Chapter 2 #3
Once upon a time, there had also been four full-sized Snickers bars in the bag, the only full-sized candy bars Daphne and her sister ever had access to, though they got the bite-sized ones at Halloween. The candy bars were long gone.
Eddie told Daphne to take off her hat, and he went to work on her face, using the significant resources now available to him.
She held the flashlight. The wound was a real bleeder, his folded handkerchief soaked through.
He didn’t touch the alcohol wipe to the cut, but he used it to wipe up some of the blood.
Then he put a glob of antibiotic ointment on a gauze pad and tapped it gently into place, wrapping her head up with the Ace bandage.
“Good work, Mr. Triplett,” he said. “Nicely done.” He carefully put her hat back on.
“Shouldn’t we wrap your ankle?” Daphne asked.
“We should not.”
It had been nice to have a project, but now they weren’t sure what to do.
Eddie asked if she wanted a chicken tender, but she didn’t.
Neither of them did. “Maybe we should try to get some sleep,” Eddie said.
“We won’t be able to do anything until morning.
” He had no idea what they would do in the morning, though.
They had gone a good way down a steep hill into the woods, in a place where no one lived and no one drove.
There was no way he could get out of the car with his ankle, and he had no idea if either of the two car doors now facing skyward could be opened.
If they waited around for assistance, it seemed possible that none would come until the raspberries were ready for harvest, and that would be, what? June?
Daphne closed the visor and unfolded the silvered blanket. “How do you want to do this?” she asked, and Eddie, who still had the flashlight on, simply raised up his right arm.
“Careful,” he said.
“I know,” she answered.
Both of the girls were capable of running into him with the velocity of cannonballs, but they could also rest beside him like leaves. Daphne lay down like a leaf, and spread the thin silver tarp on top of them. “Look out the window,” she said quietly, by which she meant, shine the light outside.
The world was just the trunks of trees, little trees and big trees, and in-between trees, the tangle of wintry underbrush.
It was like they were in a submarine under the sea.
Eddie swept the light slowly right to left, and then hit on a pair of bright yellow eyes.
Two pairs of eyes! Daphne let out a yip and both of them jumped, and mother of god, the pain in his ankle was like nothing he had ever experienced, and still, he managed not to scream.
“Did you see it?” Daphne whispered.
“I saw it,” Eddie said. He turned off the flashlight. Nothing in his voice was natural.
“What do you think it was?” She kept her voice quiet, as if not wanting to attract the attention of the yellow eyes.
“Fox, maybe? Raccoons?” He did not say coyote because coyotes were too close to wolves, and there were no wolves in Massachusetts, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to get into the car so there was no sense in thinking about them.
In time, after the flashlight went off, their eyes readjusted to the darkness, and their ears adjusted to the depth of silence.
Now that they knew there were animals out there, they could hear them walking around.
Not much, not often, but enough to remind them they weren’t there alone.
Funny, but neither one of them thought to try out Buddy’s transistor radio.
“I wish we could see the stars,” Daphne said.
“Can’t you?” Both of them looked up, the passenger-side window like a sunroof, and while the night sky was mostly blocked by a crosshatch of black branches, there might have been a few bright bits of starlight visible.
It was nice having someone to lie on, nice having Eddie to lie on. Her body rose and fell slightly with his breath. The blanket did a surprisingly good job for being so thin. “I think I’d be afraid if I was here by myself,” she whispered.
He squeezed her beneath his right arm. “I’d be afraid, too,” he said.
That was the difference between Eddie and any other adult. Any other adult would have said, Don’t be afraid. But Eddie’s way was honest and infinitely preferable.
They stayed like this for a long time, listening and breathing, trying to fall asleep and having no luck. Daphne didn’t know how much time had passed when she asked Eddie if they were going to die. That was what she’d been thinking about.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, of course we will eventually, everything does, but I don’t think you and I are going to die in this car.”
“Why not?”
He waited a long time to answer, like maybe he was weighing out how much of the truth to tell her. “I read a story at work today,” he said. “A true story.”
“Tell me.”
“It might be a little scary for you. I don’t know.”
“Scarier than this?”
Eddie laughed. “Well, it’s sort of similar to this, which is why I was thinking about it.”
She put her head back down on the side of his chest. The quiet was such that she could hear his heart through his jacket. Eddie had definitely not dressed to spend the night in a car. “Once upon a time,” she said.
Eddie began. “Once upon a time, there was a woman named Mary Carter who lived on a ranch in Wyoming. Her parents lived on a ranch, and her grandparents had lived on a ranch. Same with her husband and his family. Everybody had pretty much grown up in the same place and they stayed there. They had a lot of land and they knew it well. They raised sheep and horses, lots more sheep than horses, but they liked the horses better. Raising the horses and training them was fun. I don’t think the sheep were much fun.
Each of the Carters had their own horse.
Mary had a horse, her husband had a horse, two of her children, a boy and a girl in high school, each had a horse.
And when they went out to do things on the ranch, they always took their own horse. Mary’s horse’s name was Whistler.
“She had named her Whistler because even when the horse was young, Mary could stand in the pasture and whistle for her and the horse would come. Apparently that’s not something many horses do.
And this was a beautiful horse, chestnut color with a white blaze and two white stockings.
There was a picture of the horse that came in with the book proposal, and in the picture it was like she was looking right at the camera. ”
“Was Mary in the picture with Whistler?”
Eddie shook his head. “Just the horse, which is a little strange, but, like I say, this was a good-looking horse. Whistler followed Mary around like a dog. She’d come up behind Mary and put her head on Mary’s shoulder.
Not anybody else’s shoulder, only Mary’s.
So even though this was one of the horses they were raising to sell, Mary decided to keep her.
She trained Whistler herself, for years and years, and once Whistler was trained, she gave the horse she’d been riding to her third child, the second daughter.
That horse’s name was Nutmeg. The daughter’s name was Sarah.
Sarah was still a little young to have her own horse, but it was okay. Nutmeg was a sweetheart.”
“Did you ever have a horse?” Daphne asked.
Eddie laughed. “I’ve never even touched a horse.”
She might have told him about going to day camp last summer and how there were two days in which they were put on horses and a counselor led them around, but she didn’t want to distract him, so she just said, “Oh.”
“So by the time this story starts, Whistler had been Mary’s horse for a long time.
Her children were grown, though Sarah still worked with her parents.
One day a storm came up and blew a gate open.
They’d been meaning to fix that gate for a while, the latch wasn’t right, but they hadn’t gotten around to it and now Nutmeg was gone.
Mary didn’t know how long ago it had happened, but Nutmeg was a sweet horse and she was old by now and she probably hadn’t gone far, so Mary saddled up Whistler in the rain and went out to look for her.
Whistler was about eight years old then.
Mary didn’t even have to whistle for her anymore.
Whenever she went out to the paddock, Whistler came to her.
She remembered thinking, Oh, Whistler would never run off.
“It was still raining, but it wasn’t bad.
She had a slicker on. Mary’s husband and daughter had taken the truck into Sheridan to get some things from the hardware store and the feed store and the grocery.
She didn’t leave them a note because the drive there and back with all the errands took half the day.
Mary would be back before they got home.
She put an apple and a couple of carrots in her pocket, got an extra bridle, and she and Whistler rode off to find Nutmeg. ”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Daphne said.
Eddie’s hand was on her head, on her hat. “I wasn’t sure this would be a great story to tell you. Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t stop.”
“Okay, but if you change your mind, you tell me. We can stop. I can tell you the other part when we’re back home, or I can tell you when you’re grown up.”
“Tell me.”