Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 1

“O ld guy,” my husband said in a low voice, his lips touching my ear. “Near the exit sign.”

“Stop it.” The joke itself was old as rocks.

Jonathan raised his eyebrows. “I’m serious. He kept looking at you in the ticket line. Then he followed us through Medieval Art, and now he’s just standing there. Do you see him? He looks at you whenever you’re not looking.”

“Everyone cuts through Medieval,” I said. “It doesn’t constitute stalking.” We were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York.

“I didn’t say stalking.”

It wasn’t crowded by the standards of the Met, no blockbuster Van Gogh exhibit or Costume Institute to gum things up. If you took the time to notice the people around you, chances were you’d see some of them again in a different wing. “That guy?” I asked, tipping my head slightly in the direction of a tall, thin man who looked like a French film star—black jeans, loose black curls.

My husband straightened up. “Could you take me seriously for one minute?”

Why did the French guy imply a lack of seriousness? I didn’t ask. Jonathan was leaving tomorrow for what might be a long trip, and I had just posted grades for the end of the school year. We decided to make use of the city, have a nice day. “I’m taking you seriously.”

“Okay, let’s go up a floor and see what happens.”

“We just got here.” I liked the American Wing, the Tiffany glass and baseball cards, that tragic bust of Lincoln.

“We’ll come right back.” He started walking in the direction of Armor again, that dimly lit hall of schoolchildren staring at swords and shields. A shiver of gladness passed through me because they were not my schoolchildren and it was not my field trip.

“A suit of armor could weigh more than sixty pounds,” the teacher said as we passed, reading her facts off a display card, though the children were plenty old enough to read. The boys would all be picturing themselves going into battle with a mace and the girls would be thinking about the burdened horses that had to carry both the men and their armor.

“Still with us?” I asked Jonathan.

He looked without looking. Either he was making the whole thing up or he would have been a brilliant spy. “Yes.”

We picked up speed in Medieval Art. Jonathan hates how fast I walk and will often stop to let me sail on past without noticing he is no longer with me, but in Medieval Art, he set the pace. I guess the old guy hung in there because when we got to the Grand Staircase, Jonathan asked me if I’d taken a jealous lover.

“Funny,” I said, and up we went.

“If he follows us to Modern and Contemporary, we’ll know.”

“What will we know?” I set my stair-climbing pace to his, mindful of his knee.

“That he’s in love with you,” Jonathan said generously. “That old guys can’t get enough of you.”

It was not the first time I’d regretted having told him this. In my defense, I only said it once and that was decades ago, never thinking that one day we’d be married and he would hold on to the information like a souvenir postcard from another era. My husband had taken me as his date to a hospital board dinner more than twenty years ago when the head of general surgery all but climbed across the table to sit beside me. He then proceeded to tell me his every thought, about the emergency appendectomy he had performed before arriving, about what the food on our plates was doing to our livers, about starlight. When finally the evening was over, Jonathan apologized in the valet line. “I have no idea what that was about,” he said.

I knew what it was about, but it was stupid of me to say it to Jonathan: Old guys love me. They had always loved me. I never experienced a flicker of interest from a man my own age, but show me a man ten or fifteen years older, twenty years older, and he’d be pulling me aside to tell me he couldn’t remember the last time he felt this way. I meant to be funny, but Jonathan received my explanation as permission. There in the valet line he took me in his arms and kissed me as his car was pulling up, the headlights dousing us in white light. He was forty-seven to my thirty then, as he was seventy to my fifty-three now.

At the top of the museum’s marble stairs we took a left, bypassing Drawings and Prints and heading straight to Modern and Contemporary. For this I gave my husband credit. People don’t come to the second floor and skip Drawings and Prints unless they have an agenda. I, for one, never went to Modern and Contemporary at the Met because there were other places in this city to go if modern and contemporary was what I was after, but there it was, a monumental slab of granite into which two horses had been chiseled. Or maybe it wasn’t two horses so much as it was one horse and its ghost. It was the only piece in the room, affixed to the wall across from a bank of windows overlooking Central Park. We had come so far from those flat-faced angels and their gilded halos, proffered lilies and velvet gowns. “Who is this?” I asked my husband.

“There he is,” Jonathan said, and for a second I thought he meant the artist.

