“Maybe,” she said. Her head was wet, and Eddie’s coat was wet. There had been two extra-large Cokes in a to-go box on the floor. She moved her hand around. She felt an empty waxed paper cup and then an ice cube. She felt a chicken tender and popped it in her mouth. It was greasy and cold.
“Can you reach the visor? Go super slow.” He was thinking about his ankle. He was also thinking about that scenario in which the car detached from whatever tree was holding them in place and continued its luge run.
Daphne and Leda were both born monkeys. They could climb up trees, but they could also climb on kitchen counters and bookcases. They could stack up boxes to make it to a top closet shelf insearch of Christmas presents. Neither girl had ever looked at a vertical surface and thought, No, bad idea, too high. Up they went.
This time Daphne put some thought into it. She ran her hand over Eddie’s face, so she knew it was resting against the driver-side window. Then she took her left foot and put it in front of his face, then straightened her knee. Standing on one foot, one hand out beside her on the ceiling of the car for balance, she reached for the visor above the passenger seat. She knew that Eddie wanted the light in the makeup mirror that came on even if the car was off. There wasn’t a light or a mirror on the driver-side visor, something Eddie didn’t know because he’d probably never thought about it, whereas her mother regularly raged over the fact that there wasn’t a makeup mirror on the left-hand side of the car.
“That’s because you aren’t supposed to put on makeup when you’re driving,” Leda told her once, to which her mother had responded, “Then when in the hell am I going to have time to do it?”
The visor came down, and a parking ticket that had been pinned there fluttered away. Daphne slid the little cover over the mirror to the side, and a small light leaned against the enormity of darkness. She couldn’t see Eddie’s ankle and she didn’t want to, but she could almost make out his face. He had a sick and wild look about him, and there was blood on his chin, and there were chicken tenders everywhere.
“Oh, Daphne,” Eddie said. He was back to whispering again.
Daphne pivoted (carefully, carefully) to try to catch a bit of her own face in the mirror’s reflection. All she saw was blood. A lotof blood. Eddie put his hand on her standing calf in the exact moment she felt unwell. “Sit back down,” he said.
So she did, slowly. She sat on the side of him. Had she hit the dashboard before the shoulder harness snapped her back? Was she cut by something flying past her in the crash? Did it make any difference? None at all.
Daphne’s mind stayed straight when Eddie’s was muddled, and Eddie could think straight when she needed him to. What was there to work with here? What was in reach?
“I went to a meeting today,” he said. “About all the books coming out in the fall.”
“It’s January,” Daphne said. Now she could feel something warm dripping near her eye and it made her feel sick so she didn’t touch it. Then she thought about her sister throwing up in the school cafeteria and willed herself to stop thinking about that because she knew where this was going.
“I know, it’s stupid, but that’s the way things work. So this afternoon, we all had a big meeting with the top guy, the Edward-in-Chief, except your mother wasn’t there since she had to go be with Leda in the hospital, and you know what I wore?”
“What you always wear?” She didn’t care if it was a stupid game; she was going to play. He wore dark pants or khaki pants, an oxford shirt, and one of the two blazers he owned, every single day. Her mother always said men were so lucky.
“That’s exactly right, what I always wear, except today I also wore a tie.”
“You hate ties.”
“The Edward-in-Chief wears a tie, so when there’s a big meeting all the Eds and the Eddies wear one, too. As soon as I got out of the meeting, I took the tie off and put it in my pocket.” A shot of pain radiated up his leg, an extraordinary burst of pain, but this time he knew to hold back any sounds. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the tie his mother had bought for him when he first got the job at Houghton Mifflin. “Ta-da! So here’s what we’ll do: I’ll put my handkerchief over the cut, then I’ll tie it in place with the tie.”
“Is the handkerchief clean?” Daphne asked.
“Very clean. You’re smart to ask.”
In the dark, with only the slightest glow of a makeup mirror to guide him, Eddie wiped what blood he could from her face, then laid the handkerchief over the approximate location of where the cut seemed to be, then wrapped his necktie twice around her head and tied it snug-not-tight. “Once, when my sister was in high school, she walked out of the house with my father’s tie around her head. The look was aggressively Woodstock. That’s where I got the idea.”
“You have a sister?”
“Amy.”
“Did your father get mad at her?”
“He did indeed. He worked in a tool and die shop. He only had one tie and he wore it to funerals. Didn’t you have a hat on before?”
Daphne touched her head. “I did.” Where had the hat gone?
“Okay, it’s time for you to take inventory of our resources. If you find any ice cubes, put them in a cup. If you find chicken tenders, put them in the chicken bucket. If you find your hat, put it on your head to help keep the handkerchief in place.”
“I can do that.”
“But Daphne, I don’t mean to be a baby about this, but I don’t want to move my ankle, okay? If you get down there where my foot is, be careful not to touch it.”
It wasn’t that Eddie was talking to her like she was another adult, but he was talking to her like they were two equal people. They had to be equal because they relied on one another now. Daphne, who felt the throbbing of blood in her head, began to pick her way around the floor of the car, although the floor was technically the door now. She found the bucket and, without benefit of light, gently extracted the chicken tenders from around Eddie’s foot and put them together. She found plenty of ice cubes as well, many of them between Eddie’s back and the upholstery. She found her hat and put it on. It was her favorite: ribbed, pink with a lavender fake-fur pompom. The hat felt both nicely tight and warm. She found her mittens, which, after handling all the ice cubes, she was grateful for. She found books she knew by shape: her math workbook, her paperback copy ofCharlotte’s Web. She found the box of Kleenex her mother always kept in the car. “Do you want a Kleenex?” Daphne asked.
“Oh,” Eddie said, “I’d love one. Give me several, please.”
