“I don't think I can do it,” Linda said. “I don't think I can bear to let them put me to sleep knowing when I wake up . . . My mom, you know . . .” She waved a hand in front of her arm. Her gaze found J.J. on the swing, and you could see in her pretty face the little girl she must have been, afraid of her own mother's hug.
“And my kids,” she said, “my kids . . .” But she didn't finish the thought; she left it there, left us imagining Julie and Jamie huddled in their closet, J.J. standing at salute, watching his mother's coffin being drawn through the street.
Jeff failed in his effort to get Linda's biopsy done that day; the hospital bed could be arranged, but obtaining an operating room for anything short of an immediately life-threatening emergency was more problematic, even for Jeff. Left with no choice, he allowed himself to be talked into being reasonable with the same rationale we all used to console ourselves—that most lumps were nothing. The biopsy was scheduled for the following Thursday, eight days later. And by the end of that morning Linda had pulled herself together, or pulled herself in, anyway. She insisted in very frank Linda fashion that if we uttered one more word about it before she knew for sure—to her, to anyone else, even among ourselves—she would never forgive us. That if we called her to see if there was anything we could do (there was not, she insisted), if we even just called on some lousy trumped-up excuse to see if she was okay, she would never forgive us. She was not going to think about it, not for another moment, and we weren't to either.
“No point in losing sleep over something that is almost certainly nothing,” she said. “I've got to run. I have a committee meeting. We're trying to keep the foothills behind Stanford from being developed. Don't you think they should be kept as open space, for everyone to enjoy?” But the passion that was always in her voice when she talked about her causes wasn't there. She didn't even try to enlist us this time.
“Remember, you promised,” she said as she pushed J.J.'s stroller onto the sidewalk. And despite our promise, despite that reminder, the moment she was out of sight we were talking about it amongst ourselves, unable to grant her even this one small request.
THAT AFTERNOON, I went to Saint Thomas Aquinas, where I sat in an empty pew looking at the empty altar, wondering if there was a God up there who listened to prayers, and why He was doing this to Linda and had done it to her mom. Wondering why He didn't let Ally carry her babies to term, and why He sat by while Lee hurt Kath, and what He could have allowed to happen to Brett that left her wearing her gloves. Wondering, too, what I could possibly do for Linda other than what she'd asked, which was nothing, which was only not to talk, a task at which I'd already failed.
In bed that night I lay awake worrying about Linda, losing the sleep she didn't want us to lose. Wondering if she was sleeping, or what she was doing if she wasn't, if she, too, was lying awake. I imagined her sitting in J.J.'s room, or in Julie and Jamie's, watching them sleep like the mother had done in her story, the one she'd gotten published, that she'd sent out sixty-three times.
I climbed from bed carefully so as not to wake Danny, and took my glasses from my nightstand. I went to check on Maggie, her face tucked up against her Allo blanket as she mumbled in her sleep, words I never could understand. Then into Davy's room, where I sat on the floor by his bed with my hand on his little leg, trying to remember the details of Linda's story, thinking, Sixty-three times.
I thought again of the novel I'd written back in Chicago, the Italian Renaissance mystery. I'd spent so much time writing it, just that one draft, but I'd never done anything with it. I wondered what Linda had written in the years before I met her, what story she might have used to apply to graduate school. Was it in a drawer somewhere, or had she pulled it out, revised it, read it to us, and listened to what we had to say? Then revised again, sixty-three times. Or sixty-two, since the last one was a yes.
I'd so loved the idea of that novel of mine, a whodunit that was also an exploration of religion and the perversion of its purposes—or that was what it was meant to be, anyway. It was one part fascination for me—fascination with Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel and Pope Julius II, Il Papa Terrible, whose main concern in life seemed to have been to ensure a suitable palace for his own entombment—and one part passion for a church and a religion that were so integral to who I was. But the draft when I'd read it—“Michelangelo's Ghost,” that's what I'd called it—was so much less than I'd meant it to be. I'd thought that was all there was to it back then. One single draft. You were a writer or you weren't.