Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 10

L eda’s forehead rested on the heels of her hands, her fingers buried in her hair. Maybe she was thinking of her own children wandering around in the snow, or maybe she was thinking of me. We were back on the couch in her living room. “You were nine,” she said finally.

“Funny to think my bravest moment would come at nine.”

“You saved Eddie’s life.”

I shook my head. “Eddie wouldn’t have died.”

“Why not? Were there enough chicken tenders to last until spring? You saved Eddie’s life, you saved your own life, and no one ever said a thing about it.”

“Well, there was a lot going on. You’d had surgery, and then Eddie had surgery, and then Mom threw Eddie out.”

Leda raised her finger to her lips and I remembered to keep my voice down. Our mother was still asleep in Henry’s room.

It was late September. All three of Leda and Steve’s kids were off at school now. I was back at school, teaching my favorite AP British survey, two sections of American lit, and the perennially oversubscribed creative writing workshop. Jonathan was still the hospital administrator in Bronxville. Our mother had come to New York to see all of us, or she had come to New York to see Eddie and so we provided the backdrop. Eddie’s white count had dropped to reasonable levels after his last round of chemo. Eventually it would come back up, but it hadn’t yet. These were the good days. He was unsteady, but he held on to his cane. He had invited all of us to lunch at his apartment, even though Leda said that she would have the lunch at her apartment. I offered, too.

“Catering,” he said. “All I’m doing is paying for it.”

“But you don’t need to do anything,” I said.

“Daphne,” he said.

And so I stopped. That’s one of the things about age. If you’re lucky, you learn when to stop.

It was Saturday, and Jonathan and I had come in early on the train. The morning was so bright and blue that Jonathan and Steve decided to walk a loop in the park. Steve claimed to have ideas about restructuring the Bronxville hospital’s debt, but Leda and I suspected they wanted to get out of the apartment before our mother woke up.

“What did you think had happened to us after the accident?” I asked Leda.

She sat for a while, trying to remember what she had known when she was seven. One of the many things I loved about my sister was the way she managed to engage with every question. “I thought you and Eddie had done something stupid,” she said finally, “going to look for raspberries in the middle of winter. And that he wrecked the car and broke his ankle and you cut your face. How did you cut your face, anyway? Did the windshield break?”

I shook my head. “I never figured that out. Did you know we were in the car overnight?”

Again, she stopped to consider the past, which was so far away from us now. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I knew any of it. Did you ever tell Mom what happened?”

“No, but she must have asked Eddie about it. I don’t know, maybe she didn’t. I remember Mom meeting us in the emergency room when the ambulance came in. Eddie and I each had our own gurney. I don’t know why they put me on a gurney, but they did—”

“Because you were nine ,” my sister said. “And your face was bloody and you were probably hypothermic.”

“Anyway, Mom took it badly. In her defense, she’d probably been thinking you were going to die. She wasn’t in a good place to begin with. When she started screaming, it made me realize how calm Eddie had been through the whole thing, and how much that had helped.”

“What I want to know,” Leda said, “is how you lived without Eddie after that? I mean, I missed him. When I got home from the hospital and he wasn’t there anymore, I remember feeling incredibly sad, but to have gone through what you went through together?”

“I packed it away,” I said. “I put the whole thing in a box and shoved it behind the hot water heater in the basement. Then I forgot about it. Isn’t that what people do? They pack things up and then years later they hire you to unpack it for them.”

“I guess.”

Into our conversation about the past, our mother appeared present tense in the living room wearing a matching nightgown-and-robe set, a dark green satin covered in yellow hibiscus. She looked at the two of us on the couch. “Why did you let me sleep so late?”

“We don’t have to be at Eddie’s until noon,” Leda said.

“Hi, Mom.” I admired her for bringing a robe. I would never think to pack a robe.

“I don’t want to go over there looking like I just rolled out of bed.”

Leda looked at her watch. “So you have two and a half hours to pull yourself together.”

“Did you ever think this might be stressful for me? I haven’t seen the man in forty-five years.”

“You’re here because you wanted to see Eddie,” I said. “But if it feels stressful, don’t do it. We’re going to go, but you don’t have to. Either way is fine.”

“I’m going to go,” she said. “But I think the two of you could be a little sympathetic.”

“Sympathetic to what?” Leda asked.

“Do you want coffee?” I asked. Didn’t Lucas make her coffee in the morning?

She nodded. “That would be good.”

