Hello Beautiful

When the plane landed at O’Hare, it was after eleven, and Julia decided to sleep in the airport hotel. She knew the twins were expecting her, but she felt an almost physical need to stay outside the city, and her past, and Sylvie’s death, for just a few more hours. She texted Cecelia that she would be at their place in the morning and fell asleep with her arms wrapped around herself. In her dreams, she tried to catch up with Sylvie, who was a few steps ahead of her on the streets of Pilsen. In the morning, she drank an enormous coffee during the taxi ride into Chicago. Sylvie had told her about the twins’ double house. It felt now like Sylvie had tried to prepare Julia for the time when coming home wouldn’t be secret. She had re-familiarized Julia with Pilsen — shown her Cecelia’s murals, told her about Izzy, and explained how Sylvie, the twins, and her niece all trafficked through one another’s days to an extent that required knocking down fences and sharing homes. Sylvie had prepared Julia for when she wouldn’t be there but everyone else would.

The twins, Julia knew, had complicated feelings toward her. They’d struggled over the many years with the limits Julia had imposed on their communication. Cecelia and Emeline had started off deeply sympathetic to her when Sylvie and William first fell in love. But they’d clearly expected and wanted Julia to soften her stance over time, and she never had. Emeline and I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, Cecelia had written on a postcard once. Let us see Alice. Let us see you. We could go on vacation somewhere, take a trip together, do something that has nothing to do with Chicago or New York. Julia had read that postcard standing on a street corner, the avenue beside her strangely quiet in a city that was always loud. She remembered beginning to consider this idea, this opening, and then shaking her head no. She felt unable to bear any compromise. She had closed the valve to her past — to her heart, really — and a half-open valve was a broken one.

Julia would see William today too, for the first time since he’d handed her a note and a check and walked out of their apartment. That had taken place in what felt like another lifetime, and Julia had been a different person. When she thought of William now, she found that she didn’t remember his phone call from a few months earlier or the end of their marriage. She remembered him coming out of the gym after basketball practice, young and healthy and handsome. She remembered tugging his coat lapels in the cold, asking him to kiss her. She remembered their youth and their ignorance of who they were and what they really wanted.

When she knocked on the door of Emeline’s house, her hands were shaking, because she knew Sylvie wouldn’t be on the other side of this door. At their father’s wake, a young paper-factory worker had said, It’s impossible he’s gone. And that man had been right — that had been an impossible loss. Sylvie was an impossible loss too. But perhaps what felt impossible was leaving that person behind. When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. Charlie’s and Sylvie’s deaths were now part of Julia’s topography; the losses ran like a river inside her. She had been an idiot to stay away for so long, to give up time with her sister. Julia had experienced the beginning and the very end of Sylvie’s life, and that wasn’t enough.

The door opened to reveal Emeline and Cecelia. Her little sisters, who were now in their mid-forties, with fine lines next to their eyes. Julia became breathless at the sight of them. She had tried to do her best, but for the last twenty-five years she’d done it alone, and of course — she realized now — that could never have worked. When she’d told Emeline that she was leaving Chicago, her sister had said: You need us with you. You might not realize that, but you do. We need each other.

She heard herself say, as if it were a greeting, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, baby girl,” Emeline said.

Julia hugged both women at the same time, her face buried in their hair. The sisters held one another, breathing into this three-person structure, trying to find a new kind of stability, even if just for one moment.

William

November 2008