The Lavender Dress
Part One: Two Girls in One Bed
My daughters shared a bed until Emily was eleven.
They didn’t have to. We had a three-bedroom house in Bloomington, Indiana, and each of them had her own room with her own bed and her own pink curtains. But every night, sometime after midnight, I’d hear little feet in the hallway.
In the morning, I’d find them curled up together in one bed. Emily, two years older, with her arm thrown over her little sister like a seat belt.
My name is Laura Kessler. I’m fifty-seven years old.
I taught music at an elementary school for twenty-nine years. Recorders and xylophones and Christmas concerts in gymnasiums that smelled like floor wax. My husband, Mark, is a civil engineer for the county. He builds roads. He measures everything twice.
We raised two girls. Emily and Sophie.
Emily was the loud one.
She came out of me screaming and never really stopped. She talked early, walked early, climbed out of her crib at fourteen months and was found sitting on the kitchen counter eating sugar out of the bowl with her fingers.
She was funny. Stubborn. Fearless. She wanted to be an astronaut, then a lawyer, then a marine biologist, then a chef. She ended up a pediatric nurse at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, which surprised nobody who’d ever watched her take care of her little sister.
Sophie was the quiet one.
She was shy. She hid behind my legs at birthday parties. She cried at the end of every movie, even the happy ones. She drew pictures of horses for hours and didn’t want anybody to see them.
And everywhere Emily went, Sophie followed.
They wore each other’s clothes. They shared each other’s secrets. They had a language of looks across the dinner table that Mark and I never cracked.
When Sophie got bullied in sixth grade, Emily marched into the middle school cafeteria as an eighth grader and stood behind the girl who’d been tormenting her sister. She didn’t say a word. She just stood there until the girl turned around.
Nobody bothered Sophie again.
When Emily got her heart broken at sixteen, Sophie slept on her floor for a week.
When Sophie got into art school in Chicago, Emily drove her there herself and cried the whole way home.
When Emily met Daniel, Sophie was the first person she called.
Part Two: The Pact
There’s a story my daughters used to tell at every family gathering.
I’ve heard it a hundred times. They’d tell it together, finishing each other’s sentences, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe.
It was the summer Emily was twelve and Sophie was ten. My sister got married in a big church in Columbus, Ohio. The bridesmaids wore lavender. Long, flowing lavender dresses with little cap sleeves and a sash at the waist.
My girls thought those dresses were the most beautiful things they’d ever seen.
At the reception, they snuck under one of the round tables with two slices of cake and a plan.
They made a pact. Pinky promise. Under the tablecloth.
Whoever gets married first, the other one will be her maid of honor. And she’ll wear lavender. No matter what.
“No matter what,” Emily said, telling the story at Thanksgiving years later. “Even if it’s ugly. Even if it doesn’t match. Even if it’s a beach wedding in Mexico in July.”
“Even if we’re ninety,” Sophie said.
“Even if we hate each other’s husbands,” Emily said.
“Even if we’re dead,” Sophie said, and they both shrieked with laughter.
They thought that last part was hilarious. Two little girls under a table with frosting on their faces, promising to wear lavender even after death.
They used to say it to each other all the time. On the phone. In texts. At the end of every visit.
Lavender, no matter what.
Part Three: Daniel
Emily met Daniel Reyes when she was twenty.
He was in her anatomy class at IU. A tall, quiet boy from Fort Wayne with dark curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a laugh that came out like a surprised sneeze.
He was studying to be a physical therapist. He was terrible at anatomy. Emily was brilliant at it.
She tutored him. He failed the first exam anyway.
She told him he was hopeless. He asked her to dinner.
She said yes.
They were together for eight years.
Mark liked him right away, which surprised me. Mark doesn’t like anybody right away. But Daniel helped him re-roof the garage the first summer he visited, and he measured everything twice, and that was it.
“He’s a good one, Laura,” Mark said that night, in bed. “He’s a keeper.”
Daniel came to every Thanksgiving. Every Christmas. Every Fourth of July cookout in our backyard.
He knew the story about the lavender dresses. He’d heard it a dozen times. He’d heard lavender, no matter what at the end of every phone call between my daughters.
He always smiled when they said it.
Everybody assumed they’d get married.
They’d talked about it. Emily told me once that they were waiting until Daniel finished his doctorate. Then until they paid off some of their student loans. Then until they could afford a house.
“We’ve got time, Mom,” she said. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
Part Four: The Diagnosis
Emily was diagnosed in January of last year.
She was twenty-seven.
She’d been tired for months. She thought it was the hospital. Twelve-hour shifts on the pediatric oncology floor at Riley. Night shifts. Missed meals. Everybody on that floor was tired.
Then she started losing weight without trying. Then she found a lump under her arm.
She was a nurse. She knew what it might be. She waited two weeks before she told anybody.
The diagnosis was lymphoma. A rare and aggressive kind.
Her oncologist was a woman named Dr. Bhatt. She was kind and direct. She sat with Emily and Daniel and Mark and me in a small office with a box of tissues on the table.
“We’re going to fight this,” she said. “We’re going to fight it hard.”
Emily looked at her.
“What are the odds?” she asked.
She was a nurse. She wanted numbers.
Dr. Bhatt told her.
They weren’t good.
Emily sat very still for a long time.
Then she said, “Okay. Let’s fight.”
And then she said something I’ll never forget.
“Sophie can’t know the odds,” she said. “Not yet. She’s getting engaged.”
Sophie had called us the week before.
She’d been dating a man named Josh Hartley for three years. A high school history teacher in Chicago. Kind and funny and patient, with a beard and a bad habit of quoting old movies.
He’d asked Mark for permission over Christmas. He was going to propose on Valentine’s Day.
Emily knew. She’d helped Josh pick out the ring.
“She’s going to call me,” Emily said in Dr. Bhatt’s office. “On Valentine’s Day. She’s going to be so happy. She’s going to want to talk about dresses and flowers and the venue.”
She looked at me.
“I’m not going to take that from her,” she said. “Not with this.” 