Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

She wouldn’t earn an academic scholarship like Julia had, because she hadn’t matched her older sister’s determination to get one. Sylvie aced the classes she was interested in but got C’s or D’s in everything else. Julia had operated her determination like a lawn mower and mowed through high school with the next step in her sights.

Her sister had read hundreds of novels—it had been Sylvie’s only interest, and hobby, for their entire lives—and out of those books she’d plucked a life goal: to have a great, once-in-a-century love affair. It was a child’s dream, but Sylvie was still holding on to it with both hands. She was looking for him—her soulmate—every day of her life. And she made out with boys during her shifts in the library to practice for when she met him.

Sylvie cared too much and lived too much in her head.

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

“Reading.” Sylvie waved her hand. “The classes were a waste of my time. If I’m not interested in something, I have no hope of learning it.” She’d read in a park near the school, storing novels in the hollow of an ancient oak she thought of as her friend.

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 set down his beer glass, empty now, and rubbed his hand up and down his arm, as an example of one of his edges. “We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”

“We are not contained between our hats and boots.”

He was vast, and beautiful, and more present in the gift of baby formula to a young mother than in any day he’d spent at the paper factory. He was his acts of kindness, and his love for his daughters, and the twenty minutes he’d spent with Sylvie behind the grocer’s that evening.

She would wait, forever if necessary, for a man who saw the expanse of her, the way her father had.

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. What had been home for all of them was now merely Rose’s house.

was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him.

It occurred to him, for the

first time, that just because you never thought about someone didn’t mean they weren’t inside you.

getting darker—before she was born. It wasn’t because of her, but she showed up when nothing made sense anymore, and I had to keep turning off lights in my head to make it through the days. The thing was—”

“Alice is a lamp. A bright lamp, from the moment she was born. She kind of shines. Looking at her hurt my eyes, and I was afraid to touch her.”

“No. I was afraid I was going to put her light out. That my darkness would swamp her light.” “So you felt like you had to stay away from her, to keep her safe.” “I have to stay away from her, yes.”

When she hung up, she knew she’d failed even in ending the conversation. Crying babies were life to Emeline. Five or six were probably crying their way to nap time in her presence right now. Julia could picture her sister making her way back to her responsibilities, picking up babies and perching them on her hips, pushing pacifiers into mouths, cooing love at infants she had no relation to, simply because it was the right thing to do.

“Everyone has been so kind to me. I’m not going to waste their kindness.” These words hit Sylvie strangely. It felt like William had put together sentences that took aim at what was inside her.

There was no way she could go back to that heartbroken, lonely ground, where the sisters, who’d believed they would die if they were separated, had separated.

“Like all the walls have been knocked down. Like we’re past needing a roof or doors. They’re irrelevant.”

whispered his happiness into her skin at night.

He also wanted to keep their relationship secret forever, which to him meant until Sylvie came to her senses and broke up with him. William didn’t feel like this contradicted his mantra; this secrecy was actually just a delay tactic, a moment of stolen joy before they gathered the strength to walk away from each other. “I don’t deserve this,” he said almost daily, until Sylvie told him to please not say it anymore. But he said it again now, because he couldn’t help himself.

“Do I deserve happiness and ...

“Of course.” “Then do this for me.” “Love...

To keep him from sinking beneath the water inside himself.

admitting it even to herself—until she’d met Josie. “I had to tell her I loved her,” Emeline had said. “Even if it killed me. And I thought it might.”

From a place where they were heartbroken and besotted and free.

she accepted all of him, every day, and he did the same for her.

Alice never cried—another loss of control she shied away from—and she couldn’t afford to start now.

He was gaining ground, not just losing it.

“It’s hard to explain, but our love was so deep and wide that it made me love everyone and everything in sight. Which included me.” She smiled wider. “I know it sounds silly, but I’m proud of myself. I guess for living a brave life.”

Sylvie’s love, once William let it out of his hands, had shown itself to be exponential in its power. It had expanded to fill all the space around him, which was his entire life.

A shadow represents either the blocking out of light or the other half of a person. When a character loses their shadow, they’ve lost a part of themselves and have to search to get it back.

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.”