“But you don’t need to do anything,” I said.
“Daphne,” he said.
And so I stopped. That’s one of the things about age. If you’re lucky, you learn when to stop.
It was Saturday, and Jonathan and I had come in early on the train. The morning was so bright and blue that Jonathan and Steve decided to walk a loop in the park. Steve claimed to have ideas about restructuring the Bronxville hospital’s debt, but Leda and I suspected they wanted to get out of the apartment before our mother woke up.
“What did you think had happened to us after the accident?” I asked Leda.
She sat for a while, trying to remember what she had known when she was seven. One of the many things I loved about my sister was the way she managed to engage with every question. “I thought you and Eddie had done something stupid,” she said finally, “going to look for raspberries in the middle of winter. And that he wrecked the car and broke his ankle and you cut your face. How did you cut your face, anyway? Did the windshield break?”
I shook my head. “I never figured that out. Did you know we were in the car overnight?”
Again, she stopped to consider the past, which was so far away from us now. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I knew any of it. Did you ever tell Mom what happened?”
“No, but she must have asked Eddie about it. I don’t know, maybe she didn’t. I remember Mom meeting us in the emergency room when the ambulance came in. Eddie and I each had our own gurney. I don’t know why they put me on a gurney, but they did—”
“Because you werenine,” my sister said. “And your face was bloody and you were probably hypothermic.”
“Anyway, Mom took it badly. In her defense, she’d probably been thinking you were going to die. She wasn’t in a good place to begin with. When she started screaming, it made me realize how calm Eddie had been through the whole thing, and how much that had helped.”
“What I want to know,” Leda said, “is how you lived without Eddie after that? I mean, I missed him. When I got home from the hospital and he wasn’t there anymore, I remember feeling incredibly sad, but to have gone through what you went through together?”
“I packed it away,” I said. “I put the whole thing in a box and shoved it behind the hot water heater in the basement. Then I forgot about it. Isn’t that what people do? They pack things up and then years later they hire you to unpack it for them.”
“I guess.”
Into our conversation about the past, our mother appeared present tense in the living room wearing a matching nightgown-and-robe set, a dark green satin covered in yellow hibiscus. She looked at the two of us on the couch. “Why did you let me sleep so late?”
“We don’t have to be at Eddie’s until noon,” Leda said.
“Hi, Mom.” I admired her for bringing a robe. I would never think to pack a robe.
“I don’t want to go over there looking like I just rolled out of bed.”
Leda looked at her watch. “So you have two and a half hours to pull yourself together.”
“Did you ever think this might be stressful for me? I haven’t seen the man in forty-five years.”
“You’re here because you wanted to see Eddie,” I said. “But if it feels stressful, don’t do it. We’re going to go, but you don’t have to. Either way is fine.”
“I’m going to go,” she said. “But I think the two of you could be a little sympathetic.”
“Sympathetic to what?” Leda asked.
“Do you want coffee?” I asked. Didn’t Lucas make her coffee in the morning?
She nodded. “That would be good.”
I started to get up, but Leda put her hand on my ankle. My feet had been resting in my sister’s lap. “Mom?” Leda began. “Did you know that when Eddie and Daphne were in the car accident, Daphne went out in the snow by herself to find someone to help them?”
“The car accident?” Our mother was seventy-seven and her posture was perfect. For that matter, so was her face. She’d had work done, but that was decades before, and now she didn’t look done at all. She only looked beautiful. A case could be made that she looked better than Leda or I did, certainly better than we looked this morning.
“She was nine,” Leda said.
“Is this some sort of an ambush? I didn’t send her out in the snow. Why are we talking about the car accident?”
“Nostalgia,” Leda said.
