The Wednesday Sisters

by Meg Waite Clayton

  She started writing in a big way, a story for older children about a teenaged runaway who befriends an ancient old soul of a man who dies in the end, she told us, like Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web—but not before the girl finds herself in his history, his love of her. Kath and Linda and Brett and I could all see that this new manic writing phase had less to do with the story itself than with Ally believing she might actually carry this child to term, as though finishing this book before the baby came would be some kind of good omen, like birds building nests or whatever. As much as she wrote, though, she was always nowhere near the end. I began to wonder if she could finish, or if she’d become like that Winchester Rifle heiress who’d built that maze of a mansion down in San Jose, adding room after room for fear that if she ever finished building the house, she would die. Rooms with blind chimneys and double-back hallways, with stairways (always with thirteen stairs) leading nowhere and doors that opened to steep drops—to confuse the ghosts of those who’d died by the Winchester rifle. Sarah Pardee Winchester, that woman’s name was. Pardee, like the woman who built the house in our park. Her only daughter had died, too, from a wasting disease not long after she was born.

  None of us could imagine saying anything but “nice” about the first pages Ally gave us from her story, but Ally sat waiting the Sunday morning we were to critique them, her back to the mansion and its cobwebs, its dust, its out-of-tune piano. I saw in her expression—her big brown eyes in her pale face expectant in the slant of morning light—that this was exactly what she needed from us, that our taking her work seriously made everything possible. Not just the book—not even the book—but the baby she wanted more than anything.

  I cleared my throat awkwardly, began tentatively. There was something haunting about the writing, I said—the first to speak but it started things rolling and before long it was just like any other critique session, or almost like that, anyway. I said what I found compelling in the writing, and then what was slow, what was trite. I didn’t use words like trite, though, words I might have used with one of the other Wednesday Sisters, or with Ally herself some other time. I called the good parts “fresh,” the weaker parts “familiar”—a word I came to use whenever I meant “trite,” until one day months later I called something Brett had written “familiar” and she turned to the others and said, “Familiar. That’s Frankie-speak for trite.”

  Linda asked that morning what it was about Charlotte’s Web that Ally particularly liked; maybe it would help to think about that, since it was Ally’s model book.

  “I like the family that comes together in the barn,” Ally said without hesitation. “I like that they aren’t all the same thing; one is human and one’s a spider and one’s a pig. I like that it has nothing to do with blood relations, and everything to do with love.”

  Ally wasn’t alone in clinging to hope for this baby in improbable ways. A few weeks after Jim called his parents and, in one of those three-minute overseas calls, told them Ally was pregnant (the only time he’d told them since the first baby she’d lost, years ago by then), a box arrived from India. Jim was out of town the Saturday it arrived, and Ally didn’t want to open it without him; it was no fun to open presents without someone to share the experience. But then she’d awoken Sunday morning in the predawn darkness imagining how much fun it might be to open the thing with us, and she thought, It’s addressed to me, not to Jim, anyway—usually the packages were addressed to Jim or, more recently, to them both—and so she brought it to the park that Sunday morning.

  “It’s bigger than usual,” she said. “I figure I’ll probably need someone to help me eat whatever is inside, and I nominate you!”

  We all made faces: the one concoction we’d sampled since the rolls Ally had made with her mother-in-law’s rajgira seeds had tasted of mold and paste.

  Ally sliced away quantities of brown sealing tape, opened the box, and pulled away the packing paper. The smell of wood—as strong as cedar, but something fresher, almost brighter—filled the air.

  Ally looked up with her loony-bin grin. “Heavens to Betsy, you ladies are going to love this!”

  She pulled out a statue of some kind—no dainty figurine, this. It was a good foot high and nearly as wide, some kind of deity riding a chariot pulled by ten horses, made of polished wood inexpertly carved. It seemed to want an altar for its display; a coffee table just wouldn’t do. And one could only hope that the wood’s stiff odor was the result of its months in transit confined to the box, that the smell would die down over time.

  “I do declare, even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then,” Kath said, and we laughed and laughed, though even as I laughed I wondered if we were laughing at the statue itself, or at our own discomfort at something so foreign touching our friend’s life. I wondered if I was the only one who found the thing . . . not beautiful, but oddly moving. Though imagining it displayed in my living room was another thing.

