Chapter 2
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.”