“Now roll your wrists and ankles. Roll your neck—gently. Can you do that?”
“Rolling.” She circled her shoulders as well. Rocked her hips in her hip sockets.
“All good?”
“Good,” she said. There was something wrong with her head, but she would tell him that later when he was less upset. “What happened?”
“What happened is I missed the curve and drove off the side of the mountain.” He reached up and batted around in the dark until he found her hand. He held her hand.
“Mom’s going to be mad about the car.” The car had three more years to go before it was paid off. Thirty-five monthly payments left, to be exact. Daphne knew this because her mother made the pay-down into a game, letting Daphne and Leda count the remaining payments in the coupon book every month when she did the bills. Her mother wrote the check, and Daphne recorded the check in the register, then Leda licked the envelope and stamp. Teamwork. Her mother explained the concept of interest, which the girls found so appalling they refused to go inside the bank for months. Their mother was a big believer in spelling out the way life worked.
“She won’t be mad about the car. She’ll be happy we’re alive.” Eddie thought Abigail would be upset about the car but that her anger would quickly give way to joy. In the end, everything would balance out in their favor. “We didn’t die in the car accident and Leda didn’t die of appendicitis, all a win.”
The shoulder harness was cutting into Daphne’s neck, and she remembered again that she should have been sitting in the backseat and this was why. Maybe she could convince Eddie not to tell, which reminded her of the important question: “How long before Mom comes to get us?”
That was a second-level question: Who would find them? Eddie was still focused on the first-level questions: Was there a fuel leak?Could the car fall further down if they moved? What in God’s holy name had happened to his ankle? He turned off the ignition. “I don’t think your mother knows where we are.” He tried to keep his tone casual.
“When we don’t come home—” Daphne began, but then, before she’d reached the end of the sentence, she solved the problem herself. “She won’t be home either. She’s spending the night in the hospital with Leda. She’ll stay in the hospital until Leda gets better.”
Eddie nodded his head in the darkness. “Unfortunately, that is the case.”
“And when she calls the house to say good night and we don’t answer, she’ll think we’ve gone to the movies. She won’t worry about us because she’s already got Leda to worry about.”
“Seriously, Duck, you should join the FBI. You’ve got the right kind of mind.”
“I’m going to be a writer,” she said, as if such an admission were completely natural. She’d been thinking about it seriously since the start of fourth grade.
In the dark she could hear Eddie’s surprise. “Seriously, are you?” Then, in the spirit of fellowship shared by two people trapped in a car, he told her that he planned to be a writer as well.
“Really?” This struck Daphne as more than luck. Not for the first time, she wondered if there wasn’t some mistake and she was really Eddie Triplett’s daughter. “I thought you were an editor.”
“I’m an editor so I can be around books, so I can learn howto write books. Everybody has to have a job, you know, pay the bills.”
“Sure,” Daphne said, but she hadn’t thought about the money part, which was stupid of her because she knew about the money part. See: book of payment coupons for the car.
“What are you going to write?” Eddie asked her, as if they weren’t even hanging in a crashed car. “Poems, stories, plays, novels, essays?”
“Novels,” Daphne said quickly. She wasn’t interested in the other choices.
Eddie was quiet for a minute. Like Daphne, he felt himself genuinely moved by the coincidence. “Me, too.”
“Maybe we’ll write novels together,” Daphne said. She didn’t know if people did that, but she loved the idea.
“Maybe so,” he said. “Listen, do you think you can undo your seat belt? I don’t want you hanging there.”
“I can.”
“Okay, I want you to be—” He had a series of instructions to walk her through the process, but she had already punched the button and was released like a skydiver on the shortest possible jump, straight onto him.
Of all the things Eddie regretted, he regretted screaming the most. The weight of the nine-year-old landing full force on his right side, his good side, jostled his left side considerably, proving that something was either broken or shattered in his left ankle and foot, and that something might be wrong with his left shoulder aswell. The pain came on him in a green flash. He actually saw the color green behind his closed eyelids.
“Sorry!” Daphne cried. “Oh! Sorry, sorry, sorry!”
“Not you,” he said, his breath ragged. Now she was lying on his right side. Gravity and the angle of the car had given her no alternative. There was only one place to land. “I think I broke my ankle.” Best to put it out there.
“I broke your ankle!?”
“No, no. It broke in the accident. The front left of the car must have gotten crunched.” He made the smallest effort to move his foot, but that wasn’t happening. He left it alone. He lifted his right arm and maneuvered it around his stepdaughter’s shoulder, and she gently adjusted herself into his armpit. “Do you have Coke in your hair?”
