Chapter 1 #2
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.