Linda didn't get the least bit ruffled. She simply pulled a copy of the bulletin from her bag and handed it to Ally. When Ally didn't take it, Linda set it on the picnic table in front of her. “Just read it, please, Ally?” she said. “I'm not trying to say I know everything and you don't, but this is important.”
Ally hardly tucked her chin toward the paper—one quick glance—before announcing the drug named in it wasn't the one she was taking. Her prescription was for Tylandril.
“But it's this stuff, this diethylstil . . .”
“Diethylstilbestrol,” Brett said. “DES.”
“Your drug is a brand name for it, Ally,” Linda said. “That's what Jeff says.”
It was not, Ally insisted, one hand going to her thickening waist. It was not, and she didn't care, anyway. Here she was, three months pregnant, and if it wasn't the drug that was helping her keep the baby, then what was it? “It's the drug,” she insisted, “and I am certainly not going to take a chance that it's not.”
That drug, like her book, was Ally's Chandra, her seven-story maze of a house meant to keep the ghosts of someone else's dead too confused to get near her unborn child. “I don't care if it hurts me,” she said.
“But it doesn't help!” Linda insisted. “It doesn't help! And it's not you you're hurting anyway! It's your baby!”
In the silence that followed, the world darkened, the sun slipping behind a soft white puff of cloud.
“The daughters of mothers who took this stuff are getting cancer when they're teenagers,” Linda said softly. “Not the moms, but their daughters. Could you bear that, Ally? Could you bear to have this baby and love her to death and then have her die when she's fourteen?”
Linda. Nothing if not frank.
Ally sat staring at Linda, her pale face wedding-veil white now. Three birds flew past behind her. A squirrel looked in our direction, dropped its pinecone, and scurried up one of the old oaks.
I thought of Ally's novel, a book that a fourteen-year-old girl would love.
Ally's doctor called the next morning to tell her about the bulletin. Yes, the drug she was taking was DES, and she had to stop taking it right away, he said. It was like when an alcoholic stopped drinking, though; she'd taken so much comfort in the protection of those pills that it was like giving up her faith.
IT WAS EARLY MARCH—a Saturday evening four months later—when I saw an ambulance pull away from Ally's house. I knew she was losing the baby, though I didn't want to believe it, I wanted to think Jim had twisted his ankle or Ally's brother-in-law had burnt his hand on the grill. I tried calling her house all evening, until it got too late to call, but there was no answer. And, just after I'd told the Wednesday Sisters about the ambulance the next morning—a cold, cold morning, with frost thick on the grass—Jim appeared at the picnic table to tell us the news.
“She hopes she'll be here next Sunday,” he said, lingering on hopes, the word in his Indian accent a perfect tone. She hadn't lost the baby, but she was still in the hospital. And yes, he was sure she would love a visit from us.
We cleared our things from the picnic table—we didn't have to be asked twice—and piled into my new car. But visiting hours on Sunday, we discovered on our arrival at Stanford Hospital, didn't start until eleven o'clock.
I called Danny to get him to find someone who could cover my reading at the twelve-thirty Mass, and we huddled over a yellow Formica tabletop in the hospital cafeteria, warming our fingers on Styrofoam cups of insipid coffee until almost eleven, when we made our way through the wide, green-white halls. We found Ally sitting in a railed bed in a shared room, reading her manuscript aloud, but softly, gently. She looked up at us, smiled, and set a hand on her belly as if asking the child to wait a minute, Mommy had to attend to someone else. The book wasn't even meant for babies or toddlers, it was meant for middle-schoolers, but she'd been reading it to her unborn child.
She'd started having the baby early, way too early, but they'd given her some new drug to stop her labor. It looked, at this point, as though she might have to stay in the hospital until the baby was due, another six weeks.
We said we'd meet there on Sundays, then, and we even got permission to meet early, though not quite as early as dawn.
The first week Ally was in the hospital was the week we learned the city was going to tear down the old mansion; the dead woman's heirs had agreed not to object in exchange for half the profits from the sale of a second property the woman had left to the city to fund the upkeep of the place. That week was also the week my editor finally called again, to tell me he was sending edits. Before his letter arrived that Saturday, I'd learned that my mailman had a son Maggie's age, that he'd grown up in the Central Valley, that he was a sculptor who delivered mail to pay the bills. It was a single page, his letter, leaving me wondering how hard my editor had had to work to edit his comments down to a single, unintimidating page.