I thought of all the books I'd disliked, or put down without finishing—often books that one or more of the Wednesday Sisters had loved—or books we'd all thought dreadful, that, to our considerable disbelief, made the bestseller list. “Not every book is for every reader.” Words Linda liked to say when she'd recommended a book none of the rest of us could stand.
Linda's Ghost, I thought, and I wanted to pick up the phone and call her, even though I knew she didn't want that.
I went to the kitchen. Pulled that old manuscript from the bottom kitchen desk drawer, almost as a way to be with Linda. I looked down at the first few words, the introduction of my character Risa. She was as weak a character as Dritha, the protagonist in my new novel, I could see that now. A smelly old dishrag, Linda would say, with a spine Kath would find catawampus, delivered in prose Ally would find awkward in places, with words Brett would see were not quite what I'd meant.
But if I didn't believe in my work, how could I expect anyone else to?
I pulled the coffin photo from my refrigerator—not the one of just me, but the one of all of us—and I set it in a splash of moonlight on the coffee table. I clicked on the lamp and began making notes in my journal: What is Risa most embarrassed about or ashamed of? What little gesture does she make frequently, and does she realize it, and would she stop doing it if she did? What one thing about her seems to contradict everything else? And why in the world is she out poking into the disappearance of a nun rather than, say, living in a nice home in Palo Alto with two children and a husband, friends she meets every Wednesday in the park—or the early sixteenth-century Roman equivalent?
Because the dead nun was one of Risa's closest friends, that was the answer, of course. A friend who would have done anything for her. One who, if she had given her promise not to talk of a thing, would not go back on it even in the name of trying to help.
In the dark of the night, I made twelve pages of character sketch: what Risa did when she awoke in the morning, her favorite food, what her ideal man looked like, what made her laugh and what her laughter sounded like, which was very like Kath's most uninhibited laugh, and whether she, like me, sometimes laughed so hard she had to cross her legs lest she wet herself. I cut out magazine pictures to help me imagine what she looked like—dark hair like this picture, like Ally's; eyes shaped like this woman's, but the same green as mine; trim and petite like Brett, but with stocky hands and sturdy wrists; freckles on her nose like Brett, too, when the beauty standards of the time demanded none. Then I turned to Risa's friend, the nun, finding no need of magazine photos to imagine her: her face was there in my mind, her eyes the sea blue of Sister Josephine's, the brows above them as straight and expressive as Linda's, the brows of a woman who would put herself smack-dab in the middle of the worst poverty, doing all she could to ease the pain of strangers that Risa, sequestered in her comfortable villa, couldn't imagine how to help. And when I'd finished with the nun, I slid clean paper and carbons into the typewriter carriage, and I typed at the top of the first page “Chapter 1.”
That's where I was—sitting with my old manuscript and my scribbles of character sketches, scraping the carbon copies of a misspelled word with a razor to avoid retyping the whole page—when I looked up and saw Danny standing in the doorway, watching me. The sun was coming up already. I'd been working all night.
I looked down at my writing, stark black letters on white. At the coffin photo beside my typewriter, me in my glasses, though usually I took them off the moment I saw a camera.
“I . . . I'm writing,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and I saw in his expression that he'd stood here before, watching me so lost in what I was writing that I didn't even know he was there.
He smiled slightly. “In that first little apartment back in Chicago, you always sat in my seat, where the edge of the card table was peeling. I thought you'd given it up, though, before we moved here.”
He didn't ask why I'd never told him, didn't put me on the spot. He only looked at me like I was a gift he'd just opened, the surprise he'd known was there all along under the wrapping and the bow, but that didn't matter because it was exactly what he wanted. “And what, pray tell, are you writing?” he asked. “If you're willing to tell?”
I didn't say it was my gift to Linda, my prayer for her; I'm not sure I even saw at the time that it was, that the nun had become more and more like Linda in my notes, that I was trying to capture Linda's frankness and her generosity and her fear. But I told him the gist of the story, bungling the description badly. Still, Danny said he couldn't wait to read it. I would let him read it, wouldn't I? And while I was worrying that one—Would he like it? Would he see himself in any of it?—he called me “the future famous novelist, Frankie O'Mara.” It was like when I'd told Bob about my novel at the holiday party, only better, and I wondered if this was something Danny had learned from watching Bob, from admiring him, or if he'd always been like this.