Julia told her mother and the twins the good news on postcards. She’d started to collect postcards featuring various New York City scenes to correspond with her family. She much preferred postcards to phone calls. There was only a small space to write, so she included one or two highlights from her and Alice’s life, wrote xoxoxo, and sent the card off. Rose hated the postcards and claimed that only a psychopath would communicate with her own mother that way. To appease Rose, Julia mailed her a few photos of Alice every couple of weeks, in addition to the cards. Cecelia and Emeline sent Chicago postcards in return, as if they were entering their city into a postcard competition, and Cecelia and Julia occasionally exchanged photos of Izzy and Alice. Julia and Sylvie never corresponded, in any way.
If Julia was with her daughter when she spotted a colorful postcard in the gray locked mailbox in the foyer of the building, she never let Alice see it. She tucked the postcard in her purse, and after she’d read it, she threw it away in a street garbage can. She threw away the photographs of her niece too. Julia read most of the postcards standing alone on a busy sidewalk, buses and taxis swooshing by. That was how she learned that Emeline, Josie, and Cecelia had moved into a new house together. That was how she found out Sylvie and William had gotten married, in a small ceremony in the back room of the Lozano Library.
William
October 1984–September 1988
Once Emeline had returned from New York City, exhausted and pale, William was careful not only with himself but with Sylvie and the twins too. He had an appreciation for living in the center of a hard truth. Kent had been right: William couldn’t do otherwise. During the months of total secrecy, when he and Sylvie had limited their love to his small room, William’s mind had grown confused, and he’d had to steer his thoughts to get through the days. It hadn’t resembled the final months of his marriage, because Sylvie made him soft with happiness, and in the tiny dorm room they shared everything with each other. But the friction between life inside that room and the outside made him feel like a record needle being dragged across the vinyl surface.
William’s psychiatrist — a bald Puerto Rican man who enjoyed telling William why soccer was a better sport than basketball — ended each session by saying, “You gotta get outside and exercise, you gotta take your pills, and you gotta take care of other people.” No bullshit and no secrets went unspoken. It was a given and the foundation of William’s life. He often wondered, on his walk home, if healthy people used mantras to organize their lives. Whenever William felt his insides numb or if he hadn’t spoken in several hours, he would return to the psychiatrist’s list and do one of the commands.
He ran miles around the Northwestern track, and rehabbed his knee, and took his medications. He was now officially on staff as the most junior of the assistant coaches at Northwestern, and he focused on caring for the injured players. William developed a successful rehab exercise for a kid with recurrent ankle issues, and the student’s gratitude — he’d worried his playing career might be over — made William feel full, and of use, in a way he never had before. The impact of helping seemed to be cumulative; the more kids he helped, the more solid he felt in his own chest. He reached out to the twins when Emeline returned from New York. He’d stayed away from them, on the whole, since Sylvie told her younger sisters about her love for him. The twins had needed distance from Sylvie for a while, and he understood that they would want distance from him too. But now he knew that Sylvie wouldn’t be able to endure her new life without Julia if he, Emeline, and Cecelia weren’t on solid ground.
“We’re not angry with you, William,” Emeline said, when he asked the twins to meet him for breakfast. He hadn’t told Sylvie he was doing this; she would have wanted to come to the breakfast to try to protect everyone’s feelings, and he wanted the chance, for once, to take care of her.
He looked at Cecelia, who was cutting up a pancake for Izzy in her high chair. “It’s true,” Cecelia said. “You didn’t do any of this on purpose. I get that now. And”—she paused—“I’ve never seen Sylvie like this before. I keep painting her, to capture it.”
“It’s not that she’s happy,” Emeline said, “because I know she’s heartbroken about Julia. But she’s beautiful. She’s fully Sylvie.”
William had expected to weather some level of resentment, spoken or unspoken, from the twins, but they appeared to be letting him completely off the hook. He shook his head, confused, but he remembered the nights when he’d walked out of his bedroom to see Julia and Sylvie sleeping together on the couch. And how Emeline had left home with Cecelia, even though she wasn’t pregnant or in trouble, and slept on Mrs. Ceccione’s floor. Even though William was a major player in this drama, no matter how you looked at it — the end of his marriage, his hospitalization, his relationship with Sylvie — the four sisters managed their hearts among themselves. He was always irrelevant, in a way that used to sadden him but now felt liberating. He was free to live his own life as his true, imperfect self, and Sylvie and the twins accepted him. William felt a pang of guilt toward his ex-wife; he had given Julia and Alice up, and yet he’d ended up surrounded by the women Julia loved most. It didn’t seem fair, but he would try not to think about that. He would try to follow his doctor’s orders and take care of the people around him.
“If you feel like you need to make something up to us,” Cecelia said, “you can be our unpaid handyman. There’s a lot of work to do.” Cecelia had just bought a broken-down house in Pilsen for very little money, from an art dealer who admired her work. Cecelia, Emeline, Josie, and Izzy would live there together, as soon as the house was livable.
“It would be my honor,” he said, trying to sound lighthearted, but he meant it. He felt astonishingly lucky to have emerged from this whirlwind with Sylvie in his bed each night and Emeline and Cecelia willing to keep him in their lives. William remembered seeing Charlie standing in a doorway, smiling at William, the same night he’d walked into the lake. He thought that his father-in-law would have been proud of the twins for keeping their hearts open. He would have liked that Cecelia was making art and that Emeline had allowed herself to love who she loved. William didn’t know what Charlie would make of him and Sylvie — since their love impacted his oldest daughter, he probably wouldn’t have been thrilled — but Charlie had wanted his daughters to live fully and deeply, and Sylvie was doing that.
For four months, William devoted his weeknights and weekends to replacing the insulation on the second floor of Cecelia’s new house, retiling the kitchen, and replacing the tub and toilet. The house was only a stone’s throw away from where the Padavano girls had grown up, and it was similar in layout to the house on 18th Place. Sylvie came with him to Cecelia’s each time, and she painted walls with her sisters or babysat Izzy while they unpacked boxes. William liked to listen to the patter of the women’s voices and murmured laughter while he grouted tiles and unscrewed ancient nuts from rusted pipes. Izzy would occasionally appear in the doorway of whatever room William occupied and hand him random tools. He ended up with a pile of wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers, and bolt cutters around his feet, and when the toddler wandered away, he would place them back in the toolbox.
On the evenings when he wasn’t needed at Cecelia’s, William met Sylvie at the library and they ate dinner together. There was a Mexican diner they particularly liked, and they would share a margarita and eat tacos. During their secret period, they had been careful when they talked. They’d discussed books, basketball, and the memories Sylvie was writing down. Other permitted topics were what they’d done that day, whom they’d spoken to, and anything funny that was said. They’d avoided talking about the past and anything beyond the current day. In the late fall, though, once they’d been together for eleven months and Julia knew the truth, they allowed themselves to imagine a shared future. They smiled shyly at each other during these conversations. William still believed that he didn’t deserve Sylvie, didn’t deserve the way she loved all of him, in every mood and every thought, but she beamed at him across the table, and he found that, in her glow, his plans became more concrete, more clear.