CHAPTER 3
Leda was lying in the bed beside me, staring at the ceiling, tears soaking the pillow beneath her head. “You thought I knew that story?”
“I don’t know. I thought you knew some of it? When I was nine, I thought you knew everything I knew. I thought we transferred information telepathically.”
“I didn’t get that one.”
“I’m not even sure how accurate my memory is.
I mean, it’s been a long time, and it was fairly traumatic.
And there’s no way Eddie was just giving me a recap of a book proposal he’d read.
He must have made parts of it up when he told it to me.
Recovered childhood memories, don’t you deal with this in your business all the time? ”
Leda nodded. “Absolutely. So what part are you sure about?”
I rolled over on my side to face her. “The horse. I’m positive about the horse.”
“Tell me.”
“Did the dead people show up? Did the dog show up? There’s no evidence.
Mary Carter had a broken ankle and broken wrist, two broken ribs and a collapsed lung.
There could have been an infection setting in, she probably had a fever, dehydration.
She went through a terrible fall out there, and no doubt things got worse as the days went on.
Did she see things she didn’t really see?
The further away she got from the actual event, the less she wanted to write about it, so maybe she wasn’t sure, or maybe she didn’t want to deal with a bunch of readers questioning her memories. ”
“This was pre-internet.”
“I’m sure they still had imaginative ways of destroying people back then.”
“Or maybe Mary was sure about what happened,” Leda said, “but as time went on, she came to think of it as private.”
I nodded. “I like that answer better, but either way, we’ll never know. The only thing anyone can be sure of was that the horse came back to get her, then brought her back to the ranch. Whistler was real.”
After breakfast and a long shower, after the walk to the train station and the train ride to Bronxville and the walk back to the house, I convinced myself that I should have called my mother by now, but there simply hadn’t been time.
This was Sunday, and Jonathan and I had only gone to the Met last Thursday.
But of course there had been free hours here and there, and in those hours I did not reach for the phone.
I hadn’t even turned my phone on. When I did, I saw I had four missed calls from my husband, who never left messages.
I had a tendency to turn off my phone, and Jonathan never left messages: two habits that were a source of irritation for both of us.
“Where have you been?” he said in lieu of hello.
If I was out of touch for longer than the length of a movie, then the answer to any question regarding my whereabouts was always going to be: At Leda’s. Jonathan knew that, no matter how many times he acted like he didn’t. “At Leda’s,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“We’ve been going through papers,” Jonathan said, “which include love letters, camp letters, insurance policies, electric bill stubs, report cards, dress patterns. Would you have thought of dress patterns?”
“They didn’t immediately spring to mind, but I guess it makes sense. They’re paper.” I waited for him to ask me how I was.
“These are unopened, uncut Vogue patterns from the fifties and sixties. My mother apparently meant to sew her own clothes, but she never got around to it. Dress patterns are like baseball cards. They’re worth money. Sydney’s been Googling.”
Sydney. Why did I keep forgetting that his daughter was part of the great clean-out?
“Are you losing your mind?” I asked, half hoping he would ask me if I was losing mine.
“Not really. We found the baseball cards, too. My father’s, mine.”
“Did you call the service that takes everything away?”
“No, the patterns kind of killed that idea. There’s a lot of nuance to the sorting process.”
“But won’t that take the rest of your life?”
“Not the rest of it.” He sounded more cheerful than he had the last time we’d talked, which felt like a month ago but had only been yesterday.
“I called Eddie,” I said.
“Did you? I’m glad. You should get together. He seemed like a nice guy.”
I waited for a minute. Jonathan had started talking to Bea.
“Go,” I said. “You’re busy.”
“Let me call you later,” he said. “Keep your phone on for a change.”
I told him I loved him because I did. I did love him.
There was always a period of adjustment after school let out, a sudden realization that once again my time was my own.
Every year the ghost memory of obligations followed me well into June (I have to grade papers!
I have to look at Persuasion before class!) until finally I shook them off, though the dreams in which I was late, unprepared, or in the wrong room speaking the wrong language never left me.
It was strange to have so much to think about and so little to do.
I thought about weeding the raised beds in back and then going into town to buy tomato plants.
I thought about cleaning the refrigerator.
