“No,” Ruth told him. “It was paper. Two pieces.” She kept scowling at the photograph, daring it to change. Years later, Eddie O’Hare would be unsurprised that, as a novelist, Ruth Cole was a realist.
At last he asked the girl: “Don’t you want to go back to bed?”
“Yes,” Ruth replied, “but bring the picture.”
They went down the dark hall, which seemed darker now—the feeble night-light from the master bathroom cast only the dimmest glow through the open door of Ruth’s room. Eddie carried the child against his chest. He found her heavy to carry with one arm; in his other hand, he carried the photograph.
He put Ruth back in her bed, and leaned the picture of Marion in Paris against a chest of drawers. The photograph faced Ruth, but the child complained that the photo was too far away from her bed for her to see it properly. Eddie ended up propping the photograph against the footstool, near the head of Ruth’s bunk bed. Ruth was satisfied. The four-year-old fell back to sleep.
Before Eddie went back to his room, he took another look at Marion. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted in her sleep, and her body had given up its terrifying rigidity. Only a sheet covered her hips; her upper body was bare. It was a warm night; Eddie nevertheless covered her breasts with the sheet. She looked a little less abandoned that way.
Eddie was so tired that he lay down on his bed and fell asleep with the towel still wrapped around his waist. In the morning, he woke to the sound of Marion calling for him—she was screaming out his name— and he could hear Ruth crying hysterically. He ran down the hall (still in the towel) and found Marion and Ruth bent over a bloodstained sink in the bathroom. There was blood everywhere. It was on the child’s pajamas, on her face, in her hair. The source was a single deep cut in Ruth’s right index finger. The pad of the first joint of her finger had been slashed to the bone. The cut was perfectly straight and extremely thin.
“She said it was glass,” Marion told Eddie, “but there’s no glass in the cut. What glass, honey?” Marion asked Ruth.
“The picture, the picture!” the child cried.
In an effort to conceal the photograph under her bunk, Ruth must have banged the picture frame against a part of her bed—or against the footstool. The glass covering the photo was shattered; the photograph itself was undamaged, although the mat was spotted with blood.
“What did I did?” the four-year-old kept asking. Eddie held her while her mother got dressed; then Marion held Ruth while Eddie dressed himself.
Ruth had stopped crying and was now more concerned about the photograph than about her finger. They took the photo, still in the blood-spotted mat, out of the shattered frame; they brought the picture in the car with them, because Ruth wanted the picture to come to the hospital. Marion tried to prepare Ruth for the stitches, and there would probably be at least one shot. In truth, there would be two—the lidocaine injection before the stitches, and then a tetanus shot. Despite how deep it was, the cut was so clean and so thin that Marion was sure it wouldn’t require more than two or three stitches or leave a visible scar.
&
nbsp; “What’s a scar?” the child asked. “Am I going to die?”
“No, you are not going to die, honey,” her mother assured her.
Then the conversation turned to the matter of fixing the photograph. When they were finished at the hospital, they would take the photo to a frame shop in Southampton and leave it to be reframed. Ruth began to cry again, because she didn’t want the picture to be left at the shop. Eddie explained that there had to be a new mat, a new frame, and new glass.
“What’s a mat?” the four-year-old asked.
When Marion showed Ruth the blood-spotted mat (but not the photograph), Ruth wanted to know why the bloodstain wasn’t red; the spot of blood had dried and turned brown.
“Will I turn brown?” Ruth asked. “Am I going to die?”
“No, you won’t, honey. No, you’re not, ” Marion kept telling her.
Of course Ruth screamed at the needles, and at the stitches—there were only two. The doctor marveled at the perfect straightness of the wound; the pad of the right index finger had been precisely bisected. It would have been next to impossible for a surgeon to have cut the exact middle of such a small finger so deliberately, even with a scalpel.
After they dropped off the photograph at the frame shop, Ruth sat subdued in her mother’s lap. Eddie drove back to Sagaponack, squinting into the morning sun. Marion lowered the sun visor on the passenger side, but Ruth was so short that the sunlight shone directly into her face, causing her to turn toward her mother. Suddenly Marion began to stare into her daughter’s eyes—into Ruth’s right eye, in particular.
“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked. “Is there something in her eye?”
“It’s nothing,” Marion said.
The child curled against her mother, who shielded the sunlight from her daughter’s face with her hand. Exhausted from all her crying, Ruth fell asleep before they reached Sagaponack.
“What did you see?” Eddie asked Marion, whose gaze was notably distant again. (It was not as distant as the night before, when Eddie had asked her about her boys’ accident.) “Tell me,” he said.
Marion pointed to the flaw in the iris of her right eye, that hexagon of yellow which Eddie had often admired; he had more than once remarked to her that he loved the tiny yellow speck in her eye—the way, in certain light or at unpredictable angles, it could turn her right eye from blue to green.
Although Ruth’s eyes were brown, what Marion had seen in the iris of Ruth’s right eye was the exact same hexagonal shape of bright yellow. When the four-year-old had blinked in the sunlight, the yellow hexagon had demonstrated its capacity to turn Ruth’s right eye from brown to amber.
Marion continued to hug her sleeping daughter to her breast; with one hand, she still shielded the four-year-old’s face from the sun. Eddie had never before seen Marion manifest such a degree of physical affection for Ruth.
“Your eye is very . . . distinguished,” the sixteen-year-old said. “It’s like a birthmark, only more mysterious. . . .”