Hello Beautiful

“No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.”

“So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.”

“I have to stay away from her, yes.”

Julia

August 1983–October 1983

When the phone rang on that hot August morning, William had been gone for a day and a half. Julia was sitting on the couch with Alice in her lap. She was tickling the baby’s stomach. Alice gurgled when she laughed, and it was the best sound Julia had ever heard. It made Julia laugh too, every time. Julia carried Alice to the colorful blanket on the floor and laid the baby down. Then she picked up the phone next to the armchair, and everything changed.

Something inside Julia froze while she listened to Sylvie talk. The news that William had tried to kill himself was so enormous, she couldn’t take it in. Her hands went cold, and when she hung up the phone, she blew on them as if it were the middle of winter. She carried Alice from room to room, even though the baby hadn’t asked to be picked up. She visited each of the four windows in the apartment; she appeared to be looking for something, and yet she wouldn’t have been able to relay the weather outside or the time of day.

Cecelia and Emeline came to her apartment, and Julia told them that she needed time alone to think. They nodded, their faces grave. They’d all been shaken by the idea that William had wanted to leave them, to leave everything. His choice made them feel vulnerable; they’d never considered anything other than a natural death, and he’d pointed out another exit. The world felt scarier in the wake of what had almost happened.

The three women stood by Julia’s door for several minutes.

“How could he have done that?” Cecelia’s voice was hard.

Emeline rubbed her sister’s arm. “I don’t think it makes sense to be angry at him.”

“But,” Cecelia said, “I literally don’t understand how he could give all of this up. He was going to abandon Alice? There’s nothing more wrong in the universe.”

Julia listened to the twins talk the same way she’d listened to Sylvie on the phone. Everything was new to her now; it felt like her prior understanding of the world had been wiped away. She considered each sentence as if she were hearing words for the first time.

She said, “How could I not have known William was so unhappy?” Her husband’s lack of ambition, his unreliability, had turned out to be small symptoms in an ocean of darkness. Julia remained cold with fear. She had scared herself — how clueless she’d been — and William’s darkness terrified her. She had lain in bed, night after night, beside a man who didn’t want to live. Now, when she looked back at even the recent past, the memories were covered by shadows. Her own experience was a lie.

“He’s sick.” Emeline looked miserable. “Sylvie said he’ll probably need to be in the hospital for a long time.”

“Still,” Cecelia said. “No one should give up. It’s so selfish to do that. So wrong.”

Julia found herself nodding in agreement.

When the twins were gone, Julia became aware of her own anger. She felt like she’d caught it from Cecelia, as if the emotion were a cold. She walked from window to window again, her heart beating out questions:

How could William have done something as embarrassing as trying to drown himself in Lake Michigan?

Was life with me so unbearable that he had to not only leave me but kill himself?

Why didn’t he tell me how he felt?

Even though Julia had sworn off solving problems for the people around her, she still had all her skills at her disposal and could have helped. She could have at least stopped him from doing something so dramatic, so hopeless, so humiliating.

When Sylvie appeared later that night, Julia let her sister into the apartment but stayed by the front door again. She couldn’t bear long visits. She needed her home to be occupied by just her and her daughter.

Sylvie apologized. “I don’t know why I went with Kent,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I should have stayed with you.”

She wrapped her arms around Julia and Julia did the same, and the two sisters held tight for a long time, each leaning into the other’s body like buildings that required support.

“What do I do? Do I have to do something?” Julia said into her sister’s hair.

Sylvie had suggested, when she’d called from the hospital, that a mental breakdown erased the note William had written and the check he’d signed over to her. Was that true? Did Julia still have to be a wife, in a worst-case scenario, to a man she no longer recognized?

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “But I’ll find out.”

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