The Wednesday Sisters(79)

“It's bigger than usual,” she said. “I figure I'll probably need someone to help me eat whatever is inside, and I nominate you!”

We all made faces: the one concoction we'd sampled since the rolls Ally had made with her mother-in-law's rajgira seeds had tasted of mold and paste.

Ally sliced away quantities of brown sealing tape, opened the box, and pulled away the packing paper. The smell of wood—as strong as cedar, but something fresher, almost brighter—filled the air.

Ally looked up with her loony-bin grin. “Heavens to Betsy, you ladies are going to love this!”

She pulled out a statue of some kind—no dainty figurine, this. It was a good foot high and nearly as wide, some kind of deity riding a chariot pulled by ten horses, made of polished wood inexpertly carved. It seemed to want an altar for its display; a coffee table just wouldn't do. And one could only hope that the wood's stiff odor was the result of its months in transit confined to the box, that the smell would die down over time.

“I do declare, even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then,” Kath said, and we laughed and laughed, though even as I laughed I wondered if we were laughing at the statue itself, or at our own discomfort at something so foreign touching our friend's life. I wondered if I was the only one who found the thing . . . not beautiful, but oddly moving. Though imagining it displayed in my living room was another thing.

Ally took the statue home that morning and set it on the kitchen table, and she pulled out her mother-in-law's Indian recipes and did her best to duplicate one. She hurried to the door to greet Jim when he arrived back home that evening. “We've got a new offering from your mom,” she said as she kissed him. “Something really special this time!”

She made him leave his suitcase in the front hall and close his eyes, and she led him by the hand to the kitchen table, stood him in front of the statue, and said, “Okay!”

He smiled slightly as he looked at it, but he didn't laugh. Ally was glad, suddenly, that she hadn't laughed either, not with Jim.

“It's the Chandra I carved for my mother,” he said, his dark eyes watering above the small upward tilt of his lips, the attempt at a smile. “Although my grandfather carved it, actually. I mostly sanded. How did you know it was so special?” he asked, leaving Ally unsettled for a moment—was he teasing her?—and then relieved to see that he wasn't, that he'd mistaken the humor in her voice for delight.

“Chandra. Like my mother, Chandrika,” he said. “She used to tell me stories about him when I was a boy. He's just a minor god. A . . . a fertility god, actually.” He reached down and touched the wood, his fingers lingering on the god's head, on the chariot, the ten horses. “His chariot is the moon, which he pulls across the sky every night.”

Jim put the statue on their dresser when they went up to bed, as if he were just setting it there for lack of anything else to do with it, as if it might be as laughable as Ally had thought it was. They climbed under the covers and turned out the lights, and he curled around her. She was sure he was going to sing to their growing child, as he so often did. But he only smoothed his hand over the stretching skin of her belly, his gaze fixed on the dark shadow on the dresser.

“If the child is a boy,” he whispered, “maybe we could name him Rajiv, after my baba. If it's a girl, then maybe Chandrika.”

Ally, staring at the ceiling, gently fingered his dark hair. The names they'd talked of before were Jonathan, Michael, and Amanda, names unburdened by the weight of the past.

Even after she closed her eyes that night, she felt the statue staring down on her in the thin crack of moonlight peeking through where the drapes were not quite pulled. The gaudy thing worked its way into her dreams: she was in the chariot, and the god was whipping the horses into a frenzy, rushing her to some awful place because she didn't believe. She woke with a start to see Jim standing in the darkness near the dresser. He lifted the idol and held it to his chest, then moved to the bedroom window and pulled the curtain back. He stood there for the longest time, holding the Chandra, looking out at the moonshadowed earth.



THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, one of those brilliant November mornings when the dawn is the rich red-mauve of early sunlight reflecting around what would become, as the day progressed, bright white cumulus clouds, Linda started in again on the medicine Ally was taking to keep her from miscarrying. The Food and Drug Administration had just released a special bulletin on it. But Ally was not interested in hearing about it. This was none of Linda's business. This was between Ally and her doctor, and she would appreciate it if Linda would keep her bossy nose out of it.