Daphne pulled out the Kleenex for him, and Eddie blew his nose. “I’m going into the back,” she said. “Find out what’s there.”
“Will you please be careful?” Movement was the enemy as far as his ankle was concerned. He was increasingly terrified of even the slightest jiggling, which meant he couldn’t envision how their rescue would proceed, as obviously being rescued meant being removed from the car.
“I will,” she said. She gave him the chicken and the cup of ice. She closed the visor because the tiny light would do her no good in the back and she didn’t want to run it down. She maneuvered her body over the front seat, careful not to put her foot in Eddie’s face. It wasn’t like she’d never done this before. She’d climbed from front to back, from back to wayback, and then to the front again while her mother did sixty-five on the Jersey Turnpike, going to visit her parents. Daphne would be tasked with getting something out of a suitcase that her mother needed, or getting a snack for Leda out of the grocery bag or a drink out of the cooler. That the car was now sideways in the forest, that there was no light whatsoever, affected her less than she might have thought. She knew every inch of the Chevy, which meant she knew where to go.
There were few remaining vestiges of Buddy Zabriskie in their life: in the girls’ shared bedroom, a framed picture of him with his arms around Daphne and Leda on the boat; in the kitchen, a glass lemon juicer that had belonged to his mother; above the mantel, a clock that had been given to Buddy and Abigail as a wedding present. But the best place to know that Buddy cared about them,that he continued to think of them, was in the Impala. He changed the oil whenever he came to visit, and, when necessary, flushed out the radiator and refilled the windshield wiper fluid. If the snow was bad, he appeared with chains. Who knew why he kept this up after the divorce, but he did. Maybe he understood that doing it himself was the only way it was going to get done. He had left behind the red duffel bag that lived in the wayback. He had told Daphne it was there, and that it was important. Eddie had likely never noticed it before. Her mother grumbled about it every time she threw something back there—“Buddy’s stupid bag of crap,” she called it. But she didn’t throw it away, or she hadn’t the last time Daphne checked. If she got back there and the duffel was gone, she would never speak to her mother again.
“What are you doing?” Eddie called.
“Reconnaissance,” Daphne said.
“Big word,” Eddie said.
“I’m looking for stuff,” she said.
“I know what it means,” Eddie said.
It turned out she was good in the dark. She was good crawling over things. Maybe she wouldn’t have done as well as Leda being in the hospital and having her ruptured appendix removed. Maybe they were both holding down the crisis best suited to their own abilities. Daphne flipped her body over the backseat, landing in that small space that contained the spare tire. She ran her fingers along the little piece of carpet and found the duffel bag. She shivered from excitement and from the significant cold. She hadn’tmade the emergency bag, but she was the one who knew of its existence. That was her contribution. She made the handles into shoulder straps and arranged it on her back like a jet pack. “I got it!” she called out to the front of the car.
“Got what?” Eddie asked.
“I got my dad’s bag.”
It would be an overstatement to say that Buddy saved the day, but he made a material contribution to their survival for which he would never receive credit. He was a man who spent most of his life on the water, and there was no going to Ace Hardware to pick up what you needed while at sea. The trick was to always think ahead, be prepared for any inevitability. In the years that Buddy spent with Abigail, the Impala was the closest thing to a boat that he had, and so even on land, he was ready. The duffel bag was proof of that.
Daphne had to contain herself on the way back. Her natural inclination was to flip over the front seat and land next to Eddie in a celebratory Spider-Man move, but she remembered. “My dad left an emergency bag in the back of the car,” she said, returning to the front seat as quiet as a cat. She positioned herself in the passenger-side wheel well, bracing her feet into the center console so as not to slide forward onto Eddie’s foot.
“Are you kidding me?”
She patted the bag, then opened up the makeup mirror again so she could show him in the little light.
Eddie whistled. “Buddy Zabriskie, you are some sort of man.”
“Dad always says he was prepared for everything in life except Mom.”
Eddie laughed, knowing he shouldn’t laugh. “Open it, let’s see what we’ve got.”
And so she did, and the first thing she put her hand on was the cold silver cylinder of a flashlight. She handed it to Eddie, who flipped it on. “Oh my god, Daphne, will you look at this? I might have thought to put a flashlight in a car—possibly—but I can guarantee you the batteries would be dead when I needed it.”
“Dad changes out the batteries.” She ran her hands through the bag. “And he puts in extra batteries. See?” She held them up.
Eddie turned the light on her and she squinted. “Oh, Duck, I don’t mean to alarm you, but you’re a bloody mess. Is there any medical stuff in there?”
Was there ever! Antibiotic ointment, gauze pads, alcohol pads, Band-Aids, an Ace bandage, a bottle of Tylenol. Eddie availed himself to three of those, washing them down with the melt from the ice cup. “Do you have a headache?” he asked her.
She did. He shook out two pills for her and handed over the cup.
“I’m going to do a better job on your head,” he told her. “What else did Santa Buddy leave us?”
There were four flares. There was a box of Diamond Strike On Box Matches in a sealed Ziploc bag. The thought of anything related to fire made Eddie’s stomach churn. “Put those back. What else?”
There was a small transistor radio, also with good batteries. There was a silver space blanket. “Who is this father of yours?” Eddie asked. “The Wizard of Oz?” He didn’t think they’d freeze to death, not overnight, not in the car, but whatever warmth the car heater had provided had seeped out long ago. Eddie was not about to turn the car back on to see what would happen. There were also four plastic bottles of water, all frozen solid. Four from a time in which it had been Abigail and Buddy and Daphne and Leda in the car. They weren’t going to die of dehydration either.
Once upon a time, there had also been four full-sized Snickers bars in the bag, the only full-sized candy bars Daphne and her sister ever had access to, though they got the bite-sized ones at Halloween. The candy bars were long gone.
Eddie told Daphne to take off her hat, and he went to work on her face, using the significant resources now available to him. She held the flashlight. The wound was a real bleeder, his folded handkerchief soaked through. He didn’t touch the alcohol wipe to the cut, but he used it to wipe up some of the blood. Then he put a glob of antibiotic ointment on a gauze pad and tapped it gently into place, wrapping her head up with the Ace bandage. “Good work, Mr. Triplett,” he said. “Nicely done.” He carefully put her hat back on.
“Shouldn’t we wrap your ankle?” Daphne asked.