I thought about finding a book I would never dream of teaching or recommending to a teenage girl.
Old Philip Roth novels! Our house was full of them.
I could spend the day on the couch reading.
But I called my mother instead. This story had gone on too long without giving her an entrance.
“Daphne?” she said.
“It’s me,” I said. “How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.” Why did my mother always make me feel like a telemarketer calling to rope her into a time-share?
“Good,” I said. “Good. Listen, Mom, I was thinking I might come see you.”
“Are you in town?” I caught the edge of nervousness in her voice, as if I were on my way over to discuss the time-share now.
“No, I’m home, but school is out and Jonathan’s gone to Wisconsin to help his sister clean out their mother’s house.”
“Where is his mother?”
“She died,” I said. “You know Jonathan’s mother died.”
“I did not know Jonathan’s mother died! That’s terrible. I would have called him. I would have sent him a note.”
Was it possible I hadn’t told her, maybe to keep her from calling him or sending a note? No, I must have told her. “I was thinking maybe I could come to see you,” I said, letting the other thread of conversation lapse.
“When?” I could almost hear her stepping back.
“I don’t know. Soon? Tomorrow maybe?”
“Christopher and his family are coming over tonight.”
“Which is great,” I said, “but they live two miles away. They’ll go home after dinner.
” That my half-brother and his family chose to live in such close proximity to his parents, one of whom was also my parent, was the great and abiding joy of those parents’ lives.
It also removed the burden from my sister and me.
Matthew, the younger one, lived with Lyle in Swampscott, a scant hour away, and near the beach!
Christopher and his family provided regular attentiveness while Matthew and Lyle provided vacations.
“Let me talk to Lucas,” my mother said. “Let me see what the plans are.” As if Lucas might have plans of which she was unaware.
“Sure.”
“It might be better to wait,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, “of course, but Mom?”
There was a dead space on the line and so I went ahead. “I wanted to tell you that Jonathan and I ran into Eddie Triplett at the Met on Thursday.”
I knew my mother when I was young. I knew her through her marriage to my father, though I was four when that one ended, and I knew her through her friendship and marriage to Eddie, though, given the recent facts, I hadn’t known much.
But in her marriage to Lucas, I had barely known her at all.
I had never made a place for myself in that relationship, and no place was made for me.
Then the boys were born and that was that.
I called to tell her about Eddie because, I supposed, I still believed the primary relationship was between the two of them.
Wasn’t it? They had been married. They had been divorced.
“Eddie?” she asked brightly. “Oh my god, how is Eddie Triplett?” It was more the voice I’d expect her to use if I’d run into her best friend from high school.
“He’s good,” I said hesitantly. “He seemed good.”
“You ran into him at the opera?”
“At the museum.”
“At the museum, that makes sense. Eddie had a great eye for art. We used to go to the museum in Boston, the big one?”
“The MFA,” I said. We were talking about museums?
“That’s right. He took me to the Gardner, too, and the one at Harvard.
Anything I know about art today is something Eddie taught me.
I can only imagine how thrilled he must have been to see you.
He loved you, Daphne, you know that. He adored you.
After that car accident? He was so torn up about having hurt you. ”
“He didn’t hurt me.”
“Well, he was upset about the scar on your face. He was. All those stitches. You looked like someone had hit you with an axe. He’s not still at Random House, is he? He must have retired by now.”
As much as I would have liked to separate out each of those sentences and address them individually, I could not. I had to pick. “You knew he was at Random House?”
“I read Publishers Weekly. Even after I stopped working, I kept up with things.”
Someone started talking in the background and my mother stopped to listen. “I’m talking to Daphne,” she said. “Two more minutes.”
Lucas walked away.
“He didn’t retire,” I said. “He’s still working.”
“Oh, bravo, Eddie!” she said. “Good for him. Publishing is short on wisdom these days. All the mentors took the buyout. Of course I’ve been gone for decades, but I have to tell you, part of me still wishes I hadn’t retired.
I stay so busy around the house, and at the end of the day I have no idea what I’ve accomplished. ”
I took the phone away from my ear. I stared at it.
My mother was still talking. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen him, but—”
“Forty-four years,” I said, mystified.