Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 2

(FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)

The younger of the two Zabriskie sisters had been quiet all morning, but she ran towards quiet anyway. Then, in the school cafeteria, she put down the second half of her egg salad sandwich and vomited the first half onto the floor. The lunchroom lady, as patient Mrs. Valenti was to everyone known, came with a rag and cleaned the girl’s shoes and sopped up the pooling mess, and after she’d dropped the rag in the bucket and washed her hands, she went back and found Leda at the table alone, her feverish head pressed against the cool tin of her Camp Snoopy lunch box. When Mrs. Valenti told her they needed to walk to the nurse’s office, Leda vomited again. Mrs. Valenti left the mess and the lunch box and the little pink backpack and picked the girl up in her arms, disregarding the inevitable consequence for her own shirt and slacks. She carried Leda to the nurse’s office herself.

How could a child who’d spent the morning in reading group have gotten so sick so fast? The thermometer, which the nurse had to hold because Leda wasn’t able to keep it beneath her tongue, registered 103.5. When offered ginger ale, she gave a nominal turn of her small head and then vomited into the pan she’d been given. Remarkably few children managed to vomit into the pan. The nurse got an ice pack and picked up the school directory to find the name Abigail Triplett, mother, beneath the names Daphne and Leda Zabriskie. No father listed and a different last name for the children. It was all the story she needed to know.

Lunch for first and second grade started at eleven fifteen, which was lucky because Mrs. Triplett had a twelve o’clock launch meeting for the fall list. If the call had come any later, she would not have been at her desk. The nurse reported the symptoms and said Mrs. Triplett would need to come and get Leda as soon as possible, and maybe she should call her pediatrician.

Abigail Triplett hung up the phone and sat for a moment tapping her pencil against her desk. Wasn’t the purpose of having a sick bay at school that the child could rest on a nice cot and be monitored by an actual nurse so the parent could work without worrying about losing her job? This was January of 1980, neither the dark ages where working mothers were concerned nor the age of enlightenment. Abigail was not an unsympathetic character. She wanted to take care of her children, but part of that care meant keeping her job, a job, it should be noted, she both loved and was good at. She had just finished the scramble of getting through the Christmas holidays when the office reopened on the second and school reopened on the seventh. Abigail looked at her watch and decided she had enough time to walk over to editorial and talk to Eddie.

Eddie had recently been promoted from the cluster of desks left out in the open room of editorial and into what had once been a storage closet. Abigail and Eddie put that closet to use whenever possible. Not for sex—neither of them was as brave or stupid as that—but given a closed door, they kissed like teenagers. Let the record show that Eddie Triplett was a magnificent kisser with a clever pair of hands. Things progressed quickly even though no clothing was removed, so much so that Abigail experienced a Pavlovian arousal climbing the stairs to the third floor and had to remind herself that her daughter was sick, little Leda was sick, and she was going to tell her husband she was leaving for the day.

“How much must he love you to take on two children?” her own mother had said when she called to report the happy news. “Two children with another man who is two years behind on child support and hardly ever takes them for the weekend? I can’t even imagine what it would mean to love someone so much you’d want to get into that.”

No, Abigail thought, you can’t.

Eddie had bought two standing lamps so he could keep the buzzing fluorescent strips in his office-closet turned off and still have plenty of light by which to read. When his wife came in, he smiled, and then stopped smiling. “What?”

“Leda’s throwing up. I’m going to have to go to school and get her.”

“Virus?” Eddie asked.

Abigail didn’t know. “We’ll have to wait and see if the rest of us start throwing up in a day or two.” School was a petri dish, and the children brought home everything that was offered: pink eye, strep throat, lice. “We’re supposed to be at the meeting for the fall list in”—she looked at her watch—“seven minutes. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t pick her up an hour from now. I could tell them I got stuck in traffic.” The meeting would be in the conference room. They were bringing in lunch from Fill-A-Buster’s.

Eddie shook his head. “Go get her. I’ll tell them what happened. I’ll make it sound dire.” Eddie would do a better job framing it than she would. They both knew that. This was the benefit of working for the same company: they could cover for one another, which meant that he could cover for her since Eddie never had emergencies. He handed her the car keys. “I’ll take notes at the meeting. Everything here will be fine.”

Right away Abigail felt better. There were a million reasons to love the guy, but put this at the top of the list: He kept his head. He did not roll his eyes, change the subject, or rant over circumstances beyond his control. He helped her think things through. She would take the commuter rail back to Winchester, collect the car from the parking lot, and drive to the school. He put his arms around her and kissed her, not because he wanted something but as a means of demonstrating his support. She had to go.

“Hey, Abby,” he said when she was halfway down the hall. She turned around. “Make sure it’s not appendicitis.”

“How do I do that?”

