Hello Beautiful

Julia took a long sip of the drink, which had been Charlie’s favorite. She wasn’t much of a drinker; when she drank, she usually chose white wine. The Scotch tasted like colors: red and orange and gold and white. She’d made many choices in her life. She believed in choices, if she believed in anything. Set a goal, and then work your ass off to get it. She hadn’t accepted that Sylvie had no other choice when Emeline said so decades earlier, and she didn’t accept it now. But she wasn’t angry about it either. She didn’t know what she was.

After William’s phone call, Julia had stopped being able to sleep. She cobbled together only a couple of hours per night. She gave taxi drivers the wrong address twice on her way to work. She also had the strange sense, from the minute she hung up the phone with William, that her shadow had gotten a mind of its own; a few times she caught it pulling away from her, as if it were trying to escape. After a week of sleeplessness, Julia felt like a Picasso painting — her eyes didn’t match, and her shoulders were at different heights. She did her best to act like herself, but she got so tired that she forgot what she was like. She forgot how to act and called in sick to work. She texted with Alice but didn’t speak to her on the phone, because she had lost faith in her voice.

“I didn’t want to go to work this morning,” Julia said. “So I got into a cab and went to the airport. I only have my purse. I thought, at three a.m., that maybe if I saw you, like William wanted me to, I could go back to feeling normal.”

Sylvie nodded, like this made sense.

“It’s only a two-hour flight,” Julia said. “And please don’t act like what I’m saying is reasonable. I know it’s not.”

“Oh please,” Sylvie said, and for a second Julia saw the Sylvie she used to know, the sister who wasn’t afraid to speak to her, who wasn’t cloaked in guilt. “What’s reasonable? I’m dying, for God’s sake.”

It occurred to Julia that maybe she felt terrible because Sylvie felt terrible. Was it possible that she was falling apart in New York because her sister was dying in Chicago? That there were invisible threads that connected them, which she had been unable to see and therefore unable to sever? Julia felt so confused and fatigued and out of her body right now that when she asked, “How do you feel?” it was like she was asking after herself.

Sylvie spread her hands and looked at them. “I thought I felt pretty good, until I saw you. I have headaches sometimes. I go to sleep at seven some nights.” She leaned forward. “Julia. Are you really here? Maybe I’m hallucinating because of my medication. I’ve imagined you with me for years, but this feels much more real.”

The bar had a low hum — it was midafternoon on a weekday, and the people in here were professional drinkers. No one was messy or loud. It was mostly older men, some of whom might have known Charlie. Every single person looked tired. The act of living had exhausted them. They didn’t know that Sylvie, who was middle-aged but looked younger, wouldn’t have the chance to tire of anything.

“I wish you were hallucinating,” Julia said. “My being here makes no sense.”

Sylvie looked around them, as if assessing what might be real and what might not. “I love this hallucination. Nothing this wonderful has happened to me in a long time.”

Julia sighed. “It’ll become real when you tell William and the twins that you saw me.”

“That’s true.” Sylvie appeared to consider this. “But I don’t usually tell them about my dreams and visions. I’ll keep this one to myself, for a little while. Will you tell Alice that you came here?”

“God, no.” Sylvie didn’t know about the lie Julia had told, and Julia didn’t feel inclined to explain. She remembered, with her sister in front of her, that part of the reason she’d killed William off was that she’d been scared that Alice would leave Julia to live in Chicago, because Alice would love Sylvie more than her own mother. That had been a ridiculous concern; Julia knew that now. But the younger Julia had felt like it was possible, because she had always loved Sylvie more than she loved everyone else. Julia loved her now, across the wooden table. She had closed a door on Sylvie long ago and triple-locked it, and that had worked until William’s phone call. Now, with her sister in the same room, Julia was aware of how badly she’d missed her.