“Itchy.” I understood the stitches were small potatoes compared to everything else going on.
“You know scars make people more interesting. And not just pirates, all people.”
When I asked Eddie if he had any scars, he kicked back the covers and stuck out his bare leg, the one without the cast. His leg was pale and covered in long dark hair, an unattractive leg and still somehow thrilling to see. “Right there,” he said. “The neighbor’s dog Judith tried to take my kneecap off. Twenty-three stitches, thank you very much.”
I had had twenty-six stitches in my face, but I didn’t want to seem competitive. “How old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“What happened to Judith?”
“Not a thing. Her family had a nice, big backyard, and they fenced it in. I don’t think Judith was inconvenienced at all.”
I smiled. I had always wanted a dog.
“You know what I like about you, Daphne?”
“What?”
“You asked about the dog. You knew I was fine. You’re looking right at me. You wanted to make sure Judith was okay.”
“Well, I’m glad she didn’t eat your kneecap.”
“You and me both,” he said. “Go on and take the mail to your sister. I’m going to go back to work. No one wants to be fired when they’re in the hospital.”
I went to the bed and took the letter and gave Eddie a kiss. I believed that we were inseparable. We’d always liked each other hugely, but things were different now.
Buddy came to see us in the hospital, or he came to see Leda but both of us were there. Our mother, who must have been the one to tell him, left the room as soon as he walked in, as if there were some urgent mission she had only now remembered. He brought Leda a stuffed lobster and made it scuttle up the bed, which made her laugh. He said he was sorry he hadn’t brought one for me as well. “You were in an accident, too,” he said, maybe thinking that Leda’s appendix had ruptured in a car wreck. I told him I was fine, and Leda said the lobster could sleep on the nightstand between our beds so that it would be both of ours.
Four days later everything went to hell. I walked to our house after school and found my mother in the kitchen, sobbing, sobbing, her head down on the kitchen table, shoulders heaving. Surely Eddie or Leda was dead—I just didn’t know which one. Either way I wouldn’t be able to survive. I stood in the doorway, shaking, and when at last she looked up and saw me, my mother said that she and Eddie were getting divorced.
“What?”
She took a paper napkin out of the holder on the table andpressed it to her eyes. She could not stop crying. “I’m divorcing Eddie.”
“Why?” Was that an actual word I said, or did I make a sound?
“He could have killed you.” It was as if the accident had just happened, or was happening right this minute—BOOM!—only this time she was in the car. “Driving around in the dark like that, going out at night.”
“We were on our way home. It wasn’t his fault,” I said. I wasn’t crying. No one was dead, and what she was talking about was some sort of lunacy I could surely explain away.
“Leda’s in the hospital at death’s door, and then he takes you out and almost kills you.”
It was my death she was worried about? It was me she was afraid of losing? “The car slipped.”
“I can’t trust him. I can’t trust him with my children.”
“It’sEddie,” I said, because surely she’d forgotten who she was talking about. Eddie was more trustworthy than the rest of us put together.
Some version of this conversation happened again another twenty or thirty or forty times over the next month, and through the constant telling my mother honed the tale. Eddie had to leave our family because he had been so careless with my life.Hehad sentmeout in the snow to find help.Hedid not bother to do it himself, even though his ankle was broken and his foot was pinned in place by the emergency brake. It was my fault that they were getting divorced?
“Not your fault, not my fault.Hisfault,” my mother said.
That part I never listened to because clearly it was my fault if she had to get divorced for my safety. That was the truth I carried with me. I chewed it up and swallowed it without examination. Iwas nine. My heart exploded with the blow.
But now I was fifty-three and driving back from LaGuardia on a Saturday morning, and for the first time I was wondering what had changed between the day after the accident, when we had been found at the raspberry farm, and four days after that, when I came upon my mother crying in the kitchen. What about those four days in which my mother went from one floor of the hospital to the other, sitting by Leda’s bed, sitting by Eddie’s bed? She was exhausted and often wept, but she was weeping with gratitude. Everyone was alive.
At nine I didn’t know enough to interrogate the story, and when it all became too painful to carry, I put it away. But it wasn’t painful now. Now this thing we’d lived through was a curiosity, and not one I was going to solve on the Hutchinson River Parkway coming back from the airport. I wasn’t going to call my mother until I had sorted it out, talked it through with Leda. When I got back to the house, I called Eddie instead.
