“I’d like to know.” Steve, who had made it through the entirelunch speaking a maximum of two sentences, voted to hear what had happened at the raspberry farm in 1980.
“You don’t have to tell us everything,” Eddie said. “But I would like to hear the part I wasn’t there for.”
I looked at our mother. I didn’t blame her. We were having a nice time. “Mom?”
“Fine,” she said, but didn’t look at me.
And so I went ahead. “Okay, first off, I kept that coat until I left my apartment in Newton. I couldn’t make myself get rid of it.”
“What coat?” Jonathan asked.
“My teddy bear coat. Fake fur was all the rage among the fourth grade set in Winchester at the time. I had begged Mom to buy me one for my birthday, and it kept me from freezing to death.”
“An excellent investment,” my mother said.
“It was a magnificent coat,” Eddie said. He covered my mother’s hand with his hand. “I remember we walked over to Filene’s one day at lunch to pick it out.”
Our mother smiled.
When I went to stay with the Cathcarts, when Eddie and Leda were still in the hospital, Mr. Cathcart got all the blood out of the fur. I remember him standing at the kitchen sink, working on it with a bottle of dishwashing liquid, and by the time he was finished, it looked as good as new.
“The hardest part was jumping off the car,” I said. “The car was on its side, and I’d crawled out through the window on the top. I was afraid something awful would happen when I jumped, that I’d knock the car over. I was worried about your ankle,” I said to Eddie.
“With good reason,” he said.
“I was also worried about my own ankle. There was a lot of snow, so I had no idea what I’d be jumping into. I didn’t know how deep the snow was or what was beneath it. Anyway, that might have been the worst of it.”
Steve asked the make of the car.
“Chevrolet Impala station wagon, 1972,” my mother said.
He took out his phone and tapped it in. “The Chevrolet Impala wagon was 80.5 inches in width, so, six and a half feet wide.” He looked at me like I was still considering my options. “That’s a big jump.”
“I ended up going to the back of the car. I held on to the bumper and put my foot on top of the license plate. Anyway, that worked.”
“How do yourememberthis?” my mother asked.
“I had a lot of time to think,” I said.
I had never told this part of the story. Back in the day, I would have told it a hundred times had anyone asked, but no one did. Given all that went on in our house in January of 1980, it seemed worse than self-aggrandizing to list my own accomplishments. But as it turned out, the lack of telling had kept the story fresh. As I recounted my trip from car to civilization for the assembled luncheon, I began to shiver. I remembered the confusion caused by so many snow-covered trees and the panic I felt climbing up the hill, away from the car, away from Eddie, like I was an astronaut leaving the capsule to drift off into space. “The car hadn’t gone that far down the hill, but it was hard to climb out, you know? It was steep and there was so much snow.” And I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to leave him there.
When I got to the top, there was nothing but an enormous field of snow with snow coming down. I wasn’t six steps from thewoods, but when I turned around, I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d come out and I couldn’t see the car. I thought about screaming to Eddie to see if he could still hear me, but I didn’t want to scare him. Even though we had driven a station wagon into the trees, I knew I wouldn’t be able to find this exact place again. I could find someone and bring them back to the top of this hill and still not be able to find Eddie. “Before we found the bandages in the back of the car, Eddie had used his tie to bind his handkerchief to my head, and the tie was still around my neck.”
“The tie that binds,” Eddie said.
“I took it off and tied it to a branch so I’d know how to find you.”
Eddie shook his head in wonder. “If only my mother were alive so I could tell her what a noble purpose the tie she gave me served.”
“You took the right Zabriskie sister to the raspberry farm,” Leda said. “If Daphne had been the one to get appendicitis and you picked me up from school, we’d both be dead now.”
“What happened?” Jonathan asked for the second time. (Later that night, at home in our bed, he would be nearly angry with me, asking why I hadn’t told him before, like maybe he would have been able to find me, to help me. He was afraid, that was all. “The thought of you dying as a child,” he said, but that was the end of the sentence.)
“There was nothing in that field,” I said. “No house, no road, just white. I wondered if Eddie was wrong about the farmhouse, or maybe this wasn’t even a raspberry farm, not that I knew what a raspberry farm was supposed to look like, but I would have thought there would be something there. And if this wasn’t the raspberry farm, then there might not be two roads. But it wascold and the wind was blowing the snow hard and so I decided to walk straight, figuring I was bound to run into something.”
Years later, in school, they showed us a movie about Shackleton’s disastrous trip to the Antarctic and how his ship became trapped in the ice, and I sat at my desk with my eyes closed, and when I couldn’t stand the sound of the narrator’s voice another minute, I ran out of the darkened classroom and threw up in the hall.
The landscape was flat and wide. The snow came up to the middle of my calf and drifted into my galoshes. I thought of how much colder it would be in the station wagon with the back window open and the snow coming in, and I tried to go faster. Then I did see a house, a big one, and I ran to it, but there wasn’t anyone in there. I banged on the door, but I could tell from looking in the windows. I went out to the barn, not that I thought there would be people in the barn, but I thought maybe there would be a horse.