  Ally took the statue home that morning and set it on the kitchen table, and she pulled out her mother-in-law’s Indian recipes and did her best to duplicate one. She hurried to the door to greet Jim when he arrived back home that evening. “We’ve got a new offering from your mom,” she said as she kissed him. “Something really special this time!”

  She made him leave his suitcase in the front hall and close his eyes, and she led him by the hand to the kitchen table, stood him in front of the statue, and said, “Okay!”

  He smiled slightly as he looked at it, but he didn’t laugh. Ally was glad, suddenly, that she hadn’t laughed either, not with Jim.

  “It’s the Chandra I carved for my mother,” he said, his dark eyes watering above the small upward tilt of his lips, the attempt at a smile. “Although my grandfather carved it, actually. I mostly sanded. How did you know it was so special?” he asked, leaving Ally unsettled for a moment—was he teasing her?—and then relieved to see that he wasn’t, that he’d mistaken the humor in her voice for delight.

  “Chandra. Like my mother, Chandrika,” he said. “She used to tell me stories about him when I was a boy. He’s just a minor god. A . . . a fertility god, actually.” He reached down and touched the wood, his fingers lingering on the god’s head, on the chariot, the ten horses. “His chariot is the moon, which he pulls across the sky every night.”

  Jim put the statue on their dresser when they went up to bed, as if he were just setting it there for lack of anything else to do with it, as if it might be as laughable as Ally had thought it was. They climbed under the covers and turned out the lights, and he curled around her. She was sure he was going to sing to their growing child, as he so often did. But he only smoothed his hand over the stretching skin of her belly, his gaze fixed on the dark shadow on the dresser.

  “If the child is a boy,” he whispered, “maybe we could name him Rajiv, after my baba. If it’s a girl, then maybe Chandrika.”

  Ally, staring at the ceiling, gently fingered his dark hair. The names they’d talked of before were Jonathan, Michael, and Amanda, names unburdened by the weight of the past.

  Even after she closed her eyes that night, she felt the statue staring down on her in the thin crack of moonlight peeking through where the drapes were not quite pulled. The gaudy thing worked its way into her dreams: she was in the chariot, and the god was whipping the horses into a frenzy, rushing her to some awful place because she didn’t believe. She woke with a start to see Jim standing in the darkness near the dresser. He lifted the idol and held it to his chest, then moved to the bedroom window and pulled the curtain back. He stood there for the longest time, holding the Chandra, looking out at the moonshadowed earth.

  THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, one of those brilliant November mornings when the dawn is the rich red-mauve of early sunlight reflecting around what would become, as the day progressed, bright white cumulus clouds, Linda started in again on the medicine Ally was taking to keep her from miscarrying. The Food and Drug Administration had just released a special bulletin on it. But Ally was not interested in heari
ng about it. This was none of Linda’s business. This was between Ally and her doctor, and she would appreciate it if Linda would keep her bossy nose out of it.

  Linda didn’t get the least bit ruffled. She simply pulled a copy of the bulletin from her bag and handed it to Ally. When Ally didn’t take it, Linda set it on the picnic table in front of her. “Just read it, please, Ally?” she said. “I’m not trying to say I know everything and you don’t, but this is important.”

  Ally hardly tucked her chin toward the paper—one quick glance—before announcing the drug named in it wasn’t the one she was taking. Her prescription was for Tylandril.

  “But it’s this stuff, this diethylstil . . .”

  “Diethylstilbestrol,” Brett said. “DES.”

  “Your drug is a brand name for it, Ally,” Linda said. “That’s what Jeff says.”

  It was not, Ally insisted, one hand going to her thickening waist. It was not, and she didn’t care, anyway. Here she was, three months pregnant, and if it wasn’t the drug that was helping her keep the baby, then what was it? “It’s the drug,” she insisted, “and I am certainly not going to take a chance that it’s not.”

  That drug, like her book, was Ally’s Chandra, her seven-story maze of a house meant to keep the ghosts of someone else’s dead too confused to get near her unborn child. “I don’t care if it hurts me,” she said.