Not the artist but an old man, visibly winded from the significant distance we had traveled. He walked into the room where we were and then, seeing us seeing him, immediately walked away.

“Oh,” I said to Jonathan.

“Yes,” he said.

I went to the wall, knowing better than to put my hands on art and wanting to do exactly that. Two Horses , Charles Ray, Chicago-born, 1953.

“Do you know who he is?” my husband asked. He still wasn’t talking about art.

I shook my head.

“What do you want to do?”

“Do?” I asked. Are you seeing this?

“You can’t tell me you aren’t interested.”

I wasn’t interested in a stranger’s attention, nor was I troubled by it. Men rarely understood this. “How do you know he isn’t looking at you?” I asked. “Did you think about that? Maybe you went to school together.” But wait, I didn’t mean that. It sounded unkind. The man was clearly older than Jonathan. The old man was older than my old man.

“It isn’t me,” my husband said.

“Okay then, it’s me. We’re not going to invite him for dinner.”

“You don’t have any curiosity?”

I had plenty of curiosity, but I wasn’t curious about this. My dear dead father, whom I had seen not nearly enough of in his life, gave me one piece of advice that I have found endlessly useful: If you don’t want to engage with someone, don’t engage, by which he meant don’t smack the side of the car that cuts you off at the crosswalk because the person in the car might have a gun. Don’t think you get to say your piece and then walk away. That’s what I was thinking when Jonathan left to follow the man who had followed me there. Not that Jonathan was angry; it wasn’t that at all. He meant to start a conversation with a stranger.

I wanted to think about nothing but those horses, but the distraction of my absent husband proved powerful. Jonathan was gone and then he was still gone. When I became annoyed, I went to find him.

There they were, the two of them tucked in a corner of the next gallery. Jonathan was talking, and the man, who wore a navy blazer and pink collared shirt, gray slacks, looked up at him, nodding. His hair was thick and straight and very white, and his glasses were tortoise and round, topped by a noticeable pair of eyebrows. When he saw me crossing the room, he touched my husband’s arm and my husband turned and smiled at me, a smile that said, You’re never going to believe this.

“You’re never going to believe this,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and then I said hello to the man.

He nodded at me as if he wanted to speak and could not speak. His obvious mortification made me feel tenderly towards him. I know, I wanted to say to this stranger in regard to my husband, he does this sometimes.

“This is your stepfather,” Jonathan said.

I looked at the man, and then at Jonathan. Of course it was not my stepfather. Lucas Ekker lived outside of Boston in a large house with my mother.

“Keep going back. One more stepfather,” Jonathan said, watching me work.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie Triplett said.

All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery, but still I made a sound. I put my hand to my mouth to stop it, but it had already gotten away from me. It was his voice, Eddie Triplett’s voice coming out of this old man’s mouth. “Eddie.”

“I didn’t mean to chase you,” he said.

“He thought he saw your mother,” my husband said.

Eddie shook his head. “I knew it wasn’t your mother.”

“At first,” Jonathan said. “When he first saw you. Look, you’re crying. Daphne never cries,” he said to Eddie. “I can count on one hand the number of times.” He cut himself off to take the handkerchief out of his pocket and hand it to me.

“Duck,” Eddie said, his voice full of sorrow.

And with that I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards. It was not a few tears. Jonathan put his arm around my shoulder, understanding none of it but knowing the big reveal should not have come here, in front of art. “What do you say the three of us go to the Dining Room and get a glass of water, a cup of tea?”

Did I nod? It didn’t matter. I said nothing as my husband guided us out of Modern and Contemporary, Eddie Triplett following along. I remembered Eddie Triplett as a taller man, but that’s because I had been quite small at the time of our acquaintance. I hadn’t seen him in more than forty years, almost forty-five. Eddie Triplett walked behind us now, wanting to die. How did I know this? Because I wanted to die myself, and our hearts were forever stitched together, mine and Eddie’s.

The Dining Room was more or less above us. Jonathan knew where the elevators were and led us there, in part to make things easier for me and in part because his bad knee got worse the more he used it. The three of us stepped into that empty mechanical box, and as the doors slid shut, my crying abruptly ceased, as if I had wrestled back into place that part of myself that had come unstuck. I blew my nose gently on Jonathan’s handkerchief and looked at Eddie. How had it never occurred to me that an elevator was so much like a car pointing up? An elevator car. “Remind you of anything?” I asked.

