Hello Beautiful

“Your father was the one who called to tell me Sylvie is sick.”

“But my father is dead.”

“I told you that because he gave up his parental rights to you while you were still a baby. He had mental-health issues, and I think he didn’t feel capable of being a father. But I didn’t want you to feel rejected or feel like it had anything to do with you, because it didn’t.”

“Wait.”

Julia waited.

Alice wanted clarity; she wanted to make sure she understood the mechanics of what was being said. “You’re saying that my father gave me up, and because of that, you told me that he was dead?”

There was a visible vein in Julia’s temple. “It seemed simplest to tell you that. It felt like a kind of truth. His name is William Waters, and he lives in Chicago.”

Alice shook her head. She could hear her heart beating in her ears, as if her organs were moving around her body. She wasn’t sure what her mother said after that or even if she said anything. Alice smiled reflexively at the waiter, who was passing by, and felt a spear sink through her body. Alice missed something. She missed — wildly — everything she had wanted when she was young. She needed a backup to her mother, who was saying crazy things while wearing too much perfume and too much makeup. She needed a sibling to roll her eyes at. She needed someone else to say, Don’t listen to her. She’s lost her mind. You’re fine. None of this is true.

“Excuse me,” Alice said, not to her mother but to the tablecloth and the waiter, if he was listening. She pushed back her chair and walked with wobbly legs across the restaurant and out the door. She stood in the dim nighttime air. Broadway was in front of her, a steady grumble of taxis and buses. Building windows were lit yellow against the night sky. Alice’s heartbeats were still registering in her ears.

Alice pulled her phone out of her backpack, quickly scrolled through her contacts, and pressed the call button.

The phone rang three times, and then Rose said, “Hello?”

“Grandma.”

“Alice!” Rose sounded pleased. Alice usually tried to call her grandmother a few times a month, because she knew Rose was lonely.

“My mother just told me that my father is alive.”

There was a shocked silence through the phone. “Gracious,” Rose said finally.

“Is it true?” Alice said.

“Well,” Rose said, “I mean, I haven’t spoken to him lately, but yes, I suppose it’s true. I would have heard otherwise.” She paused. “Why in the world would she tell you that now?”

“Sylvie’s sick,” Alice said, as if handing a piece of mail to another person. She wished she were at home in the apartment she shared with Carrie, where one wall was papered with Cecelia’s murals. She wished she were standing in front of those images, looking at one strong woman after another, instead of standing on the street while her grandmother made small noises into the phone and her mother was somewhere behind her, a human wrecking ball that had swung into Alice.

Alice had stopped asking about Chicago and her mother’s past when she was a child, for her mother’s sake. She’d accepted that the place and people her mother had decided to withhold were never going to be part of her life. When the Internet had become easily searchable, in Alice’s late teens, she’d considered looking up her mother’s sisters, but — apart from tracking down Cecelia’s artwork — she’d given the idea up almost immediately. Alice knew her mother wouldn’t want her to, and since Alice no longer needed more family to feel safe, she didn’t seek out the information.

But Alice had been an idiot. She’d always known her mother was hiding something; that was why she’d gone through Julia’s drawers while she was in middle school. She’d thought the secret was Julia’s, though, and had nothing to do with her. Alice checked facts for a living. She knew how to look for evidence and confirm sources. Julia had offered the young Alice very few facts, however, and there had been no sources to reach out to for verification. What Julia said went unverified, and Alice could see that now. She could see the weakness of what she’d been handed, and she could see her own weakness in accepting it as truth.

Perhaps other people might have helped her figure this out — Rose, Carrie, Rhoan — but the young Alice had grown so tall that no one ever thought to help her, and she prided herself on never asking for help. Everyone — men and women — rushed to Carrie’s aid, even when she was perfectly fine, because she was cute and five feet tall. But the assumption was that Alice never needed help. She could, after all, reach every high shelf and carry her own luggage with no problem. When someone did try to assist her, she suspected them of ulterior motives.

“Are you still there?” Rose asked.