  “But it doesn’t help!” Linda insisted. “It doesn’t help! And it’s not you you’re hurting anyway! It’s your baby!”

  In the silence that followed, the world darkened, the sun slipping behind a soft white puff of cloud.

  “The daughters of mothers who took this stuff are getting cancer when they’re teenagers,” Linda said softly. “Not the moms, but their daughters. Could you bear that, Ally? Could you bear to have this baby and love her to death and then have her die when she’s fourteen?”

  Linda. Nothing if not frank.

  Ally sat staring at Linda, her pale face wedding-veil white now. Three birds flew past behind her. A squirrel looked in our direction, dropped its pinecone, and scurried up one of the old oaks.

  I thought of Ally’s novel, a book that a fourteen-year-old girl would love.

  Ally’s doctor called the next morning to tell her about the bulletin. Yes, the drug she was taking was DES, and she had to stop taking it right away, he said. It was like when an alcoholic stopped drinking, though; she’d taken so much comfort in the protection of those pills that it was like giving up her faith.

  IT WAS EARLY MARCH—a Saturday evening four months later—when I saw an ambulance pull away from Ally’s house. I knew she was losing the baby, though I didn’t want to believe it, I wanted to think Jim had twisted his ankle or Ally’s brother-in-law had burnt his hand on the grill. I tried calling her house all evening, until it got too late to call, but there was no answer. And, just after I’d told the Wednesday Sisters about the ambulance the next morning—a cold, cold morning, with frost thick on the grass—Jim appeared at the picnic table to tell us the news.

  “She hopes she’ll be here next Sunday,” he said, lingering on hopes, the word in his Indian accent a perfect tone. She hadn’t lost the baby, but she was still in the hospital. And yes, he was sure she would love a visit from us.

  We cleared our things from the picnic table—we didn’t have to be asked twice—and piled into my new car. But visiting hours on Sunday, we discovered on our arrival at Stanford Hospital, didn’t start until eleven o’clock.

  I called Danny to get him to find someone who could cover my reading at the twelve-thirty Mass, and we huddled over a yellow Formica tabletop in the hospital cafeteria, warming our fingers on Styrofoam cups of insipid coffee until almost eleven, when we made our way through the wide, green-white halls. We found Ally sitting in a railed bed in a shared room, reading her manuscript aloud, but softly, gently. She looked up at us, smiled, and set a hand on her belly as if asking the child to wait a minute, Mommy had to attend to someone else. The book wasn’t even meant for babies or toddlers, it was meant for middle-schoolers, but she’d been reading it to her unborn child.

  She’d started having the baby early, way too early, but they’d given her some new drug to stop her labor. It looked, at this point, as though she might have to stay in the hospital until the baby was due, another six weeks.

  We said we’d meet there on Sundays, then, and we even got permission to meet early, though not quite as early as dawn.

  The first week Ally was in the hospital was the week we learned the city was going to tear down the old mansion; the dead woman’s heirs had agreed not to object in exchange for half the profits from the sale of a second property the woman had left to the city to fund the upkeep of the place. That week was also the week my editor finally called again, to tell me he was sending edits. Before his letter arrived that Saturday, I’d learned that my mailman had a son Maggie’s age, that he’d grown up in the Central Valley, that he was a sculptor who delivered mail to pay the bills. It was a single page, his letter, leaving me wondering how hard my editor had had to work to edit his comments down to a single, unintimidating page.

  When I told the Wednesday Sisters the publication schedule the next morning in Ally’s hospital room, Linda said, “Early September—that’s when the Summer Olympics start!” and Ally said it was the International Year of the Book, that boded well, didn’t it?

  “So,” Ally said as we were leaving later that morning, “only five more weeks of the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, Sunday Morning, Stanford Hospital Branch.”

  I hated having to run off to tackle my edits rather than staying the whole day with her, but I had only a few weeks to turn in a new draft. I spent late nights hunched over my typewriter all that week while Danny worked late at the office, almost as if we were working so hard together, rather than in parallel. Still, I visited Ally at the hospital for a little bit every day, meaning to help her through this tough time of hers—though I think she was the one who helped me stay sane.

