Whistler

CHAPTER 2 #3

Eddie did not seem to be having such a terrible time.

Our mother brought in the fat manuscript he’d been working on, and he sat propped up in bed, marking away.

Eddie in the hospital didn’t seem so different from Eddie at home, except that he was wearing a green gown beneath his robe.

What was different was me. I wanted to stay right there with him.

I wanted to sleep rolled up at the foot of his bed.

“How are the stitches?” he asked me.

“Itchy.” I understood the stitches were small potatoes compared to everything else going on.

“You know scars make people more interesting. And not just pirates, all people.”

When I asked Eddie if he had any scars, he kicked back the covers and stuck out his bare leg, the one without the cast. His leg was pale and covered in long dark hair, an unattractive leg and still somehow thrilling to see.

“Right there,” he said. “The neighbor’s dog Judith tried to take my kneecap off.

Twenty-three stitches, thank you very much. ”

I had had twenty-six stitches in my face, but I didn’t want to seem competitive. “How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“What happened to Judith?”

“Not a thing. Her family had a nice, big backyard, and they fenced it in. I don’t think Judith was inconvenienced at all.”

I smiled. I had always wanted a dog.

“You know what I like about you, Daphne?”

“What?”

“You asked about the dog. You knew I was fine. You’re looking right at me. You wanted to make sure Judith was okay.”

“Well, I’m glad she didn’t eat your kneecap.”

“You and me both,” he said. “Go on and take the mail to your sister. I’m going to go back to work. No one wants to be fired when they’re in the hospital.”

I went to the bed and took the letter and gave Eddie a kiss. I believed that we were inseparable. We’d always liked each other hugely, but things were different now.

Buddy came to see us in the hospital, or he came to see Leda but both of us were there.

Our mother, who must have been the one to tell him, left the room as soon as he walked in, as if there were some urgent mission she had only now remembered.

He brought Leda a stuffed lobster and made it scuttle up the bed, which made her laugh.

He said he was sorry he hadn’t brought one for me as well.

“You were in an accident, too,” he said, maybe thinking that Leda’s appendix had ruptured in a car wreck.

I told him I was fine, and Leda said the lobster could sleep on the nightstand between our beds so that it would be both of ours.

Four days later everything went to hell.

I walked to our house after school and found my mother in the kitchen, sobbing, sobbing, her head down on the kitchen table, shoulders heaving.

Surely Eddie or Leda was dead—I just didn’t know which one.

Either way I wouldn’t be able to survive.

I stood in the doorway, shaking, and when at last she looked up and saw me, my mother said that she and Eddie were getting divorced.

“What?”

She took a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and pressed it to her eyes. She could not stop crying. “I’m divorcing Eddie.”

“Why?” Was that an actual word I said, or did I make a sound?

“He could have killed you.” It was as if the accident had just happened, or was happening right this minute—BOOM!—only this time she was in the car. “Driving around in the dark like that, going out at night.”

“We were on our way home. It wasn’t his fault,” I said. I wasn’t crying. No one was dead, and what she was talking about was some sort of lunacy I could surely explain away.

“Leda’s in the hospital at death’s door, and then he takes you out and almost kills you.”

It was my death she was worried about? It was me she was afraid of losing? “The car slipped.”

“I can’t trust him. I can’t trust him with my children.”

“It’s Eddie,” I said, because surely she’d forgotten who she was talking about. Eddie was more trustworthy than the rest of us put together.

Some version of this conversation happened again another twenty or thirty or forty times over the next month, and through the constant telling my mother honed the tale.

Eddie had to leave our family because he had been so careless with my life.

He had sent me out in the snow to find help.

He did not bother to do it himself, even though his ankle was broken and his foot was pinned in place by the emergency brake.

It was my fault that they were getting divorced?

“Not your fault, not my fault. His fault,” my mother said.

That part I never listened to because clearly it was my fault if she had to get divorced for my safety. That was the truth I carried with me. I chewed it up and swallowed it without examination. I was nine. My heart exploded with the blow.

