Hello Beautiful

But Julia’s eyes had looked panicked ever since Charlie’s death. Because Sylvie understood her older sister so well, she knew Julia was not only mourning him but reeling from the fact that he had died at all. Julia hadn’t planned for him to die, and that shock threatened her entire worldview. Their father’s absence was, after all, unfixable.

“We’ll figure it out,” Sylvie said. “You’ll come up with a new plan. You always do. It’s probably just hard to do that when you’re pregnant. Give yourself some time.”

“Was I wrong to try to fix everything?” Julia laid Sylvie’s hand on her abdomen. The baby’s movements had become discernible in just the last few days.

Sylvie went quiet, because when the baby did move, the sensation was delicate and impossible to catch unless you were still. She had the thought that Julia’s small bump felt like a drum, but the percussion was inside the instrument. Sylvie felt something and was thrilled: bubbles, perhaps the waving of a tiny hand. “No,” she said. “You weren’t wrong.”

There were moments of quiet, when one sister or the other would almost fall asleep. Only once had they both slept deeply, and William found them curled around each other in the morning. Usually they slid in and out of rest. Sylvie clung to her sister in part because she felt unmoored at night. She was swallowed up by the sky and her blanket and the paper bags holding her clothes. In the darkness, Charlie was missing, and Rose glared in Sylvie’s direction with an anger she didn’t understand but that made Sylvie’s body tighten with guilt nonetheless. Sylvie knew that Cecelia cried at each milestone Izzy reached because she’d lost both her parents and the world her little girl was supposed to grow up in. Rose, brutally silent, two houses away from Cecelia and her granddaughter, was descending deeper and deeper into stubborn grief. The last time Julia had been to see her, Rose sent her away.

Sylvie was almost asleep when her sister said, “After the funeral, William asked to be excused from his teaching-assistant job for the rest of the semester — he told the department that he needed time with me because my father died.”

“That was nice of him.”

“But we need the money. I was counting on it, and he didn’t ask me before talking to his adviser. I’d rather William taught, anyway — this makes a terrible first impression. The professors there are going to think he’s lazy, or soft.” Julia said the word soft as if it was the most damning criticism she could think of.

Sylvie considered this. Her brother-in-law limped around the apartment and smiled at Sylvie to let her know that he didn’t mind her being there, although of course he must. She didn’t feel in a position to criticize him. “Did you tell him any of this?” she said.

“It’s too late to change anything. Will you do me a favor?”

This didn’t need a response, so Sylvie simply waited.

“Will you read his book? He calls it a work in progress. I nagged him until he finally let me read it, and I don’t know what to make of it. At all.” Julia looked at Sylvie with wide eyes. “I’ve been avoiding having conversations with him, because I don’t know what to say. You’re the reader — you’ll see what he’s trying to do. And if it has potential to help him? Get a job after graduate school?”

This many question marks from Julia were unusual. We’re all unstitched, Sylvie thought. How much longer can this continue?

“Of course. I’ll read it tomorrow at the library. Or today, depending on what time it is.”

Julia kissed her cheek. “Thank you so much. You can’t tell him you read it, obviously.”

Sylvie tried to read her watch in the dark, a bubble of panic threading up her middle. What time was it? Was it close to dawn? With no sleep, the days took on the emotional cast — and the loud losses — of the night.

—

She started reading at a library table before her shift, and continued while eating a sandwich at lunch, and picked it up again on the bus on the way to class. Julia had handed her a physical mess: about two hundred typewritten pages held together with a rubber band, inside a paper bag. Sylvie’s first impression was that it was indeed a work in progress. Some chapters started and then stopped in the middle of a paragraph. There were question marks inside sentences, intended for William to answer at some point. There were footnotes filled with suggestions, ideas, and queries from William about what direction the material might go in.