I wondered if I'd have told the others if I had been surer of what I'd heard that morning in Ally's bedroom, if it hadn't been so clear that Brett had heard something else. I thought probably I wouldn't have anyway. I thought probably I'd have let Ally come to telling us herself, in her own time.
“It's just that people ask, you know?” Ally said. “‘Are you planning on having children of your own?’ And I don't know what to say because I've had three babies, three who've died, but people don't understand that, they think a baby who isn't born alive was never a baby, that I shouldn't grieve.” She looked across to the mansion, blinking, whispering, “It was comforting even though it wasn't real, to have one morning every week when I could seem like a mom with a living child.”
And Linda, who hadn't said a word—had hardly moved since she'd watched Carrie head for that blue shovel—said, “Would you bring my children to the park, too, Ally? If anything happened to me?”
Kath moved closer to Linda, took her hand.
“I felt like I never had a friend in the world after my mom got sick,” Linda said.
“You're going to be fine, Linda,” Kath said softly. “You'll be fixin' to kick up a ruckus before the sun sets tomorrow, I know you will.”
“I can bear anything but the thought of Jamie and Julie and J.J. having to endure that kind of loneliness,” Linda said, and you could hear in her voice the child who had not been invited to birthdayparties or sleepovers or afternoons of play, you could hear the rustle of skirts as neighborhood mothers leaned down to their daughters, their gentle voices saying Linda's mommy probably wanted her at home today, how about Mary or Joan or Beth? You could see the Linda who'd settled herself on a tree branch where no one could see her and tried to spin for herself a web of imaginary friendships, a world of Charlottes and Ferns and Wilburs. The child who built I-don't-care-if-I-offend-you walls, who decided she didn't want friends other than the ones she found in books.
I knew then something I could do for Linda.
“Maggie will always be there for Julie and Jamie, Linda,” I said. “And Davy will always be there for J.J.”
And as Kath and Brett echoed me, I wondered if Linda hadn't spoken to me that first morning in the park even though I read mysteries because my children were the same age as her children, because I might be someone who kept friends for a lifetime, and my children might be, too.
Not that it mattered. It only mattered that she had told me I was staring or asked what I was reading, whichever it was she'd said first, and that Kath had joined us, and then Brett, and then Ally, too.
LINDA HAD SAID that she couldn't bear to be put under anesthesia knowing she might wake without a breast, with her arm swollen and hideous. But she did bear it. She hugged her children good-bye—telling them only that she was going on a short trip; she didn't believe it was cancer; it couldn't be—and she went to the hospital and signed the consent form in a shaky hand. When the time came, she climbed onto the gurney and Jeff kissed her and told her he would always love her, no matter what, and she almost believed him, she really did.
It was only when they first put the mask over her face that she realized she was making the same mistake her own mother had. She hadn't told Jamie and Julie and J.J. the truth.
She held her breath against the anesthetic gas, imagining her mother must have felt this, too: the dread of letting go.
She didn't know what happened after that, but Jeff did. No, he wasn't allowed inside the operating room even though he was a doctor, even though he was sure he wanted to be there. He sat in the waiting room like any other husband, and Brett and I sat with him while Kath and Ally took the children to the park. He sat with an untouched cup of coffee, flipping through a stale magazine that neither Brett nor I had the heart to point out was upside down.
“They'll be started now,” he told us at 8:06. Not 8:00 or 8:10, but 8:06. He knew exactly what time they were scheduled for the operating room, exactly how long it would take for the anesthesia to put her to sleep. He knew too much for a husband whose wife had to go through this. He knew how sharp the scalpel was and how thick the skin was, how long the incision would be. What a breast looked like with the skin pulled back. What a lump that was not supposed to be there looked like, nestled in healthy tissue, and being cut away. He could almost see the clot of bloody tissue in its sterile container being hurried to the lab. He could imagine every moment: the tissue being spread on a lens, the pathologist leaning his eye to the microscope, peering. They ought to have let him observe, they really ought to have, because he was driving himself crazy, imagining them finding a wide swath of disease lodged in Linda's breastbone, scattered into her lymph nodes, making its way throughout her body to lodge in her liver, her bones, her brain. But there was Brett, armed with the facts: 75 percent of breast lumps are benign; 60 percent of cancers are in women over forty. Statistics that, surprisingly, soothed Jeff in a way that facts had failed to soothe Ally or Linda, even though Brett wasn't telling him anything he didn't already know.