Julia took a taxi to her apartment and packed a few items of clothing into a small bag. The last thing she added was the wrapped package Sylvie had handed her at the end of their visit. Julia had intended to head straight back to O’Hare after the movie, but Sylvie asked her to come to the library first so she could give her something. “Give it to me next time,” Julia had said. Sylvie seemed to consider this, but she shook her head and said, “I should give it to you now.” Julia buried the package at the bottom of her bag and returned to the airport. The trip to LaGuardia was familiar and had felt like freedom the two times she’d traveled there during the last month. Julia had unshackled herself from her history and identity and flown to her sister’s side. She’d felt, each time, like she was heading toward herself. In the air between New York and Chicago now, Julia knew that all three of her sisters were parts of her. They had grown up together, and for a long time they beat with one heart. Reunited with Sylvie, Julia had felt more alive, more whole.
She’d thought during her life in New York that she’d become her father’s rocket, but that identity had felt more true when she was sitting across from Sylvie in a Chicago bar, considering how she could help her daughter. Under her sister’s gaze, Julia felt like she had when she’d first arrived in New York City: fizzing with possibility, the panels that held her together shaking with excitement and fear. Now it seemed clear that she’d built a rocket in New York, had burnished and shined the vehicle but kept it on the ground. To be the rocket, she had to be with her sisters, and she had to set her daughter free.
Julia accepted a drink from the flight attendant and tried to imagine Alice in her home city. The idea was perplexing, as if a finished puzzle had been presented with another piece and there was nowhere to fit it in. The image of Alice hovered above the Chicago map in Julia’s mind, not because her daughter was in the wrong place, but because Julia had removed her baby from that scene a long time ago and sealed all the entrances and exits. She felt a sharp relief, though, that Alice knew the truth about her father. Sylvie would have approved of Julia’s honesty, even though it had arrived late. The thought of her sister’s approval fishhooked Julia’s heart, and she had to close her eyes because of the pain. All of her choices, from now on, would be unknown by Sylvie.
When the plane landed at O’Hare, it was after eleven, and Julia decided to sleep in the airport hotel. She knew the twins were expecting her, but she felt an almost physical need to stay outside the city, and her past, and Sylvie’s death, for just a few more hours. She texted Cecelia that she would be at their place in the morning and fell asleep with her arms wrapped around herself. In her dreams, she tried to catch up with Sylvie, who was a few steps ahead of her on the streets of Pilsen. In the morning, she drank an enormous coffee during the taxi ride into Chicago. Sylvie had told her about the twins’ double house. It felt now like Sylvie had tried to prepare Julia for the time when coming home wouldn’t be secret. She had re-familiarized Julia with Pilsen—shown her Cecelia’s murals, told her about Izzy, and explained how Sylvie, the twins, and her niece all trafficked through one another’s days to an extent that required knocking down fences and sharing homes. Sylvie had prepared Julia for when she wouldn’t be there but everyone else would.
The twins, Julia knew, had complicated feelings toward her. They’d struggled over the many years with the limits Julia had imposed on their communication. Cecelia and Emeline had started off deeply sympathetic to her when Sylvie and William first fell in love. But they’d clearly expected and wanted Julia to soften her stance over time, and she never had. Emeline and I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, Cecelia had written on a postcard once. Let us see Alice. Let us see you. We could go on vacation somewhere, take a trip together, do something that has nothing to do with Chicago or New York. Julia had read that postcard standing on a street corner, the avenue beside her strangely quiet in a city that was always loud. She remembered beginning to consider this idea, this opening, and then shaking her head no. She felt unable to bear any compromise. She had closed the valve to her past—to her heart, really—and a half-open valve was a broken one.
Julia would see William today too, for the first time since he’d handed her a note and a check and walked out of their apartment. That had taken place in what felt like another lifetime, and Julia had been a different person. When she thought of William now, she found that she didn’t remember his phone call from a few months earlier or the end of their marriage. She remembered him coming out of the gym after basketball practice, young and healthy and handsome. She remembered tugging his coat lapels in the cold, asking him to kiss her. She remembered their youth and their ignorance of who they were and what they really wanted.
When she knocked on the door of Emeline’s house, her hands were shaking, because she knew Sylvie wouldn’t be on the other side of this door. At their father’s wake, a young paper-factory worker had said, It’s impossible he’s gone. And that man had been right—that had been an impossible loss. Sylvie was an impossible loss too. But perhaps what felt impossible was leaving that person behind. When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. Charlie’s and Sylvie’s deaths were now part of Julia’s topography; the losses ran like a river inside her. She had been an idiot to stay away for so long, to give up time with her sister. Julia had experienced the beginning and the very end of Sylvie’s life, and that wasn’t enough.
The door opened to reveal Emeline and Cecelia. Her little sisters, who were now in their mid-forties, with fine lines next to their eyes. Julia became breathless at the sight of them. She had tried to do her best, but for the last twenty-five years she’d done it alone, and of course—she realized now—that could never have worked. When she’d told Emeline that she was leaving Chicago, her sister had said: You need us with you. You might not realize that, but you do. We need each other.
She heard herself say, as if it were a greeting, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, baby girl,” Emeline said.
Julia hugged both women at the same time, her face buried in their hair. The sisters held one another, breathing into this three-person structure, trying to find a new kind of stability, even if just for one moment.
William
NOVEMBER 2008
WILLIAM DIDN’T ARGUE WHEN KENT came home with him from the hospital. There was nothing William could have said to make his friend leave him alone. In the hospital, while William sat in a chair in the waiting room, waiting to hear from the doctor not if Sylvie could be saved, because she couldn’t, but what had happened, Emeline had held his hand. No one but his wife had held his hand for a long time, and this gesture from his sister-in-law was one of the ways he knew Sylvie really was gone. Cecelia was on her feet most of the day, trying to get information from any nurse or doctor who made the mistake of glancing in her direction. Kent paced the room too. Beside William, Emeline cried in an undramatic, unembarrassed way. Her cheeks shone with tears under the fluorescent lights. She said, “I want to make you eat, but I know you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
That night, turning the key in the apartment door hurt. It yawned open and revealed the landscape of his happiness. William had walked through this door eleven hours earlier with a box of donuts in his hand, and he’d smiled to himself because even though he’d been gone less than half an hour, he was looking forward to seeing Sylvie. Now Kent stood by his arm, and William didn’t go near the kitchen. He wouldn’t go into the bedroom either. He told Kent he would sleep in his clothes on the couch, and his friend nodded. Kent got him a glass of water and handed him a pill. “This will let you sleep,” he said, and William swallowed it.
The next morning he woke, groggy, and slid his feet to the floor. He sat up, a movement that required all the energy he had. He looked in the direction of the landscape Cecelia had painted but couldn’t take it in. He inhaled and exhaled air that tasted like dread. He didn’t want to inhabit a day without Sylvie, and yet here he was.
Kent said, “Where are your pills?” and William told him. He took the daily medication Kent put in his hand.
“Things have to be decided,” Kent said. “About the funeral. We’re going to go to the twins’ houses.” He hesitated. “I had some messages on my phone last night from work. Are you listening to me?” Kent’s tone was gentle.
William looked at him.