“ See the US- A in your Chev-ro- let,” he sang quietly, his eyes watching the illuminated numbers above the door.

And that made me laugh so abruptly it came out more like a bark.

“I missed the joke,” Jonathan said.

“At one time that was your wife’s favorite song,” Eddie said.

The doors opened. We had only gone two floors. “This is the strangest sensation,” I said.

“What is?” Jonathan was still holding my arm. I could tell he was starting to worry about me.

“A stranger hunting you down in the Met,” Eddie said, answering for me. “I didn’t even know why I was following you at first. Well, you do look like your mother.”

“I don’t look like my mother.” My mother, like my sister, has real beauty, the kind that did not succumb to time.

“You do,” Jonathan said with some reluctance. He wasn’t fond of my mother, who was so fond of him.

Eddie agreed. “You’ve got her height, her confidence, the way you walk is like your mother.”

“There’s the laugh, too,” Jonathan said.

“I don’t laugh like my mother,” I said.

Eddie shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t think I was following your mother. Your mother is my age.” He stopped himself, struck by a thought. “Is your mother still—”

“Very much.”

He nodded. “Good, good. All I can say is that I knew you were someone I knew and I couldn’t quite remember where I knew you from. One gets to be a certain age and this happens. By the time I was following you up the stairs, I had the terrible thought that you might be a famous actress or a soprano and I was pursuing you. I didn’t know you’d seen me. I think of myself as blending in with the crowd.”

“Believe me,” I said. “I never would have seen you.”

“I saw you,” Jonathan said.

I tilted my head in the direction of my husband. “He’s more aware of his surroundings than I am.”

“Good for you,” Eddie said. “That’s how we manage in the city. Do the two of you live here?”

“Westchester,” I said.

“Bronxville,” Jonathan said, getting specific. We were in line for a table. He gave his name to the hostess.

“That’s the dream,” Eddie said. “See some trees and grass first thing in the morning. See a squirrel, fill the bird feeders, drive a car. I always thought the day would come when I would leave, but I never left. I tell myself I have to live here. I go out a lot at night.”

“Now that you’re retired?” Jonathan asked. Now that Jonathan was retired, he thought everyone should retire. He thought I should retire.

But Eddie disappointed him. “No, no. Not retired in the least. I went to the office this morning right on schedule, but when I got there, they were doing some sort of work on a water main, no idea what it was. They’d shut the tap off for the whole building, sent everyone home, or I should say sent everyone home who was there in the first place. The young people prefer being remote. They like to work in bed with their dogs. But for me, no water means a free day. I thought, When’s the last time I went to the Met? It was a whim. I came on a whim.”

Eddie Triplett was the same age as my mother, and my mother was seventy-six. That much I knew.

“What do you do?” my husband asked, which saved me having to ask the question.

Eddie was an editor at Random House.

People make romantic reference to their own leaping hearts, but at that moment I would say my heart leapt. He was still an editor. He made a game of it when my sister and I were children. He’d say, “When the kids at school ask you what your stepfather does, what do you tell them?”

“Eddie’s an edi tor!” we’d scream.

He said the junior editors were all called Eddie, unless they were women, in which case they were called Edie, and the senior editors were either Ed or Edwina, and the guy at the tip-top of the heap who was known as the chief, he was an Edward. Unfortunately there was no woman at the top of the heap. He said it would be our job to try to change that. Eddie and my mother both worked at Houghton Mifflin publishers in Boston—that’s where they’d met—he in editorial, of course, given his name, and she in publicity, given her propensity for talking on the phone and throwing parties. When she sent Eddie packing, she insisted that he leave not only our house and our family, but his job as well.

“I’m not going to work every day to see my ex-husband in the break room,” she said.

But didn’t that punishment far exceed the crime, whatever the crime had been? “You can’t do that! You can’t make him quit his job !” Where would someone thrown out of the profession he was named for ever find work? At the time, I didn’t understand that there was more than one publishing house in the country. I thought all books came from Houghton Mifflin.

Did I say this to my mother or only think it? In the way of all children, I believed the fault for their divorce was mine, though in this case I really was to blame. The past had happened such a long time ago, and while I wasn’t square on the details, it seemed we had all come out fine.

