Why? Julia thought, when her baby sister came back into the room and when her sisters filed out of the apartment. Why ruin everything? Why would you do this to us? Julia had tried so hard to do everything right, and she had. She felt overheated now and pushed open the window. She stared at the memory of Cecelia standing in the middle of her beautiful, perfect apartment in her purple shirt. She wished that they had told her the news somewhere else. Anywhere else. Julia went outside at one point and walked around the path that framed the quad. There was a bench on the far side, which she sat on until she needed to return to motion.
When William came home that evening, she said, “I think we should have a baby.”
He stopped where he was, his crutches pushed ahead of him for the step he’d been about to take. He looked like a tree propped up with wooden stakes. William was using the crutches only at home, when his leg was exhausted and sore. “Now?” He audibly swallowed. “I thought…we need to get on our feet first. Julia, I haven’t even started graduate school.”
“You got the teaching-assistant job for the fall. You’re wonderful.”
She was building something in her head. An answer to the mess, a way to fix everything, to put her family back to rights. Julia would save as much as she could from William’s small salary and give that money to Cecelia, or Mrs. Ceccione, to make sure her sister had what she needed and was okay. The independence Cecelia had shown that afternoon felt like a flag planted into sandy ground. It was an announcement, a wish, from the pregnant girl; it wasn’t who she was. She didn’t have the strength she was pretending to have, and living down the block from Rose’s tsunami of grief and judgment was going to throw Cecelia against the rocks. So more money would help. And Julia would get pregnant as soon as possible, because as a newly married woman, her pregnancy would be celebrated. It would be undeniably accepted. Julia would put her pregnant belly beside Cecelia’s. Rose and Charlie would embrace both their grandchildren, because they would come as a set. Everyone would be back together again, and there would be enough love to go around. Julia had a sun-soaked image of two babies sitting on a blanket; one of them was hers, but she wasn’t sure which one.
“You haven’t even asked about my first day,” William said. “Did something happen?” He paused and pulled his crutches back to his sides. He was now an upright tree. “You seem…agitated?”
Julia smiled at the questioning uplift to his voice. He was full of questions, and she loved him. She was full of answers. She walked closer and pressed herself against him. She reached up and undid the top button on the white shirt she’d given him for his birthday. Then the button below that. She ran her finger across the soft white T-shirt underneath. “Are you hungry?” she said, in a voice no louder than a whisper.
He shook his head.
She tugged on his shirt, and he lowered to her. This will work, she thought, distracted, as his lips covered hers and she led him in a slow, swaying, backward walk to the couch.
—
The next day, Julia took the bus from Northwestern to Pilsen. She didn’t want to go, but it was impossible to hear that news and not appear before her mother. Julia wouldn’t have been able to put into words why, exactly, but she needed to show her mother the respect of her presence.
She found Rose sweating in the garden, bent over the herbs. Heat was rising from the soil in waves; summer in Chicago was punishing. Julia knew from experience that tending to the herbs demanded the most rigor and attention to detail. Rose insisted that whoever was working in that part of the garden use a magnifying glass and tweezers. Tiny bugs needed to be spotted and removed, and a special spindly weed that had a proclivity for climbing up the herbs and strangling them needed to be caught early.
“She’s not here,” Rose said. “If you’re here to see her.”
“I came to see you.”
This seemed to surprise Rose, and she stopped in the middle of yanking out a clump of young crabgrass. She put her hands on her thighs, and Julia was able to see her mother’s face for the first time. Rose looked wrecked, as if she’d been in a car crash. All the familiar pieces were there, but wrong and somehow broken.
“I had to draw a line,” Rose said.
Julia found it difficult to bear her mother’s distressed face, so she looked up at the hot, low sky. She searched her mind for the right thing to say, words that would make her mother feel better. Before she’d found them, Rose said, “I only asked one thing of you girls.”
“That we go to college.”
Rose glared. “No. I asked you not to mess up like I did. Was that too much to ask?”
Julia shook her head, even though she couldn’t recall her mother ever making that specific request. Rose had repeated, over and over: You have to go to college. She’d never actually told them not to get pregnant before marriage. That expectation was unspoken, but it turned out to have the highest stakes.
“You girls were supposed to do more than I did,” Rose said. “I wanted you to be better. That,” she said, her voice as gravelly as the soil at her feet, “was the whole point of my life.”
“Oh, Mama,” Julia said, taken aback. In the heat of the news the day before, she hadn’t considered that Cecelia was repeating their mother’s history. Rose had gotten pregnant with Julia when she was nineteen and unmarried, and Rose’s mother had stopped speaking to her. The mother and daughter never spoke again. The girls had never met their grandmother. Charlie always said that it wasn’t a loss, because their grandmother was an unfriendly, bitter woman. But when the subject of her mother came up, Rose always turned away. She never said a word. Now Rose was the mother turning away from the daughter, and the grandchild. Rose was axing a branch off her own family tree, which meant she was both inflicting and experiencing pain.
“I failed,” Rose said.
“No, you didn’t. You were a great mother.”
“I failed.” This time she said it in a soft voice that sounded like Emeline’s. Julia had never heard her mother speak in that tone before and wouldn’t have believed she was capable of it. Julia wondered if all four girls’ voices lived inside their mother. Emeline’s earnestness, Julia’s clear directives, Cecelia’s excitement about the palette of colors that made up the world, Sylvie’s romantic yearning. Perhaps Rose simply masked her daughters’ voices with her own gruff tone, her own twist of anger and disappointment, but they were all there, buried within her.
“Look at me,” Julia said. “I’m married, with a college degree. It didn’t mean anything that you got pregnant with me before you were married. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Julia had never been bothered by the fact that she was conceived before her parents’ marriage. It wasn’t uncommon in their neighborhood, and she’d always felt a thrum of pride that she had started their family. Without her, Charlie and Rose might not have married. Sylvie, the twins, this house, would not have existed. Julia was the catalyst.
“At least Charlie married me,” Rose said. “Your sister is pretending the father doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter. She refused to tell me his name, so I couldn’t call his parents and set this right. Do you know who he is?” Her eyes flashed with sudden hope.
“No, I don’t.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Rose said to the dirt.
Julia couldn’t see how pulling another person into a mistake did anything other than make it a bigger mistake, but she kept this opinion to herself. “Cecelia has all of us,” she said. “She has our family. We can give the baby everything he or she needs.”