The Wednesday Sisters(81)

When I told the Wednesday Sisters the publication schedule the next morning in Ally's hospital room, Linda said, “Early September—that's when the Summer Olympics start!” and Ally said it was the International Year of the Book, that boded well, didn't it?

“So,” Ally said as we were leaving later that morning, “only five more weeks of the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, Sunday Morning, Stanford Hospital Branch.”

I hated having to run off to tackle my edits rather than staying the whole day with her, but I had only a few weeks to turn in a new draft. I spent late nights hunched over my typewriter all that week while Danny worked late at the office, almost as if we were working so hard together, rather than in parallel. Still, I visited Ally at the hospital for a little bit every day, meaning to help her through this tough time of hers—though I think she was the one who helped me stay sane.

Ally's wait turned out to be not the five weeks needed to bring the baby to term, though, but less than one. The doctors had used up their bag of tricks. There was nothing further they could do.



BABIES BORN PREMATURELY often lack surfactants, soaplike substances that lubricate the surface of the lungs to allow them to inflate and deflate. Jeff explained that to us the day Ally and Jim's baby was born.

“The poor li'l thing can't breathe?” Kath said.

“They've got her hooked up to a machine that gives her oxygen,” Jeff said, “and they're treating her with a kind of synthetic surfactant. The hope is they can keep her alive long enough for her lungs to mature.”

“We've named her Asha,” Ally told us when they let us in to see her, finally, when the four of us crowded into her half of her hospital room to find a frailer, much older Ally sitting with a rough white blanket pulled up almost to her neck although the room was warm. “It means hope,” she said. “We're going to call her Hope.” She couldn't take us to see the baby, though. Only parents were allowed in the neonatal intensive care unit.

“Hope,” Linda said. “That's a beautiful name, Ally.”

“A perfect name,” I said, but I couldn't help wondering if it was, really, because Ally, in her gray print hospital gown instead of her usual muslin and batik, with her long wavy hair looking tired and limp and her big brown eyes shadowed and sunken, seemed like she had not a hope in the world.

Perhaps my thoughts showed on my face, because Ally's eyes pooled then. “It's all my fault,” she wailed, the first tear spilling down her cheek.

“There, there,” Brett said, and she sat on the edge of Ally's hospital bed and intertwined her gloved fingers with Ally's. “There, there.”

“It's all my fault,” Ally repeated. “The marriage, the medicine, I did everything wrong and now it's all my fault, and she's not even baptized, I don't even know anyone to call to baptize my baby.”

Brett pulled a tissue from the box on the metal tray by Ally's bed and handed it toward her, but Ally only sank more deeply under her blanket, as she had that awful morning we'd found her in her chalky-blue bedroom, with all those tissues on the floor. “What if my mother is right, what if this is God's will?” she said. “What if it is?”

And no amount of anyone saying anything else, no amount of our thinking what we simply could not say—that it was her coldhearted, prejudiced, religious-zealot mother who didn't deserve to have children—could convince her that it wasn't her fault that her baby was in intensive care.

Ally sat beside her daughter's bed day and night that first week. She put on scrubs and booties and a hairnet, a mask, and she washed her hands to the elbow in a deep sink just outside the intensive care unit, splashing water all over the floor until one of the nurses showed her how to work the foot pedal that controlled the water. All those babies in isolettes, or in open beds like Hope but with wires hooking them up to the monitors and tubes sticking into their little noses and bellies and mouths—they would have broken Ally's heart if it weren't already smashed to bits over Hope. Watching another mother reach through the round holes in the plastic bubble that covered her child just to touch her, Ally said a prayer of thanks to whatever god might be watching. At least she could kiss her baby; at least she wasn't left to press her lips to the glass separating her from Hope.

She took Hope's perfect little fingers in her own hand, trying not to touch the wires and the tubes. “At least she's in an open bed,” she said to the nurse assigned to Hope that shift.

“If she ever starts breathing on her own, we'll move her to an isolette,” the nurse said. “Right now we need her in an open bed in case we need to get to her fast, to revive her.”