The hostess took us to our table, and Jonathan and I both ordered a cup of breakfast tea and a slice of almond cake to share.

Eddie looked at the menu for another beat, then looked at us. “Would you mind very much if I had a glass of wine? It really has been a morning.”

We didn’t mind at all. Neither of us offered to join him, but we agreed that it had been a morning. Looking around the Dining Room, it appeared that fully half of the customers were having a glass of wine to deal with their mornings as well. Eddie ordered Chardonnay.

Eddie Triplett, sitting across the table, smiled at me. I could remember how painfully I had missed him when he left, but how long did that missing last? A year? Two years? Did Eddie Triplett ever cross my mind in high school? Did I wonder what had become of him after I left for college? “Tell me everything,” I said, because everything was what I wanted.

“I came to New York after Boston and got a job at Simon & Schuster, which turned out to be a better job than the one I had at Houghton. And I liked living in the city, so I thank your mother for that. I stayed at S&S for five years and then I moved to Random House, which proved to be the terminal stop.”

“When will you retire?” Jonathan asked, bringing the conversation back to his favorite topic. He didn’t like to see a man older than himself still working because then he had to question his choices.

“When I show up at my office one morning and find its contents packed into boxes. What do you do?” It was clear that Jonathan wanted him to ask.

“Health care. I was in hospital administration.” Jonathan then told him the name of the hospital.

“I had a stent there once, almost three years ago,” Eddie said, as if he were talking about a restaurant that served good fish. “In and out the same day. Excellent staff.”

Jonathan beamed. He thanked him. “I’ve always been proud of the work we did in cardiac care.”

“So you liked the job but you retired?”

Jonathan nodded. “It was a reorganization in advance of the hospital being sold. The senior staff got an excellent package.”

“Oh, the packages. They do their best to get the old guys out of there. What about you?” he said, turning. Each time he looked at me, he brightened. “Tell me you’re a writer.”

I had promised him the night of the accident, we had promised each other, we would both be writers. We would write books and dedicate them to one another. Now I told him I was not, which was fine. I wasn’t bound by a promise my nine-year-old self had made. I told him I taught English at a girls’ prep school. He asked me which one and I told him.

“Never too late,” he said.

“It is, actually.”

“Daphne teaches creative writing, though,” Jonathan said. “Every girl in school wants to take Mrs. Fuller’s creative writing class.” I knew he was trying to tell Eddie that I was more than I appeared to be, but the explanation came across as thin and sad.

“Mrs. Fuller?”

“That’s me.” I refilled our teacups from the little white pot. “I took Jonathan’s name.”

It was Eddie’s name I’d wanted as a child—Daphne Triplett—a true and forgotten fact recovered from where? The teacup? Daphne Triplett would have been a vast improvement for one Daphne Zabriskie. My mother said my father, however uninvolved, would never stand for it, and I shouldn’t ask him because it would be hurtful. Of course she was right. Still, I printed this true name on the flyleaf of every book I owned, the Nancy Drews and Charlotte’s Web : “This book belongs to Daphne Triplett.” I planned to use it as my pen name. I told Eddie all of this while we were hanging sideways in the car, and he said, “Nom de plume.” He said everything was more convincing when you said it in French.

“Did you marry again?” I asked. Was there a Mrs. Triplett now? He wasn’t wearing a ring, which meant exactly nothing.

He took a long sip of Chardonnay, then slowly shook his head. “You have to know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. I wasn’t good at marriage.”

“Children?” I asked, because that’s what I wanted to know: Did Eddie have children? My mother had married again and had two sons with Lucas Ekker. “The Little Ekkers,” my sister and I called our half-brothers when we were alone in our room. Their names were Christopher and Matthew because by then my mother’s interest in mythology had waned. Christopher and Matthew were in their forties now.

Eddie looked at me with love. There was no other word for it. “Just you and your sister,” he said. “What’s Leda up to?”

We kept the table through lunch, ordering salads to follow the cake while Eddie had a slice of quiche and a second glass of wine. I told him about Leda, who was a clinical psychologist; about her children, the youngest of whom was still in high school; about her husband, Steve, who minted money for a hedge fund. They lived in a sprawling apartment on the Upper West Side, overlooking the park. Leda said she could limit her practice to a ten-block radius and be booked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and run a two-year wait list. Instead she’d cut her practice back to write a column for the New York Times called “Your Therapist.”

