Hello Beautiful

by Ann Napolitano

“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 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.”

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 looked for third doors because she was like her father. Julia sought to collect labels like honors student, girlfriend, and wife, but Sylvie steered away from labels. She wanted to be true to herself with every word she uttered, every action she took, and every belief she held. There was no label for kissing boys for ninety seconds in the library, which was part of why it made Sylvie happy and Julia uncomfortable. Sylvie would keep boycotting boring classes to read in parks. She wouldn’t settle for less than true love, even though her sisters had issued a collective sigh when she told them that Ernie had asked her out on a proper date and she’d turned him down. 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.

the four Padavano girls shared their lives, celebrating and utilizing one another’s strengths, covering for one another’s weaknesses. Julia was the organizer and leader, Sylvie the reader and measured voice, Emeline the nurturer, and Cecelia the artist.

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

A radio dial spun inside her, the volume loud. I love you, she thought, and the words—impossible now to deny—brought her both desolation and deep joy. William was her one. He was her heart. He had changed all the molecules inside her. Sylvie had known love would come for her with the force of a tsunami. She’d dreamed of this ever since she was a little girl, and her dream had actually come true. But she hadn’t known her love would be impossible, a dead end, unspeakable, because he had been married to her sister.

The young man who was relieved to be chosen by a powerhouse of a woman who’d handed him plans and schedules and even thoughts. He’d followed her every instruction, but eventually the directions had led him so far away from himself that he was no longer a person.

The gleaming bridge was crumbling to dust at their feet. Sylvie thought of her childhood dream and how Julia had complained to Sylvie that the novels she cited as depictions of great love were all tragedies. Sylvie, in her innocence, had insisted that the tragedy part was avoidable. It wasn’t woven into the romance. But she had been wrong. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

Only in writing about them did Sylvie truly comprehend that the same day her beloved Izzy had entered the world, Charlie had left. And the day Alice was born, Rose had departed Chicago.

They’d found a loophole, which allowed them to be together without anyone’s knowledge, which meant this time meant nothing, which meant everything.

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.”

Alice that she had left home to see her father, and Sylvie had left her home—her life—which opened the possibility of a reunion with her own. This parallel was too much for Alice to consider further, but she felt, like a physical sensation, William’s presence in the backyard. “You know what Daddy would say when he saw Sylvie,” Julia said in a quiet voice. Emeline and Izzy nodded, and Cecelia said, “Hello beautiful.”

Izzy had started telling Alice about the Padavano sisters’ childhood, and there was something mythic and epic in the tales she was now holding in her hands. The idea that this was a narrative Alice would find herself in by the end felt strangely exciting. The coming together and falling apart of her parents; her own birth. And what would Alice do in the pages that hadn’t yet been written? Where would she live? Whom and what would she love?

On the tailwind of Sylvie’s departure, Alice had arrived in Chicago. Of course she had. Sylvie had talked about one-two punches, about how Charlie had died on the day Izzy was born, and Sylvie had clearly used her magic to somehow bring William his daughter on the day his heart broke. His wife was trying to save him, yet again.

The young woman standing before William didn’t look like them at all; she looked like him. A slightly different version of his own eyes looked back at him. William had never recognized himself in someone else’s face before. It felt like finding an answer to a question he hadn’t known he had.

He could feel their hope too. Life had surprised them all—as if the sea had risen dramatically, lifting their boats precipitously high—in the midst of a moment of sadness. If this could happen, if William and Alice could sit side by side and talk under the evening sky, then truly anything could happen. Julia could share her life with her sisters again; Rose could lay down her grudges and walk forward with lightness; Kent could find a new love.