The Wednesday Sisters

  She would ask Jim to read, too, wanting her baby to hear her father’s melodic Indian accent, her words sounding in his music, which was Ally’s music, too, no matter what her own parents might think. Day and night, they read to exhaustion, trying not to think this might be the only chance they would have to read to their little girl.

  Hope’s first awful week in intensive care—making no progress toward breathing on her own—settled into the beginning of a second week, day eight. Ally did not want to be discharged from the hospital herself; she couldn’t imagine leaving her baby there all by herself. She could hardly speak, but it was there in the cut of her cheekbone against her skin, in her stooped posture, in the strands of her long dark hair falling out in clumps.

  Jim finally convinced her she had to come home, to get a good night’s sleep in her own bed, to keep up her strength. “You can’t do anything the doctors and nurses aren’t already doing,” he said. “Hope needs you to be strong for her. She needs you to get some rest.”

  Ally relented, finally, and Jim checked her out of the hospital, eased her into the passenger seat of her white Chevy Nova, and brought her home. He helped her up the stairs and tucked her into bed, climbing in next to her. He woke at 3 A.M., though, to find Ally’s side of the bed empty. She had pulled her clothes back on quietly in the darkened bedroom, climbed into her Nova, and returned to the hospital. She’d bought a stale cup of coffee from a machine in the waiting room and drunk it on the way down the hall, tossing what she hadn’t finished into the trash outside the neonatal intensive care unit. She’d donned the scrubs and booties and hairnet again, and washed to the elbow, working the foot pedals easily, used to anything by then.

  “I just couldn’t bear to leave her all alone in the cold, bright lights of this awful room,” she told Jim when he found her there. Leave her alone to die, that’s what she was thinking, or what she was not allowing herself to think. If she left the hospital, went home to sleep for even a few hours, Hope might die there, all alone, with no one to hold her tiny hand.

  THAT WAS THE WEEK Arlene Peets announced she was moving to one of the big New York publishers. Kath was devastated, of course. She loved that job, loved working with Arlene, who’d moved her from copy editor to assistant, which hadn’t sounded like much of a move in the right direction to us, but Kath said if it got any better, she’d have to hire someone to help her enjoy it. “I’m busier than a moth in a brand-new wool mitten,” she said. Instead of finding typos and double-checking facts, she was reading through manuscripts, making the first cut, sitting down with Arlene over lunch to recommend which manuscripts she ought to read herself.

  “I just can’t believe she’s up and moving to New York without so much as a how-do-you-do,” Kath told us.

  It wasn’t as if there were a million publishing jobs to be had in San Francisco back then, either. But Kath put together a résumé, then knocked on Arlene’s door, and went in and sat down, gathered her courage, and asked for a letter of recommendation.

  “A recommendation?” Arlene asked.

  Kath, sure she sounded ridiculous, said, “So I can apply for a new job.”

  “To work for the competition?” Arlene said. “I can’t let you do that, Kath.”

  Kath looked to the piles of stacked manuscripts—manuscripts she’d spent hours on, often taking them home, reading late into the night, working her butt off for Arlene. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, she reminded herself. But all of a sudden she didn’t much care about leaving the whole world blind if it came to that. She’d like to start with that little bitch of a medical student.

  “Well, that really cocks my pistol, Arlene,” she said. “Here I am working my wide rear off for you and thinking you like my work, and . . .” She stood up. She didn’t even realize it. She towered over Arlene at her desk. “You do like my work, you can’t tell me now you don’t! You’re just being ugly here, for not a reason in the whole damned world. You’re walking away from this place yourself, but you’re going to leave me in the lurch, with no recommendation to—”

  “But I want you to come with me,” Arlene said.

  Kath felt herself sinking into her high heels. “With you?”

  “With me,” Arlene said. “I’m glad to see you’ve learned to stand up for yourself, by the way, Kath. Literally.”