I started to get up, but Leda put her hand on my ankle. My feet had been resting in my sister’s lap. “Mom?” Leda began. “Did you know that when Eddie and Daphne were in the car accident, Daphne went out in the snow by herself to find someone to help them?”

“The car accident?” Our mother was seventy-seven and her posture was perfect. For that matter, so was her face. She’d had work done, but that was decades before, and now she didn’t look done at all. She only looked beautiful. A case could be made that she looked better than Leda or I did, certainly better than we looked this morning.

“She was nine,” Leda said.

“Is this some sort of an ambush? I didn’t send her out in the snow. Why are we talking about the car accident?”

“Nostalgia,” Leda said.

“Well, don’t get me started. If you talk about the car accident, I’m going to get mad at Eddie again, and this is not the day for me to be mad at Eddie.”

“She’s got a point,” I said, and got up to see if there was any coffee left in the pot.

I had invited our mother to stay with us in Bronxville, but she said that anyone who had the opportunity to stay in the city would choose to do so. The only advantage to Bronxville was Jonathan, as our mother greatly preferred my husband to Leda’s. Jonathan, she said, was naturally gregarious and fluent in all matters medical, a topic of conversation she particularly enjoyed, while Steve was remote and had a tendency to disappear even when he was in the room with you. Still, when everything went on the scale, an Upper West Side apartment with a park view and Steve made a more compelling package than Bronxville and Jonathan.

Even with the two and a half hours allotted, we ended up having to wait. Steve and Jonathan came back from the park. Steve took a shower and then joined us while we drank our coffee. We sat in the living room, my sister and I with our husbands, and waited for our mother.

“I’m going to call for a car,” Steve said, looking at his phone.

“Don’t do it,” Leda said. “It will only be more frustrating if the car is waiting, too.”

There was nothing particularly egregious about our mother’s behavior, but the four of us were out of practice. Steve’s mother had died when he was in college, Jonathan’s mother had been gone for two years, and Leda and I rarely had to deal with our mother because she favored her sons from her third marriage.

“My mother was the opposite,” Jonathan said. “If we were supposed to leave the house at ten o’clock, she’d be sitting alone in the car at nine thirty, waiting. As far as she was concerned, being on time was the same thing as being late.”

“Your mother was very conscientious,” I said.

“What about the happy medium?” Steve said. “The one where you leave the house at the hour you agreed to leave?”

But then she was there in her blue silk blouse and billowy trousers, two tasteful gold chains lying flat against her neck, impeccable makeup. “Is everyone ready?” she asked, as if she were the one who’d been waiting.

“We are now,” my husband said. He stood and held out his hand and she took his hand. She loved him so much more than Steve, who was on his phone now, ordering the car. That was the way it went in families. Everyone had their part.

The four of us would have taken the subway to Chelsea, but there were five of us and so an extra-large SUV was ordered.

“Look at you,” Eddie said when we came through the door. He went right to our mother, took her in his arms. “Look at my beautiful ex-wife.”

I could see Eddie’s apartment through my mother’s eyes. She had always wanted to live in the city, but this place wouldn’t have been anywhere near big enough for all of us—that was what she was thinking. Raising her family, she would have needed Leda’s apartment. But now Chelsea was chic, and a place like this would be big enough if it were only the two of them.

There they stood, entwined, while Leda and I looked on and our husbands looked away. It had been one possible scenario—Eddie and Abigail—which could have worked had every single thing about them been different.

“I thought you’d be sick,” our mother said. “Daphne said you’ve been sick, but you look perfectly fine to me.”

“You’re very kind,” Eddie said. He continued to hold both her hands.

“The girls exaggerate everything,” she said. “The boys don’t do that. Turns out what they say about boys is true, they’re easier.”

“I’ve found that to be the case,” Eddie said, and our mother whooped out a laugh. He had caught her off her guard.

On the other side of the room, my sister put her hand in mine.

“You have wonderful children,” Eddie said, then added for good measure, “You’ve been a wonderful mother.”

Eddie had no idea if she’d been a wonderful mother, or he based his assessment on the years he had seen her in the role, or it was one of those meaningless things one says to fill a conversational space. Or maybe he was right. Again, I remembered what Leda had told me about bravery and resilience. Leda and I were happy, after all. We’d made good lives with men who loved us. We liked our work. We were, for the most part, remarkably untroubled by the past.

