My father, one Neil Zabriskie, called Buddy, was the reason I’d met Jonathan in the first place, as my father was dying of metastatic melanoma in the hospital in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Jonathan worked. Jonathan liked to drop in on patients, ask how things were going. He came back later to check on Buddy, to see if he was happy with the care he was receiving. He came back later still to bring me a cup of coffee while Buddy was sleeping, his intentions on his sleeve. That old guys love me has been established, but also true was the fact that Jonathan’s wife, the much beloved first Mrs. Fuller, had died of metastatic melanoma five years before. He had some insights into the disease, the main one being that I shouldn’t be angry at my father for not staying on top of this thing that was killing him. Not only had Jonathan’s wife been on top of it, she was forefront in the mind of every oncologist in the Northeast, the first one called for appropriate clinical trials. She fought like a wolverine and still the cancer pulled her under. This wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t Buddy’s fault—that’s what Jonathan Fuller had come back to the room to tell me. Then he asked me to have dinner with him so we could talk about it some more.
Jonathan and I kept on through the park, passing the pond with all its turtles, and Belvedere Castle and then the Delacorte Theater, past the Shakespeare Garden and the Bow Bridge. We were walking up to Strawberry Fields before I realized why he’d wanted to come with me: he meant to keep me from getting lost. In the best of times I was likely to take a wrong turn in Central Park, and when I was distracted, I had the potential to stay lost for days. Maybe this was why he got irritated when I walked so fast; he knew I had no idea where I was going.
Jonathan saw me to the door of Leda’s building, the Gallant Green, and told me to call and let him know what train I’d be coming home on. “If the timing works out, we’ll have dinner in town,” he said, meaning that he held no expectation that I would be back in two hours.
My husband kissed me goodbye in front of my sister’s apartment building, and I was thinking about how, at some point, I would tell Eddie all of this: about the walk across the park and the realization of Jonathan’s kindness and how I could picture Leda’s face when I said Eddie’s name. I could remember this feeling from childhood, waiting for him to come home from work on the commuter rail so that I could tell him everything.
“Is my sister back?” I asked Mohammad. I visited Leda so often that the doormen in her building knew me. In response he turned his head and gave a quick whistle. Across the lobby, Leda looked up from the stack of mail in her hands and smiled. Beautiful Dr. Ha. I should have been able to wait until we were in the apartment to tell her what had happened, or at least wait until we were in the elevator, but I lacked the discipline. I went across the lobby and put my arms around her. She smelled like oranges and verbena. “Never in a million years will you guess who Jonathan and I saw at the Met,” I said.
“Bruce Springsteen,” she said. She had once seen Springsteen at the bookstore Three Lives in the West Village and had been on the lookout for him ever since.
I didn’t want to make it into a game, especially a game she had no chance of winning, so I told her.
“Eddie Triplett?” she asked, as if the name puzzled her. Leda was younger than me, which meant she was, what, six or seven at the time? Surely she remembered Eddie.
“Our stepfather.”
“I know who he is,” she said, her cheeks f lushed. “It’s just so strange. Eddie. How did you even recognize him? He must be in his seventies now.”
“Seventy-six. I didn’t recognize him, but the more I think about it, the more I think he did look like himself. I might have walked past him in a museum, but if you put six stepfathers in a lineup, I know I would have picked him out.”
“Six stepfathers in a lineup! Oh, if only Mom had married four more times. That would have been a terrific game.” She pushed the elevator button and the doors slid open. “What did Mom say when you told her?”
“I haven’t told her. We left him less than an hour ago. If we went back to the Met right now, we could probably find him. I’ll call her later. I wanted to tell you first.” In truth it hadn’t occurred to me to call our mother, though of course I would.
“Or maybe you won’t tell her. Mom isn’t a fan of conflicting narratives. She’s married to Lucas, period. The boys bring their families home for Christmas. She’s decided the past was happy and so she has no reason to think about it.”
I asked her where we fit into that narrative.
“We don’t,” she said.
When the elevator doors opened again, we walked down the hall to her apartment.
My sister had been named for a girl raped by Zeus, god of all gods, who turned himself into a swan for the occasion. I had been named for a girl whose father, the river god Peneus, turned her into a tree to save her from being raped by the god Apollo. Leda liked to say that made me the lucky one, but I was never sure. Daphne had been saved, but she was always going to be a tree, a virtuous tree, whereas Leda was still human, though her children had arrived in a clutch of eggs. Our mother had taken a semester of Greek mythology in college and it spoke to her. When she told us she had hoped for a third daughter to name Persephone, Leda and I counted our lucky constellations.
