Chapter 2 #2
“The Edward-in-Chief wears a tie, so when there’s a big meeting all the Eds and the Eddies wear one, too.
As soon as I got out of the meeting, I took the tie off and put it in my pocket.
” A shot of pain radiated up his leg, an extraordinary burst of pain, but this time he knew to hold back any sounds.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tie his mother had bought for him when he first got the job at Houghton Mifflin.
“Ta-da! So here’s what we’ll do: I’ll put my handkerchief over the cut, then I’ll tie it in place with the tie. ”
“Is the handkerchief clean?” Daphne asked.
“Very clean. You’re smart to ask.”
In the dark, with only the slightest glow of a makeup mirror to guide him, Eddie wiped what blood he could from her face, then laid the handkerchief over the approximate location of where the cut seemed to be, then wrapped his necktie twice around her head and tied it snug-not-tight.
“Once, when my sister was in high school, she walked out of the house with my father’s tie around her head.
The look was aggressively Woodstock. That’s where I got the idea. ”
“You have a sister?”
“Amy.”
“Did your father get mad at her?”
“He did indeed. He worked in a tool and die shop. He only had one tie and he wore it to funerals. Didn’t you have a hat on before?”
Daphne touched her head. “I did.” Where had the hat gone?
“Okay, it’s time for you to take inventory of our resources. If you find any ice cubes, put them in a cup. If you find chicken tenders, put them in the chicken bucket. If you find your hat, put it on your head to help keep the handkerchief in place.”
“I can do that.”
“But Daphne, I don’t mean to be a baby about this, but I don’t want to move my ankle, okay? If you get down there where my foot is, be careful not to touch it.”
It wasn’t that Eddie was talking to her like she was another adult, but he was talking to her like they were two equal people.
They had to be equal because they relied on one another now.
Daphne, who felt the throbbing of blood in her head, began to pick her way around the floor of the car, although the floor was technically the door now.
She found the bucket and, without benefit of light, gently extracted the chicken tenders from around Eddie’s foot and put them together.
She found plenty of ice cubes as well, many of them between Eddie’s back and the upholstery.
She found her hat and put it on. It was her favorite: ribbed, pink with a lavender fake-fur pompom.
The hat felt both nicely tight and warm.
She found her mittens, which, after handling all the ice cubes, she was grateful for.
She found books she knew by shape: her math workbook, her paperback copy of Charlotte’s Web.
She found the box of Kleenex her mother always kept in the car. “Do you want a Kleenex?” Daphne asked.
“Oh,” Eddie said, “I’d love one. Give me several, please.”
Daphne pulled out the Kleenex for him, and Eddie blew his nose. “I’m going into the back,” she said. “Find out what’s there.”
“Will you please be careful?” Movement was the enemy as far as his ankle was concerned. He was increasingly terrified of even the slightest jiggling, which meant he couldn’t envision how their rescue would proceed, as obviously being rescued meant being removed from the car.
“I will,” she said. She gave him the chicken and the cup of ice.
She closed the visor because the tiny light would do her no good in the back and she didn’t want to run it down.
She maneuvered her body over the front seat, careful not to put her foot in Eddie’s face.
It wasn’t like she’d never done this before.
She’d climbed from front to back, from back to wayback, and then to the front again while her mother did sixty-five on the Jersey Turnpike, going to visit her parents.
Daphne would be tasked with getting something out of a suitcase that her mother needed, or getting a snack for Leda out of the grocery bag or a drink out of the cooler.
That the car was now sideways in the forest, that there was no light whatsoever, affected her less than she might have thought.
She knew every inch of the Chevy, which meant she knew where to go.
There were few remaining vestiges of Buddy Zabriskie in their life: in the girls’ shared bedroom, a framed picture of him with his arms around Daphne and Leda on the boat; in the kitchen, a glass lemon juicer that had belonged to his mother; above the mantel, a clock that had been given to Buddy and Abigail as a wedding present.
But the best place to know that Buddy cared about them, that he continued to think of them, was in the Impala.
He changed the oil whenever he came to visit, and, when necessary, flushed out the radiator and refilled the windshield wiper fluid.