Eddie took my mother around the apartment. In the kitchen, he introduced her to Marta, his housekeeper, who had come to serve lunch and then clean up. Marta sat on a stool scrolling through her phone, and when he said her name, she looked up and waved. He showed my mother the bedroom. We didn’t follow them there, but we could hear them laughing. Jonathan looked at me in alarm. When they came back to the living room, Eddie took her to the case of books he had edited. She pulled one from the shelf. “ This was you?” she asked, opening it up. A huge bestseller, prizewinner, a book that everyone had read.

“I didn’t write it.”

“But you brought it into the world.” She hugged the book to her chest. “I loved this book so much.” She put it back and took out another, marveling. “This one, too?”

“That one I may as well have written,” Eddie said. “That one I take full credit for.”

She shook her head. “You were a brilliant editor. Even when you were in that little closet at Houghton. You were better than any of them.”

“I wasn’t, but thank you.”

“I’m serious. I envy you your career. After Lucas and I got married, I dropped out. They promised to bring me back to work on his books, but then there were no more books. The next thing I knew, I was home with two new babies. I didn’t know anybody anymore. There was no way I could keep up.” She couldn’t stop staring at the book’s cover. “I loved publishing. I wish I’d stayed.”

He shook his head. “Publishing was ruined. Amazon, Germans, the end of antitrust laws, printing in China, take your pick. You left in the golden age. Keep those happy memories.”

“But what did I ever do with my life? I didn’t do anything,” she said.

“You’ve had a full and beautiful life,” Eddie told her.

She ran her fingers across the spines like keys on a piano. “Nothing like this,” she said.

Eddie, I knew, still carried the burden of the novel he had meant someday to write, while my mother regretted that she hadn’t come up with more publicity campaigns. Still, from the perspective of a daughter standing in the living room of a Chelsea apartment, it didn’t seem that either of them had done a bad job.

Marta brought the plates to the table. Four of us opted for orange juice and two of us went for mimosas, which were followed up with glasses of champagne. “I never understood the need to put orange juice in champagne because it’s Saturday afternoon,” my mother said. Eddie agreed.

“Did you know,” Leda said to the table, “that when Daphne was nine years old, she climbed out of a wrecked car in a snowstorm by herself to go find help?”

“Leda,” our mother said sternly.

“She saved Eddie’s life,” Leda said.

“That’s a little hyperbolic,” my mother said, holding her glass.

We all looked to Eddie, who smiled at me. “No, she did. Daphne saved my life.”

I had never thought of it that way, but if it were true, I would never need to do anything else.

“I didn’t know about it,” Leda said. “I thought I did, but all I knew was a story I’d made up when I was seven. Daphne’s been telling me what happened, how you were in the hospital with me”—she nodded at our mother—“and Eddie picked her up from school and they went to the raspberry farm.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t do this,” our mother said.

“Why not? I’m telling you, Daphne did the most amazing thing. She should have had her picture on the front page of the paper.”

“It was a terrible time,” our mother said, “and I don’t see why we have to dredge it up on an otherwise happy occasion.”

“I want to hear what happened,” Eddie said to me. I was across from him at the table. Leda was on his right side and our mother was on his left. “I never knew. We weren’t ever alone again, or we were alone for a minute when you would come to my room in the hospital, but we didn’t get to talk. I never told you how petrified I was after you left, or how much I missed you. That time in the car, before you came back, I think that was the loneliest I’ve ever been. Isn’t that funny? I felt like we’d been in that car together for months and then you shot out the window and were gone.” He looked at my mother. “She was afraid that someone was going to snatch her, that she’d knock on the wrong door or get in a car with the wrong person, and I said, ‘No, no, everyone’s nice. You’re going to find good people who want to help you.’”

“I remember that,” I said.

“Then I’m alone with my broken ankle and my foot pinned under the emergency brake, thinking, Someone is going to take her and lock her in a basement and I won’t be able to get her back.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that,” I said, thinking of how his case for human decency had informed my life. I believed him, and by believing him, I had found it to be true.

“I had a pack of cigarettes in my jacket pocket, but I was too afraid of striking a match and blowing up the car.”

“What happened ?” Jonathan asked. He was as scared as Eddie.

Leda looked at him. “You don’t know?”

“I knew Daphne was in a car accident when she was young, but I had it in my head that Abigail was driving.”

“That I was driving?” our mother asked.

Leda laughed.

“You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,” I said. “Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?”

