Chapter 2 #4
Eddie repositioned his shoulders. The left one was definitely wrong.
He hadn’t thought about it because his ankle took precedence over everything else in his body, but still, he could feel it.
“Mary went up the hill where the sheep liked to graze, but Nutmeg wasn’t there.
She decided to go farther up, up to where it turned rocky, because there was a place with a good view from which she’d be able to spot the horse, but when she got there, she looked all around and didn’t see her.
Part of the problem was the rain, which was coming down harder now.
She couldn’t see much of anything. She decided to keep going up, though Nutmeg could as easily have gone down to the lower pasture.
She had to look, she had to start somewhere.
Mary and Whistler went farther and farther, and even though Mary was sure she’d been over every square inch of this land, she didn’t remember it.
Nothing looked familiar. She rode out another mile or so and was starting to think this was stupid and she should go home and wait for her husband and daughter to come back and help her, when a bolt of lightning made Whistler rear up and Mary fell. ”
Daphne dug her face into Eddie’s arm. “I don’t like this part.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought this might be too scary.”
“Does she live?”
“She lives,” Eddie said.
“And the horses?”
“Everybody lives,” Eddie said, because the creation of narrative tension was not his objective. He only meant to take her mind off the fact that they were trapped in the freezing car. He meant to take his own mind off of that as well.
“Okay,” Daphne said, taking in a deep breath. “Go ahead. I’m ready now.”
“You’re a champion.”
“Tell me what happens.”
He told her it was a hard fall. Maybe Mary lost consciousness, but only for a minute or two.
When she opened her eyes, the rain seemed to be about the same, and the light, not that there was much light with all the clouds, but the light was the same.
Her ankle had gotten twisted in the stirrup.
She knew it was broken, and so was her wrist. Never put your arm out when you’re falling off a horse, but how can you stop yourself?
Based on how much it hurt to breathe, she guessed she’d cracked a rib or two.
She tried to sit up, but it was too much, so she lay back down in the grass.
She lifted her head and looked around in the rain for Whistler, but the horse wasn’t there.
“Whistler isn’t there?” Now Daphne was scared, because Mary was alone and badly hurt. She wouldn’t tell Eddie to stop the story, but she sort of wished he’d never started.
The lightning had spooked the horse. Wherever Whistler was, she was probably still running.
Mary put her head back down in the grass.
Now there were two horses gone. She was still thinking about what had happened in terms of the horses.
After another twenty minutes or so she began to understand what had happened to her.
She was badly hurt and alone in a place where no one in her family normally went.
She had no way to get herself out of there.
Eddie hadn’t thought this through. Not only was the story too scary, it was too close to home. But this was what he had started and now there was no way out but through.
The rain came and came. May was a month more tied to winter than spring.
Water seeped beneath Mary’s slicker and spread up the back of her flannel shirt and then around to the front until she was so wet she might as well not have been wearing a slicker at all.
She opened her mouth to drink what she could.
There was nothing else for her to do but wait.
The rest of the day passed and no one came.
At night she thought about wolves and the sheep.
She would have said she didn’t sleep at all, but when she opened her eyes, the rain had stopped and the sky was full of stars, so many stars it almost looked white in places.
“The way the stars looked before we went off the road,” Daphne said.
“Like that,” Eddie said, “and maybe even more because Mary was fifty miles from town and that town was small. There was no other light where she was. She looked at the stars. For all the pain she was in, she loved the stars.”
“She lay there and loved the stars?”
“There was nothing else to do.”
“Then what happened?”
Mary doesn’t die and Whistler doesn’t die and Nutmeg doesn’t die.
“She fell asleep for a while, and when she woke up, the stars were still there and Mary went back to watching them. She wondered how long she could last before anyone found her, and she thought that maybe if she didn’t last she’d be one of those stars.
She thought how terrible it would be for her husband and her daughters, and how they’d blame themselves for not being able to find her. ”
“And her son,” Daphne said. “Her son would feel bad, too.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. “Her son died years before. His name was Jeffrey.”