If the snow was bad, he appeared with chains.
Who knew why he kept this up after the divorce, but he did.
Maybe he understood that doing it himself was the only way it was going to get done.
He had left behind the red duffel bag that lived in the wayback.
He had told Daphne it was there, and that it was important.
Eddie had likely never noticed it before.
Her mother grumbled about it every time she threw something back there—“Buddy’s stupid bag of crap,” she called it.
But she didn’t throw it away, or she hadn’t the last time Daphne checked.
If she got back there and the duffel was gone, she would never speak to her mother again.
“What are you doing?” Eddie called.
“Reconnaissance,” Daphne said.
“Big word,” Eddie said.
“I’m looking for stuff,” she said.
“I know what it means,” Eddie said.
It turned out she was good in the dark. She was good crawling over things.
Maybe she wouldn’t have done as well as Leda being in the hospital and having her ruptured appendix removed.
Maybe they were both holding down the crisis best suited to their own abilities.
Daphne flipped her body over the backseat, landing in that small space that contained the spare tire.
She ran her fingers along the little piece of carpet and found the duffel bag.
She shivered from excitement and from the significant cold.
She hadn’t made the emergency bag, but she was the one who knew of its existence.
That was her contribution. She made the handles into shoulder straps and arranged it on her back like a jet pack.
“I got it!” she called out to the front of the car.
“Got what?” Eddie asked.
“I got my dad’s bag.”
It would be an overstatement to say that Buddy saved the day, but he made a material contribution to their survival for which he would never receive credit.
He was a man who spent most of his life on the water, and there was no going to Ace Hardware to pick up what you needed while at sea.
The trick was to always think ahead, be prepared for any inevitability.
In the years that Buddy spent with Abigail, the Impala was the closest thing to a boat that he had, and so even on land, he was ready. The duffel bag was proof of that.
Daphne had to contain herself on the way back.
Her natural inclination was to flip over the front seat and land next to Eddie in a celebratory Spider-Man move, but she remembered.
“My dad left an emergency bag in the back of the car,” she said, returning to the front seat as quiet as a cat.
She positioned herself in the passenger-side wheel well, bracing her feet into the center console so as not to slide forward onto Eddie’s foot.
“Are you kidding me?”
She patted the bag, then opened up the makeup mirror again so she could show him in the little light.
Eddie whistled. “Buddy Zabriskie, you are some sort of man.”
“Dad always says he was prepared for everything in life except Mom.”
Eddie laughed, knowing he shouldn’t laugh. “Open it, let’s see what we’ve got.”
And so she did, and the first thing she put her hand on was the cold silver cylinder of a flashlight.
She handed it to Eddie, who flipped it on.
“Oh my god, Daphne, will you look at this? I might have thought to put a flashlight in a car—possibly—but I can guarantee you the batteries would be dead when I needed it.”
“Dad changes out the batteries.” She ran her hands through the bag. “And he puts in extra batteries. See?” She held them up.
Eddie turned the light on her and she squinted. “Oh, Duck, I don’t mean to alarm you, but you’re a bloody mess. Is there any medical stuff in there?”
Was there ever! Antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, alcohol pads, Band-Aids, an Ace bandage, a bottle of Tylenol. Eddie availed himself to three of those, washing them down with the melt from the ice cup. “Do you have a headache?” he asked her.
She did. He shook out two pills for her and handed over the cup.
“I’m going to do a better job on your head,” he told her. “What else did Santa Buddy leave us?”
There were four flares. There was a box of Diamond Strike On Box Matches in a sealed Ziploc bag. The thought of anything related to fire made Eddie’s stomach churn. “Put those back. What else?”
There was a small transistor radio, also with good batteries.
There was a silver space blanket. “Who is this father of yours?” Eddie asked.
“The Wizard of Oz?” He didn’t think they’d freeze to death, not overnight, not in the car, but whatever warmth the car heater had provided had seeped out long ago.
Eddie was not about to turn the car back on to see what would happen.
There were also four plastic bottles of water, all frozen solid.
Four from a time in which it had been Abigail and Buddy and Daphne and Leda in the car.
They weren’t going to die of dehydration either.