“It’s all people think about,” Leda said.

Eddie put his hands flat on the table, like we were going to do this as a séance. “Tell us now.”

My mother shook her head. “Please don’t.”

“I’d like to know.” Steve, who had made it through the entire lunch speaking a maximum of two sentences, voted to hear what had happened at the raspberry farm in 1980.

“You don’t have to tell us everything,” Eddie said. “But I would like to hear the part I wasn’t there for.”

I looked at our mother. I didn’t blame her. We were having a nice time. “Mom?”

“Fine,” she said, but didn’t look at me.

And so I went ahead. “Okay, first off, I kept that coat until I left my apartment in Newton. I couldn’t make myself get rid of it.”

“What coat?” Jonathan asked.

“My teddy bear coat. Fake fur was all the rage among the fourth grade set in Winchester at the time. I had begged Mom to buy me one for my birthday, and it kept me from freezing to death.”

“An excellent investment,” my mother said.

“It was a magnificent coat,” Eddie said. He covered my mother’s hand with his hand. “I remember we walked over to Filene’s one day at lunch to pick it out.”

Our mother smiled.

When I went to stay with the Cathcarts, when Eddie and Leda were still in the hospital, Mr. Cathcart got all the blood out of the fur. I remember him standing at the kitchen sink, working on it with a bottle of dishwashing liquid, and by the time he was finished, it looked as good as new.

“The hardest part was jumping off the car,” I said. “The car was on its side, and I’d crawled out through the window on the top. I was afraid something awful would happen when I jumped, that I’d knock the car over. I was worried about your ankle,” I said to Eddie.

“With good reason,” he said.

“I was also worried about my own ankle. There was a lot of snow, so I had no idea what I’d be jumping into. I didn’t know how deep the snow was or what was beneath it. Anyway, that might have been the worst of it.”

Steve asked the make of the car.

“Chevrolet Impala station wagon, 1972,” my mother said.

He took out his phone and tapped it in. “The Chevrolet Impala wagon was 80.5 inches in width, so, six and a half feet wide.” He looked at me like I was still considering my options. “That’s a big jump.”

“I ended up going to the back of the car. I held on to the bumper and put my foot on top of the license plate. Anyway, that worked.”

“How do you remember this?” my mother asked.

“I had a lot of time to think,” I said.

I had never told this part of the story. Back in the day, I would have told it a hundred times had anyone asked, but no one did. Given all that went on in our house in January of 1980, it seemed worse than self-aggrandizing to list my own accomplishments. But as it turned out, the lack of telling had kept the story fresh. As I recounted my trip from car to civilization for the assembled luncheon, I began to shiver. I remembered the confusion caused by so many snow-covered trees and the panic I felt climbing up the hill, away from the car, away from Eddie, like I was an astronaut leaving the capsule to drift off into space. “The car hadn’t gone that far down the hill, but it was hard to climb out, you know? It was steep and there was so much snow.” And I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to leave him there.

When I got to the top, there was nothing but an enormous field of snow with snow coming down. I wasn’t six steps from the woods, but when I turned around, I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d come out and I couldn’t see the car. I thought about screaming to Eddie to see if he could still hear me, but I didn’t want to scare him. Even though we had driven a station wagon into the trees, I knew I wouldn’t be able to find this exact place again. I could find someone and bring them back to the top of this hill and still not be able to find Eddie. “Before we found the bandages in the back of the car, Eddie had used his tie to bind his handkerchief to my head, and the tie was still around my neck.”

“The tie that binds,” Eddie said.

“I took it off and tied it to a branch so I’d know how to find you.”

Eddie shook his head in wonder. “If only my mother were alive so I could tell her what a noble purpose the tie she gave me served.”

“You took the right Zabriskie sister to the raspberry farm,” Leda said. “If Daphne had been the one to get appendicitis and you picked me up from school, we’d both be dead now.”

“What happened?” Jonathan asked for the second time. (Later that night, at home in our bed, he would be nearly angry with me, asking why I hadn’t told him before, like maybe he would have been able to find me, to help me. He was afraid, that was all. “The thought of you dying as a child,” he said, but that was the end of the sentence.)

“There was nothing in that field,” I said. “No house, no road, just white. I wondered if Eddie was wrong about the farmhouse, or maybe this wasn’t even a raspberry farm, not that I knew what a raspberry farm was supposed to look like, but I would have thought there would be something there. And if this wasn’t the raspberry farm, then there might not be two roads. But it was cold and the wind was blowing the snow hard and so I decided to walk straight, figuring I was bound to run into something.”

