Hello Beautiful

Something inside Julia started to crumble, like those awful images of glaciers shedding giant sections to the freezing ocean below. He had said that Sylvie was dying. Her sister, who used to be as familiar to Julia as her own body. Her sister, who had not been her sister for over two decades. Julia coughed, and inside the cough was a strange sound, as if her insides had begun to cry, without tears reaching her surface. Her ecosystem was changing beneath her skin.

“Please come home,” William said.

Julia knew how to control her voice. She had been manipulating outcomes, with men in boardrooms and on dates, for decades. She was an expert at setting a goal and steering in that direction. When her voice came out confident and clear, she was pleased. She said, “I’m sorry, William, but I can’t do that.”

When Julia hung up, she noticed that her hands were shaking. No problem, she thought. I can handle this. She stood up and concentrated on walking gracefully to the bathroom. She chose two different employees at random to smile at on her way across the office. In the bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and thought: Stick to your calendar, Padavano. What do you have to do next? Don’t think about anything else. After all, it was none of her business that Sylvie was sick. The phone call changed nothing about her current life. Her sister was no longer part of her world.

When Julia left the bathroom, she started a conversation with one of her smartest employees — an MIT grad who, Julia knew, thought she didn’t deserve her position as his boss — about a project they were working on. Julia had a hard time paying attention to the young man’s voice, though. Her attention faded in and out—attention, attention, none—as if it were her heartbeat. She excused herself, said she had an important call to make, and stepped away. When she got back to her desk, she realized she was barefoot. She stared at her heels, which were sitting neatly under her desk. She must have taken them off while she spoke to William, but she had no memory of doing so. Had the MIT grad noticed she was shoeless in the middle of the office? Julia had a personal rule about not being barefoot at work, even when she worked late, and now that was broken.

She opened and closed her desk drawers, as if she was looking for something, because she needed a few moments of blankness to reset. When her cellphone rang, Julia looked at the screen, saw it was Alice, and felt a hiccup of fear. Had her daughter sensed that she’d just spoken to her father? The fact that William and Alice could call her, back-to-back, was supposed to be impossible. William was dead, Chicago was dead. Sylvie was— Julia couldn’t finish this thought. “Hi, sweetheart,” she said, and poured all her effort and attention into employing her normal voice.

“Are we on for tonight?” Alice said. “I don’t mind either way. I have a new project, so I could work.”

The mother and daughter watched a movie or television show together once a week. Alice would come to Julia’s apartment after work, and they’d order in dinner and sit cross-legged on the couch like they had ever since Alice was tiny. Julia knew they both found the experience comforting, even though Julia also felt uncomfortable, knowing that her daughter should be out there living a life, not in here with her mother, as if she were still ten years old.

“I’m too busy. Another night would be better,” Julia said. She had the sense that today’s schedule was tipping away from her, like a plate falling off a table. She was still barefoot; some part of her resisted slipping the heels back on. Then, because the normal Julia — the one she’d been before William called — would continue the conversation, she said, “What’s the new project?”

“Oh, I’m copyediting a novel. I told Naveen that I don’t like doing novels — I prefer nonfiction — but he said fiction is good for me.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a modern take on Little Women. Did you read that when you were a kid?”

“Little Women?” Julia’s body felt like it was filled with wet, prickly sand. She managed to make a noise of assent. She remembered lying in bed next to Sylvie in the dark, in their small room on 18th Place. She’d fallen asleep to the sound of her sister’s voice countless times. In their beds, they kept returning to the same argument: which of them was better suited to be Jo March. “I have Jo’s spunk and determination,” Julia had said. “But I’m going to be a writer,” Sylvie said. “I’m the one who could tell our stories.”

“Jo runs a feminist publishing company in New York,” Alice said. “Meg still marries for love, Amy is a hell-raiser, and Laurie is a woman they’re all in love with.”

Julia said, “Does Beth still die?”

“Beth dies,” Alice said. “It’s very sad.”