Hello Beautiful

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?”

“It’s Sylvie,” he said.

Sylvie, she thought. Julia looked around, but no one was staring. No one in her office seemed to have realized that Julia’s past had just reached through a phone line and grabbed her heart out of her chest.

“Sylvie is dying, Julia. She’s all right now, but she has less than a year.”

Julia skimmed over what William had said. She couldn’t go too close, because the words were hot coals. She had the urge to say, I love my job, and I’m one of the best in the world in my field. I made three hundred thousand dollars last year. She wanted him to know that she was successful and therefore too busy, or maybe even too important, for this kind of news. But she couldn’t say that. She had the urge to gently set the phone down, like a child who had picked up the extension on someone else’s call.

“No,” she said.

“The only thing she wants is you, Julia. She needs you.”

Julia looked down. She was wearing a gray-blue suit. She had a slight run in her stockings, which she’d stopped with clear nail polish. She tried to understand; it felt like William was asking her to speak in a language that she hadn’t used for a long time. “Did Sylvie ask you to call me?”

He paused, and Julia remembered that this was how William spoke: with reluctance and hesitation, never sure if he had the right words. Julia had assumed that William and Sylvie were still married, but only because it seemed like news of their divorce would have made its way to her. Julia never thought about life in Chicago, past or present, at all.

Finally, William said, “No. Sylvie doesn’t know I’m doing this.”

“I have a full calendar,” Julia said. “I run my own business. I don’t have time to go anywhere.” She lifted her hand in the air and waved it. On the other side of the glass wall, her young assistant popped out of her chair, a notepad and pen in hand, and headed her way. Julia had nothing to say to her, of course. She was going to send her away, just like she was going to send William away. Both were dead ends, blank walls. But she had panicked and set the young woman in motion.

“Julia?” William said.

She waited, and the years pulsed between them, down the phone line.

“I never saw two people love each other like you and Sylvie.” He cleared his throat. “I thought maybe it was just because of how I was raised, that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of thing, but that wasn’t it. I’ve never seen anything like you and your sister.”