Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

William had the strange thought that he might never see his parents again—that they’d only ever had one child, and it wasn’t him.

The dream was now in the air, at risk of the elements, beyond her grasp.

he admired how Julia saw her life as a system of highways to be expertly navigated, and he was grateful to be in her car.

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.

“It’s because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can’t see that distinction, so they just do as they’re told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that’s the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

We’re not separated from the world by our own edges.”

Charlie had seen and loved each of them for who they were. When any of his girls—including Rose—had come into view, he’d always given them the same welcome, calling out, Hello beautiful!

Sylvie and her sisters had known themselves under their father’s gaze. And with that gaze gone, the threads that had tied their family so tightly together had loosened. What had been effortless would now take effort.

Alice’s birth had reshuffled Julia’s place in her family. She was the mother now. Alice was the daughter. Julia wondered if Rose had sensed that she was about to become a supporting character, instead of the main one, and left to avoid that fate.

It occurred to him, for the first time, that just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.

Life was opportunity, a chest of drawers to open, one after the other, and William had tried to hurl the chest out the window.

William lived the way he imagined drunks did after they stopped drinking: carefully, and one day at a time. He felt newly housed in his body, aware that any negligence could cause the entire building to collapse.

The Padavanos had never spent a holiday apart from one another like this, and the three sisters still here were haunted by ghosts.

Alice remembered the time in middle school when she had passed her mother in height and realized that Julia was not a perfect superhero, that her mother was a human woman, which meant she had flaws and a past, which seemed to be at one with her wild hair. Alice had spent her life watching her mother try to harness both her hair and her past, wrapping them up, trying to impose her control on them every single day.

When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin.

“When an old person dies,” Kent said, “even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They’re like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.”

My mom said she forgave her because she wanted to keep loving her.

She couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift; these pages would give her all the stories and people she’d missed. Her own history was in this document.