“But I would,” Linda said. “All of us would, wouldn't we?”
Brett ran a gloved hand through her cropped red hair as visions of that long-ago Wednesday Sisters blowup flashed through my mind, that Miss America gathering when we'd learned that Linda was Jewish and Jim was Indian, and that we could hurt each other even when we weren't trying to, and that none of us was as perfect as we liked to pretend.
Was Linda right? Would we all peek? Would we all want to?
I thought she probably was.
“Well then,” Brett said, “I'd better be sure to leave instructions for a closed-coffin wake.”
I ARRIVED AT THE PICNIC TABLE one Sunday morning the following April to find Linda just sitting there, looking off into the empty space where the mansion had stood. I said good morning, but she only nodded, leaving me to sit with her in silence until everyone had arrived. When they had, Linda told us she'd found another lump in her breast.
“Oh, Linda,” Kath started, but Linda cut her off.
“I'm sure it's nothing,” she said. “But I've got an appointment to have it looked at next month.”
“Next month!” Brett said. “But—”
“In three weeks,” Linda said.
“But three weeks is—”
“The last one was benign, and they told me then that I shouldn't be surprised to find another one. They told me not to panic. Women who get lumps get lumps.”
“Linda!” Kath said.
“Heavens to Betsy,” Ally whispered.
“I probably couldn't get in to see anyone here for a few weeks anyway,” Linda said.
“Here?” Ally said, and Kath started, “But Jeff could—”
“I'm running the mini-marathon in New York again,” Linda interrupted. “I'm having it looked at back there. I can't do it here. Jeff knows everyone here.”
She didn't want Jeff to know about it, didn't want him to worry about it, not like he had the last time. That's what she was saying without quite being able to say it. Still, we all understood. And we understood, too, that we were sworn to secrecy, which felt wrong to me, but I wasn't Linda, it wasn't my choice.
Then Linda dropped another bombshell on us: Jeff was taking a position at a hospital in Boston, starting the next week. It was just for the summer, but he was pretty sure that if it went well, they'd make him a permanent offer, a better one than he could get out here.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “Say he can't accept a job in Boston because I have friends here?”
“We're staying in Palo Alto for the summer—the kids and I are,” she said. “We decided it would be less disruptive for them.”
“We always knew this wouldn't be a permanent home, right, Kath?” she said. “We've been lucky to get to stay as long as we have.”
“God, I don't know what I'll do without you guys,” she said. “You'll still have each other, but I won't have anyone.”
WHEN LINDA CAME BACK from New York a month later, she was depressed as hell. No, the lump was nothing, just a cyst, she assured us that Sunday at dawn, the morning after she returned. She'd run poorly in the race, though. Slower than last year. “A fourteen-year-old girl won in under forty minutes,” she said, but without enthusiasm, as if she'd read about it in the paper rather than tried to keep up. “Maybe I'm overtraining,” she said.
Maybe that was it: she was running too much. Maybe that was why her shoulders looked so angular, why the skin under her eyes was translucent blue and her hair seemed in need of a good old-fashioned scrub.
“But you had the lump whacked out?” Kath said. “By someone who knows a fur coat from a frying pan?”
Linda sat silently for a moment, staring off at the empty playground as if watching J.J. pump high on a swing and leap forward off it, planting his palms in the sand as he landed. She gathered a smile from somewhere in the red morning light, then, as if to give her son a big thumbs-up, and she turned that newly gathered smile to us. “They did something called mammography,” she said. “They smushed my breasts flat between plates of glass they must keep stored in a freezer, they were so damned cold. And then they told me to stand stock-still up on my toes the way they had me hooked to the machine, and to hold my breath until I just about burst.”
“It's like an X-ray,” Brett explained. “It takes a sort of picture of the breast tissue, like an X-ray takes a picture of bone.”
“Anyway, the lump is gone, ‘whacked out’ by a nice New York surgeon,” Linda said; though mammography technology existed, it didn't save you from a biopsy back then. “And it was nothing,” she said, that gathered smile somehow deepening the circles under her eyes. “Really. It was just a cyst.”