Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 4

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

This was Daphne Zabriskie’s first car accident, and it was a big one. They had sailed off a cliff and crashed down through the dark winter trees. Two minutes in and she could already imagine herself telling the story.

“Take an inventory,” Eddie told her. “Wiggle your fingers and toes.” It seemed prudent to whisper. He had a fear of setting things back into motion.

“Okay,” she said. Wiggle, wiggle.

“Now roll your wrists and ankles. Roll your neck—gently. Can you do that?”

“Rolling.” She circled her shoulders as well. Rocked her hips in her hip sockets.

“All good?”

“Good,” she said. There was something wrong with her head, but she would tell him that later when he was less upset. “What happened?”

“What happened is I missed the curve and drove off the side of the mountain.” He reached up and batted around in the dark until he found her hand. He held her hand.

“Mom’s going to be mad about the car.” The car had three more years to go before it was paid off. Thirty-five monthly payments left, to be exact. Daphne knew this because her mother made the pay-down into a game, letting Daphne and Leda count the remaining payments in the coupon book every month when she did the bills. Her mother wrote the check, and Daphne recorded the check in the register, then Leda licked the envelope and stamp. Teamwork. Her mother explained the concept of interest, which the girls found so appalling they refused to go inside the bank for months. Their mother was a big believer in spelling out the way life worked.

“She won’t be mad about the car. She’ll be happy we’re alive.” Eddie thought Abigail would be upset about the car but that her anger would quickly give way to joy. In the end, everything would balance out in their favor. “We didn’t die in the car accident and Leda didn’t die of appendicitis, all a win.”

The shoulder harness was cutting into Daphne’s neck, and she remembered again that she should have been sitting in the backseat and this was why. Maybe she could convince Eddie not to tell, which reminded her of the important question: “How long before Mom comes to get us?”

That was a second-level question: Who would find them? Eddie was still focused on the first-level questions: Was there a fuel leak? Could the car fall further down if they moved? What in God’s holy name had happened to his ankle? He turned off the ignition. “I don’t think your mother knows where we are.” He tried to keep his tone casual.

“When we don’t come home—” Daphne began, but then, before she’d reached the end of the sentence, she solved the problem herself. “She won’t be home either. She’s spending the night in the hospital with Leda. She’ll stay in the hospital until Leda gets better.”

Eddie nodded his head in the darkness. “Unfortunately, that is the case.”

“And when she calls the house to say good night and we don’t answer, she’ll think we’ve gone to the movies. She won’t worry about us because she’s already got Leda to worry about.”

“Seriously, Duck, you should join the FBI. You’ve got the right kind of mind.”

“I’m going to be a writer,” she said, as if such an admission were completely natural. She’d been thinking about it seriously since the start of fourth grade.

In the dark she could hear Eddie’s surprise. “Seriously, are you?” Then, in the spirit of fellowship shared by two people trapped in a car, he told her that he planned to be a writer as well.

“Really?” This struck Daphne as more than luck. Not for the first time, she wondered if there wasn’t some mistake and she was really Eddie Triplett’s daughter. “I thought you were an editor.”

“I’m an editor so I can be around books, so I can learn how to write books. Everybody has to have a job, you know, pay the bills.”

“Sure,” Daphne said, but she hadn’t thought about the money part, which was stupid of her because she knew about the money part. See: book of payment coupons for the car.

“What are you going to write?” Eddie asked her, as if they weren’t even hanging in a crashed car. “Poems, stories, plays, novels, essays?”

“Novels,” Daphne said quickly. She wasn’t interested in the other choices.

Eddie was quiet for a minute. Like Daphne, he felt himself genuinely moved by the coincidence. “Me, too.”

“Maybe we’ll write novels together,” Daphne said. She didn’t know if people did that, but she loved the idea.

“Maybe so,” he said. “Listen, do you think you can undo your seat belt? I don’t want you hanging there.”

“I can.”

“Okay, I want you to be—” He had a series of instructions to walk her through the process, but she had already punched the button and was released like a skydiver on the shortest possible jump, straight onto him.

Of all the things Eddie regretted, he regretted screaming the most. The weight of the nine-year-old landing full force on his right side, his good side, jostled his left side considerably, proving that something was either broken or shattered in his left ankle and foot, and that something might be wrong with his left shoulder as well. The pain came on him in a green flash. He actually saw the color green behind his closed eyelids.

“Sorry!” Daphne cried. “Oh! Sorry, sorry, sorry!”

“Not you,” he said, his breath ragged. Now she was lying on his right side. Gravity and the angle of the car had given her no alternative. There was only one place to land. “I think I broke my ankle.” Best to put it out there.

“I broke your ankle!?”

“No, no. It broke in the accident. The front left of the car must have gotten crunched.” He made the smallest effort to move his foot, but that wasn’t happening. He left it alone. He lifted his right arm and maneuvered it around his stepdaughter’s shoulder, and she gently adjusted herself into his armpit. “Do you have Coke in your hair?”

