CHAPTER 7 #3
When I got to the top, there was nothing but an enormous field of snow with snow coming down.
I wasn’t six steps from the woods, but when I turned around, I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d come out and I couldn’t see the car.
I thought about screaming to Eddie to see if he could still hear me, but I didn’t want to scare him.
Even though we had driven a station wagon into the trees, I knew I wouldn’t be able to find this exact place again.
I could find someone and bring them back to the top of this hill and still not be able to find Eddie.
“Before we found the bandages in the back of the car, Eddie had used his tie to bind his handkerchief to my head, and the tie was still around my neck.”
“The tie that binds,” Eddie said.
“I took it off and tied it to a branch so I’d know how to find you.”
Eddie shook his head in wonder. “If only my mother were alive so I could tell her what a noble purpose the tie she gave me served.”
“You took the right Zabriskie sister to the raspberry farm,” Leda said. “If Daphne had been the one to get appendicitis and you picked me up from school, we’d both be dead now.”
“What happened?” Jonathan asked for the second time.
(Later that night, at home in our bed, he would be nearly angry with me, asking why I hadn’t told him before, like maybe he would have been able to find me, to help me.
He was afraid, that was all. “The thought of you dying as a child,” he said, but that was the end of the sentence.)
“There was nothing in that field,” I said.
“No house, no road, just white. I wondered if Eddie was wrong about the farmhouse, or maybe this wasn’t even a raspberry farm, not that I knew what a raspberry farm was supposed to look like, but I would have thought there would be something there.
And if this wasn’t the raspberry farm, then there might not be two roads.
But it was cold and the wind was blowing the snow hard and so I decided to walk straight, figuring I was bound to run into something. ”
Years later, in school, they showed us a movie about Shackleton’s disastrous trip to the Antarctic and how his ship became trapped in the ice, and I sat at my desk with my eyes closed, and when I couldn’t stand the sound of the narrator’s voice another minute, I ran out of the darkened classroom and threw up in the hall.
The landscape was flat and wide. The snow came up to the middle of my calf and drifted into my galoshes.
I thought of how much colder it would be in the station wagon with the back window open and the snow coming in, and I tried to go faster.
Then I did see a house, a big one, and I ran to it, but there wasn’t anyone in there.
I banged on the door, but I could tell from looking in the windows.
I went out to the barn, not that I thought there would be people in the barn, but I thought maybe there would be a horse.
“A horse?” my mother asked.
“That’s a different story,” Eddie said.
Marta was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, listening.
The barn was locked, too. Everything was locked for the winter. When I came back to the house, I couldn’t remember what direction I’d come from and my footprints were gone. I finally decided to walk back towards the woods, thinking that if I walked along the edge I’d find the road.
“I can’t stand this,” my mother said.
And again, Eddie touched her hand. “She’s right here,” he said.
“I won’t make this long,” I said, “but I found Eddie’s tie hanging in the tree.
I felt like I’d been walking for an hour and somehow I’d come back to the exact same spot.
I thought about going back to the car and resting for a while.
I was tired then, and my feet were frozen.
” I looked at Eddie. I was that girl again, and he was waiting for me to save him.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you,” I said.
“Not possible,” Eddie said.
We had driven off the road—that’s what I had failed to factor.
If we had driven off the road, then the road couldn’t be that far away.
As soon as I’d had the thought, I found it.
There was a wide break in the trees and the snow was smooth.
I would have sworn it had been years ago that we had driven up to look at stars, but it had only been the night before.
“Doesn’t that seem impossible?” I said to Eddie.
He nodded at me, but he didn’t say anything.
“You were right about people being kind, even if you were making it up. The first house I came to was close to the road, a small yellow house. The lights were on. The woman who answered took one look at me and pulled me inside. She started calling for her husband, whose name was Frank, and I remember there were two little girls, and when they saw me, they started crying, screaming, really. There was a big dog and the mother was trying to hold the dog back and yelling at all of them to stop and calling for her husband. Such a long stretch of silence and then all of that. Then Frank the husband came out. He had been shaving. He had a towel around his neck and shaving cream on half his face and he kneeled down in front of me and said, ‘What happened?’”
