“I would have borrowed some.”
They kept the light low in the museum, enough to see the paintings but not enough to leach the color away. We watched the never-ending stream of people pass through the choir gate, half in one direction and half in the other, and I thought about the wedding at the Plaza. What a night that had been! We needed to find another wedding we could go to, just for half an hour or so. Surely Eddie could manage that. We would drink champagne and dance, or we would watch them dance. I had been a teacher at a girls’ school for a long time. I could find a wedding, and if I couldn’t find one, I could put one on, or ask Polly to do it. She would be so happy to do that for Eddie, but then she would insist on keeping all the dances for herself.
“What if,” Eddie said, “you wrote it all down?”
“Wrote what down?”
“Everything. Mary Carter, the raspberry farm, the car accident, the snow, the two of us. You could change the details. That’s how people do it.”
“So you do it. You’re the one who wanted to be a novelist.”
“We were both going to be novelists.”
“I was nine,” I said. For today, that was my excuse for everything.
“You’ll be the writer and I’ll be the editor.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Immortality,” he said.
“How so?”
“Because in the book, I don’t die. In the book, we’re sitting on this bench, talking about a book about the two of us, and then the story stops with us waiting for Jonathan and your mother to come back.”
“It just stops?”
“Well, there would be a little something at the end, a denouement. Maybe the character looks back.”
“Hasn’t there been enough of that?”
“Never enough of that. I’m going to use your shoulder. Do you mind?”
“Help yourself,” I said.
Eddie rested his head against my shoulder. “I didn’t realize I was so tired. I need to close my eyes for a minute.”
This minute. He was right. Stop everything here. “What about the book?” I asked.
“You’re the smart one,” he said, yawning. “You’ll figure it out.”
(SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)
Before the firemen and policemen cut Eddie from the car (they took the windshield out, that’s how they did it), the ambulance men had stabilized his ankle with an inflatable cast. Daphne couldn’t stop staring at it. “If I fall in a swimming pool on the way to the hospital, my foot will float,” he said to her. There was some discussion among the various county employees as to whether Daphne should ride in the police car or the ambulance, but Eddie shut it down. “She stays with me,” he said. The next thing Daphne knew, one ofthe men lifted her up and put her inside the ambulance, then they slid Eddie’s gurney through the wide-open doors.
“This is a lot nicer than our last place,” Eddie said.
Two of the men got in behind them and the third one got in the front. They closed the doors. The man then lifted Daphne onto the second gurney, covered her with a blanket, and strapped her down. “Like a big seat belt,” he said.
“I can—” she started to say, but then gave up after those two words. There would be no telling them all the things she had already done.
“Always wear your seat belt,” Eddie said.
Then they were driving away. Through the back windows, Daphne could see the red lights spinning out across the snow.
“Could you ask the guy in the front to turn the siren off?” Eddie asked. “I have a headache.”
The siren snapped off just like that. Eddie turned his head to the side and looked at her. “I made up the headache,” he whispered.
