she hadn’t said a word —not one word about the accident. But one day, after Ruth was born, Marion just walked into my workroom—you know, she never went anywhere near my workroom—and she said to me: ‘How could you have let me see Timmy’s leg? How could you?’ I had to tell her that I’d been physically unable to move—that I was paralyzed, turned to stone. But all she said was: ‘How could you?’ And we never talked about it again. I tried, but she just wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Please get out of here,” Eddie said.
As he was leaving, Ted said: “See you in the morning, Eddie.”
The one curtain that Ted had opened did not admit enough of the faint, predawn light for Eddie to see what time it was; he saw only that his wristwatch and his wrist—including his whole arm and hand— were the sickly, silver-gray color of a corpse. Eddie rotated his hand, but he could discern no difference in the shade of gray. The palm and the back of his hand were the same; in fact, his skin and the pillows and the wrinkled sheets were uniformly dead-gray. He lay awake, waiting for truer light. Through the window, he watched the sky; it slowly faded. Shortly before sunrise, the sky had lightened to the color of a week-old bruise.
Eddie knew that Marion must have seen many hours of this predawn light. She was probably seeing it now—for surely she couldn’t have been asleep, wherever she was. And whenever Marion was awake, Eddie now understood what she saw: the wet snow melting on the wet, black highway, which would also have been streaked with reflected light; the inviting neon of the signs, which promised food and drink and shelter (even entertainment); the constantly passing headlights, the cars inching by so slowly because everyone needed to gawk at the accident; the circulating blue of the police cars’ lights, the blinking yellow lights of the wrecking truck, and the flashing red lights of the ambulance, too. Yet, even in this mayhem, Marion had spotted the shoe !
“Oh, Ted, look—he’s going to need his shoe,” she would always remember saying, as she limped to the wreck and bent down.
What kind of shoe was it? Eddie wondered. The absence of detail stopped him from seeing the leg exactly. An aprés-ski boot, possibly. Maybe it was an old tennis shoe—something that Timothy didn’t mind getting wet. But the namelessness of the shoe or boot—whatever it was—stopped Eddie from seeing it, and not seeing the shoe prevented him from seeing the leg. He couldn’t even imagine the leg.
Lucky Eddie. Marion was not so lucky. She would always remember the blood-soaked shoe; the exact detail of the shoe would always lead her to remember the leg.
Working for Mr. Cole
It was because he didn’t know what kind of shoe it was that Eddie fell asleep without meaning to. He woke with the low sun shining in the one window with the open curtain; the sky was a crisp and cloudless blue. Eddie opened a window to feel how cold it was—it would be a chilly trip on the ferry, if he could get a ride to Orient Point—and there in the driveway he saw an unfamiliar truck. It was a pickup truck. Both a sit-down, tractor-type lawn mower and the kind of lawn mower that you walk behind were in the back of the truck, together with some rakes and spades and hoes and an assortment of sprinkler heads; there was also a long, neatly coiled hose.
Ted Cole mowed his own lawn; and Ted watered the lawn only when it looked as if it needed it, or when he got around to it. Since the yard was unfinished, a result of Ted’s standoff with Marion, it was hardly a yard that merited the attention of a full-time gardener. Yet the guy in the pickup truck looked like a full-time gardener.
Eddie dressed himself and went down to the kitchen; one of the kitchen windows would offer him a better view of the man in the truck. Ted, who was surprisingly awake and had already made a pot of coffee, was peeking out a kitchen window at the mystery gardener, who was no mystery to Ted.
“It’s Eduardo,” Ted whispered to Eddie. “What’s Eduardo doing here?”
Eddie now recognized Mrs. Vaughn’s gardener, although Eddie had seen the gardener only once—and briefly—when Eduardo Gomez had scowled at Eddie from the vantage of his ladder, from which the tragically mistreated man had been plucking pieces of pornography from the Vaughns’ privet.
“Maybe Mrs. Vaughn has hired him to kill you,” Eddie speculated.
“No, not Eduardo !” Ted said. “But do you see her anywhere? She’s not in the cab or in the back.”
“Maybe she’s lying down under the truck,” Eddie suggested.
“I’m being serious, for Christ’s sake,” Ted told the boy.
“So am I,” Eddie said.
They both had reason to believe that Mrs. Vaughn was capable of murder, but it appeared that Eduardo Gomez was alone; the gardener was just sitting in the cab of his truck. Ted and Eddie could see the steam escape from Eduardo’s thermos when he poured himself a cup of coffee; the gardener was politely waiting for the household itself to give him some active indication that it was awake.
“Why don’t you go find out what he wants?” Ted asked Eddie.
“Not me, ” Eddie said. “I’ve been fired—isn’t that right?”
“For Christ’s sake . . . at least come with me, then,” Ted told the sixteen-year-old.
“I better stay by the phone,” Eddie said. “If he has a gun and shoots you, I’ll call the police.”
But Eduardo Gomez was unarmed; the gardener’s only weapon was a harmless-looking piece of paper, which he removed from his wallet. He showed it to Ted; it was the smudged, illegible check that Mrs. Vaughn had sailed into the fountain.
“She said it was my last paycheck,” Eduardo explained to Ted.
“She fired you?” Ted asked the gardener.
“Because I warned you that she was coming after you in her car,” Eduardo said.
“Oh,” Ted said; he kept staring at the worthless check. “You can’t even read this,” he told Eduardo. “It might as well be blank.” From its adventure in the fountain, the check was coated with a patina of faded squid ink.
“It wasn’t my only job,” the gardener explained, “but it was my biggest. My principal income.”