“No!” Eddie put down his fork. “I read ‘Your Therapist.’ That’s our Leda?”

“Our Leda. She turned out to be the writer.”

He thought for a moment. “Dr. Ha.”

“Steve is Korean.”

“Fuller and Ha? I thought all the modern women kept their names these days.”

I shook my head. When given the choice between our father’s name or our husband’s name, we went with our husbands’. “What therapist wouldn’t want to be Dr. Ha?”

“You girls could have done anything.” He looked at Jonathan. “You wouldn’t have believed this one. I was young back then. I mistakenly thought she was representative of her age. I don’t think I understood at the time how extraordinary you were.”

“We were kids,” I said.

“She’s still awfully bright,” Jonathan said fondly, and for the second time I wished he’d stop it with the praise.

But Eddie held firm. “She was extraordinary.”

It embarrassed me, this unchecked adoration of a stranger. I, who was accustomed only to the adoration of certain teenage girls who loved Jane Austen and Toni Morrison. I started talking about books, a brilliant conversational swerve on my part, as Eddie had read everything I could think to ask him about. Some of the books I recommended to him were books he turned out to have edited.

“I’ve never known anyone who reads as much as Daphne,” Jonathan said. Jonathan, who walked the line between amazed and appalled where my reading was concerned. The various stacks beside our bed at times exceeding the height of our nightstand.

“Well, now you know two of us,” Eddie said.

When the time came to leave—and that time had passed an hour before—Eddie took a tiny leather notebook from his shirt pocket and a tiny pen, asking if he might give me his number.

“I can put it right in my phone,” I said, reaching for my purse.

He shook his head, writing out his first and last name lest I find another scrap of paper in my bag that said “Triplett” and get confused. I thought of how that piece of paper was now the only thing I owned that he had given me. I’m sure he gave me plenty of things when I was a child, but life is long and there had been many moves in the years that intervened. Not only did I have nothing left from Eddie, I couldn’t remember what those things might have been. I held out my hand for his notebook so that I could write my number in return, but he declined.

“You may walk to the train station after lunch and say to your nice husband, Mon Dieu! That man! I thought we’d never be rid of him. If that’s the case then, you’ll be relieved you didn’t give me your number.”

“Eddie,” I said, and put my hand on his hand.

He looked at our two hands there on the table. He waited. “Your mother called me Eddie,” he said finally. “Only your mother and you and your sister.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There would be no reason for you to know that.”

“What do people call you?”

Then he looked at me, smiling. “I’ll never tell you,” he said. “You’ll never know. You’ll have to call me Eddie for the rest of your life.”

We took the elevator downstairs together and Eddie walked us as far as the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid before hugging me goodbye. His neck smelled lightly of Ivory soap, and I was overcome with the memory of that smell, that single night I had slept with my face buried in his neck for warmth. He shook Jonathan’s hand. He said he was going back to look for a particular Monet, a haystack in the snow, which he hadn’t seen in years. He had no idea if it would still be there, though surely they wouldn’t have sold it off. The Monet was the whim that had brought him to the Met on the day they’d shut the water off at Random House.

Jonathan and I did not go back to the American Wing. We walked out of the museum and into the clear May light. The day had been wrecked for anything else, and both of us knew it. We were going home.

“That was something,” he said after two full blocks of silence. Not that the city was silent. Only us.

The day was barely warm, but it had been an unusually cold May. The fact that it was warmer than the other days had caused people to run home and pull the bedspreads off their beds and then carry them back to the park so they could spread them out across the grass. Some of them, tight on time, lay in the grass without benefit of bedspread. “Do me a favor,” I said, taking my husband’s arm. “Let me go see Leda. Let me go for an hour or two and not feel bad about abandoning you, then I’ll take the train and meet you at home.”

He stopped walking. “When have I ever made you feel bad about seeing your sister?”

“Never, but I feel bad anyway. We were supposed to spend the day together and we haven’t and now I feel guilty because you’re leaving tomorrow.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow to go and see my sister,” he said. “In case you don’t remember.”

“I remember.”

Jonathan looked at me. “So here’s a compromise: text her and see if she’s home, and if she is, let me walk you over. I promise I won’t come up, no matter how many times she asks me.”

