The Wednesday Sisters(98)

The next morning, she and Jeff got dressed quietly, not wanting to wake the children before they had to. When she was ready, she climbed back into the bed, woke them gently, hugged them and said again how much she loved them.

“Always remember that,” she said. “How much I love you. And remember: it's okay if you're afraid, even if you're afraid of me, if you think I look gross.”

They giggled at the word gross.

“Mommies can't look gross!” J.J. protested.

She wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Remember that two-headed snake we saw yesterday?” she said.

“Mommy, you won't have two heads!” J.J. howled delightedly, and they all laughed.

“No,” Linda promised them. “I won't have two heads, I can promise you that.”

She hugged them again, and she told them one last time that she loved them, and she said good-bye, and she went to the hospital and signed the consent to surgery, the you-may-die stuff. She held her breath as she had that first time, when they put the mask over her face. And she said a prayer not to God but to Jeff, to take special care of them if anything happened to her, to hug them every morning and kiss them every night and always always to remind them how much she had loved them, how much she still loved them even if she couldn't be with them as they grew up.





ANYONE WHO SAW JEFF with Linda that summer could see he would never leave her. I hoped she could see it herself. He commuted to Boston until they could find someone to replace him, but he'd already gone back to the people at Stanford, already said whatever they could give him, he'd take. And still we Wednesday Sisters were saying to each other that we had to do something for Linda. But what?

We could take the children for a weekend or even a week, we told Jeff the week Linda was finishing the chemotherapy. She would be feeling better physically, at least. What she needed now, we decided, was some time without worries, to have fun, to remember who she was. “Why don't you two go on a vacation together?” we said to Jeff.

He ran a hand through uncharacteristically unkempt hair, and for a moment I thought he would cry, and I pictured Linda, how she never cried. I imagined how hard that must be for Jeff, to feel he couldn't cry because she wouldn't.

“She isn't comfortable with the physicality of being with me,” he said, his mouth heavy. “She will be. I know she will be. But she isn't yet.” He did not sound convincing.

“What about you girls all going somewhere?” he said. “A Wednesday Sisters weekend away.” And something in his handsome, exhausted face made me remember him in that Wilbur the pig costume at our Halloween party, made me think, Some Husband.

“Not too far away,” he said, and you could see the struggle in him, the need to make Linda happy fighting against his own need to keep her within his grasp, to help her himself.

“The Miss America weekend, a Miss America retreat,” Kath said, and the rest of us rang up in an echo chorus before the utter ridiculousness of it splashed across our expressions, Ally blinking, looking down, Kath's eyes startling with the realization that this dog certainly would not hunt. How could we imagine Linda would want to watch those perfect women in bathing suits when she'd just lost her breasts, her hair? When she was fighting for her life?

Brett sat rubbing one gloved index finger over her other gloved palm. “I've got the Carson thing that Friday,” she said, and you could see she could barely stand to mention it, that she was mortified to be talking about promoting her novel on television at such a time.

“Linda's really excited about that,” Jeff said. “I'm so glad you're doing it. It gives her something to look forward to. And Carson always makes her laugh, even when his jokes aren't funny.” He smiled a little, and you could almost see him sitting in bed beside Linda, tucked under the covers with her. Ten-thirty. Watching Johnny's opening monologue, basking in her laugh.

“The Tonight Show.”

I think we all said it at the same time.

We'd talked about getting tickets when we first found out Brett would be on, but we hadn't known the date yet, and then with Linda being sick it had slipped our minds. Or perhaps we'd pushed it out, the fun we'd once imagined seeming far beyond our reach.

Could we still get tickets?

“Maybe I could get them, as a guest,” Brett said. “I got one for Chip.”

“I might could get them through the office,” Kath offered.

I thought, but didn't say, that if all else failed, Danny could get them for us, through the investment bankers, I was pretty sure of that. They were always offering tickets to the opera and weekends in Napa, dinners at trendy new restaurants you couldn't get reservations at for months. Four Tonight Show tickets couldn't be that hard to come by, if you knew how to go about it, if you had strings to pull.