The Wednesday Sisters(97)
“Listen,” she said. “This is important. I want you to listen for a minute while I tell you something, and then you can ask anything you want. I want you to ask anything you want.”
“Can we go to the toy store?” J.J. asked; they'd passed FAO Schwarz on the way.
“After we're done talking,” Linda said. “Maybe it will be open by then.”
She pulled J.J. into her lap and leaned closer to the table, the twins on either side of her. She looked at each one of them, at Julie and Jamie, who had Jeff's sober brown eyes, at J.J., whose eye color couldn't quite be described, like her own.
“Mommy has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning for an operation,” she said. “I hope it will be just a little operation, but I don't know. If it is, I'll be home in two days. I might have to have a second operation, though, and if I do, I'll be in the hospital longer.”
“Will you bring a baby home, like Hope?” Julie asked, her face so expectant that Linda had to look away. Her eyes met her own reflection looking back at her from the mirrored wall, her children's smaller faces focused on hers, fear edging its way into their eyes.
She held J.J. more surely, leaning closer to the girls. She set her hand on Julie's hair, on the little bit of ear that peeked through the sheet of blond. “Not this time, honey,” she said.
“Can we come visit you?” Jamie asked.
“Yes, you can visit me there,” Linda said. “Daddy will be here tonight, and he'll bring you every day.” She touched a finger to her daughter's neck, pushing away the thought that she might never see how lovely it would look on the woman her daughter would become. “I might look kind of weird after the second operation, if I end up having two,” she said. “Grandma did.”
Her mother must have known Linda loved her even as she was hiding in the closet, Linda realized. Julie and Jamie and J.J. would always love her: she knew that as surely as she knew anything.
She took a sip of her coffee, cold already. She didn't want to scare them, but she wanted them to understand. “Honestly,” she said, “it's okay to be afraid if you think I look weird. I'll probably be afraid, too. Everyone is.”
And when Julie said, “But Grandma died, Mommy. Are you going to die?” Linda thought: This is why Mom and Dad never told us, because how do you answer this?
She met each of their eyes before she spoke again—all those straight-across eyebrows, like hers—so they would see that she was telling them the truth. “I don't think so,” she said. “I don't think I'm going to die, but I can't promise I won't.” The earnest way they looked back at her. Could they even begin to understand this? “If anything happens to me,” she said, “I want you to always remember this: No mommy in this whole wide world has ever loved her children more than I love you guys. And always, always, you make me the happiest mommy in the world. No matter what happens, I want you to remember that. Okay? Promise me that?”
They all did. They all promised her, no matter what.
“Forever?” she said, working to make her voice lighter. “Even when you're a hundred and two?”
They all giggled.
“Even when I'm a hundred and ninety-two,” Julie said, and Jamie, not to be outdone, said, “Even when I'm two thousand!”
Linda wrapped them in a big group hug then, not able to get out the one last thing she'd wanted to say, not able to tell Jamie and Julie they might have to remind J.J., that he might not remember his mother at all, he was so young.
They rode the carousel in Central Park that morning. At the zoo, the children laughed at the gorillas (Linda trying not to think about the poor mother gorilla who'd been so sad to be separated from baby Patty Cake and now might never get him back), and J.J., at least, eeeewwwed with real glee at the two-headed snake. They rented a little rowboat and the twins took turns at the oars, making a crazy zigzag across the water, putting them in the path of other rowboats again and again, but no harm ever came to them.
When they got back to her brother's place, Jeff was there, and she told him, and when she leaned into him once the awful words were out, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. “It's going to be okay,” he whispered, and for a moment she thought maybe it would.
They all slept in the same bed that night, the five of them together, so that if the children woke in the middle of the night she and Jeff would be there. She snuggled up with them, and when they were all breathing easily—even Jeff, who'd been up all the night before at the hospital—she eased out from under the covers and found some of her sister-in-law's heavy stationery. She settled on the floor in the hallway outside their room, and she wrote Jamie and Julie and J.J. each a long letter, recalling the moments they were born and their first words, their first steps, describing in detail what she loved about each of them and imaging the wonderful futures she knew they would have, the things they would do and the love they would find, the love they would give along the way.