“Maybe,” she said. Her head was wet, and Eddie’s coat was wet. There had been two extra-large Cokes in a to-go box on the floor. She moved her hand around. She felt an empty waxed paper cup and then an ice cube. She felt a chicken tender and popped it in her mouth. It was greasy and cold.

“Can you reach the visor? Go super slow.” He was thinking about his ankle. He was also thinking about that scenario in which the car detached from whatever tree was holding them in place and continued its luge run.

Daphne and Leda were both born monkeys. They could climb up trees, but they could also climb on kitchen counters and bookcases. They could stack up boxes to make it to a top closet shelf in search of Christmas presents. Neither girl had ever looked at a vertical surface and thought, No, bad idea, too high. Up they went.

This time Daphne put some thought into it. She ran her hand over Eddie’s face, so she knew it was resting against the driver-side window. Then she took her left foot and put it in front of his face, then straightened her knee. Standing on one foot, one hand out beside her on the ceiling of the car for balance, she reached for the visor above the passenger seat. She knew that Eddie wanted the light in the makeup mirror that came on even if the car was off. There wasn’t a light or a mirror on the driver-side visor, something Eddie didn’t know because he’d probably never thought about it, whereas her mother regularly raged over the fact that there wasn’t a makeup mirror on the left-hand side of the car.

“That’s because you aren’t supposed to put on makeup when you’re driving,” Leda told her once, to which her mother had responded, “Then when in the hell am I going to have time to do it?”

The visor came down, and a parking ticket that had been pinned there fluttered away. Daphne slid the little cover over the mirror to the side, and a small light leaned against the enormity of darkness. She couldn’t see Eddie’s ankle and she didn’t want to, but she could almost make out his face. He had a sick and wild look about him, and there was blood on his chin, and there were chicken tenders everywhere.

“Oh, Daphne,” Eddie said. He was back to whispering again.

Daphne pivoted (carefully, carefully) to try to catch a bit of her own face in the mirror’s reflection. All she saw was blood. A lot of blood. Eddie put his hand on her standing calf in the exact moment she felt unwell. “Sit back down,” he said.

So she did, slowly. She sat on the side of him. Had she hit the dashboard before the shoulder harness snapped her back? Was she cut by something flying past her in the crash? Did it make any difference? None at all.

Daphne’s mind stayed straight when Eddie’s was muddled, and Eddie could think straight when she needed him to. What was there to work with here? What was in reach?

“I went to a meeting today,” he said. “About all the books coming out in the fall.”

“It’s January,” Daphne said. Now she could feel something warm dripping near her eye and it made her feel sick so she didn’t touch it. Then she thought about her sister throwing up in the school cafeteria and willed herself to stop thinking about that because she knew where this was going.

“I know, it’s stupid, but that’s the way things work. So this afternoon, we all had a big meeting with the top guy, the Edward-in-Chief, except your mother wasn’t there since she had to go be with Leda in the hospital, and you know what I wore?”

“What you always wear?” She didn’t care if it was a stupid game; she was going to play. He wore dark pants or khaki pants, an oxford shirt, and one of the two blazers he owned, every single day. Her mother always said men were so lucky.

“That’s exactly right, what I always wear, except today I also wore a tie.”

“You hate ties.”

“The Edward-in-Chief wears a tie, so when there’s a big meeting all the Eds and the Eddies wear one, too. As soon as I got out of the meeting, I took the tie off and put it in my pocket.” A shot of pain radiated up his leg, an extraordinary burst of pain, but this time he knew to hold back any sounds. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tie his mother had bought for him when he first got the job at Houghton Mifflin. “Ta-da! So here’s what we’ll do: I’ll put my handkerchief over the cut, then I’ll tie it in place with the tie.”

“Is the handkerchief clean?” Daphne asked.

“Very clean. You’re smart to ask.”

In the dark, with only the slightest glow of a makeup mirror to guide him, Eddie wiped what blood he could from her face, then laid the handkerchief over the approximate location of where the cut seemed to be, then wrapped his necktie twice around her head and tied it snug-not-tight. “Once, when my sister was in high school, she walked out of the house with my father’s tie around her head. The look was aggressively Woodstock. That’s where I got the idea.”

“You have a sister?”

“Amy.”

“Did your father get mad at her?”

“He did indeed. He worked in a tool and die shop. He only had one tie and he wore it to funerals. Didn’t you have a hat on before?”

Daphne touched her head. “I did.” Where had the hat gone?

“Okay, it’s time for you to take inventory of our resources. If you find any ice cubes, put them in a cup. If you find chicken tenders, put them in the chicken bucket. If you find your hat, put it on your head to help keep the handkerchief in place.”

“I can do that.”