It might have been nice to walk through the park by myself and sort things through, but it was a reasonable request. We leaned against the stone wall that circled the park and I texted my sister to see if she was home and asked her if I could come over. Leda didn’t see patients on Thursday, she kept the day open to work on her column, but since the column only ran once a month, she often spent Thursdays on errands instead, or went to a yoga class, or had lunch with a friend. I heard back from her right away, saying she wasn’t home but she was close. Twenty minutes? She asked me if everything was okay.

I told her yes.

“I’m trying to remember what you ever told me about Ed Triplett,” Jonathan said as we started out across the park. “I can’t remember anything other than your mother had three husbands. I’m not even sure I knew his name.” Jonathan saw this as a failure on his part. He loved to ask me questions about the past: high school friends and family vacations. He was sorry to think he hadn’t asked me more about someone I’d all but forgotten myself.

For me the past was a sinkhole. Not that it was terrible, but there was nothing for me there. “Eddie didn’t get much of a run,” I said. “A year, possibly two years start to finish. Leda and I were crazy about him, but when he was gone, he was gone.”

“He didn’t visit after he left?” My husband had two grown daughters. He could never imagine letting go of them.

But we weren’t Eddie’s daughters. The marriage was so brief we were barely his stepdaughters. I shook my head. “My mother scrubbed him, at least that’s what I told myself when I was nine and I’m guessing I was right. No visits, no birthday cards, nothing. I’m sure she thought we’d get over it better that way, that we’d forget about him. It probably had to do with my father. He was the one she wanted to scrub, but she wasn’t allowed to do that, whereas she had complete control over how things went down with Eddie.”

“Did you ever think of trying to find him?”

Oh, this moment, when all the leaves were fresh and the lilacs were out and New York seemed like the best idea. The present, I wanted to say to my husband, let’s live here. “I thought about it when I was nine, but by the time affordable home computers had been invented and the internet was up and running, I guess I’d forgotten.” Had I failed Eddie? I’d been sure of it at the time. Maybe I was right.

Jonathan put his arm around my shoulder, kissed my head. “Poor you,” he said.

“I did all right.”

“You did better than all right, but I knew your father, and I know your stepfather, and now I’ve had lunch with Ed Triplett, and I have to say that of the three, the best one got away.”

My father, one Neil Zabriskie, called Buddy, was the reason I’d met Jonathan in the first place, as my father was dying of metastatic melanoma in the hospital in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Jonathan worked. Jonathan liked to drop in on patients, ask how things were going. He came back later to check on Buddy, to see if he was happy with the care he was receiving. He came back later still to bring me a cup of coffee while Buddy was sleeping, his intentions on his sleeve. That old guys love me has been established, but also true was the fact that Jonathan’s wife, the much beloved first Mrs. Fuller, had died of metastatic melanoma five years before. He had some insights into the disease, the main one being that I shouldn’t be angry at my father for not staying on top of this thing that was killing him. Not only had Jonathan’s wife been on top of it, she was forefront in the mind of every oncologist in the Northeast, the first one called for appropriate clinical trials. She fought like a wolverine and still the cancer pulled her under. This wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t Buddy’s fault—that’s what Jonathan Fuller had come back to the room to tell me. Then he asked me to have dinner with him so we could talk about it some more.

Jonathan and I kept on through the park, passing the pond with all its turtles, and Belvedere Castle and then the Delacorte Theater, past the Shakespeare Garden and the Bow Bridge. We were walking up to Strawberry Fields before I realized why he’d wanted to come with me: he meant to keep me from getting lost. In the best of times I was likely to take a wrong turn in Central Park, and when I was distracted, I had the potential to stay lost for days. Maybe this was why he got irritated when I walked so fast; he knew I had no idea where I was going.

Jonathan saw me to the door of Leda’s building, the Gallant Green, and told me to call and let him know what train I’d be coming home on. “If the timing works out, we’ll have dinner in town,” he said, meaning that he held no expectation that I would be back in two hours.

My husband kissed me goodbye in front of my sister’s apartment building, and I was thinking about how, at some point, I would tell Eddie all of this: about the walk across the park and the realization of Jonathan’s kindness and how I could picture Leda’s face when I said Eddie’s name. I could remember this feeling from childhood, waiting for him to come home from work on the commuter rail so that I could tell him everything.

