Hello Beautiful

Dr. Dembia raised her eyebrows. “It sounds like you did the right thing,” she said. “I’ll change your designation to sister-in-law on the visitors’ sheet. Thank you for letting me know.”

If Sylvie’s sisters had heard any of this, they would have been surprised; Sylvie was surprised too. She felt like a stranger to herself. She had been changed by the night and day she’d spent running through the city streets with William’s friends. That time had been different from any other set of hours in Sylvie’s life — the exertion, the company, the fear, the sleeplessness. She would never forget it; she felt marked by the experience, as if she’d gotten a tattoo.

Sylvie told herself that she continued to visit William for two reasons: First, because William was still physically unwell and unable to take charge of his own medical care, so it helped to have someone there to speak to the doctor. Kent couldn’t do it, because he’d had to return to medical school. And second, because Julia had asked Sylvie to find out if she had to come to the hospital, if she still had to be a wife. “Do I need to do something?” Julia had asked when Sylvie visited. Sylvie had already disappointed her sister once, by leaving her to search for William, and she didn’t want to disappoint her again. Sylvie waited by William’s bedside for him to become alert enough to talk.

The many hours William spent in the lake had temporarily affected his eyesight, his electrolyte levels, and his thyroid. He had a hard time staying awake, and Sylvie read a favorite collection of poems while he slept. Poems suited her fractured attention span, but she also chose them to feel closer to her father. Charlie was almost always on Sylvie’s mind while she sat beside the sleeping patient. Her father had understood her, and she knew he would have recognized William’s brokenness too. Sylvie knew with all her heart that if Charlie had been alive, he would also be in this hospital room, able, like his middle daughter, to follow the inner journey of the man in the bed.

One afternoon, William blinked awake and pulled himself up to a seated position, and Sylvie put her book down. Her body became fretful beneath her, and she knew it was time. She could almost feel Julia fretful in her own apartment across town. Did William mean what he had written in the note? Did he really not want Julia to be his wife? When William said — in a flat, clear voice — that, no, he didn’t want Julia to visit, and he didn’t want Alice either, and he was giving both of them up more completely than Sylvie or Julia or the twins would have considered possible, Sylvie looked at his turned-away face, his long body in the bed, the white sky out the window, and felt her body gather and release into silent sobs.

It turned out that she had needed that answer too. Sylvie was composed of question marks and feelings that she didn’t know what to do with, as if her hands were full and she was wearing pants with no pockets. Sylvie was going through something herself in this hospital room. She missed her sister, but if Julia showed up at the hospital, there would no longer be a place for Sylvie beside William’s bed. And if Julia and her husband reunited, Sylvie knew she would fit nowhere; their apartment and this room would somehow no longer hold space for her. Sylvie felt like she’d checked into this hospital room alongside William, and she needed more time. She wasn’t sick, but she wasn’t well either.

Sylvie intended to stop visiting after that. She’d met both of her goals: William was well enough to speak to the doctor, and Julia had been given the news she desired. But Sylvie found that she couldn’t stay away. She told herself every morning that she wouldn’t visit that day and then climbed onto the bus that traveled to the hospital. She felt pulled, as if by magnetic force, between the library, the hospital, and her older sister’s apartment. She stamped books, sent out overdue notices, sat by William’s bed, and ate takeout with her sisters.

What am I doing? she asked herself repeatedly, and she never had a good answer. In the hospital, Sylvie spent hours sitting next to someone who had wanted to be dead. He certainly didn’t seem to be fully alive. Sometimes his eyes were blank when he looked at Sylvie, and she could tell he had to work to remember her name. She sat in silence, a book open in her lap, willing the man in the bed to restitch himself to life’s fabric. Dr. Dembia had talked to her about the stickiness of depression, about the art and science of finding the right mixture and levels of medication. “He’ll need to be on medication for the rest of his life,” Dr. Dembia said. “He won’t be able to manage this depression without it. It’s remarkable he made it this far.”