“Frank!” Dolores called him again now.
“Coming, Dee,” he called back. He put his notebook and the hairpin back in his desk drawer. He extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray and turned out the light.
But as he stood and walked down the hallway to go to bed, something Nick Carraway said about his cousin Daisy, which had struck him funny at the time, struck him again: She’s dead inside, Nick had said. I don’t know what she’s capable of.
What exactly had Nick meant by that?
Daisy 1918
LOUISVILLE
A FULL MONTH AFTER CHRISTMAS day, our tree still sat naked in the parlor. Its branches, our house, devoid of any holiday cheer. Rose’s perfect ornaments sat packed away in the box on the hard pine floor by the fireplace, untouched. I didn’t think I could ever touch them again. Ever have Christmas again. The tree was dying, withering, but no one made a move to remove it, either. It looked exactly how I felt inside.
The train crash had been so bad that Daddy and Rose had come home in one single box, delivered with a letter from the railroad company saying they could not guarantee that all parts of their bodies had made it back to us. I read those words, pictured my dear sweet Rosie torn up into pieces, and I vomited right there on the spot, in the middle of the parlor. Then I tore the letter to pieces and threw it in the fire, so Mother could never read it.
Mother spent nearly a whole month in the dark in her bedroom, crying. “How will we survive?” she murmured to me, when I went in to check on her each morning. She knelt by her bed, praying through her tears. “Daisy Fay, pray with me,” she’d whisper, the snow goose hoarse, faltering.
It seemed a cruel joke, that God had cured Rosie of polio only to put her on a train that was going to run off the tracks a year later. And that he would be so spiteful to take Daddy with her. I did not believe that a god that hateful would exist, and then what was the use of praying to him any longer?
“I’m here,” I said to Mother, kneeling beside her. Instead of clasping my hands in front of me, I put my arm around her shoulders. I pulled her close to me. “You have me,” I promised her.
* * *
THE SECOND I read the telegram about the accident, everything changed.
Any sadness I’d thought I’d felt over Jay leaving was nothing compared to this. And I knew I could not follow Jay to New York as I’d promised him. I could not leave Mother, not after Christmas, not any time after that either. I sent Jay a telegram and told him what had happened, that I couldn’t come to New York to marry him now.
But you’ll wait for me? Jay wrote me a letter back. After the war we’ll be together, get married. I’ll love you forever, Daisy. I’ll wait for you forever…
I’d folded his letter up and tucked it away in my jewelry box on my bureau. It had sat there ever since, a secret, a faraway promise. But I could not bring myself to write Jay back, to answer his question.
Sometimes in the weeks after the accident, I’d lie in bed at night and close my eyes, trying to remember the feel of Jay’s hands upon my bare skin, trying to remember how I felt so much that I’d cared so little about my family.
Every time I tried to conjure Jay, all I could think about instead was my dear sweet Rosie, forcing me to walk with her to the almshouse in the depths of August. Me complaining about the heat. Why had I always complained so much? Why couldn’t I have just happily done what she wanted?
Night after night I tried to conjure Jay, but instead, I heard her voice again and again: Don’t go kissing him, just because he’s giving us a ride.
I’d thought Jay was my heart, but maybe Rose was my heart. Without my sister, I was pale skin and marrowless bones, walking around Louisville like a ghost.
Be good, Rose had implored me, more than once. I know you have it in you, Daise.
But what if she was wrong?
By January, all her lettuce was dead. Her victory garden now a useless patch of dirt in the backyard. I’d done that. I’d forgotten to keep on watering it.
* * *
“WE’RE GOING TO have to sell the house,” Mother announced out of nowhere one morning in March. She’d finally left her room, come down to the dining room for breakfast at the table, rather than having Fredda bring her up a tray, as she had for months. Since I’d just gotten over the shock of seeing her sitting here, dressed and real and breathing beside me, I could not immediately completely absorb her words.
Our house was a two-story brick Victorian in the most fashionable section of Louisville, the Southern Extension. Daddy had bought the house for Mother as a wedding present, and I’d lived here my whole entire life. “Why would we ever sell it?” I said. “And where would we live?”