Hello Beautiful

He’d made it this far because he almost never thought of Alice. He’d successfully closed off that part of his history. He had not allowed himself a daughter, so in his mind, he didn’t have one. This conviction had not been effortless. There were paintings of Alice that he’d had to avoid in Cecelia’s house, and Izzy had gone through a period when she was about ten where she tried to make him talk about his daughter. He’d always liked Izzy; she had no patience for small talk, and he was no good at it. But there had been a time in her childhood when she was painfully direct, and all the adults around her had been stung in one way or another. “You always eat more food than you need,” she’d said to Josie once, and the woman had flushed to her hairline, a forkful of chocolate mousse pie in her hand.

“Why don’t you drive to New York to see Alice?” Izzy had said. “Aren’t you curious what she’s like? What if she’s not okay because you’re not in her life?”

William had forced himself to stay still, to answer. If Izzy had been an adult, he would have left the room. He’d said, “You’re fine without your father.”

Izzy seemed to consider this. “Yes. But I have you and my whole family. Who does Alice have?”

“She has her mother.” This, for William, had always been the bottom line.

Everyone else — Kent, Sylvie, the twins — understood that if they had something to say about Julia or Alice, they said it out of his hearing. This new situation, waiting for a bomb William had lit to explode, or not, was exhausting. William showed up for his days — watched players play, ate lunch with Kent, ate dinner with Sylvie — and waited. He was no longer trying to be comfortable. He was engaged in the long-term project of eradicating the bullshit and secrets from his life and taking care of Sylvie in any way he could think of.

One morning after Sylvie had left for the library, William opened their bedroom closet and took down a medium-sized cardboard box with only one item inside. He pulled the framed photo of Caroline out of the box and looked at it for the first time since it had arrived in the mail after his parents’ deaths, two years earlier. The night Sylvie had told her sisters about her diagnosis, William’s sister arrived like a surprise guest in his mind. Life seemed littered with small surprises since Sylvie had gotten sick. Emeline yelling about a character from a childhood novel. William calling his first wife. His sister occupying a new place in his heart. And once Caroline had appeared, she’d stayed. The small redheaded girl, from so far in his past, was accompanying him through his days. He’d wanted to see her face.

William’s mother had apparently died first, of liver disease. His father had a massive heart attack at his office desk a few months later. They’d left their assets to their Catholic parish. Their lawyer had called to tell William the news and to ask him to come back to Boston to pack up the house and decide what to do with personal items. “Like what?” William had asked, truly unable to imagine what they might be. “Photo albums,” the lawyer said. “China? Jewelry?” William had hired a service to pack up and sell or give away everything in the house, with the exception of the framed photograph of the redheaded little girl that had sat on the end table in his parents’ living room. This was shipped to him, and although Sylvie — who was as delighted to see the photo as she might have been to meet William’s sister — wanted to hang it on the wall, William had stored it in their bedroom closet.

He ran his thumb lightly across his sister’s face now. He remembered telling Sylvie about Caroline when he was in the hospital, but then he’d sealed her back up inside him. He’d always known that his parents would have preferred that he had died instead of his sister. It had been clear, in the house he’d grown up in, that the loss of a little girl was the worst pain imaginable. Losing Caroline had ruined William’s parents, and living with those two wrecked people had made William a little frightened of his sister too. He realized now, with the photo in his hands, that he’d turned away from his sister and his daughter to protect himself from that specific devastation. He’d made sure that he couldn’t lose a little girl. Of course, the irony was that, to ensure that, he’d cut them out of his life.