Hello Beautiful

She put the manuscript down on the table next to her and wrapped her arms around her mother. Julia squeezed Alice tight, the same way she’d squeezed her when Alice was a small girl and Julia wanted to show how much she loved her. Alice smiled and pressed her head on top of Julia’s, so her straight hair mixed with her mother’s curls. Izzy had talked about forgiveness, and in that moment Alice felt drenched with it. She forgave herself for locking herself away, and she forgave her parents for the bold choices they’d made to protect her. She forgave every mistake she would read about in the manuscript she’d just received. Earlier that afternoon, when Emeline had noticed Alice watching Rose’s dramatic tears, she’d whispered into her niece’s ear, “Grief is love.” Now Alice thought: Forgiveness is too. The mother and daughter held each other in the quiet hallway in a house thundering with life.

When they pulled apart, Alice said, “I’m scared.”

“I am too,” Julia said, but she picked up a coat from the nearest chair and handed it to her daughter. Alice pulled it on, and walked slowly outside.

William

November 2008

William looped the yard. He was feverish with sorrow, and pacing the grass felt like the best way to expel it, like sweat, from his pores. The onset of grief bore no resemblance to his experience with depression. Depression meant disconnection, shutting down, a dangerous quiet. Now William’s feelings whipped around inside him like a flailing water hose. He needed to control this hose as quickly as possible, though, because Alice was here. She had been brave enough to seek him out, and he had to gather himself enough to make her feel like she hadn’t made a mistake. Any mistakes, all the mistakes, were his.

His heart beat with words: Alice is here.

On the tailwind of Sylvie’s departure, Alice had arrived in Chicago. Of course she had. Sylvie had talked about one-two punches, about how Charlie had died on the day Izzy was born, and Sylvie had clearly used her magic to somehow bring William his daughter on the day his heart broke. His wife was trying to save him, yet again.

The sun had just left the sky when William felt calm enough, ready enough. He headed toward the house and then stopped abruptly, because Alice had appeared in the open doorway.

“I was coming to find you,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. Her face was questioning, pale, anxious. “You were?”

William nodded. He could feel the cool air against the palms of his hands and the nape of his neck. When he’d first met the Padavano sisters, he’d noticed their similarities: their hair, their brown eyes, their shared gestures. The four sisters looked like different versions of the same person: They were parts of a whole. The young woman standing before William didn’t look like them at all; she looked like him. A slightly different version of his own eyes looked back at him. William had never recognized himself in someone else’s face before. It felt like finding an answer to a question he hadn’t known he had.

“What were you going to say?” Alice asked.

William almost smiled, because the answer was so simple. “Hello?” he said. “I was going to say hello.”

Her face relaxed; the air between them relaxed too. Neither of them sensed an attack — not right now, anyway. Alice’s appearance was more reserved than Julia’s; she was contained, behind her face and eyes. William remembered her as an infant, how she had looked friendly, even optimistic, as she took in the world around her. William could see how much time he’d missed, the gap between then and now. Was life constructed of arrivals and departures? He’d married into the Padavano family and then left his first marriage and fatherhood behind; Sylvie had walked into William’s hospital room and his heart, and now she was gone. On the same day, the adult version of Alice had arrived in his life.

She said, “I thought you were dead, until a few weeks ago.”

“Your mom told you that?” William nodded, though, because this sounded right. He had been dead, or deadened, as far as this young woman was concerned. He was alive now, and it hurt. “I need to say a lot of things,” he said. “I should explain the choice I made a long time ago.”

“You don’t have to. Not right now,” Alice said. “I’m sorry about your wife. We don’t have to talk about everything today.”