“But Daphne, I don’t mean to be a baby about this, but I don’t want to move my ankle, okay? If you get down there where my foot is, be careful not to touch it.”

It wasn’t that Eddie was talking to her like she was another adult, but he was talking to her like they were two equal people. They had to be equal because they relied on one another now. Daphne, who felt the throbbing of blood in her head, began to pick her way around the floor of the car, although the floor was technically the door now. She found the bucket and, without benefit of light, gently extracted the chicken tenders from around Eddie’s foot and put them together. She found plenty of ice cubes as well, many of them between Eddie’s back and the upholstery. She found her hat and put it on. It was her favorite: ribbed, pink with a lavender fake-fur pompom. The hat felt both nicely tight and warm. She found her mittens, which, after handling all the ice cubes, she was grateful for. She found books she knew by shape: her math workbook, her paperback copy of Charlotte’s Web . She found the box of Kleenex her mother always kept in the car. “Do you want a Kleenex?” Daphne asked.

“Oh,” Eddie said, “I’d love one. Give me several, please.”

Daphne pulled out the Kleenex for him, and Eddie blew his nose. “I’m going into the back,” she said. “Find out what’s there.”

“Will you please be careful?” Movement was the enemy as far as his ankle was concerned. He was increasingly terrified of even the slightest jiggling, which meant he couldn’t envision how their rescue would proceed, as obviously being rescued meant being removed from the car.

“I will,” she said. She gave him the chicken and the cup of ice. She closed the visor because the tiny light would do her no good in the back and she didn’t want to run it down. She maneuvered her body over the front seat, careful not to put her foot in Eddie’s face. It wasn’t like she’d never done this before. She’d climbed from front to back, from back to wayback, and then to the front again while her mother did sixty-five on the Jersey Turnpike, going to visit her parents. Daphne would be tasked with getting something out of a suitcase that her mother needed, or getting a snack for Leda out of the grocery bag or a drink out of the cooler. That the car was now sideways in the forest, that there was no light whatsoever, affected her less than she might have thought. She knew every inch of the Chevy, which meant she knew where to go.

There were few remaining vestiges of Buddy Zabriskie in their life: in the girls’ shared bedroom, a framed picture of him with his arms around Daphne and Leda on the boat; in the kitchen, a glass lemon juicer that had belonged to his mother; above the mantel, a clock that had been given to Buddy and Abigail as a wedding present. But the best place to know that Buddy cared about them, that he continued to think of them, was in the Impala. He changed the oil whenever he came to visit, and, when necessary, flushed out the radiator and refilled the windshield wiper fluid. If the snow was bad, he appeared with chains. Who knew why he kept this up after the divorce, but he did. Maybe he understood that doing it himself was the only way it was going to get done. He had left behind the red duffel bag that lived in the wayback. He had told Daphne it was there, and that it was important. Eddie had likely never noticed it before. Her mother grumbled about it every time she threw something back there—“Buddy’s stupid bag of crap,” she called it. But she didn’t throw it away, or she hadn’t the last time Daphne checked. If she got back there and the duffel was gone, she would never speak to her mother again.

“What are you doing?” Eddie called.

“Reconnaissance,” Daphne said.

“Big word,” Eddie said.

“I’m looking for stuff,” she said.

“I know what it means,” Eddie said.

It turned out she was good in the dark. She was good crawling over things. Maybe she wouldn’t have done as well as Leda being in the hospital and having her ruptured appendix removed. Maybe they were both holding down the crisis best suited to their own abilities. Daphne flipped her body over the backseat, landing in that small space that contained the spare tire. She ran her fingers along the little piece of carpet and found the duffel bag. She shivered from excitement and from the significant cold. She hadn’t made the emergency bag, but she was the one who knew of its existence. That was her contribution. She made the handles into shoulder straps and arranged it on her back like a jet pack. “I got it!” she called out to the front of the car.

“Got what?” Eddie asked.

“I got my dad’s bag.”

It would be an overstatement to say that Buddy saved the day, but he made a material contribution to their survival for which he would never receive credit. He was a man who spent most of his life on the water, and there was no going to Ace Hardware to pick up what you needed while at sea. The trick was to always think ahead, be prepared for any inevitability. In the years that Buddy spent with Abigail, the Impala was the closest thing to a boat that he had, and so even on land, he was ready. The duffel bag was proof of that.

Daphne had to contain herself on the way back. Her natural inclination was to flip over the front seat and land next to Eddie in a celebratory Spider-Man move, but she remembered. “My dad left an emergency bag in the back of the car,” she said, returning to the front seat as quiet as a cat. She positioned herself in the passenger-side wheel well, bracing her feet into the center console so as not to slide forward onto Eddie’s foot.

“Are you kidding me?”

She patted the bag, then opened up the makeup mirror again so she could show him in the little light.

Eddie whistled. “Buddy Zabriskie, you are some sort of man.”