Years later, in school, they showed us a movie about Shackleton’s disastrous trip to the Antarctic and how his ship became trapped in the ice, and I sat at my desk with my eyes closed, and when I couldn’t stand the sound of the narrator’s voice another minute, I ran out of the darkened classroom and threw up in the hall.

The landscape was flat and wide. The snow came up to the middle of my calf and drifted into my galoshes. I thought of how much colder it would be in the station wagon with the back window open and the snow coming in, and I tried to go faster. Then I did see a house, a big one, and I ran to it, but there wasn’t anyone in there. I banged on the door, but I could tell from looking in the windows. I went out to the barn, not that I thought there would be people in the barn, but I thought maybe there would be a horse.

“A horse?” my mother asked.

“That’s a different story,” Eddie said.

Marta was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, listening.

The barn was locked, too. Everything was locked for the winter. When I came back to the house, I couldn’t remember what direction I’d come from and my footprints were gone. I finally decided to walk back towards the woods, thinking that if I walked along the edge I’d find the road.

“I can’t stand this,” my mother said.

And again, Eddie touched her hand. “She’s right here,” he said.

“I won’t make this long,” I said, “but I found Eddie’s tie hanging in the tree. I felt like I’d been walking for an hour and somehow I’d come back to the exact same spot. I thought about going back to the car and resting for a while. I was tired then, and my feet were frozen.” I looked at Eddie. I was that girl again, and he was waiting for me to save him. “I didn’t want to disappoint you,” I said.

“Not possible,” Eddie said.

We had driven off the road—that’s what I had failed to factor. If we had driven off the road, then the road couldn’t be that far away. As soon as I’d had the thought, I found it. There was a wide break in the trees and the snow was smooth. I would have sworn it had been years ago that we had driven up to look at stars, but it had only been the night before. “Doesn’t that seem impossible?” I said to Eddie.

He nodded at me, but he didn’t say anything.

“You were right about people being kind, even if you were making it up. The first house I came to was close to the road, a small yellow house. The lights were on. The woman who answered took one look at me and pulled me inside. She started calling for her husband, whose name was Frank, and I remember there were two little girls, and when they saw me, they started crying, screaming, really. There was a big dog and the mother was trying to hold the dog back and yelling at all of them to stop and calling for her husband. Such a long stretch of silence and then all of that. Then Frank the husband came out. He had been shaving. He had a towel around his neck and shaving cream on half his face and he kneeled down in front of me and said, ‘What happened?’”

“What a question,” Eddie said.

“And I told him there had been an accident, and that my father was still in the car, and the mother looked at me in complete terror and she said, ‘Dead?’ And then all the barking and screaming stopped for a second, or it probably didn’t stop, but it did in my mind. I felt so lucky, and I told her, no, no, not dead, but you were stuck. We needed help.”

I wish I could remember their last name. Frank had a cool head, I remember that. I asked to use the bathroom, and it seemed like by the time I came back there was an ambulance and a police car and a fire truck pulling up to the house. I know it couldn’t have been that fast, but that’s what it felt like. Frank was dressed and ready. He’d wiped the rest of the shaving cream off his face, and I could see the tracks in his dark beard that the razor had made. His wife said I should stay there with her, and before I had the chance to object, he said no, that I was the one who knew where the car was. And I did know. Frank and I got in the back of the police car and the two policemen asked me questions about what time the accident had happened and why we had been up at the raspberry farm to begin with.

“We were going to look at the stars,” I said, and the officer who was driving nodded and said he used to bring his kids up there sometimes to look at stars, and Frank said they went there, too. I told them to make a right at the top of the road, and then I showed them where the tie was in the tree.

“I bet the cops loved that,” Eddie said.

“They didn’t let me go with them to find you. I’d turned into a child again. They didn’t want me out in the snow or they didn’t want me to see the car. Maybe they thought you were going to be dead. They said they’d be able to find you.”

“And so they did,” Eddie said.

“I wanted to go,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I was grateful to have been forbidden, to be made to sit in the overheated car. I couldn’t imagine how they were going to get him out of there.

“Policemen, firemen, three guys from the ambulance, quite a party,” Eddie said.

