The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Page A

closed against the beautiful day. No radio or TV. No little Carrie chattering to her dolly or throwing a fit over having to eat oatmeal or pulling on Ally’s hem and telling her it was time to go to the park.
    “Ally?” I called.
    No answer.
    “Ally?” Brett called a little louder.
    The faucet dripped in the kitchen. In the park, the children were screaming the way kids in parks do, all overly excited and dramatic and joyous.
    “Ally?” we called a third time, together.
    A sound came from upstairs, not a voice or a word, but a human sound. Fear?
    Brett and I looked at each other:
Should we call the police?
But this was Palo Alto in the middle of a sunny Wednesday morning, for goodness sakes. I imagined the police showing up and taking one look at Brett’s white gloves, the event replayed in the crime column of the
Palo Alto Times
under the heading “No Crime at All” with some long-winded rant about how kooks like us distracted the police from important business. And Brett was already creeping up the stairs, whispering, “Ally? Ally, are you here?”
    There was a louder sound then, a sob, and Brett and I bolted up the stairs and started opening doors until we found Ally curled up on a double bed in a dreary, drape-shrouded room, her hair sprawled in a tangle across sheets and blankets and pillows that were a single gray hue in the lightless room.
    Brett sat gently on the edge of the bed and lay a white-gloved hand on shoulders so thin they ought to have belonged to a young girl. After a moment, she smoothed Ally’s hair from her face, tucked it gently behind her ear, stroked her cheek. “Ally, what happened?” she said.
    Ally’s shoulders shook soundlessly.
    “What’s wrong?” Brett insisted, but so kindly that I wondered how this came so naturally to her. “Has something happened to Jim?” she said. “Or to Carrie?”
    I sat at Ally’s feet and put my hand on the blanket over her calves, trying to echo Brett’s ease. We sat there for the longest time, Ally sobbing silently, a tissue buried in her fist, unused. I tried to imagine how long she must have lain like this; there must have been twenty tissues scattered across the carpet, and the basket was full. I imagined Jim—whom I’d never met—picking them up and loading them in the basket, torn between not wanting to leave her that morning and having to get to a court appearance that his job depended on.
    “Did something happen to Carrie?” Brett said again, gentle but insistent. “Tell us.”
    Ally shook her head.
    “Was it the baby?” I guessed.
    That awful sob again.
    “You lost the baby,” I whispered.
    Brett stayed with Ally while I slipped out to tell Kath and Linda—they wanted to come, too, but we thought that might be too much for Ally, and anyway, someone had to stay with the kids.
    When I returned to Ally’s house, I put a kettle on for tea. No Lipton’s in Ally’s cabinet, nothing remotely resembling a tea bag, but there was a copper teapot inlaid with silver at the handle and spout, and on the shelf beside it two cylindrical containers made of thin wood. The first one I opened smelled of spices: cloves and ginger and something else I couldn’t identify, maybe a whole bunch of different things. But the other container held a dark, powdery substance that, though it looked finer than tea leaves, did smell like tea.
    By the time I came back to the room with the steaming cup, Brett had gotten Ally to sit up. She was leaning against a pile of pillows, and the light on her nightstand was on now, raising the room from dreary colorlessness to chalky blue. I handed Brett the tea, discreetly picked up the tissues, added them to the pile in the basket, and sat back down at the end of the bed.
    Brett was trying to be soothing, saying that sometimes a miscarriage happens because there is something wrong with the baby, maybe it was for the best.
    Ally’s face crumpled in on itself like a dying leaf. “But I always lose my babies. A year