“Dad always says he was prepared for everything in life except Mom.”

Eddie laughed, knowing he shouldn’t laugh. “Open it, let’s see what we’ve got.”

And so she did, and the first thing she put her hand on was the cold silver cylinder of a flashlight. She handed it to Eddie, who flipped it on. “Oh my god, Daphne, will you look at this? I might have thought to put a flashlight in a car—possibly—but I can guarantee you the batteries would be dead when I needed it.”

“Dad changes out the batteries.” She ran her hands through the bag. “And he puts in extra batteries. See?” She held them up.

Eddie turned the light on her and she squinted. “Oh, Duck, I don’t mean to alarm you, but you’re a bloody mess. Is there any medical stuff in there?”

Was there ever! Antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, alcohol pads, Band-Aids, an Ace bandage, a bottle of Tylenol. Eddie availed himself to three of those, washing them down with the melt from the ice cup. “Do you have a headache?” he asked her.

She did. He shook out two pills for her and handed over the cup.

“I’m going to do a better job on your head,” he told her. “What else did Santa Buddy leave us?”

There were four flares. There was a box of Diamond Strike On Box Matches in a sealed Ziploc bag. The thought of anything related to fire made Eddie’s stomach churn. “Put those back. What else?”

There was a small transistor radio, also with good batteries. There was a silver space blanket. “Who is this father of yours?” Eddie asked. “The Wizard of Oz?” He didn’t think they’d freeze to death, not overnight, not in the car, but whatever warmth the car heater had provided had seeped out long ago. Eddie was not about to turn the car back on to see what would happen. There were also four plastic bottles of water, all frozen solid. Four from a time in which it had been Abigail and Buddy and Daphne and Leda in the car. They weren’t going to die of dehydration either.

Once upon a time, there had also been four full-sized Snickers bars in the bag, the only full-sized candy bars Daphne and her sister ever had access to, though they got the bite-sized ones at Halloween. The candy bars were long gone.

Eddie told Daphne to take off her hat, and he went to work on her face, using the significant resources now available to him. She held the flashlight. The wound was a real bleeder, his folded handkerchief soaked through. He didn’t touch the alcohol wipe to the cut, but he used it to wipe up some of the blood. Then he put a glob of antibiotic ointment on a gauze pad and tapped it gently into place, wrapping her head up with the Ace bandage. “Good work, Mr. Triplett,” he said. “Nicely done.” He carefully put her hat back on.

“Shouldn’t we wrap your ankle?” Daphne asked.

“We should not.”

It had been nice to have a project, but now they weren’t sure what to do. Eddie asked if she wanted a chicken tender, but she didn’t. Neither of them did. “Maybe we should try to get some sleep,” Eddie said. “We won’t be able to do anything until morning.” He had no idea what they would do in the morning, though. They had gone a good way down a steep hill into the woods, in a place where no one lived and no one drove. There was no way he could get out of the car with his ankle, and he had no idea if either of the two car doors now facing skyward could be opened. If they waited around for assistance, it seemed possible that none would come until the raspberries were ready for harvest, and that would be, what? June?

Daphne closed the visor and unfolded the silvered blanket. “How do you want to do this?” she asked, and Eddie, who still had the flashlight on, simply raised up his right arm.

“Careful,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

Both of the girls were capable of running into him with the velocity of cannonballs, but they could also rest beside him like leaves. Daphne lay down like a leaf, and spread the thin silver tarp on top of them. “Look out the window,” she said quietly, by which she meant, shine the light outside.

The world was just the trunks of trees, little trees and big trees, and in-between trees, the tangle of wintry underbrush. It was like they were in a submarine under the sea. Eddie swept the light slowly right to left, and then hit on a pair of bright yellow eyes. Two pairs of eyes! Daphne let out a yip and both of them jumped, and mother of god, the pain in his ankle was like nothing he had ever experienced, and still, he managed not to scream.

“Did you see it?” Daphne whispered.

“I saw it,” Eddie said. He turned off the flashlight. Nothing in his voice was natural.

“What do you think it was?” She kept her voice quiet, as if not wanting to attract the attention of the yellow eyes.

“Fox, maybe? Raccoons?” He did not say coyote because coyotes were too close to wolves, and there were no wolves in Massachusetts, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to get into the car so there was no sense in thinking about them.

In time, after the flashlight went off, their eyes readjusted to the darkness, and their ears adjusted to the depth of silence. Now that they knew there were animals out there, they could hear them walking around. Not much, not often, but enough to remind them they weren’t there alone. Funny, but neither one of them thought to try out Buddy’s transistor radio.

“I wish we could see the stars,” Daphne said.

“Can’t you?” Both of them looked up, the passenger-side window like a sunroof, and while the night sky was mostly blocked by a crosshatch of black branches, there might have been a few bright bits of starlight visible.

