The Wednesday Sisters(40)

Ally pulled the girl to her, hugged her, but Carrie, not to be deterred, wriggled from her embrace.

“I'll tell you what, Carrie,” Linda said so gently you could not imagine that just a moment before she'd been ready to bludgeon us.

“J.J.'s favorite color is blue, so why don't you do this?” She leaned closer to Carrie, her voice an emotional whisper. “You go pick up that blue shovel and start playing with it, and just mention how much bigger it is than the red shovel, how much more sand it can pick up. See if J.J. doesn't offer to trade.”

“It is bigger!” Carrie said. “I want the blue shovel!”

“Well then go get it, honey,” Linda said. “And be real quiet about how much bigger it is.”

Carrie ran off, leaving the rest of us to our awkward silence.

Ally pressed her palms together, looked up at the sky—a deep blue that day. Not a cloud anywhere in sight. No filmy sliver of moon.

“I used to watch you through my window, before Frankie moved here,” she said, “when you two”—Linda and Kath—“used to come and talk together, and watch your children. When I was pregnant, I'd watch you. Then I'd lose the baby and I couldn't watch for a while.” Her face clouded over, and I was about to say something, but then she went on. “But I'd always be drawn back to the window. And then Frankie started joining you, and even Brett—” She stopped herself, but it was clear what she meant, that even this weird woman who wore the gloves could find friends in this park, so why not her? “But I didn't have a baby. I kept thinking I would. I'd get pregnant and I'd take every bit of the medicine my doctor gave me to keep from losing the baby, but . . . Then the day Robert Kennedy was shot, I just thought no one would notice. I just thought everyone would be caught up in that and I could bring out tea and say hello and no one would notice I didn't have a child, no one would wonder what I was doing coming to the park alone.

“I even picked out a child to pretend was mine that first day,” she said. “I picked a little boy in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt at first, but then there was this girl with loose, dark curls, like my hair was when I was a toddler, like I imagine my baby's hair will be when I allow myself to imagine. Then no one asked, which was a blessing, because what if I'd pointed to that curly-haired girl and she'd gone running off to her real mother?”

There was a low murmur of sympathy from around the table.

“That girl, she seemed almost like a sign that morning.” Ally tilted her pale face toward the splintered table. “My babies,” she whispered, “they've all been sons.”

Kath put her arm around Ally, then, and we all leaned in closer, as if to share our warmth.

“My mother always wanted a son,” she said. “I sometimes think if I could have a son, a grandson for her, she and my father both might . . .” She looked again to the sky, to the sharp blue that looked solid and impenetrable hanging over the mansion.

“That first day I just waited till you all left,” she said. “It was nice being in the park, even when it was empty. I almost couldn't bear to leave. I think it was only realizing about Carrie that got me up off that bench.”

She'd gone home and called her sister, who was delighted at the idea of having one morning a week to herself, without Carrie. Wednesday morning.

“But why didn't you just tell us she was your niece, honey?” Kath said.

“We all have our secrets to hide,” Brett said quietly, and we turned to see her looking down at her gloves, at the hands underneath that none of us had ever seen. “‘Every man is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.’”

Linda, frowning at Brett, adjusted her Stanford cap. I wondered if she was thinking of the scar she would have on her breast by the end of the next day, if she still had a breast, or if she was wondering about Brett's hands, or thinking about something else entirely, some secret she hadn't yet shared.

“But there's nothing wrong with bringing your niece to the park, Ally,” Brett said. “You know we wouldn't have cared.”

Ally tucked her hair behind her ears as she'd done with Carrie just minutes before, her eyes as vulnerable as her niece's had been. “I did try to tell you, Brett. You and Frankie. When it seemed nothing would matter ever again anyway.”

I took Ally's hand. “She did,” I said. “She tried to tell us, but we misunderstood, we thought she was saying her sister was taking care of Carrie for her.”

It had been impossible to question her about it that morning in her chalky-blue bedroom, with all those tissues scattered across the floor.