Mary doesn’t die and Whistler doesn’t die and Nutmeg doesn’t die.
“She fell asleep for a while, and when she woke up, the stars were still there and Mary went back to watching them. She wondered how long she could last before anyone found her, and she thought that maybe if she didn’t last she’d be one of those stars. She thought how terrible it would be for her husband and her daughters, and how they’d blame themselves for not being able to find her.”
“And her son,” Daphne said. “Her son would feel bad, too.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. “Her son died years before. His name was Jeffrey.”
“How?” Daphne started to cry. The death of this character who had not been introduced by name proved too much for her.
Eddie should never have been in charge of a child, especially not a child he dearly loved. First he ran the car off the road, and then he finished her off with a story. “Oh, Duck, oh god, I’m so sorry I started this.”
“I want to know!” she cried. “You have to tell me.”
“I will, I will. We’re going to be novelists, you and I. Sometimes the stories are terrible.”
“Jeffrey!” she shouted.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not trying to protect you. I should have tried to protect you, but we’re way past that now. Mary Carter said in her proposal that her son, Jeffrey, had died three years before her accident. That’s all she said.”
“Are you going to ask her?”
Eddie stretched his neck back. Daphne was right. The thought of this dead son was unbearable, not knowing how old he was or how it happened. He must have been a grown man. “Yes,” he said. “If I get to buy the book, if she writes it, she’ll need to tell us about Jeffrey. A proposal is more like an outline. You don’t get much of what happened in the proposal.” In fact, a few of the details he was making up himself to fill things out, but he would never make up a death for Mary Carter’s son.
“All right,” Daphne said. “But when you find out, you have to tell me.”
“I’ll tell you,” Eddie said.
Mary thought a lot about Jeffrey when she was lying there looking at the stars. She thought about all three of her children and her husband. She thought of how hard they worked. She thought about how much she loved them even though there was almost never enough time to think about loving them. She thought of the ways she had failed them. Jeffrey had wanted to go to school in Laramie, but her husband thought it was a waste of money andtime. Mary had said nothing about it either way and Jeffrey didn’t go to college, smart as he was. That was wrong.
Time went on like this until the darkness began to ease and a little dog came running through the pine trees. Mary heard something, and she lifted her head to see the dog barreling towards her, mouth open, tail going, a little gray-and-white dog who then leapt onto her chest and began licking her face, licking, licking, one of his paws pushing down on her cracked rib, the one that had collapsed her right lung, and the pain was more than she could stand, but she stood it. She would not have pushed the dog away for anything.
“Was it her dog?”
“It was her dog, the dog she’d had growing up, a dog named Marty. The greatest dog she had ever known, and everyone in her family had dogs.”
“Marty’s dead, too?”
“I’m afraid so. Marty had died a long time ago.”
Daphne and Leda lobbied tirelessly for a dog, and still they got nowhere. Maybe after the accident their mother would change her mind. “So if Mary can see Marty, does it mean Mary’s dead?” She was looking for logic. Was Mary sick enough to hallucinate a dog? She had already asked Eddie, and he swore that Mary didn’t die.
“Mary thought the same thing. If she was seeing her dead dog, then she must have died in the night. But if she was dead, then why was she still in so much pain?”
“If she’s dead, she shouldn’t be in any pain.”
“That’s what she thinks, and then she doesn’t think about anyof it because she’s so happy to see her dog. She’d cried for months when Marty died. She would go in her bedroom closet to cry because she was a ranch girl and ranch girls knew the way life worked. Both of her parents had told her it was time to get over it, but there had never been a dog as good as Marty. And look at him now! All youthful and shiny again, all his little white teeth still there. He licked her neck and then he’d stop and look right in her eyes, then he’d lick her neck some more. He barked! He had missed her as much as she had missed him, and now they were together and they were so happy.”
Eddie stopped for a minute here so they could repair themselves, bask in the joy of Mary and Marty being reunited.
Then the story came together—click-click-click—in her mind. “Then Jeffrey comes,” Daphne said. She could hardly believe it.
“What?”
“That’s the story. If Marty comes, then Jeffrey comes. They’re coming to see her before she dies.”
Eddie was quiet. “How did you know that?”
“That’s the story,” Daphne said, feeling the intense wonder of it.