It was nice having someone to lie on, nice having Eddie to lie on. Her body rose and fell slightly with his breath. The blanket did a surprisingly good job for being so thin. “I think I’d be afraid if I was here by myself,” she whispered.

He squeezed her beneath his right arm. “I’d be afraid, too,” he said.

That was the difference between Eddie and any other adult. Any other adult would have said, Don’t be afraid. But Eddie’s way was honest and infinitely preferable.

They stayed like this for a long time, listening and breathing, trying to fall asleep and having no luck. Daphne didn’t know how much time had passed when she asked Eddie if they were going to die. That was what she’d been thinking about.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, of course we will eventually, everything does, but I don’t think you and I are going to die in this car.”

“Why not?”

He waited a long time to answer, like maybe he was weighing out how much of the truth to tell her. “I read a story at work today,” he said. “A true story.”

“Tell me.”

“It might be a little scary for you. I don’t know.”

“Scarier than this?”

Eddie laughed. “Well, it’s sort of similar to this, which is why I was thinking about it.”

She put her head back down on the side of his chest. The quiet was such that she could hear his heart through his jacket. Eddie had definitely not dressed to spend the night in a car. “Once upon a time,” she said.

Eddie began. “Once upon a time, there was a woman named Mary Carter who lived on a ranch in Wyoming. Her parents lived on a ranch, and her grandparents had lived on a ranch. Same with her husband and his family. Everybody had pretty much grown up in the same place and they stayed there. They had a lot of land and they knew it well. They raised sheep and horses, lots more sheep than horses, but they liked the horses better. Raising the horses and training them was fun. I don’t think the sheep were much fun. Each of the Carters had their own horse. Mary had a horse, her husband had a horse, two of her children, a boy and a girl in high school, each had a horse. And when they went out to do things on the ranch, they always took their own horse. Mary’s horse’s name was Whistler.

“She had named her Whistler because even when the horse was young, Mary could stand in the pasture and whistle for her and the horse would come. Apparently that’s not something many horses do. And this was a beautiful horse, chestnut color with a white blaze and two white stockings. There was a picture of the horse that came in with the book proposal, and in the picture it was like she was looking right at the camera.”

“Was Mary in the picture with Whistler?”

Eddie shook his head. “Just the horse, which is a little strange, but, like I say, this was a good-looking horse. Whistler followed Mary around like a dog. She’d come up behind Mary and put her head on Mary’s shoulder. Not anybody else’s shoulder, only Mary’s. So even though this was one of the horses they were raising to sell, Mary decided to keep her. She trained Whistler herself, for years and years, and once Whistler was trained, she gave the horse she’d been riding to her third child, the second daughter. That horse’s name was Nutmeg. The daughter’s name was Sarah. Sarah was still a little young to have her own horse, but it was okay. Nutmeg was a sweetheart.”

“Did you ever have a horse?” Daphne asked.

Eddie laughed. “I’ve never even touched a horse.”

She might have told him about going to day camp last summer and how there were two days in which they were put on horses and a counselor led them around, but she didn’t want to distract him, so she just said, “Oh.”

“So by the time this story starts, Whistler had been Mary’s horse for a long time. Her children were grown, though Sarah still worked with her parents. One day a storm came up and blew a gate open. They’d been meaning to fix that gate for a while, the latch wasn’t right, but they hadn’t gotten around to it and now Nutmeg was gone. Mary didn’t know how long ago it had happened, but Nutmeg was a sweet horse and she was old by now and she probably hadn’t gone far, so Mary saddled up Whistler in the rain and went out to look for her. Whistler was about eight years old then. Mary didn’t even have to whistle for her anymore. Whenever she went out to the paddock, Whistler came to her. She remembered thinking, Oh, Whistler would never run off.

“It was still raining, but it wasn’t bad. She had a slicker on. Mary’s husband and daughter had taken the truck into Sheridan to get some things from the hardware store and the feed store and the grocery. She didn’t leave them a note because the drive there and back with all the errands took half the day. Mary would be back before they got home. She put an apple and a couple of carrots in her pocket, got an extra bridle, and she and Whistler rode off to find Nutmeg.”

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Daphne said.

Eddie’s hand was on her head, on her hat. “I wasn’t sure this would be a great story to tell you. Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

“Okay, but if you change your mind, you tell me. We can stop. I can tell you the other part when we’re back home, or I can tell you when you’re grown up.”

“Tell me.”

Eddie repositioned his shoulders. The left one was definitely wrong. He hadn’t thought about it because his ankle took precedence over everything else in his body, but still, he could feel it. “Mary went up the hill where the sheep liked to graze, but Nutmeg wasn’t there. She decided to go farther up, up to where it turned rocky, because there was a place with a good view from which she’d be able to spot the horse, but when she got there, she looked all around and didn’t see her. Part of the problem was the rain, which was coming down harder now. She couldn’t see much of anything. She decided to keep going up, though Nutmeg could as easily have gone down to the lower pasture. She had to look, she had to start somewhere. Mary and Whistler went farther and farther, and even though Mary was sure she’d been over every square inch of this land, she didn’t remember it. Nothing looked familiar. She rode out another mile or so and was starting to think this was stupid and she should go home and wait for her husband and daughter to come back and help her, when a bolt of lightning made Whistler rear up and Mary fell.”

Daphne dug her face into Eddie’s arm. “I don’t like this part.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought this might be too scary.”

“Does she live?”

“She lives,” Eddie said.

“And the horses?”

“Everybody lives,” Eddie said, because the creation of narrative tension was not his objective. He only meant to take her mind off the fact that they were trapped in the freezing car. He meant to take his own mind off of that as well.

“Okay,” Daphne said, taking in a deep breath. “Go ahead. I’m ready now.”

“You’re a champion.”

“Tell me what happens.”

He told her it was a hard fall. Maybe Mary lost consciousness, but only for a minute or two. When she opened her eyes, the rain seemed to be about the same, and the light, not that there was much light with all the clouds, but the light was the same. Her ankle had gotten twisted in the stirrup. She knew it was broken, and so was her wrist. Never put your arm out when you’re falling off a horse, but how can you stop yourself? Based on how much it hurt to breathe, she guessed she’d cracked a rib or two. She tried to sit up, but it was too much, so she lay back down in the grass. She lifted her head and looked around in the rain for Whistler, but the horse wasn’t there.

“Whistler isn’t there?” Now Daphne was scared, because Mary was alone and badly hurt. She wouldn’t tell Eddie to stop the story, but she sort of wished he’d never started.

The lightning had spooked the horse. Wherever Whistler was, she was probably still running. Mary put her head back down in the grass. Now there were two horses gone. She was still thinking about what had happened in terms of the horses. After another twenty minutes or so she began to understand what had happened to her. She was badly hurt and alone in a place where no one in her family normally went. She had no way to get herself out of there.

Eddie hadn’t thought this through. Not only was the story too scary, it was too close to home. But this was what he had started and now there was no way out but through.

The rain came and came. May was a month more tied to winter than spring. Water seeped beneath Mary’s slicker and spread up the back of her flannel shirt and then around to the front until she was so wet she might as well not have been wearing a slicker at all. She opened her mouth to drink what she could. There was nothing else for her to do but wait. The rest of the day passed and no one came. At night she thought about wolves and the sheep. She would have said she didn’t sleep at all, but when she opened her eyes, the rain had stopped and the sky was full of stars, so many stars it almost looked white in places.

“The way the stars looked before we went off the road,” Daphne said.

“Like that,” Eddie said, “and maybe even more because Mary was fifty miles from town and that town was small. There was no other light where she was. She looked at the stars. For all the pain she was in, she loved the stars.”

“She lay there and loved the stars?”

“There was nothing else to do.”

“Then what happened?”

Mary doesn’t die and Whistler doesn’t die and Nutmeg doesn’t die.

“She fell asleep for a while, and when she woke up, the stars were still there and Mary went back to watching them. She wondered how long she could last before anyone found her, and she thought that maybe if she didn’t last she’d be one of those stars. She thought how terrible it would be for her husband and her daughters, and how they’d blame themselves for not being able to find her.”

“And her son,” Daphne said. “Her son would feel bad, too.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. “Her son died years before. His name was Jeffrey.”

“ How? ” Daphne started to cry. The death of this character who had not been introduced by name proved too much for her.

Eddie should never have been in charge of a child, especially not a child he dearly loved. First he ran the car off the road, and then he finished her off with a story. “Oh, Duck, oh god, I’m so sorry I started this.”

“I want to know!” she cried. “You have to tell me.”

“I will, I will. We’re going to be novelists, you and I. Sometimes the stories are terrible.”

“ Jeffrey! ” she shouted.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not trying to protect you. I should have tried to protect you, but we’re way past that now. Mary Carter said in her proposal that her son, Jeffrey, had died three years before her accident. That’s all she said.”

“Are you going to ask her?”

Eddie stretched his neck back. Daphne was right. The thought of this dead son was unbearable, not knowing how old he was or how it happened. He must have been a grown man. “Yes,” he said. “If I get to buy the book, if she writes it, she’ll need to tell us about Jeffrey. A proposal is more like an outline. You don’t get much of what happened in the proposal.” In fact, a few of the details he was making up himself to fill things out, but he would never make up a death for Mary Carter’s son.

“All right,” Daphne said. “But when you find out, you have to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you,” Eddie said.

