The Wednesday Sisters(84)

So Hope came home, and Ally and Jim settled her into that antique cradle, and as you can imagine they just couldn't stand not holding her. They picked her up again, and wondered over her the entire morning, watching her clear eyes watching them. They called her “princess” and gave her their fingers to grasp, laughing at the sounds and expressions she made. They kissed her nose, her belly, her toes. And they said over and over again, to her, to each other: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Hope.”

Late in the afternoon of the day Hope came home, a crane with a wrecking ball drove up over the curb and across the grass of the park to the circular drive in front of the old mansion. The driver got out, lit a cigarette, and stood looking up at the place. A second truck, a pickup, pulled up beside it a few minutes later. Two men joined the first and began talking and pointing at the trees and at the park around them. They disappeared around back, reappeared several minutes later, stood talking for another moment before all three loaded into the pickup and set off over the grass again. They left the crane squatting on the cracked asphalt of the circular drive that went nowhere, its wrecking ball looming over the poor old mansion's grand columns, its peeling paint, its already-falling-down porch.

The children wanted to bring a present to Hope—her first teddy bear, they decided, since Hope hadn't been allowed stuffed animals in the intensive care unit (too many possibilities for germs). So that Wednesday we piled everyone into Kath's and my convertibles—Kath joining us since she had a few days off while the movers packed up Arlene's furniture and personal files and moved them into the office space for the new publisher—and we headed for the Stanford Mall.

Of course, the children wanted to deliver the bear to Hope themselves, but even at home Hope wasn't allowed visitors yet, especially not child-sized visitors with their runny noses and dirty hands. Linda, though, had an idea. While we were at the mall she bought one of the new Polaroid Instamatic cameras, the kind that spit out pictures you could watch develop right before your eyes, and the following morning, bright and early, we brought the children over to Ally's front porch and waited while Ally took Mr. Pajamas—that's what the children had named the bear, because Hope couldn't talk yet and the poor bear needed a name—and put him in the cradle with Hope, and shot off ten pictures, squandering the entire picture pack so we could see them right away. Ally stayed with Hope to rock her to sleep afterward, but I brought the camera out to her front porch, where Linda pulled the film pack from it. We sat on the steps with the children, all of us eating Popsicles and watching the image of Hope and Mr. Pajamas arise from the little gray squares.

“She sucks her thumb,” Linda said. “I sucked my thumb when I was little.”

I had sucked my thumb, too, and carried my blanket everywhere I went. My mom used to joke about it sometimes, when I wouldn't let go of something I wanted—a new pair of shoes that were too expensive, or an inappropriate boy I wanted to date. I wondered if Linda's mother told her those same kinds of stories before she died, and if they would have meant as much to a nine-year-old.

“Hope sure does favor her daddy, doesn't she?” Kath said. Which she did: she had her father's narrow face and full mouth, and her skin was a creamy light brown that was warm and lovely even marred with newborn acne, as Davy's had been.

“But she has Ally's huge eyes,” I said. “Except they're blue.”

“All newborns have blue eyes,” Brett said.

“Even Indian babies?” Kath asked.

Brett frowned to herself. “Hope is only half Indian,” she said, and I sat wondering if that would be hard for Hope, to be neither entirely one thing nor entirely another.

“She looks like Mr. Pajamas,” Brett said.

“She looks like Mr. Magoo,” I said. “But all babies look like Mr. Magoo.”

“Bless her iddy-biddy li'l heart, she's just about nothing,” Kath said. “My babies were whoppers compared to her.”

“She looks like a miracle to me,” Linda said, and we all agreed: that child lying in Kath's antique bassinet in Ally's room with Mr. Pajamas, covered with the softest blanket Linda and I could find, was definitely a miracle.

An engine rumbled to life across the street as Ally joined us, leaving the front door open so she could hear Hope if she woke. Quite a few trucks had gathered around the mansion that morning, with men in hard hats smoking cigarettes and kicking at the earth. Before we knew it, the crane was swinging its heavy ball at the top story of that poor old mansion, at the windows of the room with the faded-rose wallpaper, where the piano had been. The sound of shattering windows and splitting boards joined the rumble of the crane.