“What a question,” Eddie said.
“And I told him there had been an accident, and that my father was still in the car, and the mother looked at me in complete terror and she said, ‘Dead?’ And then all the barking and screaming stopped for a second, or it probably didn’t stop, but it did in my mind.
I felt so lucky, and I told her, no, no, not dead, but you were stuck. We needed help.”
I wish I could remember their last name.
Frank had a cool head, I remember that. I asked to use the bathroom, and it seemed like by the time I came back there was an ambulance and a police car and a fire truck pulling up to the house.
I know it couldn’t have been that fast, but that’s what it felt like.
Frank was dressed and ready. He’d wiped the rest of the shaving cream off his face, and I could see the tracks in his dark beard that the razor had made.
His wife said I should stay there with her, and before I had the chance to object, he said no, that I was the one who knew where the car was.
And I did know. Frank and I got in the back of the police car and the two policemen asked me questions about what time the accident had happened and why we had been up at the raspberry farm to begin with.
“We were going to look at the stars,” I said, and the officer who was driving nodded and said he used to bring his kids up there sometimes to look at stars, and Frank said they went there, too. I told them to make a right at the top of the road, and then I showed them where the tie was in the tree.
“I bet the cops loved that,” Eddie said.
“They didn’t let me go with them to find you. I’d turned into a child again. They didn’t want me out in the snow or they didn’t want me to see the car. Maybe they thought you were going to be dead. They said they’d be able to find you.”
“And so they did,” Eddie said.
“I wanted to go,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I was grateful to have been forbidden, to be made to sit in the overheated car. I couldn’t imagine how they were going to get him out of there.
“Policemen, firemen, three guys from the ambulance, quite a party,” Eddie said.
“I stayed in the police car with Frank, and he told me a whole story about how he had worked at the raspberry farm every summer when he was growing up, and how he was always scratched from the canes and sunburned and bitten up by mosquitos, but then he got older and got a real job and he missed it. He said even now, every summer, he wished he was picking raspberries.”
“And while he was telling you about the raspberries, they were down the hill cutting Eddie out of the car,” Jonathan said.
“Some parts of the story do not bear revisiting,” Eddie said.
“It seemed like it happened so fast,” I said.
Eddie said that was not his memory.
“The whole group came out of the woods together,” I said to Eddie, “carrying you on a stretcher, and I got out of the car and ran over so I could hold your hand. I had never been so happy to see anyone.”
“Was it still snowing?” Leda asked.
“It snowed forever,” Eddie said. “I think it snowed all week.”
“They put us in the ambulance side by side,” I said. “You looked terrible.”
“So did you,” he said. “Shockingly bad. I think it must have been the lights in the ambulance.”
I smiled. “That must have been it.”
Jonathan refilled my mother’s glass of champagne, then handed the bottle to Eddie.
“Please tell me that’s the end of it,” my mother said. She looked as though she would not have survived another word.
“Yes,” I said. “Ten minutes later we were at the hospital. You met us in the emergency room and that was that.”
“That was that,” my mother said sadly.
They took Eddie off to surgery. They sewed my face back together. There was nothing left to talk about. A plum torte sat in the middle of the table, but none of us had the will to push ahead to dessert.
“Someone think of a better ending to lunch,” I said. “I’ve ruined it.”
My mother, who was a great one for handkerchiefs, took hers out of her pocket. “You lived,” she said, “both of you. What sort of better ending are you looking for?”
When it was time for us to leave, Leda admitted she still had work to do on her column, which was about how to deal with the anger that came up around the uneven distribution of inheritance.
“Goodness,” Eddie said. “Go, go.”
Steve said he would take her home.
My mother wanted to go to the Met. “That’s where she found you, isn’t it?” she said to Eddie.
“In Contemporary Art.”
“What do you think?” I asked Eddie. “Are you up for it?”
“It’s perfect. By the time I come home, the wonderful Marta will have set the whole place right again.”