Hello Beautiful

Sylvie said, “She knows you love her.”

“More than anything.”

“Then it will probably work out.”

Julia made a sour face. “I’ve always hated the word probably.” She looked upward, as if checking the street signs, then said, “I had everything under control while Alice was young. I mean it. Everything. It was beautiful. I wasn’t prepared for Alice to grow up, though. I don’t know why.”

Sylvie stopped walking. They were across the street from an old movie theater they’d frequented as children, where they’d seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Star Wars, and the Buster Keaton films their father had loved. “Hey, let’s see a movie,” she said.

Julia squinted at the list of titles on the marquee. “I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in years,” she said. “I never have time.”

The movie that was about to start was one neither of them had heard of, but they purchased two tickets anyway. They bought giant tubs of popcorn with extra butter and two massive sodas. Once they were settled in their plush seats, Sylvie looked down and wondered what the popcorn would taste like. Food and drink were beginning to switch up their flavor profiles in her mouth. A donut might taste bitter, even though it was glazed with sugar. Her coffee that morning had tasted like it was doused with maple syrup, even though she hadn’t added any sweetener. Sylvie placed one piece of popcorn in her mouth, tentatively, and was relieved to find that it tasted the same as it had her entire life. Salty and crunchy. This was because she was with Julia, she decided, in this time outside both their real lives. Sylvie’s headaches had recently become more frequent and intense, but she hadn’t had one with Julia by her side; it made sense that with her sister she would also briefly be allowed her normal taste buds.

Sylvie knew she should tell William that she had been reunited with Julia, and she would tell him, soon. These visits with Julia reminded her, though, of the weeks when Sylvie and William’s love had been confined to his dorm room, before Kent found them out. At that time, Sylvie and William had assured each other that what they were doing was less a secret than a delay — a few precious stolen moments — before real life, with its inherent complications, intervened. During those private weeks, she and William had breathed air dense with every molecule of their love and their joy at having found each other. Sylvie felt all of these emotions, this magical alchemy, with her sister now. Sylvie had experienced two great loves in her life, after all: her sisters first, and then William. Sylvie could feel something significant happening inside herself now: She was tying together who she’d been in the first half of her life with who she had become. She was stitching her life and heart together, and she wanted to keep it all before her: a beautiful whole.

Next week, Sylvie thought. I’ll tell him next week. She knew this delay and her reasons were technically both bullshit and secrets by the terms of her husband’s mantra, but she told herself that the mantra was for the living. She was dying, which meant she could sit next to Julia right now and lie in William’s arms tonight.

The movie turned out to be about car racing and was clearly intended for teenagers. Sylvie laughed whenever a car was about to flip over, while the people around her gasped. She had the realization that she could respond to any stimulus however she wanted. If something sad happened, she didn’t have to cry. In the midst of a climactic scene involving a ten-car pileup, she reached over and held Julia’s hand. They hadn’t touched until now. They’d both been careful not to, because it felt like a parameter that kept them in this liminal place where they got to see each other without it counting. It was the bumpers on the strange bowling lane they were playing within. But Sylvie was running out of time, and she was no longer interested in parameters and rules — even the ones she’d made up.

She felt Julia stiffen for a split second, then relax. She didn’t pull away, and in the dark of the movie theater, the two sisters were ageless. They were ten, and thirteen, and in their forties. Julia was absolutely confident that she could design her own destiny, and Sylvie opened herself to books and the boys who came into the library. There were so many moments, piled on top of one another, and the long period when they had turned away from each other, for better and for worse.

Sylvie thought, This is worth dying for.