“Other parents do it,” she said. And they did. Not her mother but other people’s mothers. Never the fathers as far as she knew.
The word “parents” struck him. “Other people’s parents.” “My parents.” That’s what won him over. Eddie made room for her in the big chair he sat in at night and showed her how to improve her work.
“What should we get for Leda?” Eddie asked when they pulled out of the hospital parking lot. “We could go to the grocery store and get her something special for when she comes home.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight, tomorrow, either way. What kind of ice cream does she like?”
“Raspberry sherbet,” Daphne said. She considered herself the authority on what her sister did and did not eat. “She likes raspberry yogurt, raspberry licorice, raspberry jam, raspberry-lemon snack cakes.”
“Did you know there’s a raspberry farm up on the hill over there?” Eddie asked. They were driving in the direction of home, but that also meant they would pass the grocery store.
Daphne shook her head. “There wouldn’t be raspberries now.” It was too cold for anything to be growing now. Old snow banked along the side of the road in dirty lumps.
“That’s true. That’s absolutely right. Have you ever picked raspberries?”
She wanted so much to say yes because maybe he had a special respect for children who picked their own raspberries, but it seemed important not to lie to Eddie, not to do anything that could mess things up between them. She shook her head again.
“I went a couple of years ago, before I knew you. Picking raspberries is a terrible business. The canes are covered in tiny thorns. But the place was pretty, way up on top of a big hill. Do you want to see it?”
“In the dark?”
“If you wanted to. There are all sorts of things to see in the dark if you can sit with it for a while, let your eyes adjust.”
Her mother would never drive to a raspberry farm in the middleof winter when there weren’t any raspberries. It was the kind of thing Daphne only could have done with Eddie. “Are we going to walk around?” She was thinking of those thorny canes.
Eddie shook his head. “I don’t have a flashlight. We’ll stay in the car, eat the chicken, look at the stars. There’s hardly any moon at all. Can you see it over there?”
Daphne craned her head. She saw the silver crescent moon.
“See how small it is? That means the stars are going to be bright.”
Whenever either Eddie or Daphne thought of this excursion later in life, what struck them was the utter pointlessness of it. As many times as they were interrogated as to what the purpose of their trip had been, no purpose could be found. How did it happen? Why did you think it was a good idea? It happened because Leda liked raspberry sherbet, which got them talking about actual raspberries. They thought it was a good idea because it was so dark that the stars would be especially bright. “Leda was in thehospital,” her mother would say, as if one child’s surgery logically precluded another child’s trip to a raspberry farm in winter. But there was no logic. Stop looking for it.
“I’d like to see the stars,” Daphne said.
Eddie reached out his hand and patted her coat above her woolly knee, which was his way of saying, You and me, kiddo. He took a left on High Street, heading off in a direction Daphne didn’t know. The heat vent blew directly on her boots, which were galoshes because she’d outgrown her snow boots. The front seat was a lot warmer.
The raspberry farm hired workers in the summer and early fall to pick the berries and take them to a co-op that sold them to grocery stores or sent them to processing plants, but several acres were U-Pick, where families drove up for the day, usually Saturday or Sunday, to crawl around picking berries and getting scratched. There was a farmhouse set back on the property where the owners lived, but that was nowhere near the dirt U-Pick parking lot, and anyway, the owners left for Fort Lauderdale every year after Christmas and came back the first of March.
Eddie and Abigail had been married for fourteen months. They had dated for a year before that and been chummy at work for quite some time prior to dating. Because Daphne was nine and Leda seven, this otherwise small amount of time that comprised their mother’s relationship represented a significant portion of the girls’ lives on earth. They had almost grown up with Eddie. They knew he drank coffee with milk and worked the crossword puzzle with a blue Bic pen, leaving the easiest answers blank so that Daphne could fill them in later. He had no temper that they had witnessed, though he did not like to be sat on while he was reading, and he was often reading. He brought home piles of books from the children’s department (he had a friend in children’s—he had friends everywhere) so they could read with him. He did not cook. He was nice to their friends when they had friends over. He made their mother laugh. At night he would sit on the front steps of the house they rented and smoke a cigarette, which drove the girls to grief because they loved him and wanted him to live.
Up the hill the station wagon climbed, the transmission straining. Maybe it was more mountain than hill. There were no streetlights this far from town, no houses. The dark of night was dazzling and complete. When Eddie clicked off the headlights, Daphne gasped. Now the only light came pale from the dashboard. They were going eighteen miles an hour and had a third a tank of gas. Who knew things could be so different ten minutes from home! Up and up. How could Eddie see? Sometimes the town swung into view below them and then another turn and it was gone again. “Look at that,” he said, pointing, because now they had nearly reached the top. They were turned away from the town and Eddie was right: without the headlights, her eyes adjusted to the dark. Then through the windshield came the milky wash of stars.
“Look!” she cried. “Look!” Both of them were looking up, trying to take in the wonder of the universe, when the car, going forward, left the edge of the road and pitched into the fathomless darkness below.
There was no time to correct the situation but a seemingly infinite amount of time to consider it. What Eddie wanted to know and did not know was if Daphne was wearing her seat belt. He knew he hadn’t put it on her himself—she was nine, she put her own seat belt on—but it was his responsibility to check and he had not checked. He had not been driving fast, but now they were picking up speed. When they hit whatever it was they would eventually hit and she wasn’t wearing her seat belt, her neck could break. She had bones like a pigeon. He had been entrusted withthe one child because the other child had just come from surgery. He would not be forgiven, not by Abigail or himself or the god of all those stars. Impact arrived when he reached the word “stars” in his mind, and the car, a 1972 Chevrolet Impala weighing more than four thousand pounds, tossed like a boat on high seas before coming to rest on its left side, the left front quadrant crunching in, the nose pointed down. Eddie’s head rested on the driver-side window, and he felt something catastrophic in the area of his left foot or ankle. He turned to look over his right shoulder, and in the utter darkness, he could make out the shape of something dangling. He didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but she had put her seat belt on.
“Duck?” he whispered.
“I’m here,” she said. “Are you okay?”
Eddie Triplett had not killed a child, nor would he ever again in his life love another person as much as he loved her.
2
Ilooked at my watch. Five o’clock. I told my sister I had to go.
