Chapter 1
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.
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.
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.