medical file to Kent; he was the person they both thought of in case of an emergency. Sylvie might have thought: Maybe Kent can save me. “I figured,” William said, “that she might have spoken to you first, seen what you thought.”
“She saw the best specialist at Northwestern. I made some calls, checked him out. There was a second opinion. The diagnosis is correct.”
The air in the room felt dark, but perhaps it was just William turning dark. “She said she turned down most of the treatment. That she has something like six months.”
Kent gave a single, effortful nod, as if he had to fight the air to move. “I thought she was going to do that.”
“What do you think?”
“I’d do the same thing, in her position. It’s the brave choice. The treatment is almost as bad as what she’s got.”
William noticed Kent’s arm twitch, and said, “I don’t want a hug.”
“I know.”
William glanced at his watch, although he didn’t care what time it was. He’d gotten what he needed here. Confirmation. Sylvie’s news was real, because Kent had said so. He headed out of the room. “I have some things to take care of,” he said. “I might come back this afternoon, but I might not.”
“I’m gonna get you through this.” Kent jogged to catch up with William. “I’m not going to leave you alone. Your meds are solid. It’s going to be hard, but you’ll be able to bear it.”
“I have to think,” William said, but by then he had pushed out the front door of the building and was alone on the sidewalk. He could feel his friend behind him, wanting to follow but stopping himself.
William walked toward Pilsen. His skin hurt. His hair hurt. His knee, which rarely bothered him anymore, hurt. He’d hoped Kent would say that Sylvie had misunderstood the doctor or that there was a cure she wasn’t aware of yet. He made his way by muscle memory to Throop Park. This was where Arash still held his weekly clinic, so William knew every inch of the outdoor court. He found a beat-up basketball under a bench and began to dribble. The sound of a ball hitting the ground calmed him; it untangled his heartbeats and allowed him to think straighter. William had noticed a change in Sylvie—a slight hesitation in her movements—a few months earlier, but he’d thought it was just due to aging. An infinitesimal slowing of her muscles, joints, and tendons. William had thought, We’re in the middle of our lives, after all. He never would have reached this point, the middle, without her.
He made the ball pound the cement. His wife had looked at him with her wide-open, beautiful face last night. She was his city, his sky. She had given him a life, two and a half decades earlier. He hadn’t deserved it; for the first few years of their relationship, he’d told himself, You should leave. You should break up with her. But he couldn’t bear to. He’d always known that the rift that had occurred in the Padavano family was his fault. The ensuing silence between Sylvie and Julia was his fault. Julia moving to New York City and staying there was his fault. Sylvie disagreed, but she was too kind, and he knew she had convinced herself that that was the truth because she loved him. William had let the lie continue for this long because he loved his life with Sylvie; he loved her and was as happy as it was possible for him to be. He hadn’t wanted anything to change. He’d been a coward.
Not anymore, he thought. William was going to lose everything that mattered to him. But first he could do everything possible to make Sylvie feel beloved and whole.
He had gazed at his wife’s face last night and known what he had to do. There was only one answer. When William had dribbled long enough to break a sweat and his entire body was warm, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and called his first wife.
Julia
SEPTEMBER 2008
JULIA WAS AT HER DESK, waiting to receive a pitch deck from her assistant and thinking about Alice. She knew intellectually that her daughter was grown up and had her own life—she was twenty-five and no longer lived with Julia, after all—but the patterns in Julia’s brain had been set years earlier, and she was programmed to worry about her daughter at least once an hour. Perhaps worry wasn’t the right word: Julia habitually turned her daughter over in her mind as if she were a Rubik’s Cube she couldn’t solve. She knew her daughter better than anyone, but there was some part of Alice behind lock and key, and Julia worried that this was her fault. Her daughter’s life was too simple, too streamlined, for someone in her mid-twenties. Alice never stayed out too late or got too drunk. She never sobbed over a man, or sobbed at all, as far as Julia could tell. Most concerning, to Julia’s mind, was the fact that Alice had never had a boyfriend. Julia was too afraid to ask directly, but she thought there was a strong chance that her daughter was a virgin. This absence in her daughter’s life—of love, of touch, of relationship—made Julia panicky. Why would her beautiful daughter have backed away from intimacy? She knew Alice’s height must intimidate some men but not all of them; Julia only went to bed with men who agreed to her terms, and although she’d given up on dating a few years earlier, she’d never had any trouble finding agreeable men. This blank space in her daughter’s life was presumably deliberate, and Julia wanted to understand why, but Alice was skillful at steering conversations away from her personal life. Once, when Julia had ignored Alice’s signposts and pushed too hard, her daughter had said, “Why do I have to live the way you think I should? You never needed a man, and I don’t either.”
In college, Alice had delayed choosing a major, because she found most subjects equally interesting. This mystified Julia; her daughter was smart but unfocused on any possible career. “How about graduate school?” Julia had suggested. “You’re good at science—I’d be happy to pay for medical school.” Alice shook her head, a distracted look on her face, and said, “No, thank you.” After college, she worked as a freelance copy editor for a few publishing houses, a job that required her to comb through sentences for ten hours a day and paid barely enough to live on. Alice had never been an avid reader growing up—she’d preferred television—but now she reminded Julia of Sylvie, with her attention always adhered to a book. Sylvie had truly loved to read, though; it was unclear what was gluing Alice’s eyes to the pages. What are you really going to do? Julia wondered. Who are you really going to be? Because this controlled, Teflon version of her daughter couldn’t be the final product, could it? Julia worried—she had always worried about this—that Alice was depressed, but her daughter seemed too steady, too level, for that to be the case. And when Julia asked her daughter if she was okay, Alice always said yes.
When the light on Julia’s phone blinked, she was happy for the distraction from her thoughts. She picked up the receiver and said, in the confident, professional tone she’d mastered long ago: “Julia Padavano.”
“Hi, Julia.” There was a pause. “It’s William.”
She heard his voice, but it was accompanied by an echoing sound. Julia had closed off her past as if it were a water pipe, and the creak of the valve opening was noisy. She repeated his name, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “William?”
She never thought about him, because why would she? Her job was to think of Alice, and so she pictured the tall young woman bent over a manuscript, looking for mistakes. At the same moment she had a memory of standing in the Northwestern apartment, her breasts swollen with milk. Julia felt flushed, as if the warm air in that living room had crossed time and distance to find her.
She cleared her throat. “Why would you call me?”