He put his hand on the right side of his lower abdomen, below his belt. “Push a little bit there, on the right. If she screams, take her to the ER.”

She should have asked the school nurse to do it, but when she saw her daughter there, she forgot what Eddie had told her. Leda on her cot was crying to go home, holding up her arms so her mother would pick her up like a baby. When they were home again and she was helping her daughter out of her sour-smelling clothes, Abigail remembered. Leda, hot and dry, weighing as much as a feather pillow, screamed as soon as her mother touched her stomach. She didn’t have to press. Was she going to get the child dressed again and put her back in the car? She didn’t want to go to the hospital for any number of reasons, including that January meant a new year’s deductible to pay, but Leda was sobbing now, heaving up teaspoons of bile, of nothing.

The minute Abigail said the word “appendicitis” to the nurse, the staff of the emergency room heard her. Poor Leda, there were people lining up to press on her lower right abdomen now, then each one stuck a needle in her. Abigail held her daughter’s hand but turned her head, thinking she might faint. Things moved so quickly that she didn’t have the chance to call Eddie until Leda was wheeled off to surgery.

“How did you know?” she asked Eddie when at last she found a pay phone.

Eddie sighed. “My brother. His appendix ruptured when we were kids.”

“Martin?” Had there been some other brother she never knew about, the one who didn’t make it?

“He was so god-awful sick and my mother kept trying to give him ginger ale. By the time she finally got him to the hospital, it was a mess. The doctor said another half an hour and he would have died.”

“Your poor mother,” Abigail said, knowing how close she’d come to letting Leda sleep. All of life’s mistakes were the fault of the mother, all of the suffering.

“Listen,” Eddie said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll come to the hospital and get the car, give you a kiss, then I’ll pick up Daphne and we’ll go home and pack a bag for you and Leda, then we’ll come back to visit. Does that sound good?”

Eddie had come into the marriage without a car. He had a two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge and took the T to work like any sensible Boston bachelor. Now he paid half her rent in Winchester, paid half of the car insurance. She had forgotten about Daphne but didn’t say so. She might only have been able to hold one child in her head at a time. She told him that sounded good. She told him to bring the manuscript she’d left on her desk.

Would she have been like Eddie’s mother, who, on the occasions they had met, struck her as more competent than she could ever dream of being? Without Eddie’s preemptive direction, would she have left Leda in her bed, a cool washcloth on her forehead, only to find her dead later in the day? Abigail sat down in the hallway, near the doors where they had taken her daughter away. She closed her eyes and felt the sickening speed of her heart, like being on the turnpike when the eighteen-wheeler starts to merge into your lane from the right because it doesn’t see you there, the concrete barriers on the left, eighteen inches from the edge of the side mirror. It was the almost death that terrified her, the almost derailment of everything she had ever known. Sitting in that hallway, she turned her fear into rage because she could not abide the fear. Her rage took the shape of Buddy Zabriskie, who, on this freezing January day, was no doubt sitting in a shed somewhere mending lobster traps, his phone long disconnected for nonpayment. He didn’t know that his younger child had almost died, or that she had been saved by the good thinking of one Eddie Triplett.

Eddie, her office pal who paid for lunch, who sat beside her at book launch meetings and passed her notes, who wanted to marry her, who did marry her. Eddie, who loved her and loved her girls. He had been willing to take the whole package. Eddie, who knew where the appendix was located, because honestly, she did not. There ought to be some sort of a test you had to pass before you were allowed to have children. First you would have to be able to identify a good man (she’d had to repeat a grade on that one), then prove a basic proficiency in how to keep your child alive. Abigail knew nothing at all. Her greatest fear was that she and Buddy Zabriskie were soulmates, and that they should be together on that boat with no one to hurt but one another and some fish.

Daphne and Leda attended an after-school program, which gave Abigail enough time to finish her workday. That’s where Eddie picked Daphne up. Full-on dark of night arrived before five o’clock in the winter, and so she was waiting behind the glass front doors of the school in what she referred to as her teddy bear coat, a pale brown coat made of fake fur that made the child look like a large stuffed animal. She had wanted the coat for her birthday. She had begged for it, and she had won.

When Daphne saw the station wagon, she ran outside, waving goodbye to the one remaining teacher and a couple of the other leftover kids. Eddie was rarely the one to pick her up, but it was not unprecedented.

“Leda threw up in the cafeteria,” Daphne said, sliding into the front seat even though she knew she was supposed to sit in the back. She wasn’t about to sit in the back. “She got sent home from school.”

“So I heard.”

“She threw up everywhere. All the kids were talking about it.”

“They should cut her some slack,” Eddie said, correcting the mythic pack of other children but not Daphne. “She’s pretty sick.”

Daphne looked at him. “How sick?”