But now I was fifty-three and driving back from LaGuardia on a Saturday morning, and for the first time I was wondering what had changed between the day after the accident, when we had been found at the raspberry farm, and four days after that, when I came upon my mother crying in the kitchen.

What about those four days in which my mother went from one floor of the hospital to the other, sitting by Leda’s bed, sitting by Eddie’s bed?

She was exhausted and often wept, but she was weeping with gratitude. Everyone was alive.

At nine I didn’t know enough to interrogate the story, and when it all became too painful to carry, I put it away.

But it wasn’t painful now. Now this thing we’d lived through was a curiosity, and not one I was going to solve on the Hutchinson River Parkway coming back from the airport.

I wasn’t going to call my mother until I had sorted it out, talked it through with Leda.

When I got back to the house, I called Eddie instead.

He answered on the first ring. “Daphne!” he cried.

“Eddie!” I said.

“I don’t want to say that I’ve been walking around with my phone in my hand, but I’ve been walking around with my phone in my hand.”

“Is your heart on your sleeve?”

“Can you see it?”

“It’s radiant.”

“All the way in Westchester. I wouldn’t have thought. Oh, Daphne, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

“I feel the same way.” Eddie had aged, as all of us had aged, but his voice was still his voice. I would have been happy listening to him read me a takeout menu from a Greek restaurant: spanakopita, tzatziki, baklava.

“I’ve been carrying around my memory of you for a long time now and still you are remarkably fresh. How long has it been again?”

I told him, forty-four years.

He whistled. “Forty-four years. Isn’t that something? Now here you are all grown up and married. Did you have a nice wedding? I meant to ask you that yesterday. Did Buddy Zabriskie walk you down the aisle?”

“It was a nice wedding, very small, but Buddy died before I got married. That’s how I met Jonathan. I met him in the hospital when Buddy was sick.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and I could hear it in his voice. He truly was sorry. “I wasn’t allowed to say it at the time, but I was enormously fond of your father.”

“You knew him?”

“I’m sure I didn’t know him, but I’d do the handoffs when he came to get you and Leda. Or I’d drive to Gloucester to pick you up. Do you remember?”

And then I did remember in a fuzzy way, the joy of Eddie coming to my father’s apartment to reclaim us, the careful suppression of that joy until we were back on the highway.

“I was so afraid of hurting Buddy’s feelings,” I said.

“We never wanted him to know how happy we were to be leaving.” Or how happy we were to see Eddie.

“He was such a decent man who had no business getting married, certainly no business having children. I remember as soon as we’d gotten you all strapped into the backseat he’d close the door and look at me, and his eyes would be huge and he’d give his head a little shake, like he was saying, What the hell happened?

All he wanted was to be out on his boat, have a couple of beers with the guys at the end of the day.

Your mother was always screaming at him to keep hats on both of you. ”

“Is that why Buddy was always buying us hats?”

“He was completely flummoxed by girls. He might have done better with boys, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Did he feed you Cheetos the whole time you were there?”

“Pretty much.”

“You were always dusted with orange when you came back. Did you ever read that Mishima novel, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea?”

I smiled. I had.

“That was your father. His nature was to be on the ocean. Your mother thought she could change him, but no one changes another person’s nature.”

“Why did she even want to try?” That was the part I’d never understood.

“Well, Buddy Zabriskie was a notably attractive man. Virile, you know? Women were on him like a flock of seagulls.” Eddie sighed. “Your poor mother. She wasn’t much for picking husbands.”

“She married a third time. That one stuck.”

“Third time’s the charm. What’s this one like?”

“Positively positive.”

“How do you mean that?”

“She married Lucas Ekker. Do you remember those books?”

“She married Lucas Ekker? I’m speechless.”

“Did you know him?”

“Of course I knew him! Your mother was his publicist when we worked at Houghton. What a pontificating bore of a man.”

“That’s him.”

“I shudder to imagine the through line between Buddy Zabriskie, myself, and Lucas Ekker.”

“My mother had range.”

“Well, I wish her every happiness. I do. She deserves some peace in her life. Did you tell her that we ran into each other?”

“I haven’t yet.” The phone and I went out the kitchen door and into the backyard, where I sat in Jonathan’s Adirondack chair.