Hello Beautiful

William thought of Charlie again; his father-in-law had seemed interested in knowing him. And then, briefly, he thought of his parents. Had his mother or father ever looked straight at him? He didn’t think so. He imagined that his mother must have held him as a baby with her face turned away. Maybe this was why he had a hard time picturing himself as a parent, because his own parents had wanted to leave every room he was in.

William took a jagged breath. Why was he having these thoughts? It felt like Sylvie’s attention had revealed him to himself. And the stars were so bright overhead. Aggressively bright.

“I’ve been very tired lately,” he heard himself say.

“Me too.”

“You lost your father and your home.” He hadn’t considered this before, but he knew, as if the air between them were stacked with answers, that this was the truth.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice wavered.

Something wavered inside William in response, and he was afraid — for a split second — that he might cry. But he couldn’t do that in front of his wife’s sister; too much had already passed between them. He stood up and said in a brusque voice, “Let’s get inside.”

A few days later, Julia told him, upset, that Sylvie had found a place of her own; she was moving out. William felt a stab of something sharp in his chest and thought, That’s my fault too. Something had happened to him on the bench, and since then he’d found his daily routine even more difficult to power through. He’d almost wept in front of his sister-in-law, and he never cried. Not since he was a child, anyway, and William had few memories of tears even then. His unstitching must have looked distasteful to Sylvie. Understandably, the combination of reading his embarrassing footnotes and that moment on the bench had been too much — too much what, he wasn’t sure — for Sylvie to take.

—

A month later, Rose announced she was moving to Florida, and the sisters gathered the following evening at William and Julia’s apartment. William wanted to be helpful but didn’t know how. He sat in the armchair and watched the four sisters roam the living room. The women shared the same crease between their eyebrows and the same need for movement. They passed Izzy back and forth among them, even though the baby kicked and wriggled in their arms.

“She’s working on crawling,” Cecelia said in apology.

“Of course she is.” Julia spoke as if she were running out of air. She was so pregnant she had a hard time filling her lungs. “Izzy’s brilliant.”

None of the women smiled, because Julia wasn’t joking and they all agreed with her.

“What can we do?” Emeline said. “If Mama wants to leave, we can’t stop her.”

“She might not like Florida. She might come back,” Sylvie said.

William had made eye contact with Sylvie very briefly when she arrived. They exchanged a nod that felt like shorthand for: I saw you that night, and you saw me, but we’re fine. Since Sylvie had moved out, William was careful to never be alone with her. He’d finally regained some sense of momentum that allowed him to get through his days, and he didn’t want to lose it. Also, he’d seen Sylvie’s emotions as if they were drawn all over her body, and that seemed alarmingly intimate, as if he’d seen her without clothes. William didn’t understand what had happened between him and his sister-in-law on the bench that night, but it felt dangerous, like a shining dagger that could cut through his life as if it were made of paper.

He scanned the other women in the room. No one here had ever been to Florida or even on an airplane. Rose already had her ticket. William had looked in the local real estate section of the newspaper that morning and seen that her house was on the market, for far more than he would have thought it was worth.

“I can’t believe she’s leaving now,” Julia said. “She’ll probably miss the baby being born.”

Izzy was passed from Sylvie to Julia. Julia kissed the baby girl’s cheek and then nuzzled her face into her neck.

The three other sisters looked distressed, their eyes on their oldest sister; Julia was their leader, and she didn’t have a plan. William felt a surge of annoyance at them for expecting Julia to fix this. His wife was having a hard time sleeping, and her back hurt all the time. “I feel like the baby is crowding me out,” she’d told William that morning at breakfast. She looked uncomfortable and swollen every minute of the day.

“Older people often move south when they retire,” he said, and noticed that his deeper, male voice sounded odd in the room. “It’s very common. This isn’t bad news necessarily…you just weren’t expecting it.”

There was a beat of silence. No one met his eyes. He wondered if he had no credibility on the subject because his own family tree had shriveled so prematurely. Or did he lack credibility simply because he was a man in his armchair, like Charlie had been?

William looked down at his weak knee.