CHAPTER 7 #4
And so we went, Jonathan, Eddie, my mother, and I, into the taxi and out again, up the stairs and through the ticket line.
Half of the tourists on the island of Manhattan had decided to see the Met that day.
Eddie had forgotten his cane and I had forgotten to remind him.
He held my arm. When finally we had made it through Medieval, he stopped.
“The two of you,” he said to Jonathan and my mother, “are going to have to go ahead. Daphne and I are going to sit on that bench right there.” He nodded his head to the far corner, past the choir screen from the Cathedral of Valladolid.
“You take all the time you need, and if we get tired of waiting, Daphne will send a text to say she’s taken me home. ”
As Jonathan readied himself to present an alternate plan, my mother interceded. “That was my favorite thing about you,” she said to Eddie. “One of my many favorite things about you. You always knew what to do.”
“Always,” Eddie said.
“We won’t be long,” she said. Then she folded her hand into my husband’s arm, and off they went, the two of them, while we laid claim to the bench.
“Such a nice man, Jonathan,” Eddie said.
“He is.”
“Your mother will have a better time with him anyway.”
“And we’ll have a better time.”
“People are art,” he said. “It’s enough to just watch the people.”
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He nodded. “A little too much activity, that’s all. Nothing like trudging through the snow.”
“The past will take it out of you.”
He held my hand. “My brave girl.”
I looked out at the paintings of dragons and saints.
“When I was walking through the field, I kept thinking about Mary Carter and her little dog, and how great it would be to have a dog come bounding through the snow to see me through. I’d never had a dog, and certainly not a horse, and at that point I didn’t know a single person who had died.
That’s what it means to be nine. You can’t come up with any dead people who would show up to help you die in the snow.
I kept wishing I’d asked you if you knew any dead people. ”
“Plenty,” Eddie said.
“I would have borrowed some.”
They kept the light low in the museum, enough to see the paintings but not enough to leach the color away.
We watched the never-ending stream of people pass through the choir gate, half in one direction and half in the other, and I thought about the wedding at the Plaza.
What a night that had been! We needed to find another wedding we could go to, just for half an hour or so.
Surely Eddie could manage that. We would drink champagne and dance, or we would watch them dance.
I had been a teacher at a girls’ school for a long time.
I could find a wedding, and if I couldn’t find one, I could put one on, or ask Polly to do it.
She would be so happy to do that for Eddie, but then she would insist on keeping all the dances for herself.
“What if,” Eddie said, “you wrote it all down?”
“Wrote what down?”
“Everything. Mary Carter, the raspberry farm, the car accident, the snow, the two of us. You could change the details. That’s how people do it.”
“So you do it. You’re the one who wanted to be a novelist.”
“We were both going to be novelists.”
“I was nine,” I said. For today, that was my excuse for everything.
“You’ll be the writer and I’ll be the editor.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Immortality,” he said.
“How so?”
“Because in the book, I don’t die. In the book, we’re sitting on this bench, talking about a book about the two of us, and then the story stops with us waiting for Jonathan and your mother to come back.”
“It just stops?”
“Well, there would be a little something at the end, a denouement. Maybe the character looks back.”
“Hasn’t there been enough of that?”
“Never enough of that. I’m going to use your shoulder. Do you mind?”
“Help yourself,” I said.
Eddie rested his head against my shoulder. “I didn’t realize I was so tired. I need to close my eyes for a minute.”
This minute. He was right. Stop everything here. “What about the book?” I asked.
“You’re the smart one,” he said, yawning. “You’ll figure it out.”
(SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)
Before the firemen and policemen cut Eddie from the car (they took the windshield out, that’s how they did it), the ambulance men had stabilized his ankle with an inflatable cast. Daphne couldn’t stop staring at it.
“If I fall in a swimming pool on the way to the hospital, my foot will float,” he said to her.
There was some discussion among the various county employees as to whether Daphne should ride in the police car or the ambulance, but Eddie shut it down.
“She stays with me,” he said. The next thing Daphne knew, one of the men lifted her up and put her inside the ambulance, then they slid Eddie’s gurney through the wide-open doors.
“This is a lot nicer than our last place,” Eddie said.
Two of the men got in behind them and the third one got in the front. They closed the doors. The man then lifted Daphne onto the second gurney, covered her with a blanket, and strapped her down. “Like a big seat belt,” he said.
“I can—” she started to say, but then gave up after those two words. There would be no telling them all the things she had already done.
“Always wear your seat belt,” Eddie said.
Then they were driving away. Through the back windows, Daphne could see the red lights spinning out across the snow.
“Could you ask the guy in the front to turn the siren off?” Eddie asked. “I have a headache.”
The siren snapped off just like that. Eddie turned his head to the side and looked at her. “I made up the headache,” he whispered.
“Good,” she whispered back. There was no one out there to alert anyway.
“You are a bloody mess, Duck,” Eddie said. “I hope they can get you pieced back together right.”
It made her laugh.
One of the men took Eddie’s blood pressure, so the other one asked if Daphne could get her arm out of her coat so he could take hers.
While struggling to free her arm, she suddenly remembered Frank. “I didn’t say goodbye to Frank!” She was horrified. How had she forgotten Frank? She wanted to ask them to go back, but she knew they wouldn’t do it.
“Who’s Frank?” Eddie asked.
“Didn’t you see him? It was his house I went to. He was the one who called the ambulance, and then he came with me to wait in the car. He used to work at the raspberry farm.” All her life she would remember Frank, his kindness.
“What a good man,” Eddie said. “Once we’re better, we’ll go back and find him, tell him thank you.” He closed his eyes. “Is there anything in this bus for ankle pain?”
“Hang on, chief. We’re only a few minutes away,” the ambulance man said.
“Is there a child’s cuff on your side?” the other ambulance man asked.
The first one looked, but he couldn’t find it.
“Do you know what my daughter did?” Eddie said to no one.
“Don’t tell me she drove the station wagon off the road in a snowstorm,” the first ambulance man said.
“That was me,” Eddie said. “But she was the one who rescued us. She climbed out of the window and jumped off the car, climbed up the hill in the snow, went door to door until she found Frank, then she brought Frank and all the rest of you back to save me.”
“Well, that’s something,” said the second ambulance man, the one that Daphne thought of as hers. He patted the blanket that covered her.
Then the ambulance went over quite a bump, which was followed by a fishtail on the ice.
Eddie made the smallest sound and Daphne reached out her hand to him and he took it.
Hand in hand, they remained for what was left of their time together.
She was already missing the station wagon, those frozen hours when they had almost died. It was the happiest she’d ever been.
“Line up all the daughters in the world,” Eddie said to the ambulance men. “You’re never going to find a girl as good as this one.”