William waved his arm in greeting—the boy was part of Arash’s clinic—and shrugged. The rectangular playground wasn’t full, because of the hour and the time of year, but kids wandered in small groups and several girls were perched on top of the jungle gym as if it were their nest. When William reached the center of the space, he turned around in a circle, not sure what he was looking for, until he saw it. A giant mural was painted against the back wall. William walked in that direction and took a seat on a bench that offered a good view. He examined the lower corner and saw the CP flourish, which was how Cecelia signed her work. A handful of young boys ran around William’s bench, gulping with laughter, and then sped off in different directions.
The mural showed roughly twenty kids standing together, as if for a school photo. The children were smiling brightly in unison, suggesting the photographer had just told them a joke. William ran his eyes along the top row of kids; this was a habit, because he had always been put in the back row of every picture growing up. At the end of the back row stood a white girl with blond-brown hair, wearing a shy smile. William stopped breathing for a moment. The little girl’s face looked exactly like his own as a ten-year-old. She couldn’t be anyone other than his daughter. It was Alice. He continued to move his eyes, like a typewriter spitting out words, unable to take in what he’d just seen. William studied the middle row, where one beaming child stood beside another. These kids looked like younger versions of the boys and girls in Arash’s clinic, and they might have been, since many of the players lived in this neighborhood. At the end of the bottom row, there was a redheaded girl—brighter than all the other children, probably because she had recently been painted onto the wall. Cecelia had taken care to blend her in and had updated some of the lines in the rest of the mural, so Caroline didn’t stick out. But still, with her red hair and excited grin, she looked the most alive, the most keen to leap off the wall and run toward the swings.
William sat on the bench for a long time. He had a flash of anger at Cecelia for tricking him into taking in the visage of his daughter, but the anger was gone as fast as it had come. He made himself look at Alice and Caroline. He made himself look without wincing, without fear that he would extinguish their light and beauty with his gaze. This was the first time he’d ever given his daughter his full attention. Parents shaped their kids; he knew that better than anyone, and he realized now that he must have shaped Alice by his absence, by his silence, even though he’d intended to save her by the same means. This realization was a personal blow, and he said, “I’m sorry,” out loud. His premises had been wrong, and he wondered what else he’d been wrong about.
William knew already that he would visit this wall again, many times. He’d assumed that Cecelia would paint his sister alone, because she usually did individual portraits, but he was grateful that she’d placed his lost sister and lost daughter together. The two girls would exist for as long as this wall stood, in the same neighborhood William had wandered through when he was at his lowest point. The fact that he’d also seen Charlie in this neighborhood didn’t feel like a coincidence, either. Sylvie had written once about Emeline being stuck in a tree when she was a kid and refusing to come down until her father pointed his tractor beam of love at her. Charlie would have chosen this area of the city to haunt so that he could keep loving his family. He would spend his endless days in this playground, admiring his daughter’s art, reading poetry to the two little girls and lighting them up with his affection.
William shook his head, amazed that he could believe in children keeping each other company in a painting and a dead man locomoting through Chicago. As a younger man, he’d believed in very little, and without his noticing, that had changed. William also used to worry about what he did and did not deserve, but no one around him seemed to think in these terms, and it turned out that he no longer did either. He texted his sister-in-law Thank you, and she replied <3. William frowned at his phone, confused, before realizing that Cecelia had sent him back a heart.
Sylvie
NOVEMBER 2008
SYLVIE AND JULIA WALKED DOWN the sidewalk, past a rickety diner and a taqueria. This was Julia’s second visit, which took place only ten days after her first. She sighed and said, “I did something.”
Sylvie noticed that her sister still looked tired but also calmer, like a knot had unraveled under her skin. “That’s exciting,” she said.
“Sure,” Julia said in a dry tone. “Very exciting. I did something to try to fix the situation with Alice. I had to mess everything up, though, in order to do it, and now she’s angry at me. She might be too angry to ever forgive me.”
Sylvie said, “She knows you love her.”
“More than anything.”
“Then it will probably work out.”
Julia made a sour face. “I’ve always hated the word probably.” She looked upward, as if checking the street signs, then said, “I had everything under control while Alice was young. I mean it. Everything. It was beautiful. I wasn’t prepared for Alice to grow up, though. I don’t know why.”
Sylvie stopped walking. They were across the street from an old movie theater they’d frequented as children, where they’d seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Star Wars, and the Buster Keaton films their father had loved. “Hey, let’s see a movie,” she said.
Julia squinted at the list of titles on the marquee. “I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in years,” she said. “I never have time.”
The movie that was about to start was one neither of them had heard of, but they purchased two tickets anyway. They bought giant tubs of popcorn with extra butter and two massive sodas. Once they were settled in their plush seats, Sylvie looked down and wondered what the popcorn would taste like. Food and drink were beginning to switch up their flavor profiles in her mouth. A donut might taste bitter, even though it was glazed with sugar. Her coffee that morning had tasted like it was doused with maple syrup, even though she hadn’t added any sweetener. Sylvie placed one piece of popcorn in her mouth, tentatively, and was relieved to find that it tasted the same as it had her entire life. Salty and crunchy. This was because she was with Julia, she decided, in this time outside both their real lives. Sylvie’s headaches had recently become more frequent and intense, but she hadn’t had one with Julia by her side; it made sense that with her sister she would also briefly be allowed her normal taste buds.
Sylvie knew she should tell William that she had been reunited with Julia, and she would tell him, soon. These visits with Julia reminded her, though, of the weeks when Sylvie and William’s love had been confined to his dorm room, before Kent found them out. At that time, Sylvie and William had assured each other that what they were doing was less a secret than a delay—a few precious stolen moments—before real life, with its inherent complications, intervened. During those private weeks, she and William had breathed air dense with every molecule of their love and their joy at having found each other. Sylvie felt all of these emotions, this magical alchemy, with her sister now. Sylvie had experienced two great loves in her life, after all: her sisters first, and then William. Sylvie could feel something significant happening inside herself now: She was tying together who she’d been in the first half of her life with who she had become. She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole.