Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 9

(FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, JANUARY 18 AND 19, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)

The hands on Eddie’s watch glowed in the dark, two green sticks of illumination against the all-encompassing darkness. Timex. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Abigail had bought it for him for his birthday and he liked it. The casing was rugged and had an exterior ring of numbers to track Greenwich Mean Time in case he decided to fly a plane. “She bought you a Timex?” Skip had said to Eddie the last time they were together, the Timex in his hand. They’d split the difference on travel, each taking the train to New London in order to be home for dinner. Eddie had put the watch on the nightstand. Was that the last time? He did not mean if he made it out of this situation alive, he would break it off with Skip. He meant there was a possibility that things might not work out. That the outcome of driving up to a raspberry farm in the middle of winter, in the middle of the night to see the stars, could be his own death. He never thought that Daphne could die. His imagination was not big enough to encompass that. She would find a way out, but he was shattered and pinned and possibly freezing. The thought made his eyes sting, which was ridiculous. The last thing he needed to do was start crying over his own death. His missed potential. His unlived dreams. If they did get out of there, and he still put the odds in their favor, he should break it off with Skip once and for all, devote himself to Abigail and Leda and this one, this dream child curled against his chest beneath the silver space blanket. He would knock off the occasional pickups, too. No good would come of that. And he would write a novel. A great novel. Who gets such a chance at thirty-two? He thought of Robert Frost, “Wild Grapes,” And the life I live now’s an extra life / I can waste as I please on whom I please.

But if he could waste his life on whom he pleased, wouldn’t it please him more to waste it on men? Survival could finally allow him to be gay because he’d always been gay. Why was he married to Abigail? Why had he waited around for Skip? Couldn’t a second chance mean finally, fully, living the life he’d been given, instead of contorting himself into someone else’s expectations? Abigail deserved more than the half-life he had to offer. And Skip deserved Polly. That’s right, Eddie thought. You heard me.

He needed to make a choice, go one way or the other instead of spending his life trying to cover all the bases. That was the problem.

No, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the temperature inside the car. He wished the watch—which was both water-resistant (not helpful) and shockproof (still running)—could tell him the temperature inside the car, or maybe he didn’t want to know. One thing was certain: if they made it out alive, they’d have Buddy Zabriskie to thank for it. The space blanket was their salvation.

Buddy Zabriskie, my god, now there was a man. He pictured Buddy out on his boat, pulling up nets full of fish. Eddie told himself to knock it off. Daphne had her mittened hands beneath his arms. He had his hands (no gloves or hat, because he was an idiot) balled up in the plush fur of her coat. She was a scrap of a thing, but she still generated heat.

“Eddie?” Her voice came soft from underneath the silver blanket, like she was afraid of waking him.

“Awake,” he said.

“I have to pee.”

Coincidentally, this was the other thing Eddie had been thinking about, after thinking about Skip and Buddy and freezing to death in the station wagon. “Me, too.”

“Really?”

What he didn’t say, what he’d been thinking, was that if they gave in to nature and peed on themselves, their genitals would be frozen solid in twenty minutes. “Find the empty Coke cup.”

Daphne, who had never been asleep, was ready for a task, and was ready to empty her overfull bladder.

“Be careful,” he said when he felt her shift. “I live in fear of moving my ankle.” How funny that he said it like that, exactly the truth, exactly what he was thinking. His ankle had a consistent throb, but he knew beneath that throb was a truly terrifying pain.

Daphne had been lying with her back against the driver-side door, her legs over Eddie’s lap, her head on Eddie’s chest, completely covered by the silver blanket. She knew the Chevrolet like she knew the bedroom she shared with her sister. She knew where the extra cup was, the one without the ice. She knew how to stand up without jiggling Eddie’s leg. She had shed her corporeal self and now was free to be a butterfly, disturbing nothing. She closed her eyes so as not to waste her energy straining to see. She couldn’t see, she didn’t need to. She put her hand around the cup. “Got it.”

“Okay, good job. Now you go in the backseat and pee.”

“In the cup ?”

“It’s been done before.”

Daphne thought about this. She tried to work out the logistics in her mind. “What about toilet paper?”

“Napkins,” he said.

She knew where the leftover napkins from the chicken were. For that matter, she knew where the chicken was, though neither she nor Eddie wanted anything to do with it.

Carefully, carefully, Daphne flipped herself into the backseat, and, finding the most stable place to squat was on the left-hand backseat window, pulled down her navy tights with one hand and positioned the cup with the other. “Sing something,” she said. Now that she was ready, she could barely hold it.

“ We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. ” Eddie belted it out like a Broadway audition, and she laughed.

They sang the chorus together. “ Baa, baa, baa. ”

“ We are little black sheep who have gone astraaay … ”

Again, they baaed. The chicken place had upsized their drinks to extra large, standard practice when two drinks were purchased with the large bucket of chicken tenders, and thank heavens for it because Daphne almost needed the whole cup. “Wow,” she said, pulling up her tights.

“Finished?”

“Now what?”

“Now you’ve got to empty the cup and give it to me. That part’s up to you. Just be quick.”

Daphne put the full cup at her feet, then raised both hands. She wasn’t tall enough to reach the crank and so she stopped to assess the situation. She needed to be taller. She pulled out the armrest between the seats and climbed up, then located the crank of the right-side back window directly above her head. Then she began to turn.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Eddie said.

The weather inside the car shifted as even colder air rushed in.

“I got it!” Daphne said. She could smell the trees.

“Now what?”

“Now I have the cup. Now I’m back on the armrest.” And then—pop!—Daphne’s bloodied head was out of the car. She tipped up her chin and saw the stars beyond the crosshatch of black branches. Oh, great and glorious night! Nothing had ever been as beautiful as this. Her hands were shaking and so she tipped her urine as far past the roof of the car as she could reach. At the last possible second, she remembered to hold on to the cup. In her excitement, she had nearly let it go.

She stepped back down and handed the cup and some napkins over the seat to Eddie. His fingers were nearly too frozen to manage his fly.

“You’re going to have to sing,” he said.

There was no doubt about her choice. “ See the US- A in your Chev-ro- let,” Daphne sang with gusto. “ America is asking you to call. Drive your Chevrolet through the USA. America’s the greatest land of all. ” It was the girls’ favorite jingle—no one knew why. They sang it every morning when they got in the car to go to school.

“One more verse,” Eddie called out.

Which, of course, she knew, the last line being Life is completer in a Chevy .

Eddie laughed so hard he was lucky that nothing spilled. When he was done, she took the cup. She was brave about it and neither of them made a joke. She climbed back out in the night and poured it away.

“I feel like a completely new person,” Eddie said once she was settled back into her spot against him.

“Me, too,” Daphne said.

“I wish you weren’t here,” Eddie said. “I wish you were home, but since you aren’t home and you are here, I want to say I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be in a car crash with.”

“Me, too,” Daphne said.

Eddie pulled the silver blanket back over their heads. “We should try to get some sleep now.”

“Good night, Eddie,” she said.

“Good night, Duck,” Eddie said.

And this time Daphne did fall asleep, but Eddie did not because now he understood that there was only one way for this story to go. In the morning Daphne was going to have to crawl out the window alone and try to save them.

At the first crack of dawn they were awake. They might as well have been inside the giant freezer chest at the dock where the Zabriskies stored their fish. Fish shrink-wrapped in plastic and frozen into concrete slabs.

“Daphne?” Eddie said.

“Right here,” she said, and shivered.

“It snowed.”

It had taken Eddie several minutes of staring out the window to pinpoint what was different. In his defense, the light was dim and he hadn’t seen anything at all since yesterday and his brain had turned to ice inside his skull. Why couldn’t he see out the windows? What was that fluffy stuff?

Daphne pulled the silver blanket down, looked around. “Oh boy,” she said.

Had it snowed an inch? A foot? Was it snowing now? From inside the igloo of their existence, nothing could be known.

“I’m going to the bathroom again,” Daphne said. Now she knew the drill so she didn’t have to sit around thinking about it. She got up carefully. One of her legs had been at a weird angle and had fallen asleep. She wiggled her toes until she felt it coming back to life, then swung into the backseat.

“Sing, please,” she said.

Eddie had less energy now. “ Lambs, lambs, lambs, lambs, poor and lost, easily tossed, gone away, gone astray. ”

“ Baa, baa, baa. ”

Tights up, onto the armrest for the window crank, turn the crank, and then the block of accumulated snow came straight down on her head, snow down the back of her neck, down the front of her sweater. She shook like a dog.

“Careful!” Eddie said. He could feel the vibration in his leg.

“Sorry. It surprised me.”

“How much is there?”

Daphne went back to get her cup of urine then, stepping onto the armrest again, stuck her head into the snowy morning. She dispensed with the urine first.

“Hand me the cup,” Eddie said. “You can give me the weather report while I’m busy.”

She brought him the cup, then went back up, popping herself out into the cold winter wonderland. “Lots of snow.” Snow everywhere. Snow blown around and stuck to the sides of trees.

“More than six inches?”

“Maybe?” She didn’t know how to tell.

“Is it snowing now?”

“Yes.” Big fat flakes were wafting onto her sock hat. She remembered the cut on her face. Her face felt stiff.

“Can you see anything?”

“Trees.”

“Any houses?”

“Somewhere,” Daphne said. “Nothing I can see.”

“Can you tell if we’re near the bottom of a hill or near the top?” Eddie tried to phrase this one carefully, because what he wanted to ask was how well anchored the car appeared to be and did they have further to fall?

Daphne put a hand on either side of the window frame and pulled herself up farther to look.

“Jesus,” Eddie said, watching her dangle there. “Be careful.” From where he sat, she appeared to be weightless, boneless, her infinitely flexible self rising up through the window like smoke. Then she came down.

“About halfway? It looks straight going up and straight going down.”

None of this struck him as good news. “Okay, come get the cup and we’ll talk about it.”

Down she came to take the Coke cup in her mittened hand and was gone again, dispensing with his waste. Now he could see it snowing into the car. If they survived, he was going to talk to Abigail about signing Daphne up for gymnastics or ballet. He would pay for the lessons himself. This talent she had, something should come of it. Never had he seen a human being so assured in her own body.

She cranked the window closed and slowly worked her way back into the front seat, sitting in the wheel well on the passenger side.

“Don’t you want to get under the blanket?” he asked.

“I’m all wet from the snow.” She ran her mitten over her hat, flicking away the flakes.

If the car had opened up a break in the woods, the snow had closed it. If someone was looking for them, they were now harder to find. But no one was looking for them. Abigail and Leda would be waking up at the hospital now. Abigail might possibly call the house again, but when he didn’t answer for the second time, she would be annoyed, not concerned. She would decide that in the future, he would have to call her. With everything she had to deal with, she would still be a good way away from worrying about the two of them. “So I’m thinking,” he began.

“I’m going to have to find somebody to help us,” Daphne said.

Eddie smiled at her, this remarkable, bloody-faced child. He was almost too moved to speak. “Yes.”

“You can’t go,” she said. “And no one’s going to find us down here. We could wait awhile, see if maybe it gets warmer, but it could also snow more, and that would make it harder to walk. Hey, do you think we could turn the car on for a little while to run the heater?” It had only now occurred to her.

“I tried,” he said. “The car’s dead.” This wasn’t true, of course. He hadn’t tried, but lying was preferable to explaining his fear of fire. Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. What was it with Frost poems and car accidents?

“So what am I going to do?”

As if he knew. “You’re going to pull yourself out of the window and go to the top of the hill. Check and see if anyone’s in the farmhouse. Look there first. If no one’s there, then you need to find the road. There are two roads, one on either side of the hill, and either one you walk down is going to bring you to a house in less than a mile. When you see a house, you knock on the door. If nobody answers, go to the next house. If a car passes you, wave at it like crazy so they’ll stop.”

All this time, Daphne hadn’t been afraid. She was with Eddie, who might well have been her favorite person after her sister, and they were having a huge adventure. They were spending time together, solving problems, singing songs. She knew she could get out of the car. She could get up the hill. The rest of it she wasn’t so sure about.

“What?” Eddie asked.

“I’m not supposed to go inside people’s houses or get in their cars if I don’t know them.”

Ah, that. Sure. A lifetime of purposefully imprinted fear. “That’s right,” he said. “Everybody is always going to tell you that because there’s a tiny percentage of bad people in the world, and the bad people get all the publicity. Everybody’s got to be vigilant against the bad people. I get that. But there are so many more people who are going to want to help you. I mean so, so many more good people that you couldn’t begin to count them. If I thought somebody out there was going to hurt you, I’d say we were better off taking our chances waiting it out in the car. But I swear to you, it’s mostly good people out there, with a few bad people around the edges. I’m more worried about you falling in the snow than I’m worried about you running into a bad person.”

“I’m not going to fall in the snow,” Daphne said.

“Then I think you’re going to save the day.”

Her departure was slowed by the argument they had about the space blanket. Eddie insisted she take it with her. The blanket would keep her warm and dry and make her easier to see from a distance. “You’ll be a walking reflective blob,” he said. “Everybody slows down for those.”

But Daphne refused. “I’ve got my teddy bear coat, my hat, scarf, mittens, tights, boots, sweater, jumper. All you’ve got is your stupid jacket.”

“I didn’t think I’d be sleeping in a car,” he said, though she was right. He had dressed for work. He was still dressed for work.

“So you have to keep the blanket.”

“You’re going outside in the snow. You’re the one who has to brave the elements, find civilization and save us. All I have to do is wait in the car.”

Daphne turned her head away, refusing to look at him. Abigail did the same thing when she was mad. “I’m not taking the blanket.”

“ Your father put it in the car for your safety, not mine.”

“Dad would want you to have it,” she said. This was probably true, as Buddy would weigh out each party’s potential for survival and then award the blanket to whoever was weaker.

“Okay, Daphne, okay, I didn’t want to do this.”

“Then don’t,” Daphne said.

“I’m the grown-up here. I’m telling you.”

It was a terrible breach of the trust between them, but it also made Daphne realize that all she had to do was leave without the blanket. She didn’t have to win the argument. What was he going to do about it? Follow her? Make her take it? She rested the cup of ice and the bucket of disgusting chicken and their pee cup up against him.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving.” When she’d climbed into the backseat, she leaned over and gave him a hard kiss on the top of the head. The space blanket discussion was finished. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, Duck.”

She climbed up and cranked the window open, leaning back as the shelf of new accumulation dumped into the car. “I’m not going to be able to close this behind me.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

She lifted her torso through the window with the strength in her arms. For a moment her lower half dangled there, coat, tights, boots. He knew she was taking in the enormity of the forest. “Daphne?”

“Yeah,” she called.

“When you find someone to help us, tell them I’m your father, okay?”

They both knew what he was saying. “Okay!” she called.

“Be careful!”

One leg pulled up and then the other. Then, after another second, her face appeared in the open frame. “I’m coming back to save you,” she said.

“Whistler,” he said, and waved. Oh, he was terrified. He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted to hold her again, the two of them curled up together. Come back. Don’t go, don’t go.

Daphne smiled hugely, like the hard job had already been finished. Then she was gone.