Mary thought a lot about Jeffrey when she was lying there looking at the stars. She thought about all three of her children and her husband. She thought of how hard they worked. She thought about how much she loved them even though there was almost never enough time to think about loving them. She thought of the ways she had failed them. Jeffrey had wanted to go to school in Laramie, but her husband thought it was a waste of money and time. Mary had said nothing about it either way and Jeffrey didn’t go to college, smart as he was. That was wrong.

Time went on like this until the darkness began to ease and a little dog came running through the pine trees. Mary heard something, and she lifted her head to see the dog barreling towards her, mouth open, tail going, a little gray-and-white dog who then leapt onto her chest and began licking her face, licking, licking, one of his paws pushing down on her cracked rib, the one that had collapsed her right lung, and the pain was more than she could stand, but she stood it. She would not have pushed the dog away for anything.

“Was it her dog?”

“It was her dog, the dog she’d had growing up, a dog named Marty. The greatest dog she had ever known, and everyone in her family had dogs.”

“Marty’s dead, too?”

“I’m afraid so. Marty had died a long time ago.”

Daphne and Leda lobbied tirelessly for a dog, and still they got nowhere. Maybe after the accident their mother would change her mind. “So if Mary can see Marty, does it mean Mary’s dead?” She was looking for logic. Was Mary sick enough to hallucinate a dog? She had already asked Eddie, and he swore that Mary didn’t die.

“Mary thought the same thing. If she was seeing her dead dog, then she must have died in the night. But if she was dead, then why was she still in so much pain?”

“If she’s dead, she shouldn’t be in any pain.”

“That’s what she thinks, and then she doesn’t think about any of it because she’s so happy to see her dog. She’d cried for months when Marty died. She would go in her bedroom closet to cry because she was a ranch girl and ranch girls knew the way life worked. Both of her parents had told her it was time to get over it, but there had never been a dog as good as Marty. And look at him now! All youthful and shiny again, all his little white teeth still there. He licked her neck and then he’d stop and look right in her eyes, then he’d lick her neck some more. He barked! He had missed her as much as she had missed him, and now they were together and they were so happy.”

Eddie stopped for a minute here so they could repair themselves, bask in the joy of Mary and Marty being reunited.

Then the story came together—click-click-click—in her mind. “Then Jeffrey comes,” Daphne said. She could hardly believe it.

“What?”

“That’s the story. If Marty comes, then Jeffrey comes. They’re coming to see her before she dies.”

Eddie was quiet. “How did you know that?”

“That’s the story,” Daphne said, feeling the intense wonder of it.

“I didn’t know,” Eddie said. “I was reading the proposal and I didn’t know.”

“Did anyone else come?”

“Susan, her best friend from childhood, who had died when she was having her first baby, and her father, who had died ten years before, and Jeffrey.”

“Did they come one at a time, or did they all come together?”

“One at a time,” Eddie said. Who was this child? How had she figured this out? “So she got some time with each of them alone at first. They must have had a lot to say to one another. It had been a while since she’d seen any of them.”

“What order?”

“It was Marty, then Susan, then her father, and then Jeffrey. I’m pretty sure Marty was there the whole time.”

“And she had enough time with each of them?”

“She had a lot of time. She was up there for three days.”

“And did the dead people all know each other? Did they like each other?”

“Her father knew Susan when she was growing up,” Eddie said. “She lived down the road. And of course he knew Jeffrey because Jeffrey was his grandson. Susan and Jeffrey wouldn’t have known one another, but they all got along.”

“And they were all nice to Marty?”

Eddie nodded. “Oh, sure, everybody loved Marty. Mary’s father had found Marty on the side of the road when he was a puppy. Someone had thrown him out in the snow. He wouldn’t have lasted an hour if Mary’s father hadn’t seen him. He pulled the truck over and put the puppy in the inside pocket of his coat, brought him straight home to Mary. ‘Mary, what are you doing leaving your dog out in the cold?’ he said to her when he came home, then he gave her the puppy. There had never been a happier girl or a happier dog.”

Daphne made a mental note to tell her mother this part when she saw her again.

“So what happened?”

“What do you think happened?” Eddie said, still shaken by how quickly she’d gotten ahead of him.

“Tell me.”

Jeffrey and his grandfather were trying to start a fire. The wood was wet and they kept apologizing for the smoke. They couldn’t get it to catch, and Mary and Susan laughed and said they had nothing but time. Everyone was happy. Susan got Mary’s head in her lap and she combed out her hair with her fingers, and Marty went to sleep on Mary’s chest. Mary asked them how it was, and they all said it was different, but it wasn’t bad. “You know,” her father said. “It’s the way things go.”

“Sure is nice to be here, though,” Susan said, and she ran her hand down Marty’s back. “I wish I had a dog.”

Marty stayed close to Mary the entire time. One of them was always with her. She would go to sleep for a while, and sometimes when she woke up they would all be there, then other times it would only be Susan or her father. Once when she woke up, Jeffrey was lying beside her, his arm across her waist. She couldn’t imagine how she could have had such a luminous son. “I love you, Mama,” he said. “I love you, baby,” she said, and she was glad she got to say it because after he died, she wasn’t sure if she had told him. She told him when he was young but maybe not after he’d grown up.