  Kath sat back in her chair, remembering her daddy’s voice: You keep letting your mouth overload your tail, Katherine Claire, and you surely will live to regret.

  “Don’t look so sheepish,” Arlene said. “I still want you to come with me. Yes, even after that. Good thing I stopped you before you started telling me what you really think of me, eh?” She laughed her genuine laugh, the one Kath would sometimes hear when Arlene was reading a manuscript that Kath, too, had found laugh-out-loud funny, which was the rarest of finds.

  “On second thought, go ahead, look sheepish,” Arlene said, still laughing. Then a moment later, “‘Cocks my pistol’? Damn, Kath, if only my authors could express themselves half as colorfully as you!”

  Kath was flattered, she really was, but she couldn’t possibly move to New York, not with Lee here. True, part of her thought that might be a great solution—move to New York and start over by herself. Leave Lee behind. But she couldn’t bear to move Anna Page and Lee-Lee and Lacy away from their daddy. And how would she survive without the Wednesday Sisters?

  “Gosh, I would just about move a mountain to keep working for you, Arlene. But I can’t move to New York. I just can’t.”

  “New York?” Arlene smiled, not the professional smile she pasted on when she met with the most unpleasant of her authors, but a genuine one that went with her laugh. “I’m not going to New York,” she said. “I thought you knew that. I’m opening a West Coast office. Here. And I have plans for you, Kath. Plans that do not include letting you go off to work for someone else.”

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to celebrate anything that spring with Hope’s fragile little future overshadowing everything in the Wednesday Sisters’ lives. How can you bear to feel good for even a moment when your friend is in so much pain? Still, when I received the Michelangelo’s Ghost galley proofs—my typeset novel, the way it would look between hard covers—I did feel something. I turned to the dedication page: “to Danny and Maggie and Davy, and to the Wednesday Sisters.” Then to the first page: “Chapter One.” I read the opening sentence. It read like a novel.

  I thought of Ally as I sat wiping my face to keep tears from dripping on the pages. I imagined her sitting at the hospital with Hope, reading quietly to her. I imagined what her book would look like when it was set, too, after it had sold, which I decided then it had to, it really had to. And I imagined Brett’s book, too, and Linda’s stories gathered into a collection, and even something by Kath. I imagined walking into Kepler’s or Books Inc. or Stacey’s and finding our beautiful books all on the shelves. I imagined the five of us on the bestseller list, numbers one through five. I imagined myself at the top first, but then I put Ally there instead, and my own name second. I wondered if I’d be jealous. I wondered if the other Wednesday Sisters were really, deep in their hearts where they wouldn’t even admit it to themselves, jealous. I knew I would have been. I knew I would have felt the same way I’d felt watching my brothers drive off to college. Not jealous as in wanting to take it away from them, but jealous as in wanting it for myself as well.

  I began to read aloud, my words in my voice like Ally’s words in hers. It’s a surprisingly different way of reading. You become more focused on the rhythms. You find all sorts of places where you stumble. You even see typos you never saw before. I remember how silly I felt at first, how I closed myself in the bathroom and turned on the fan lest Danny or the kids hear me and think I’d gone off my rocker. But then I imagined Ally reading in that intensive care unit, and I read on.

  THE SURFACTANT the doctors were giving Hope would not help her breathe, though no one knew that then; it would be another ten years before effective artificial surfactants
were developed, far too late to help Hope. But she was one of the lucky ones. Slowly, gradually, she turned the corner, needing less and less oxygen from the machine until, finally, she was breathing on her own.