“She had to go to the hospital and have her appendix out. She’s going to be fine.”

“Leda had surgery?” People in books had surgery. The thought of surgery was so glamorous he might as well have said she’d gone to New York City for the day.

Eddie nodded, eyes on the road. “Like I said, she’ll be fine.”

“Are we going to the hospital to see her?” Daphne liked her sister. Even when they were children, they had liked one another. People talked about how pretty Leda was, but it didn’t bother Daphne because privately Daphne knew Leda to be a strange little bird.

“We’re going to run home and pick up some things Leda and your mother need, then we’ll go to the hospital so we can check on both of them.”

Daphne thought about this. “We should bring them dinner.”

“I don’t think Leda can have dinner.”

“Sure, but Mom can.”

So that’s what they did. They went back to the house, and Daphne packed a bag for her sister: a nightgown and bathrobe, underwear, toothbrush, a bear who was named Mr. Crispy for reasons none of them could remember. Eddie packed a bag for his wife. They went to their favorite chicken place and got a grilled chicken sandwich and French fries for Abigail (“No onions, double sauce,” Daphne told the girl at the counter). They got a bucket of chicken tenders with honey mustard dipping sauce for the two of them to eat later at home. They got three Cokes.

The visit didn’t turn out to be much of a visit. Leda slept through the whole thing. She looked so insubstantial in the hospital bed, her golden hair caught up in a blue paper surgical bonnet. Her mother told them Leda’s appendix ruptured during surgery, so it had taken the doctor longer than he’d expected. She would be monitored overnight and, if she was stable, she could go home in a few days. Fortunately it was Friday, so Abigail had at least two days before she had to start worrying about work.

Daphne’s mother looked like she’d been sitting by that bed since the day Leda was born, so exhausted that Eddie offered to trade places with her. “You go home with Daphne,” he said. “I can sleep in the chair. If there’s any trouble, I’ll call you.”

But Abigail declined. Even if Eddie was more competent than she was, she wasn’t about to drop her guard now.

When Eddie and Daphne headed home, it was barely past six, but the night was so cold and dark it looked more like the small hours of the morning, not that it mattered. The big car was warm and smelled of chicken, and while Daphne wished that she were the one who’d had her ruptured appendix removed and been laid out in a hospital bed like Sleeping Beauty, she was also glad to be the one with Eddie. Daphne had no details from the time her parents had lived together, and in the years since their divorce, she had seen her father so infrequently that the thought of him made her uncomfortable. What did she know about her father? That he was burly. That he often but not always had a beard and his face above that beard was either sunburned or wind-chapped. That he had never smelled of fish on the times she’d seen him but she had assigned the smell of fish to him all the same. Whenever she passed the tank of lobsters in the grocery store, their bound claws tapping sadly at the glass, she wanted to ask them, Did my father do this to you?

Eddie Triplett had been cut from an entirely different piece of cloth, and it was the same piece of cloth that Daphne came from, or that’s what she told herself. He read constantly, and not just finished books. He read books that were loose piles of paper and marked them up to make them better. “A work in progress,” he liked to say, as if the novel needed some help getting on its feet. At her insistent begging, he once marked up a theme paper she had written for English class, correcting it the way a teacher would so that she could write it out a second time, fixing her mistakes before handing it in. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” Eddie said, circling her misspellings, her word repetitions.

“Other parents do it,” she said. And they did. Not her mother but other people’s mothers. Never the fathers as far as she knew.

The word “parents” struck him. “Other people’s parents.” “My parents.” That’s what won him over. Eddie made room for her in the big chair he sat in at night and showed her how to improve her work.

“What should we get for Leda?” Eddie asked when they pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “We could go to the grocery store and get her something special for when she comes home.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight, tomorrow, either way. What kind of ice cream does she like?”

“Raspberry sherbet,” Daphne said. She considered herself the authority on what her sister did and did not eat. “She likes raspberry yogurt, raspberry licorice, raspberry jam, raspberry-lemon snack cakes.”

“Did you know there’s a raspberry farm up on the hill over there?” Eddie asked. They were driving in the direction of home, but that also meant they would pass the grocery store.

Daphne shook her head. “There wouldn’t be raspberries now.” It was too cold for anything to be growing now. Old snow banked along the side of the road in dirty lumps.

“That’s true. That’s absolutely right. Have you ever picked raspberries?”

She wanted so much to say yes because maybe he had a special respect for children who picked their own raspberries, but it seemed important not to lie to Eddie, not to do anything that could mess things up between them. She shook her head again.

“I went a couple of years ago, before I knew you. Picking raspberries is a terrible business. The canes are covered in tiny thorns. But the place was pretty, way up on top of a big hill. Do you want to see it?”

“In the dark?”

