The Wednesday Sisters(8)

“My favorite daughter,” her mother said, which was what she often called Linda, and it was true of course, because Linda was her mother's only daughter. Linda had always heard “favorite child” though, and she'd always felt that, always felt her mother loved her best.

When she raised her eyes to the bed that afternoon, though, the mother she saw didn't match the voice. She remembers thinking they'd taken her mother away and returned something empty, a Coke bottle with the top flipped off, with the sweet liquid drained and nothing left inside. Her hair was flat and awful, and where her bosom had been full and soft and welcoming, it was empty. But it was her arm that frightened Linda most—this grotesquely swollen thing, more the size of a leg. Years later, Jeff brought home an old stethoscope and some booties and hairnets and surgical gloves for the children to play doctor with. He blew two of the gloves up and tied them off, like balloons. One for Julie, one for Jamie. They'd come running to Linda to show her their prizes, and it had been all she could do not to scream. The balloons had been her mother's hand: that colorless, that lifeless, that distorted.

“Climb up here and snuggle with me, sweetheart,” her mother had said that afternoon, the way she did when Linda had a nightmare. But her mother wasn't her mother anymore, she was that hideous arm, and Linda turned and ran to her bedroom, where her father found her sometime later, curled up in the closet, sobbing, with the closet door shut.

He kicked some shoes out of the way and sat next to her on the closet floor. He pulled the door closed again, leaving them together in the mothball, dirty-sock semidarkness, the crack of daylight where the door wasn't quite shut falling on Linda. He just sat there, his face staring at the inside of the closet door, not saying a word, not touching her. After a few minutes, he pushed the door open, stood, and without looking at her, said, “I'll need your help with the dinner, honey.” And Linda stood and followed him down to the kitchen, where she scrounged in the pantry for a box of macaroni and cheese while her father filled a pot with water from the tap.

Linda didn't tell us any of that in the park that morning, though.

It would come later, not all at once, but in pieces over the years. I came to know the story of Linda's mom the way we came to know everything about each other, I suppose. The way friends who are as close as we are know the important moments in each other's lives, even when we weren't there.

That Wednesday morning, Linda just stared silently out at the playground. We all did, watching our children a little more closely, thinking we didn't want them even to imagine growing up without us to kiss their skinned elbows and applaud their finger paintings and tuck them into their beds.

“When I was a kid, I used to climb up into this big oak tree in our backyard, where no one would see me,” Linda said. “I'd straddle one of its fat branches, lean against the trunk, and read until the bark left dents in my skin. Charlotte's Web. I read it over and over, a dozen times at least.”

“Me, too,” Ally said quietly. “Over and over.”

“It was like Wilbur, this male pig, was more like me than anyone at school,” Linda said, “because he knew about dying.”

“‘After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die,’” Brett said, just quoting from the book, but her words left us all staring at Linda.

Linda looked away, to the sad old mansion. “Charlotte's children didn't need her,” she said finally, quietly.

I think we all leaned more closely together on the park bench then, trying not to think of those poor Kennedy children. Of Ethel Kennedy sitting at the hospital in Los Angeles, wondering if her husband would ever regain consciousness. Of Rose at home in Hyannis Port, facing the loss of a third son. Three sons. How could you bear that, to lose three sons?



LINDA AND KATH and Brett and I left Ally sitting on the park bench that morning. She was just going to stay a bit longer, she said. But even after I put Maggie and Davy down for their naps, called Danny—he was in a meeting—and made myself a cup of coffee, I could see Ally through the plate glass of my living room window, sitting in the same spot on that bench, her plastic cups stacked one inside the other and abandoned in the empty pitcher, her rounded shoulders in her muslin blouse still as death. All the mothers were packing up to take their children home for lunch, but Ally didn't move. And when I looked again, all the mothers were gone except Ally, who sat there alone, one hand absently fingering a lock of long, wavy, dark hair. She got up and left, finally, with only the empty pitcher, the five empty cups. She hurried off with her head bowed, her legs striding the width of her long skirt, and she went into the house with the green shutters, with the cluster of pine trees in the front. You might think I'd have gone running out my door, calling, “Ally, honey, you're forgetting your little one!” But I didn't. There was no child left in the park.