  Ally had not yet done anything to get ready for the baby when she found out Hope was going to be released. She didn’t have a crib or a changing table or even diapers. We’d thought we’d have a baby shower for her, but then she’d gone into the hospital and it wasn’t clear the baby would be born alive, then if she would survive. So the minute we learned Hope was coming home, we all just started bringing things to Ally’s house. Brett brought her changing table, because she was done with it, or if it turned out she wasn’t, she could always get it back. I loaned her my crib and my baby buggy. Kath had the most beautiful little antique bassinet that she insisted Ally use for this special child of hers. We all chipped in money, too, and Linda and I went out and bought everything you could need for a baby: diapers and baby powder and pacifiers, a receiving blanket, pajamas, a cute little baby hat. And bottles. We knew Ally’s milk would have come in while Hope was in intensive care, and it would have dried up. But most mothers used bottles then, anyway. We didn’t know things like how very good that first stuff that comes before the milk, the colostrum, is for babies. We assumed the formulas developed by male scientists in jackets and ties must be better for our babies than anything we girls could produce.

  So Hope came home, and Ally and Jim settled her into that antique cradle, and as you can imagine they just couldn’t stand not holding her. They picked her up again, and wondered over her the entire morning, watching her clear eyes watching them. They called her “princess” and gave her their fingers to grasp, laughing at the sounds and expressions she made. They kissed her nose, her belly, her toes. And they said over and over again, to her, to each other: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Hope.”

  Late in the afternoon of the day Hope came home, a crane with a wrecking ball drove up over the curb and across the grass of the park to the circular drive in front of the old mansion. The driver got out, lit a cigarette, and stood looking up at the place. A second truck, a pickup, pulled up beside it a few minutes later. Two men joined the first and began talking and pointing at the trees and at the park around them. They disappeared around back, reappeared several minutes later, stood talking for another moment before all three loaded into the pickup and set off over the grass again. They left the crane squatting on the cracked asphalt of the circular drive that went nowhere, its wrecking ball looming over the poor old mansion’s grand columns, its peeling paint, its already-falling-down porch.

  The children wanted to bring a present to Hope—her first teddy bear, they decided, since Hope hadn’t been allowed stuffed animals in the intensive care unit (too many possibilities for germs). So that Wednesday we piled everyone into Kath’s and my convertibles—Kath joining us since she had a few days off while the movers packed up Arlene’s furniture and personal files and moved them into the office space for the new publisher—and we headed for the Stanford Mall.

  Of course, the children wanted to deliver the bear to Hope themselves, but even at home Hope wasn’t allowed visitors yet, especially not child-sized visitors with their runny noses and dirty hands. Linda, though, had an idea. While we were at the mall she bought one of the new Polaroid Instamatic cameras, the kind that spit out pictures you could watch develop right before your eyes, and the following morning, bright and early, we brought the children over to Ally’s front porch and waited while Ally took Mr. Pajamas—that’s what the children had named the bear, because Hope couldn’t talk yet and the poor bear needed a name—and put him in the cradle with Hope, and shot off ten pictures, squandering the entire picture pack so we could see them right away. Ally stayed with Hope to rock her to sleep afterward, but I brought the camera out to her front porch, where Linda pulled the film pack from it. We sat on the steps with the children, all of us eating Popsicles and watching the image of Hope and Mr. Pajamas arise from the little gray squares.

  “She sucks her thumb,” Linda said. “I sucked my thumb when I was little.”

  I had sucked my thumb, too, and carried my blanket everywhere I went. My mom used to joke about it sometimes, when I wouldn’t let go of something I wanted—a new pair of shoes that were too expensive, or an inappropriate boy I wanted to date. I wondered if Linda’s mother told her those same kinds of stories before she died, and if they would have meant as much to a nine-year-old.

  “Hope sure does favor her daddy, doesn’t she?” Kath said. Which she did: she had her father’s narrow face and full mouth, and her skin was a creamy light brown that was warm and lovely even marred with newborn acne, as Davy’s had been.

  “But she has Ally’s huge eyes,” I said. “Except they’re blue.”

  “All newborns have blue eyes,” Brett said.

  “Even Indian babies?” Kath asked.

