I looked up to find Tom muttering incessantly into the bereaved husband’s ear, his hand fallen like an anvil on Wilson’s shoulder, repeating the same thing over and over again.
“That car that ran her down, it wasn’t mine, it was a loan for the day,” he insisted. “I was in the coupe, we came out from the city just now … do you hear me, we came up from the city just now.”
“He looks guilty,” I muttered, and Nick pulled me away.
“We all do,” he said, sounding a little stricken.
“Not me,” I said.
I got him into the back seat, holding him close. I asked him once if he needed to throw up, and he shook his head.
“I saw worse things at war,” he said indignantly.
“But not,” I said with a sigh, “in New York. Once I saw a girl hit by a car trying to cross Broadway, you know. She was hit so hard she was knocked out of her shoes and her hat. Her friend who was with her ran to fetch her hat and then tried to set it on her head as if she were alive again.”
It seemed to take hours, but Tom came back out, stumbling a little bit, his thick frame hitting the car and making it shudder. Clumsily, he climbed into the driver’s seat, ignoring Nick’s tentative offer to take the wheel on the way back to East Egg. Instead, Tom only stared at the road blankly for a few moments, and then he hit the accelerator so hard the coupe lurched back before surging forward. We got a half mile down the road before I realized he was weeping.
“The God damned coward!” he whimpered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”
No, he didn’t, the thought came to me.
Gatsby would have known how to fix this, and he would have, I realized. It might have been with polite threats, it might have been with hundred dollar bills handed out like benedictions, but … he would have fixed this.
I felt my stomach sink as if it had been sewn shut with stones inside, and as we sped down the road, Tom’s breathing thick with tears, Nick’s head lolling back on the seat like he was a dead man, I thought we had come to the final disaster of the night.
We got back to the house in East Egg to find that all of the lights had been turned on, flooding the place with illumination as if for a great party. Despite the lights, however, it was eerily silent. Instinctively, I looked over towards Gatsby’s place across the Sound. It was dark as it had been for weeks. Margaret Dancy had said that the party was well and truly over, and for the first time, I really thought I might believe her.
Tom halted the coupe in front of the porch, gazing up at the house lit up like a beacon.
“Daisy’s come home,” he said, and if he had said it with any degree of satisfaction, I might have struck him. He frowned back at Nick.
“Sorry, I should have thought to drop you off in West Egg…”
Nick shook his head as he handed me out of the car.
“No, no worries at all…”
“I’ll have a cab sent for you,” Tom said, handing the keys of the coupe off to an indifferent footman. “Til then, why don’t you and Jordan get inside? You’re likely both starving, and they should be able to do you up something.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I will ever eat again,” I started to say, but Nick shook his head at Tom’s retreating back.
“No, thank you, but I won’t say no to that cab.”
We both watched Tom ascend the porch stairs, his chin up as if he had some kind of noble purpose. When the gracious double doors closed behind him, I reached for Nick’s hand.
“Come on,” I said, being as gentle as I knew how. “Even if we’re not hungry, we can poke at their plates as if we were.”