“How?” Daphne started to cry. The death of this character who had not been introduced by name proved too much for her.
Eddie should never have been in charge of a child, especially not a child he dearly loved. First he ran the car off the road, and then he finished her off with a story. “Oh, Duck, oh god, I’m so sorry I started this.”
“I want to know!” she cried. “You have to tell me.”
“I will, I will. We’re going to be novelists, you and I. Sometimes the stories are terrible.”
“Jeffrey!” she shouted.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not trying to protect you. I should have tried to protect you, but we’re way past that now. Mary Carter said in her proposal that her son, Jeffrey, had died three years before her accident. That’s all she said.”
“Are you going to ask her?”
Eddie stretched his neck back. Daphne was right.
The thought of this dead son was unbearable, not knowing how old he was or how it happened.
He must have been a grown man. “Yes,” he said.
“If I get to buy the book, if she writes it, she’ll need to tell us about Jeffrey.
A proposal is more like an outline. You don’t get much of what happened in the proposal.
” In fact, a few of the details he was making up himself to fill things out, but he would never make up a death for Mary Carter’s son.
“All right,” Daphne said. “But when you find out, you have to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you,” Eddie said.
Mary thought a lot about Jeffrey when she was lying there looking at the stars.
She thought about all three of her children and her husband.
She thought of how hard they worked. She thought about how much she loved them even though there was almost never enough time to think about loving them.
She thought of the ways she had failed them.
Jeffrey had wanted to go to school in Laramie, but her husband thought it was a waste of money and time.
Mary had said nothing about it either way and Jeffrey didn’t go to college, smart as he was. That was wrong.
Time went on like this until the darkness began to ease and a little dog came running through the pine trees.
Mary heard something, and she lifted her head to see the dog barreling towards her, mouth open, tail going, a little gray-and-white dog who then leapt onto her chest and began licking her face, licking, licking, one of his paws pushing down on her cracked rib, the one that had collapsed her right lung, and the pain was more than she could stand, but she stood it.
She would not have pushed the dog away for anything.
“Was it her dog?”
“It was her dog, the dog she’d had growing up, a dog named Marty. The greatest dog she had ever known, and everyone in her family had dogs.”
“Marty’s dead, too?”
“I’m afraid so. Marty had died a long time ago.”
Daphne and Leda lobbied tirelessly for a dog, and still they got nowhere.
Maybe after the accident their mother would change her mind.
“So if Mary can see Marty, does it mean Mary’s dead?
” She was looking for logic. Was Mary sick enough to hallucinate a dog?
She had already asked Eddie, and he swore that Mary didn’t die.
“Mary thought the same thing. If she was seeing her dead dog, then she must have died in the night. But if she was dead, then why was she still in so much pain?”
“If she’s dead, she shouldn’t be in any pain.”
“That’s what she thinks, and then she doesn’t think about any of it because she’s so happy to see her dog.
She’d cried for months when Marty died. She would go in her bedroom closet to cry because she was a ranch girl and ranch girls knew the way life worked.
Both of her parents had told her it was time to get over it, but there had never been a dog as good as Marty.
And look at him now! All youthful and shiny again, all his little white teeth still there.
He licked her neck and then he’d stop and look right in her eyes, then he’d lick her neck some more.
He barked! He had missed her as much as she had missed him, and now they were together and they were so happy. ”
Eddie stopped for a minute here so they could repair themselves, bask in the joy of Mary and Marty being reunited.
Then the story came together—click-click-click—in her mind. “Then Jeffrey comes,” Daphne said. She could hardly believe it.
“What?”
“That’s the story. If Marty comes, then Jeffrey comes. They’re coming to see her before she dies.”
Eddie was quiet. “How did you know that?”
“That’s the story,” Daphne said, feeling the intense wonder of it.
“I didn’t know,” Eddie said. “I was reading the proposal and I didn’t know.”
“Did anyone else come?”
“Susan, her best friend from childhood, who had died when she was having her first baby, and her father, who had died ten years before, and Jeffrey.”
“Did they come one at a time, or did they all come together?”