The Wednesday Sisters(78)

He climbed from the car with the biggest grin I'd seen on his face since the day Davy was born.

“Danny!” I said, tamping down my exasperation.

He held open the door, motioning for me to take the driver's seat. “You won't mind driving me back to the car dealer in your new chariot, will you?” he said. “So I can pick up my old jalopy?”

The car was for me. He wasn't a red-car guy. He saw me as his red-car gal.

And when I climbed in beside him, he leaned over and whispered a dollar amount in my ear, not the price of the car, but the value of our Intel stock. I remember thinking it was people-might-kidnap-the-children money, your-friends-look-at-you-differently money—though it wasn't, really; it was just more money than I'd ever imagined we'd have. Still, we agreed we wouldn't tell anyone.

The next morning at dawn, I told the Wednesday Sisters.

They told me I'd have to buy the champagne from now on.





ALLY CROSSED the three-month mark that November, still pregnant. She was actually beginning to show. It shocked me when I realized that: the children she'd carried before had died before much more than a hint of their existence was visible to the world.

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.