“If you wanted to. There are all sorts of things to see in the dark if you can sit with it for a while, let your eyes adjust.”

Her mother would never drive to a raspberry farm in the middle of winter when there weren’t any raspberries. It was the kind of thing Daphne only could have done with Eddie. “Are we going to walk around?” She was thinking of those thorny canes.

Eddie shook his head. “I don’t have a flashlight. We’ll stay in the car, eat the chicken, look at the stars. There’s hardly any moon at all. Can you see it over there?”

Daphne craned her head. She saw the silver crescent moon.

“See how small it is? That means the stars are going to be bright.”

Whenever either Eddie or Daphne thought of this excursion later in life, what struck them was the utter pointlessness of it. As many times as they were interrogated as to what the purpose of their trip had been, no purpose could be found. How did it happen? Why did you think it was a good idea? It happened because Leda liked raspberry sherbet, which got them talking about actual raspberries. They thought it was a good idea because it was so dark that the stars would be especially bright. “Leda was in the hospital ,” her mother would say, as if one child’s surgery logically precluded another child’s trip to a raspberry farm in winter. But there was no logic. Stop looking for it.

“I’d like to see the stars,” Daphne said.

Eddie reached out his hand and patted her coat above her woolly knee, which was his way of saying, You and me, kiddo. He took a left on High Street, heading off in a direction Daphne didn’t know. The heat vent blew directly on her boots, which were galoshes because she’d outgrown her snow boots. The front seat was a lot warmer.

The raspberry farm hired workers in the summer and early fall to pick the berries and take them to a co-op that sold them to grocery stores or sent them to processing plants, but several acres were U-Pick, where families drove up for the day, usually Saturday or Sunday, to crawl around picking berries and getting scratched. There was a farmhouse set back on the property where the owners lived, but that was nowhere near the dirt U-Pick parking lot, and anyway, the owners left for Fort Lauderdale every year after Christmas and came back the first of March.

Eddie and Abigail had been married for fourteen months. They had dated for a year before that and been chummy at work for quite some time prior to dating. Because Daphne was nine and Leda seven, this otherwise small amount of time that comprised their mother’s relationship represented a significant portion of the girls’ lives on earth. They had almost grown up with Eddie. They knew he drank coffee with milk and worked the crossword puzzle with a blue Bic pen, leaving the easiest answers blank so that Daphne could fill them in later. He had no temper that they had witnessed, though he did not like to be sat on while he was reading, and he was often reading. He brought home piles of books from the children’s department (he had a friend in children’s—he had friends everywhere) so they could read with him. He did not cook. He was nice to their friends when they had friends over. He made their mother laugh. At night he would sit on the front steps of the house they rented and smoke a cigarette, which drove the girls to grief because they loved him and wanted him to live.

Up the hill the station wagon climbed, the transmission straining. Maybe it was more mountain than hill. There were no streetlights this far from town, no houses. The dark of night was dazzling and complete. When Eddie clicked off the headlights, Daphne gasped. Now the only light came pale from the dashboard. They were going eighteen miles an hour and had a third a tank of gas. Who knew things could be so different ten minutes from home! Up and up. How could Eddie see? Sometimes the town swung into view below them and then another turn and it was gone again. “Look at that,” he said, pointing, because now they had nearly reached the top. They were turned away from the town and Eddie was right: without the headlights, her eyes adjusted to the dark. Then through the windshield came the milky wash of stars.

“Look!” she cried. “Look!” Both of them were looking up, trying to take in the wonder of the universe, when the car, going forward, left the edge of the road and pitched into the fathomless darkness below.

There was no time to correct the situation but a seemingly infinite amount of time to consider it. What Eddie wanted to know and did not know was if Daphne was wearing her seat belt. He knew he hadn’t put it on her himself—she was nine, she put her own seat belt on—but it was his responsibility to check and he had not checked. He had not been driving fast, but now they were picking up speed. When they hit whatever it was they would eventually hit and she wasn’t wearing her seat belt, her neck could break. She had bones like a pigeon. He had been entrusted with the one child because the other child had just come from surgery. He would not be forgiven, not by Abigail or himself or the god of all those stars. Impact arrived when he reached the word “stars” in his mind, and the car, a 1972 Chevrolet Impala weighing more than four thousand pounds, tossed like a boat on high seas before coming to rest on its left side, the left front quadrant crunching in, the nose pointed down. Eddie’s head rested on the driver-side window, and he felt something catastrophic in the area of his left foot or ankle. He turned to look over his right shoulder, and in the utter darkness, he could make out the shape of something dangling. He didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but she had put her seat belt on.

“Duck?” he whispered.

“I’m here,” she said. “Are you okay?”

Eddie Triplett had not killed a child, nor would he ever again in his life love another person as much as he loved her.