  Brett frowned to herself. “Hope is only half Indian,” she said, and I sat wondering if that would be hard for Hope, to be neither entirely one thing nor entirely another.

  “She looks like Mr. Pajamas,” Brett said.

  “She looks like Mr. Magoo,” I said. “But all babies look like Mr. Magoo.”

  “Bless her iddy-biddy li’l heart, she’s just about nothing,” Kath said. “My babies were whoppers compared to her.”

  “She looks like a miracle to me,” Linda said, and we all agreed: that child lying in Kath’s antique bassinet in Ally’s room with Mr. Pajamas, covered with the softest blanket Linda and I could find, was definitely a miracle.

  An engine rumbled to life across the street as Ally joined us, leaving the front door open so she could hear Hope if she woke. Quite a few trucks had gathered around the mansion that morning, with men in hard hats smoking cigarettes and kicking at the earth. Before we knew it, the crane was swinging its heavy ball at the top story of that poor old mansion, at the windows of the room with the faded-rose wallpaper, where the piano had been. The sound of shattering windows and splitting boards joined the rumble of the crane.

  The children had to be told no, they couldn’t watch from any closer, it would be dangerous, something might fall on their little heads.

  “How’ll that rascal mansion ghost of yours occupy herself now, Frankie?” Kath said.

  “She’ll have to find another home to haunt,” Linda said.

  “Maybe she’s done haunting,” I said. “Maybe she’s found whatever she was searching for.”

  “Maybe she has,” Ally said. “Maybe she can be at peace.”

  We sat silently for a moment, watching the heavy ball swing back again in a long arc, almost in slow motion. It was shocking how quickly the sad old house succumbed to the tyranny of that wrecking ball. Within minutes, only a few walls of the lower floor were standing, and I was left wondering what had been done with the house’s contents, hoping the tuneless piano had found a home in a house with a little girl who would just be learning to play. Then the lower walls, too, were down, the once glorious old home reduced to a pile of rubble. It didn’t even kick up much dust in its last gasp.

  DESPITE ALL THE DISTRACTIONS that spring (Hurricane Agnes hit the East Coast, George Wallace was shot, Title IX steamed toward passage, and the Cubs . . . well, never mind the Cubs that year), Brett presented us with her revised novel one Sunday in late May. She seemed excited about the prospects of this new version, though what she said was, “It’s changed. I’m just warning you. It could be atrocious, I don’t even know. I have no perspective on it anymore, if I ever did.” And when the rest of us showed up in the park at dawn the next Sunday to discuss it, she did not.

  We’d just decided we’d have to go drag her out of her house when she showed up, finally, her tiny face flustered under that glorious red hair, full of hope and dread. The minute we saw her, Kath stood and started clapping wildly, and we all followed suit.

  In the prior versions—all those drafts that had ended up in the fireplace—the book had been a mystery, or tried to be, but the
mystery element had failed to add narrative drive to the story. Brett, astonishingly, had simply abandoned it altogether. No murder in the book anymore. And where the earlier version had been set in the present, this new one was set in the future. It was funny, because this wasn’t a book I’d rush off to the bookstore for, although the original version had been. A short description of it now would read something like “as the destruction of Earth looms, fifteen women set off in a rocket ship with frozen sperm and insemination technology, to start a new world.” No men. Men couldn’t give birth, so they’d have wasted precious seats on the rocket. And yet by page 3, before you even realized you were reading science fiction, you were so charmed by Elizabeth and Ratty that you were not putting the book down. Charmed and intrigued, and sympathetic to Elizabeth’s plight, which was the same plight Kath had identified in the earlier draft, the mother-daughter story.

  “I bawled like a babe at the end,” Kath said.

  “But I was laughing out loud, too,” Ally said.

  “How did you make it so funny and so touching at the same time, Brett?” I asked. “It’s a little bit of magic, that.”

  “There’s just this one iddy-biddy li’l thing about this novel,” Kath said. “I do love it to death but—”