“Once they finally got the fire started, they kept it going,” Eddie said. “They talked about their memories. They didn’t ask Mary many questions because they more or less knew what was going on with her. Mary loved them all so much, and the weaker she got, the more she thought it would be fine to be with them all the time.”

The others weren’t so sure.

“You’ve got your whole life to be dead,” her father said to her.

“Well,” Mary said, “I don’t know what kind of choice I have. I can’t get up. Either they find me or they don’t.” Was it easier to think about death when you lived on a ranch? Animals always getting killed, people you knew died in one sort of horrendous accident or another. Maybe she wouldn’t mind, or maybe she was very tired?

Then Jeffrey leaned right over her face and Marty looked up. “Whistle,” he said.

“Oh,” Daphne said. She hadn’t thought of that.

Mary’s mouth was dry. There had been nothing to drink since the rain stopped. She did not say that surely Whistler was too far away to hear her, that surely she and Nutmeg were home by now and her husband had fixed the lock on the gate. No, he wouldn’t have fixed the lock. He would still be looking for her. Did she have a fever? Even if he thought she was dead by now, he would still be looking. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and pursed her lips. She made a breathy sound, a pale imitation of a whistle. Marty barked. They waited.

“It isn’t going to happen right away,” Susan said. “You have to be patient.”

Mary Carter was made of patience. Her whole life was patience. She didn’t mind waiting because she was with the people she loved, the people she had missed for such a long time. They went back to telling stories and laughing, and Mary drifted in and out. Such a comfort to hear them talking. Marty’s head was on her shoulder now. Whenever she thought of it, she’d try to whistle again. Then she fell back to sleep.

She whistled. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been trying, but then the horse was there, entering their circle through the pine trees to stand near the fire. She seemed almost shy at first, like maybe she knew she shouldn’t have reared, shouldn’t have run away. Mary didn’t know where Whistler had been all this time, but clearly, it wasn’t home. She hadn’t been brushed. That saddle and blanket had been on for three days, the reins and the bit. Mary felt terrible to think her horse had spent three days with a bit in her mouth.

“This is going to be the hard part,” Susan said when she saw the horse.

Mary couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Marty. Was that a terrible thing to say? Her best friend, her father, her own son, but the dog had never left her side. “I don’t know about this,” Mary said. “I’m not sure I want to leave.”

“It’s okay,” her father said. “You’ll be back later.”

“We’ll still be here,” Jeffrey said. “You won’t believe how fast it goes. Might as well be a minute.”

“You’ll look after everyone?” she asked her son.

“No,” he said. “We’ll look after you.”

They couldn’t help her on to the horse. Somehow that was part of the deal. They didn’t explain it and she didn’t ask them why because it was clear. She whistled again and the horse came to her, leaning down to sniff her pockets. Marty gave a low growl and Mary petted his head. Then she remembered the two carrots and the apple she’d brought for Nutmeg. All this time she’d had a little food in her pocket and she’d forgotten. She gave one of the carrots to Whistler. She had come back, after all.

Then Whistler lay down on the ground. For a horse it was an unheralded act of generosity. The fire had gone out, and her friend and her father and her son were standing together in front of the trees. She had tried so many times to teach the horse to do this as a trick, but horses weren’t interested in lying down unless something was wrong. Then she remembered, of course, that everything was wrong. She had to get herself on top of the horse with her broken ankle, her broken wrist and ribs, all of it on the right side. She would have to do it or she would have to die there, though dying there wouldn’t be the worst thing. Marty went over to her father, and her father picked him up and held the dog in his arms.

When Mary rolled onto her left side, the pain exploded, turning her vision green. She lay there in the sea of it, panting. “I can’t do this,” she said.

“Sure you can,” Susan said. “Take your time.” Susan had pink cheeks and a thick brown braid. She’d barely been more than a girl when she died.

“We’ve all done this,” Jeffrey said. “You’ll make it through.”

She hadn’t thought about that, but of course it was true. They had already died. All of them had faced the hardest thing and gone forward. And so Mary Carter dragged herself on top of the horse, enduring something so otherworldly that she would never be able to tell anyone about it. When Whistler stood again, she held to the saddle horn with her left hand, dug her left foot into the stirrup, letting her right foot hang. Whistler standing was not an easy thing, not for either of them. She didn’t know if she cried from the pain or from the wonder of it all, or if she cried because she was losing the people and the dog she had already lost. They waved to her, the three of them, and Marty barked as the horse picked her way down the hill towards home.

By the time he had finished, Daphne was crying too hard to say anything, but she knew now why Eddie had told her the story. They weren’t going to die.