“I stayed in the police car with Frank, and he told me a whole story about how he had worked at the raspberry farm every summer when he was growing up, and how he was always scratched from the canes and sunburned and bitten up by mosquitos, but then he got older and got a real job and he missed it. He said even now, every summer, he wished he was picking raspberries.”

“And while he was telling you about the raspberries, they were down the hill cutting Eddie out of the car,” Jonathan said.

“Some parts of the story do not bear revisiting,” Eddie said.

“It seemed like it happened so fast,” I said.

Eddie said that was not his memory.

“The whole group came out of the woods together,” I said to Eddie, “carrying you on a stretcher, and I got out of the car and ran over so I could hold your hand. I had never been so happy to see anyone.”

“Was it still snowing?” Leda asked.

“It snowed forever,” Eddie said. “I think it snowed all week.”

“They put us in the ambulance side by side,” I said. “You looked terrible.”

“So did you,” he said. “Shockingly bad. I think it must have been the lights in the ambulance.”

I smiled. “That must have been it.”

Jonathan refilled my mother’s glass of champagne, then handed the bottle to Eddie.

“Please tell me that’s the end of it,” my mother said. She looked as though she would not have survived another word.

“Yes,” I said. “Ten minutes later we were at the hospital. You met us in the emergency room and that was that.”

“That was that,” my mother said sadly.

They took Eddie off to surgery. They sewed my face back together. There was nothing left to talk about. A plum torte sat in the middle of the table, but none of us had the will to push ahead to dessert.

“Someone think of a better ending to lunch,” I said. “I’ve ruined it.”

My mother, who was a great one for handkerchiefs, took hers out of her pocket. “You lived,” she said, “both of you. What sort of better ending are you looking for?”

When it was time for us to leave, Leda admitted she still had work to do on her column, which was about how to deal with the anger that came up around the uneven distribution of inheritance.

“Goodness,” Eddie said. “Go, go.”

Steve said he would take her home.

My mother wanted to go to the Met. “That’s where she found you, isn’t it?” she said to Eddie.

“In Contemporary Art.”

“What do you think?” I asked Eddie. “Are you up for it?”

“It’s perfect. By the time I come home, the wonderful Marta will have set the whole place right again.”

And so we went, Jonathan, Eddie, my mother, and I, into the taxi and out again, up the stairs and through the ticket line. Half of the tourists on the island of Manhattan had decided to see the Met that day. Eddie had forgotten his cane and I had forgotten to remind him. He held my arm. When finally we had made it through Medieval, he stopped. “The two of you,” he said to Jonathan and my mother, “are going to have to go ahead. Daphne and I are going to sit on that bench right there.” He nodded his head to the far corner, past the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid. “You take all the time you need, and if we get tired of waiting, Daphne will send a text to say she’s taken me home.”

As Jonathan readied himself to present an alternate plan, my mother interceded. “That was my favorite thing about you,” she said to Eddie. “One of my many favorite things about you. You always knew what to do.”

“Always,” Eddie said.

“We won’t be long,” she said. Then she folded her hand into my husband’s arm, and off they went, the two of them, while we laid claim to the bench.

“Such a nice man, Jonathan,” Eddie said.

“He is.”

“Your mother will have a better time with him anyway.”

“And we’ll have a better time.”

“People are art,” he said. “It’s enough to just watch the people.”

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

He nodded. “A little too much activity, that’s all. Nothing like trudging through the snow.”

“The past will take it out of you.”

He held my hand. “My brave girl.”

I looked out at the paintings of dragons and saints. “When I was walking through the field, I kept thinking about Mary Carter and her little dog, and how great it would be to have a dog come bounding through the snow to see me through. I’d never had a dog, and certainly not a horse, and at that point I didn’t know a single person who had died. That’s what it means to be nine. You can’t come up with any dead people who would show up to help you die in the snow. I kept wishing I’d asked you if you knew any dead people.”

“Plenty,” Eddie said.

“I would have borrowed some.”

They kept the light low in the museum, enough to see the paintings but not enough to leach the color away. We watched the never-ending stream of people pass through the choir gate, half in one direction and half in the other, and I thought about the wedding at the Plaza. What a night that had been! We needed to find another wedding we could go to, just for half an hour or so. Surely Eddie could manage that. We would drink champagne and dance, or we would watch them dance. I had been a teacher at a girls’ school for a long time. I could find a wedding, and if I couldn’t find one, I could put one on, or ask Polly to do it. She would be so happy to do that for Eddie, but then she would insist on keeping all the dances for herself.

