Hello Beautiful

The specialist, a man who spoke at a fast clip — presumably because he was in so much demand and therefore had so little time — told her that there was a tumor in her brain. Sylvie nodded in response, to be polite. He talked about the location of the tumor and the size. He used the word terminal. Sylvie nodded again, listened some more, and then left his office. The building she exited was near Northwestern, and she decided to walk home. She didn’t pay any attention to her direction; she knew that, like a homing pigeon, her body would take itself to Pilsen.

While she walked, Sylvie discovered that she wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis. It settled so quickly inside her that she realized she must have known, on some level, that it was coming. When the specialist had used the word incurable, she’d thought: Of course. That sounds right. Whenever something went wrong in her house while she was growing up — the electricity went out, the washing machine flooded, the refrigerator died — her mother’s first words were: “We’re being punished.” Sylvie was being punished for the choice she’d made twenty-five years earlier. Even though she’d stopped considering herself Catholic after her father’s funeral, she recognized the religion’s retributive justice in her bones. She was surprised, though, to find that she’d unconsciously kept that belief system. She would have thought that she’d evolved past the guilt that was laced through Catholicism and her childhood, past the concept of an eye for an eye. But apparently she had bought into that retaliative framework, perhaps in the pews of St. Procopius as a child. Sylvie had betrayed her sister, so her body had betrayed itself.

It’s also possible that you’re just in shock, Sylvie thought now. The painting in front of her was becoming less potent; the light, the hope on the canvas, was fading. Sylvie knew this was because she’d been looking at the painting for too long; its meaning was lost, the same way the meaning of a word is lost when repeated fifty times. She knew the hope was still in the painting; she just could no longer see it.

Sylvie hadn’t told William yet; she would tell him tonight. She wished her husband could remain ignorant of this; she wished she could simply grow sick and die without him having to watch. Sylvie knew that when William looked at her, he saw the twenty-something girl he’d fallen in love with. It seemed possible, and yet impossible, that she could fade away while staying whole under his gaze. I wish? Sylvie thought, but then stopped herself, because I wish was a dangerous path to walk down. She needed to stay with what is.

Sylvie wasn’t worried about herself. She was now in the unusual position of knowing how her own story would end — she would die from an aberrant cluster of cells in her brain — but she was deeply worried about her husband, about how and whether he would live after she was gone. William was so much healthier, so much stronger than he had been as a young man, but she knew they both believed his solid foundation had been built on three planks: his antidepressant medication, daily reckoning with his mental health, and their love. With one third of that equation removed, would he fall apart? If he did, Sylvie would no longer be there to save him. Since leaving the specialist’s office, she’d been ruminating on William, wondering if there was a loophole that might allow him to be okay. At the same time, the rest of Sylvie, her mind and body, had turned in a surprising direction: toward Julia. The diagnosis had brought a physical longing for her older sister, a longing so deep that Sylvie felt breathless. Sylvie missed the timbre of Julia’s voice when she was coming up with a plan. She missed the specific fit of their hug and her sister’s smell. She missed lying in their childhood bedroom in the dark, listening to Julia organize all of their lives. This yearning enveloped Sylvie’s entire body now, while she tried to find the light in the painting. She wondered if the tumor was a punishment for hurting her sister and was even created by the separation between them. Perhaps Sylvie’s body had been ultimately unable to bear the distance between Chicago and New York.

That night, in the kitchen of their apartment, Sylvie told William what the doctor had said. She wanted to close her eyes so she couldn’t see the news fracture his beloved, worn face, but she made herself watch. She needed to catch him if he fell.

“Are you certain?” he said.

“Yes.”

After a few minutes, he said, “What do you need? What can I do?”

She didn’t say anything, but the longing was still present, and William always saw all of her. Loved all of her.

He said, “You need Julia.” Her name sounded strange coming out of his mouth. They never spoke of her anymore.

Sylvie shook her head. “It’s impossible. I would never ask her for anything.”