“Is my sister back?” I asked Mohammad. I visited Leda so often that the doormen in her building knew me. In response he turned his head and gave a quick whistle. Across the lobby, Leda looked up from the stack of mail in her hands and smiled. Beautiful Dr. Ha. I should have been able to wait until we were in the apartment to tell her what had happened, or at least wait until we were in the elevator, but I lacked the discipline. I went across the lobby and put my arms around her. She smelled like oranges and verbena. “Never in a million years will you guess who Jonathan and I saw at the Met,” I said.

“Bruce Springsteen,” she said. She had once seen Springsteen at the bookstore Three Lives in the West Village and had been on the lookout for him ever since.

I didn’t want to make it into a game, especially a game she had no chance of winning, so I told her.

“Eddie Triplett?” she asked, as if the name puzzled her. Leda was younger than me, which meant she was, what, six or seven at the time? Surely she remembered Eddie.

“Our stepfather.”

“I know who he is,” she said, her cheeks flushed. “It’s just so strange. Eddie. How did you even recognize him? He must be in his seventies now.”

“Seventy-six. I didn’t recognize him, but the more I think about it, the more I think he did look like himself. I might have walked past him in a museum, but if you put six stepfathers in a lineup, I know I would have picked him out.”

“Six stepfathers in a lineup! Oh, if only Mom had married four more times. That would have been a terrific game.” She pushed the elevator button and the doors slid open. “What did Mom say when you told her?”

“I haven’t told her. We left him less than an hour ago. If we went back to the Met right now, we could probably find him. I’ll call her later. I wanted to tell you first.” In truth it hadn’t occurred to me to call our mother, though of course I would.

“Or maybe you won’t tell her. Mom isn’t a fan of conflicting narratives. She’s married to Lucas, period. The boys bring their families home for Christmas. She’s decided the past was happy and so she has no reason to think about it.”

I asked her where we fit into that narrative. “We don’t,” she said.

When the elevator doors opened again, we walked down the hall to her apartment.

My sister had been named for a girl raped by Zeus, god of all gods, who turned himself into a swan for the occasion. I had been named for a girl whose father, the river god Peneus, turned her into a tree to save her from being raped by the god Apollo. Leda liked to say that made me the lucky one, but I was never sure. Daphne had been saved, but she was always going to be a tree, a virtuous tree, whereas Leda was still human, though her children had arrived in a clutch of eggs. Our mother had taken a semester of Greek mythology in college and it spoke to her. When she told us she had hoped for a third daughter to name Persephone, Leda and I counted our lucky constellations.

Remembering how young our mother was when she fell for Buddy Zabriskie had been my life’s discipline. She found out she was pregnant the week after they graduated from college, and at twenty-three they were married with their new baby Daphne. I told myself to bear in mind how young she still was when he left her with two daughters, the second one in diapers, so that he could go back to work on his family’s fishing boat full-time. He told her he was meant for the ocean, and that he would not let her vision of life define him. He actually said that to her. He told me so when he was dying. What had our mother’s vision of life been in those days? Paying rent? Buying food? I tried to imagine how I would have managed in similar circumstances, and all I could say was that I would not have survived, any more than I would have survived being thrown out of a plane with two small children. Our mother, who had annoyed me deeply throughout most of my life, managed something so heroic that there should have been songs written about her to be sung around campfires by Girl Scouts.

Abigail Zabriskie paved the way

So we might see a better day

She never thought that she could fail

Let’s raise our cups to Abigail.

Leda put the mail on the counter, dropped her bag. She got us each a can of seltzer flavored with lime. “I keep trying to get a picture of Eddie in my mind. He seems more like a visiting relative than someone Mom married.”

“You were so young then.”

“But he made an impression. Like our childhood was pretty much a chaotic mess except for this one little part when Eddie lived with us, even though I can’t remember what he did to make it feel that way. He was a nice guy, wasn’t he?”

“That’s my memory.” Leda’s living room offered no end of seating options, but we both took our place on the same smallish couch, our shoes off and feet touching.

“Did he seem happy when you saw him?”

I opened my seltzer and drank. Crying makes me thirsty, which was psychosomatic, I know. I had not wept away the equivalent of this seltzer can. “I think he did, but who can say if another person is happy based on one lunch? He was shocked to see me, that much was clear. We were both shocked. I burst into tears when he introduced himself. Sobbed. I have no idea where that came from.”

