“How did you know?” she asked Eddie when at last she found a pay phone.
Eddie sighed. “My brother. His appendix ruptured when we were kids.”
“Martin?” Had there been some other brother she never knew about, the one who didn’t make it?
“He was so god-awful sick and my mother kept trying to give him ginger ale. By the time she finally got him to the hospital, it was a mess. The doctor said another half an hour and he would have died.”
“Your poor mother,” Abigail said, knowing how close she’d come to letting Leda sleep. All of life’s mistakes were the fault of the mother, all of the suffering.
“Listen,” Eddie said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll come to the hospital and get the car, give you a kiss, then I’ll pick up Daphne and we’ll go home and pack a bag for you and Leda, then we’ll come back to visit. Does that sound good?”
Eddie had come into the marriage without a car. He had a two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge and took the T to work like any sensible Boston bachelor. Now he paid half her rent in Winchester, paid half of the car insurance. She had forgotten about Daphne but didn’t say so. She might only have been able to hold one child in her head at a time. She told him that sounded good. She told him to bring the manuscript she’d left on her desk.
Would she have been like Eddie’s mother, who, on the occasions they had met, struck her as more competent than she couldever dream of being? Without Eddie’s preemptive direction, would she have left Leda in her bed, a cool washcloth on her forehead, only to find her dead later in the day? Abigail sat down in the hallway, near the doors where they had taken her daughter away. She closed her eyes and felt the sickening speed of her heart, like being on the turnpike when the eighteen-wheeler starts to merge into your lane from the right because it doesn’t see you there, the concrete barriers on the left, eighteen inches from the edge of the side mirror. It was the almost death that terrified her, the almost derailment of everything she had ever known. Sitting in that hallway, she turned her fear into rage because she could not abide the fear. Her rage took the shape of Buddy Zabriskie, who, on this freezing January day, was no doubt sitting in a shed somewhere mending lobster traps, his phone long disconnected for nonpayment. He didn’t know that his younger child had almost died, or that she had been saved by the good thinking of one Eddie Triplett.
Eddie, her office pal who paid for lunch, who sat beside her at book launch meetings and passed her notes, who wanted to marry her, who did marry her. Eddie, who loved her and loved her girls. He had been willing to take the whole package. Eddie, who knew where the appendix was located, because honestly, she did not. There ought to be some sort of a test you had to pass before you were allowed to have children. First you would have to be able to identify a good man (she’d had to repeat a grade on that one), then prove a basic proficiency in how to keep yourchild alive. Abigail knew nothing at all. Her greatest fear was that she and Buddy Zabriskie were soulmates, and that they should be together on that boat with no one to hurt but one another and some fish.
Daphne and Leda attended an after-school program, which gave Abigail enough time to finish her workday. That’s where Eddie picked Daphne up. Full-on dark of night arrived before five o’clock in the winter, and so she was waiting behind the glass front doors of the school in what she referred to as her teddy bear coat, a pale brown coat made of fake fur that made the child look like a large stuffed animal. She had wanted the coat for her birthday. She had begged for it, and she had won.
When Daphne saw the station wagon, she ran outside, waving goodbye to the one remaining teacher and a couple of the other leftover kids. Eddie was rarely the one to pick her up, but it was not unprecedented.
“Leda threw up in the cafeteria,” Daphne said, sliding into the front seat even though she knew she was supposed to sit in the back. She wasn’t about to sit in the back. “She got sent home from school.”
“So I heard.”
“She threw up everywhere. All the kids were talking about it.”
“They should cut her some slack,” Eddie said, correcting the mythic pack of other children but not Daphne. “She’s pretty sick.”
Daphne looked at him. “How sick?”
“She had to go to the hospital and have her appendix out. She’s going to be fine.”
“Leda had surgery?” People in books had surgery. The thought of surgery was so glamorous he might as well have said she’d gone to New York City for the day.
Eddie nodded, eyes on the road. “Like I said, she’ll be fine.”
“Are we going to the hospital to see her?” Daphne liked her sister. Even when they were children, they had liked one another. People talked about how pretty Leda was, but it didn’t bother Daphne because privately Daphne knew Leda to be a strange little bird.
“We’re going to run home and pick up some things Leda and your mother need, then we’ll go to the hospital so we can check on both of them.”
Daphne thought about this. “We should bring them dinner.”
“I don’t think Leda can have dinner.”
“Sure, but Mom can.”
So that’s what they did. They went back to the house, and Daphne packed a bag for her sister: a nightgown and bathrobe, underwear, toothbrush, a bear who was named Mr. Crispy for reasons none of them could remember. Eddie packed a bag for his wife. They went to their favorite chicken place and got a grilled chicken sandwich and French fries for Abigail (“No onions, double sauce,” Daphne told the girl at the counter). They got a bucket of chicken tenders with honey mustard dipping sauce for the two of them to eat later at home. They got three Cokes.
The visit didn’t turn out to be much of a visit. Leda slept through the whole thing. She looked so insubstantial in the hospital bed, her golden hair caught up in a blue paper surgical bonnet. Her mother told them Leda’s appendix ruptured during surgery, so it had taken the doctor longer than he’d expected. She would be monitored overnight and, if she was stable, she could go home in a few days. Fortunately it was Friday, so Abigail had at least two days before she had to start worrying about work.
Daphne’s mother looked like she’d been sitting by that bed since the day Leda was born, so exhausted that Eddie offered to trade places with her. “You go home with Daphne,” he said. “I can sleep in the chair. If there’s any trouble, I’ll call you.”
But Abigail declined. Even if Eddie was more competent than she was, she wasn’t about to drop her guard now.
When Eddie and Daphne headed home, it was barely past six, but the night was so cold and dark it looked more like the small hours of the morning, not that it mattered. The big car was warm and smelled of chicken, and while Daphne wished that she were the one who’d had her ruptured appendix removed and been laid out in a hospital bed like Sleeping Beauty, she was also glad to be the one with Eddie. Daphne had no details from the time her parents had lived together, and in the years since their divorce, she had seen her father so infrequently that the thought of him made her uncomfortable. What did she know about her father? That he was burly. That he often but not always had a beard and his face above that beard was either sunburned or wind-chapped. That hehad never smelled of fish on the times she’d seen him but she had assigned the smell of fish to him all the same. Whenever she passed the tank of lobsters in the grocery store, their bound claws tapping sadly at the glass, she wanted to ask them, Did my father do this to you?
Eddie Triplett had been cut from an entirely different piece of cloth, and it was the same piece of cloth that Daphne came from, or that’s what she told herself. He read constantly, and not just finished books. He read books that were loose piles of paper and marked them up to make them better. “A work in progress,” he liked to say, as if the novel needed some help getting on its feet. At her insistent begging, he once marked up a theme paper she had written for English class, correcting it the way a teacher would so that she could write it out a second time, fixing her mistakes before handing it in. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” Eddie said, circling her misspellings, her word repetitions.