  Ally’s wait turned out to be not the five weeks needed to bring the baby to term, though, but less than one. The doctors had used up their bag of tricks. There was nothing further they could do.

  BABIES BORN PREMATURELY often lack surfactants, soaplike substances that lubricate the surface of the lungs to allow them to inflate and deflate. Jeff explained that to us the day Ally and Jim’s baby was born.

  “The poor li’l thing can’t breathe?” Kath said.

  “They’ve got her hooked up to a machine that gives her oxygen,” Jeff said, “and they’re treating her with a kind of synthetic surfactant. The hope is they can keep her alive long enough for her lungs to mature.”

  “We’ve named her Asha,” Ally told us when they let us in to see her, finally, when the four of us crowded into her half of her hospital room to find a frailer, much older Ally sitting with a rough white blanket pulled up almost to her neck although the room was warm. “It means hope,” she said. “We’re going to call her Hope.” She couldn’t take us to see the baby, though. Only parents were allowed in the neonatal intensive care unit.

  “Hope,” Linda said. “That’s a beautiful name, Ally.”

  “A perfect name,” I said, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was, really, because Ally, in her gray print hospital gown instead of her usual muslin and batik, with her long wavy hair looking tired and limp and her big brown eyes shadowed and sunken, seemed like she had not a hope in the world.

  Perhaps my thoughts showed on my face, because Ally’s eyes pooled then. “It’s all my fault,” she wailed, the first tear spilling down her cheek.

  “There, there,” Brett said, and she sat on the edge of Ally’s hospital bed and intertwined her gloved fingers with Ally’s. “There, there.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Ally repeated. “The marriage, the medicine, I did everything wrong and now it’s all my fault, and she’s not even baptized, I don’t even know anyone to call to baptize my baby.”

  Brett pulled a tissue
from the box on the metal tray by Ally’s bed and handed it toward her, but Ally only sank more deeply under her blanket, as she had that awful morning we’d found her in her chalky-blue bedroom, with all those tissues on the floor. “What if my mother is right, what if this is God’s will?” she said. “What if it is?”

  And no amount of anyone saying anything else, no amount of our thinking what we simply could not say—that it was her coldhearted, prejudiced, religious-zealot mother who didn’t deserve to have children—could convince her that it wasn’t her fault that her baby was in intensive care.

  Ally sat beside her daughter’s bed day and night that first week. She put on scrubs and booties and a hairnet, a mask, and she washed her hands to the elbow in a deep sink just outside the intensive care unit, splashing water all over the floor until one of the nurses showed her how to work the foot pedal that controlled the water. All those babies in isolettes, or in open beds like Hope but with wires hooking them up to the monitors and tubes sticking into their little noses and bellies and mouths—they would have broken Ally’s heart if it weren’t already smashed to bits over Hope. Watching another mother reach through the round holes in the plastic bubble that covered her child just to touch her, Ally said a prayer of thanks to whatever god might be watching. At least she could kiss her baby; at least she wasn’t left to press her lips to the glass separating her from Hope.

  She took Hope’s perfect little fingers in her own hand, trying not to touch the wires and the tubes. “At least she’s in an open bed,” she said to the nurse assigned to Hope that shift.

  “If she ever starts breathing on her own, we’ll move her to an isolette,” the nurse said. “Right now we need her in an open bed in case we need to get to her fast, to revive her.”

  Ally felt her own breath kicked out of her. She moved back so the nurse could adjust Hope’s tubes and change her diaper and draw her blood—once an hour they drew her blood, to make sure Hope was getting enough oxygen from the machine that was delivering it to her. Ally couldn’t watch. She went back to her room, got her manuscript. Came back and put on fresh booties, a fresh hairnet. Lathered her hands and arms with more antiseptic soap than was necessary, and returned to her daughter’s side. When she was seated again, she began reading through the mask over her nose and mouth, not caring what any of the others in the neonatal intensive care unit—the doctors, the nurses, the technicians—thought of her story, her voice even more gentle than usual against the beeping monitors, the hard, sterile surfaces, the glaring hospital lights.