CHAPTER 7
Leda’s forehead rested on the heels of her hands, her fingers buried in her hair. Maybe she was thinking of her own children wandering around in the snow, or maybe she was thinking of me. We were back on the couch in her living room. “You were nine,” she said finally.
“Funny to think my bravest moment would come at nine.”
“You saved Eddie’s life.”
I shook my head. “Eddie wouldn’t have died.”
“Why not? Were there enough chicken tenders to last until spring? You saved Eddie’s life, you saved your own life, and no one ever said a thing about it.”
“Well, there was a lot going on. You’d had surgery, and then Eddie had surgery, and then Mom threw Eddie out.”
Leda raised her finger to her lips and I remembered to keep my voice down. Our mother was still asleep in Henry’s room.
It was late September. All three of Leda and Steve’s kids were off at school now.
I was back at school, teaching my favorite AP British survey, two sections of American lit, and the perennially oversubscribed creative writing workshop.
Jonathan was still the hospital administrator in Bronxville.
Our mother had come to New York to see all of us, or she had come to New York to see Eddie and so we provided the backdrop.
Eddie’s white count had dropped to reasonable levels after his last round of chemo.
Eventually it would come back up, but it hadn’t yet.
These were the good days. He was unsteady, but he held on to his cane.
He had invited all of us to lunch at his apartment, even though Leda said that she would have the lunch at her apartment. I offered, too.
“Catering,” he said. “All I’m doing is paying for it.”
“But you don’t need to do anything,” I said.
“Daphne,” he said.
And so I stopped. That’s one of the things about age. If you’re lucky, you learn when to stop.
It was Saturday, and Jonathan and I had come in early on the train.
The morning was so bright and blue that Jonathan and Steve decided to walk a loop in the park.
Steve claimed to have ideas about restructuring the Bronxville hospital’s debt, but Leda and I suspected they wanted to get out of the apartment before our mother woke up.
“What did you think had happened to us after the accident?” I asked Leda.
She sat for a while, trying to remember what she had known when she was seven.
One of the many things I loved about my sister was the way she managed to engage with every question.
“I thought you and Eddie had done something stupid,” she said finally, “going to look for raspberries in the middle of winter. And that he wrecked the car and broke his ankle and you cut your face. How did you cut your face, anyway? Did the windshield break?”
I shook my head. “I never figured that out. Did you know we were in the car overnight?”
Again, she stopped to consider the past, which was so far away from us now. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I knew any of it. Did you ever tell Mom what happened?”
“No, but she must have asked Eddie about it. I don’t know, maybe she didn’t. I remember Mom meeting us in the emergency room when the ambulance came in. Eddie and I each had our own gurney. I don’t know why they put me on a gurney, but they did—”
“Because you were nine,” my sister said. “And your face was bloody and you were probably hypothermic.”
“Anyway, Mom took it badly. In her defense, she’d probably been thinking you were going to die. She wasn’t in a good place to begin with. When she started screaming, it made me realize how calm Eddie had been through the whole thing, and how much that had helped.”
“What I want to know,” Leda said, “is how you lived without Eddie after that? I mean, I missed him. When I got home from the hospital and he wasn’t there anymore, I remember feeling incredibly sad, but to have gone through what you went through together?”
“I packed it away,” I said. “I put the whole thing in a box and shoved it behind the hot water heater in the basement. Then I forgot about it. Isn’t that what people do? They pack things up and then years later they hire you to unpack it for them.”
“I guess.”
Into our conversation about the past, our mother appeared present tense in the living room wearing a matching nightgown-and-robe set, a dark green satin covered in yellow hibiscus. She looked at the two of us on the couch. “Why did you let me sleep so late?”
“We don’t have to be at Eddie’s until noon,” Leda said.
“Hi, Mom.” I admired her for bringing a robe. I would never think to pack a robe.
“I don’t want to go over there looking like I just rolled out of bed.”
Leda looked at her watch. “So you have two and a half hours to pull yourself together.”
“Did you ever think this might be stressful for me? I haven’t seen the man in forty-five years.”
“You’re here because you wanted to see Eddie,” I said. “But if it feels stressful, don’t do it. We’re going to go, but you don’t have to. Either way is fine.”
