Lily was deliberate. She approached everything with the focused caution of someone who wanted to understand a thing before committing to it. She learned to walk later than most children because she spent months studying the mechanics of it from the floor, watching adults move around her with the careful attention of a junior engineer. When she finally walked, she walked correctly. She has never fallen down since in the way that children fall — she simply incorporated balance into her understanding and moved on.
Emily was the opposite.
Emily walked early and ran immediately and fell constantly and got up without interruption and ran again. She was the kind of child who greeted the world by throwing herself at it, trusting that it would catch her or that getting up was fine either way. She laughed loudly and at things that weren’t always conventionally funny. She had my mother’s habit of talking to strangers as though she had known them her whole life, which had been my mother’s most exhausting and most wonderful quality.
Together they were a complete system.
Lily provided caution; Emily provided momentum. Emily provided joy without analysis; Lily provided the structure that kept the joy from becoming chaos. They fought with the ferocity of people who are intimate enough to know exactly where the pressure points are, and they defended each other with the ferocity of people who share something that cannot be articulated.
My father called them the ecosystem.
“You can’t take one out,” he said once, watching them play in his backyard on a summer afternoon, Emily trying to climb a tree while Lily stood below making suggestions about technique. “They only work together.”
Carl laughed at that.
Carl was, in those five years, exactly the person you hope for when you are trying to build something. He was steady in the way that not everyone is steady — not boring, not without dimension, but reliably present. He showed up. For bedtimes and for the school drop-offs and for the Tuesday afternoons when nothing was happening and he could have been somewhere else but chose to be exactly where he was. He was the kind of father who knew the particular laugh of each of his daughters, the individual sound, the difference between them in the dark.
He loved them differently, the way you love different things with the same love — differently shaped, equally complete.