“What if,” Eddie said, “you wrote it all down?”

“Wrote what down?”

“Everything. Mary Carter, the raspberry farm, the car accident, the snow, the two of us. You could change the details. That’s how people do it.”

“So you do it. You’re the one who wanted to be a novelist.”

“We were both going to be novelists.”

“I was nine,” I said. For today, that was my excuse for everything.

“You’ll be the writer and I’ll be the editor.”

I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Immortality,” he said.

“How so?”

“Because in the book, I don’t die. In the book, we’re sitting on this bench, talking about a book about the two of us, and then the story stops with us waiting for Jonathan and your mother to come back.”

“It just stops?”

“Well, there would be a little something at the end, a denouement. Maybe the character looks back.”

“Hasn’t there been enough of that?”

“Never enough of that. I’m going to use your shoulder. Do you mind?”

“Help yourself,” I said.

Eddie rested his head against my shoulder. “I didn’t realize I was so tired. I need to close my eyes for a minute.”

This minute. He was right. Stop everything here. “What about the book?” I asked.

“You’re the smart one,” he said, yawning. “You’ll figure it out.”

(SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)

Before the firemen and policemen cut Eddie from the car (they took the windshield out, that’s how they did it), the ambulance men had stabilized his ankle with an inflatable cast. Daphne couldn’t stop staring at it. “If I fall in a swimming pool on the way to the hospital, my foot will float,” he said to her. There was some discussion among the various county employees as to whether Daphne should ride in the police car or the ambulance, but Eddie shut it down. “She stays with me,” he said. The next thing Daphne knew, one of the men lifted her up and put her inside the ambulance, then they slid Eddie’s gurney through the wide-open doors.

“This is a lot nicer than our last place,” Eddie said.

Two of the men got in behind them and the third one got in the front. They closed the doors. The man then lifted Daphne onto the second gurney, covered her with a blanket, and strapped her down. “Like a big seat belt,” he said.

“I can—” she started to say, but then gave up after those two words. There would be no telling them all the things she had already done.

“Always wear your seat belt,” Eddie said.

Then they were driving away. Through the back windows, Daphne could see the red lights spinning out across the snow.

“Could you ask the guy in the front to turn the siren off?” Eddie asked. “I have a headache.”

The siren snapped off just like that. Eddie turned his head to the side and looked at her. “I made up the headache,” he whispered.

“Good,” she whispered back. There was no one out there to alert anyway.

“You are a bloody mess, Duck,” Eddie said. “I hope they can get you pieced back together right.”

It made her laugh.

One of the men took Eddie’s blood pressure, so the other one asked if Daphne could get her arm out of her coat so he could take hers.

While struggling to free her arm, she suddenly remembered Frank. “I didn’t say goodbye to Frank!” She was horrified. How had she forgotten Frank? She wanted to ask them to go back, but she knew they wouldn’t do it.

“Who’s Frank?” Eddie asked.

“Didn’t you see him? It was his house I went to. He was the one who called the ambulance, and then he came with me to wait in the car. He used to work at the raspberry farm.” All her life she would remember Frank, his kindness.

“What a good man,” Eddie said. “Once we’re better, we’ll go back and find him, tell him thank you.” He closed his eyes. “Is there anything in this bus for ankle pain?”

“Hang on, chief. We’re only a few minutes away,” the ambulance man said.

“Is there a child’s cuff on your side?” the other ambulance man asked.

The first one looked, but he couldn’t find it.

“Do you know what my daughter did?” Eddie said to no one.

“Don’t tell me she drove the station wagon off the road in a snowstorm,” the first ambulance man said.

“That was me,” Eddie said. “But she was the one who rescued us. She climbed out of the window and jumped off the car, climbed up the hill in the snow, went door to door until she found Frank, then she brought Frank and all the rest of you back to save me.”

“Well, that’s something,” said the second ambulance man, the one that Daphne thought of as hers. He patted the blanket that covered her.

Then the ambulance went over quite a bump, which was followed by a fishtail on the ice. Eddie made the smallest sound and Daphne reached out her hand to him and he took it. Hand in hand, they remained for what was left of their time together. She was already missing the station wagon, those frozen hours when they had almost died. It was the happiest she’d ever been.

“Line up all the daughters in the world,” Eddie said to the ambulance men. “You’re never going to find a girl as good as this one.”