“I’m going to go,” she said. “But I think the two of you could be a little sympathetic.”
“Sympathetic to what?” Leda asked.
“Do you want coffee?” I asked. Didn’t Lucas make her coffee in the morning?
She nodded. “That would be good.”
I started to get up, but Leda put her hand on my ankle. My feet had been resting in my sister’s lap. “Mom?” Leda began. “Did you know that when Eddie and Daphne were in the car accident, Daphne went out in the snow by herself to find someone to help them?”
“The car accident?” Our mother was seventy-seven and her posture was perfect.
For that matter, so was her face. She’d had work done, but that was decades before, and now she didn’t look done at all.
She only looked beautiful. A case could be made that she looked better than Leda or I did, certainly better than we looked this morning.
“She was nine,” Leda said.
“Is this some sort of an ambush? I didn’t send her out in the snow. Why are we talking about the car accident?”
“Nostalgia,” Leda said.
“Well, don’t get me started. If you talk about the car accident, I’m going to get mad at Eddie again, and this is not the day for me to be mad at Eddie.”
“She’s got a point,” I said, and got up to see if there was any coffee left in the pot.
I had invited our mother to stay with us in Bronxville, but she said that anyone who had the opportunity to stay in the city would choose to do so.
The only advantage to Bronxville was Jonathan, as our mother greatly preferred my husband to Leda’s.
Jonathan, she said, was naturally gregarious and fluent in all matters medical, a topic of conversation she particularly enjoyed, while Steve was remote and had a tendency to disappear even when he was in the room with you.
Still, when everything went on the scale, an Upper West Side apartment with a park view and Steve made a more compelling package than Bronxville and Jonathan.
Even with the two and a half hours allotted, we ended up having to wait. Steve and Jonathan came back from the park. Steve took a shower and then joined us while we drank our coffee. We sat in the living room, my sister and I with our husbands, and waited for our mother.
“I’m going to call for a car,” Steve said, looking at his phone.
“Don’t do it,” Leda said. “It will only be more frustrating if the car is waiting, too.”
There was nothing particularly egregious about our mother’s behavior, but the four of us were out of practice.
Steve’s mother had died when he was in college, Jonathan’s mother had been gone for two years, and Leda and I rarely had to deal with our mother because she favored her sons from her third marriage.
“My mother was the opposite,” Jonathan said. “If we were supposed to leave the house at ten o’clock, she’d be sitting alone in the car at nine thirty, waiting. As far as she was concerned, being on time was the same thing as being late.”
“Your mother was very conscientious,” I said.
“What about the happy medium?” Steve said. “The one where you leave the house at the hour you agreed to leave?”
But then she was there in her blue silk blouse and billowy trousers, two tasteful gold chains lying flat against her neck, impeccable makeup. “Is everyone ready?” she asked, as if she were the one who’d been waiting.
“We are now,” my husband said. He stood and held out his hand and she took his hand. She loved him so much more than Steve, who was on his phone now, ordering the car. That was the way it went in families. Everyone had their part.
The four of us would have taken the subway to Chelsea, but there were five of us and so an extra-large SUV was ordered.
“Look at you,” Eddie said when we came through the door. He went right to our mother, took her in his arms. “Look at my beautiful ex-wife.”
I could see Eddie’s apartment through my mother’s eyes.
She had always wanted to live in the city, but this place wouldn’t have been anywhere near big enough for all of us—that was what she was thinking.
Raising her family, she would have needed Leda’s apartment.
But now Chelsea was chic, and a place like this would be big enough if it were only the two of them.
There they stood, entwined, while Leda and I looked on and our husbands looked away. It had been one possible scenario—Eddie and Abigail—which could have worked had every single thing about them been different.
“I thought you’d be sick,” our mother said. “Daphne said you’ve been sick, but you look perfectly fine to me.”
“You’re very kind,” Eddie said. He continued to hold both her hands.
“The girls exaggerate everything,” she said. “The boys don’t do that. Turns out what they say about boys is true, they’re easier.”
“I’ve found that to be the case,” Eddie said, and our mother whooped out a laugh. He had caught her off her guard.
On the other side of the room, my sister put her hand in mine.
“You have wonderful children,” Eddie said, then added for good measure, “You’ve been a wonderful mother.”