“Where do you think it came from?” Leda cracked her seltzer and tucked her feet beneath herself like a swan.

“Don’t go getting professional on me,” I said. I admired my sister’s professionalism and wanted no part of it.

“I’m serious. Why do you think you cried? It’s not exactly your go-to emotional response.”

I picked up a throw pillow with a giant red poppy needlepointed on the front and held it against my chest, my blooming, bleeding heart. One of her clients had made it for her when she moved away, obviously to ensure that Leda would never again walk through her own living room without thinking about this missing woman. Why did I cry when I realized Eddie was Eddie? Why was I so close to crying again now? Because I had loved him and I had ruined his life. “There was a time I carried a lot of guilt, about the divorce, about Eddie losing his job—childish stuff, I know that. I would have told you it wasn’t in me now, but I guess there was a splinter of it left. Subconscious, not conscious. I haven’t thought about him in decades.”

Leda nodded and then took a long slug from her can. “I felt the same way.”

That was the difference between being the client and being the sister—the sister-therapist was free to join in. “What could you have done to Eddie?” I asked. “You were in the first grade when he left. You were a baby.”

“Logic doesn’t have anything to do with it, and for the record, I was in the second grade. I was almost eight. I had appendicitis, then you and Eddie were in the car accident, then he was in the hospital—”

“—and after that he was gone.”

She nodded. “Exactly. If I hadn’t said I was sick, then the whole chain of events wouldn’t have gone into motion and he wouldn’t have had to leave.”

“And you would have died of a ruptured appendix.”

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

“Did you ever work through any of this as an adult?” Leda had to go through plenty of therapy on her way to becoming a therapist herself.

“Interestingly, I have not. Somehow this brief but meaningful chapter remained subterranean. This is a revelation in real time. So did you and Eddie talk about the accident?”

“In the Dining Room at the Met? It didn’t come up. To tell the truth, the accident isn’t something I talked about with anyone, I mean, aside from you.”

“And Jonathan.”

I drank my seltzer, held my pillow. “Not really. I mean, he knows I was in a car accident when I was a kid.” I tapped the thin white line that ran down the left side of my forehead and disappeared into my hairline near the top of my ear. You couldn’t see it if my hair was down, and for that reason, my hair remained down. Jonathan saw it when we were in bed for the first time. He leaned over me and traced it with his finger. “What’s the story on this?” he asked, and I told him. I’d been in a car accident when I was a kid, not a big deal, no one seriously hurt.

“Did he ask you who was driving?” This was the reason my sister was Dr. Ha, “Your Therapist.” She always knew the follow-up question.

“I told him Mom was driving.”

Leda opened her mouth and left it open, an incredibly affecting gesture. I wondered if she tried it with her patients.

“I know, I know.”

“Get thee to therapy, sister.”

“Why? Because I didn’t tell the guy I’d gone to bed with about Eddie Triplett? It was an oversimplification.”

“In my profession we call that a lie.”

“I didn’t feel like opening up to him at that moment.”

“You didn’t feel like opening up to him, but you’d just had sex with him?”

“Jesus, Leda, you remember having sex with people for the first time, don’t you? Deep dives into childhood trauma sort of ruins it for everyone. Did you tell Steve about your appendix the first time you slept with him? He must have seen the scar.”

She shook her head and smiled at some private memory.

Later on, when Jonathan became True-Love Jonathan, I never found the right moment to correct myself. “If he thought Mom slammed a car into a tree, well, Jonathan never liked her anyway.”

She nodded. Had it been a tennis match, I would have gotten a point off of her. “So you want to hear something crazy?”

“These are crazy times.”

“You never told me about the car accident.”

I looked surprised. How had she forgotten? “Of course I did.”

“When?”

“When you came home from the hospital.”

“When I was seven.”

We shared a room in the little house in Winchester, twin beds with a nightstand between them, a lamp with a shade made of dotted swiss. Leda was allowed to have popsicles, Jell-O, Cream of Wheat. She was directed to rest, and when she wasn’t resting, I was directed to read her Harriet the Spy and play Go Fish. I asked her what had happened in the hospital, and she asked me what had happened in the car.