Hello Beautiful

William said to Kent, “I’ll go running, but not near the lake.” He knew he probably didn’t need to say these words, that Kent would naturally steer them away from the shoreline, but William wanted to be clear about what he didn’t want, when he knew what that was. Before his hospitalization, he’d done things he didn’t want to do all the time, and he’d gotten so good at muffling his own preferences that he was rarely aware of them. Knowing he didn’t want to jog along the lake path, and saying so, felt like progress.

He tried this tack again with Cecelia when she brought over a painting of Alice to hang on the wall in his dorm suite. She’d deemed his set of small rooms — a bedroom and a tiny living area with a kitchen along one wall — acceptable. “At least they gave you bookshelves,” she said. “They could use a coat of paint, though. I see Sylvie brought you a haul from the library.” It was true; all the books on his shelves were covered in plastic and had the Lozano Library seal on the spine. Sylvie had arrived one afternoon with equal amounts of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; the nonfiction was all basketball-related — biographies of players and histories of the sport.

“Careful, Iz,” Cecelia said. The thirteen-month-old was walking slowly around the rooms, her small face fixed with concentration beneath her unruly curls. She appeared to be judging the space: the walls, the furniture. She looked under the bed, then walked into the bathroom to check out the bathtub. When William had gone into the hospital, Izzy was still a baby everyone carried around; he kept doing double takes, startled by the tiny independent human studying his belongings.

“Sylvie said she was going to switch the books out when they’re due back at the library,” he said. “I mean, I told her she didn’t have to, but…” He shrugged. He was acutely aware of his relief that Cecelia, and not Sylvie, was here now. He was comfortable with Cecelia. She was who she’d always been with him, and his feelings for her remained unchanged. This wasn’t the case with Sylvie. It felt like William had seen Sylvie through a sliver in a doorway, and now the door had been thrown wide open. She commanded his full attention in a way that mystified him, and whenever they were together, goosebumps rose on William’s arms. Sylvie showed up at his place every few days, and her presence always jolted him, as if he’d been dealt an electric shock.

He knew, rationally, that this change could be explained by the fact that Sylvie had accompanied him through the most turbulent moment of his life. She’d sat beside his hospital bed, spoken to the psychiatrist. She had received his secrets. He’d been confused when he woke up in the hospital to find Sylvie next to him, but she’d looked confused too, and somehow they’d started over from the same groggy place. She had accepted him unquestioningly, even when he was bloated with lake water. This had surprised William, and still surprised him. No one in his life, except perhaps Kent, had ever accepted him just as he was, and Sylvie had accepted him when he was so broken he was barely a person.

“The kitchen is a bit drab,” Cecelia said, frowning at the sink, mini-refrigerator, and hot plate. “Not sure what we can do about that.”

“Cecelia?” he said.

She looked at him. Of all the sisters, she reminded him the most of Julia. She shared her older sister’s searing focus. Cecelia was more curious than Julia, though, and more interested in getting to the bottom of things. He’d heard Cecelia tell her sisters once, “I don’t give a shit what people think of me.” William had been startled by this, partly because he believed her, and partly because it hadn’t occurred to him that this was an option.

“Thank you for the painting of Alice, but I don’t want to hang it up. I”—he hesitated—“I don’t want it.”

Cecelia didn’t look offended; she studied William’s face the same way Izzy was currently studying the knob on the bedroom door. “It’s too painful to look at her?”

“I’m not her father anymore.”

Cecelia’s eyes flashed; William was engaging with her, and that pleased her. “You’re still her father,” she said. “You gave her up because of your depression. And to please Julia. That doesn’t mean you don’t love Alice. And it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to look at her.”

William had been raised by unhappy parents, and he’d been unhappy from his own earliest memories. William knew that a father could be present and nonviolent in a child’s life and still destroy that child. William’s parents’ grief had shaped him, like a glacier moving silently through a valley. Alice would be better off if her universe was filled with Julia’s light and none of his darkness. He said, “I don’t want to.”

Cecelia gave him an appraising look. “It’s an interesting thing to get to know you now,” she said, “after being in your life for so long. You’ve made a bold decision. I’m not sure it’s right, but it’s bold. It’s the kind of decision Julia would make.”