Remembering how young our mother was when she fell for Buddy Zabriskie had been my life’s discipline. She found out she was pregnant the week after they graduated from college, and at twenty-three they were married with their new baby Daphne. I told myself to bear in mind how young she still was when he left her with two daughters, the second one in diapers, so that he could go back to work on his family’s fishing boat full-time. He told her he was meant for the ocean, and that he would not let her vision of life define him. He actually said that to her. He told me so when he was dying. What had our mother’s vision of life been in those days? Paying rent? Buying food? I tried to imagine how I would have managed in similar circumstances, and all I could say was that I would not have survived, any more than I would have survived being thrown out of a plane with two small children. Our mother, who had annoyed me deeply throughout most of my life, managed something so heroic that there should have been songs written about her to be sung around campfires by Girl Scouts.
Abigail Zabriskie paved the way
So we might see a better day
She never thought that she could fail
Let’s raise our cups to Abigail.
Leda put the mail on the counter, dropped her bag. She got us each a can of seltzer f lavored with lime. “I keep trying to get a picture of Eddie in my mind. He seems more like a visiting relative than someone Mom married.”
“You were so young then.”
“But he made an impression. Like our childhood was pretty much a chaotic mess except for this one little part when Eddie lived with us, even though I can’t remember what he did to make it feel that way. He was a nice guy, wasn’t he?”
“That’s my memory.” Leda’s living room offered no end of seating options, but we both took our place on the same smallish couch, our shoes off and feet touching.
“Did he seem happy when you saw him?”
I opened my seltzer and drank. Crying makes me thirsty, which was psychosomatic, I know. I had not wept away the equivalent of this seltzer can. “I think he did, but who can say if another person is happy based on one lunch? He was shocked to see me, that much was clear. We were both shocked. I burst into tears when he introduced himself. Sobbed. I have no idea where that came from.”
“Where do you think it came from?”
Leda cracked her seltzer and tucked her feet beneath herself like a swan.
“Don’t go getting professional on me,” I said. I admired my sister’s professionalism and wanted no part of it.
“I’m serious. Why do you think you cried? It’s not exactly your go-to emotional response.”
I picked up a throw pillow with a giant red poppy needle-pointed on the front and held it against my chest, my blooming, bleeding heart. One of her clients had made it for her when she moved away, obviously to ensure that Leda would never again walk through her own living room without thinking about this missing woman. Why did I cry when I realized Eddie was Eddie? Why was I so close to crying again now? Because I had loved him and I had ruined his life. “There was a time I carried a lot of guilt, about the divorce, about Eddie losing his job—childish stuff, I know that. I would have told you it wasn’t in me now, but I guess there was a splinter of it left. Subconscious, not conscious. I haven’t thought about him in decades.”
Leda nodded and then took a long slug from her can. “I felt the same way.”
That was the difference between being the client and being the sister—the sister-therapist was free to join in. “What could you have done to Eddie?” I asked. “You were in the first grade when he left. You were a baby.”
“Logic doesn’t have anything to do with it, and for the record, I was in the second grade. I was almost eight. I had appendicitis, then you and Eddie were in the car accident, then he was in the hospital—”
“—and after that he was gone.”
She nodded. “Exactly. If I hadn’t said I was sick, then the whole chain of events wouldn’t have gone into motion and he wouldn’t have had to leave.”
“And you would have died of a ruptured appendix.”
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
“Did you ever work through any of this as an adult?” Leda
had to go through plenty of therapy on her way to becoming a therapist herself.
“Interestingly, I have not. Somehow this brief but meaningful chapter remained subterranean. This is a revelation in real time. So did you and Eddie talk about the accident?”
“In the Dining Room at the Met? It didn’t come up. To tell the truth, the accident isn’t something I talked about with anyone, I mean, aside from you.”
“And Jonathan.”
I drank my seltzer, held my pillow. “Not really. I mean, he knows I was in a car accident when I was a kid.” I tapped the thin white line that ran down the left side of my forehead and disappeared into my hairline near the top of my ear. You couldn’t see it if my hair was down, and for that reason, my hair remained down. Jonathan saw it when we were in bed for the first time. He leaned over me and traced it with his finger. “What’s the story on this?” he asked, and I told him. I’d been in a car accident when I was a kid, not a big deal, no one seriously hurt.
“Did he ask you who was driving?” This was the reason my sister was Dr. Ha, “Your Therapist.” She always knew the follow-up question.
“I told him Mom was driving.”
Leda opened her mouth and left it open, an incredibly affecting gesture. I wondered if she tried it with her patients.
“I know, I know.”
“Get thee to therapy, sister.”
“Why? Because I didn’t tell the guy I’d gone to bed with about Eddie Triplett? It was an oversimplification.”
“In my profession we call that a lie.”
“I didn’t feel like opening up to him at that moment.”
“You didn’t feel like opening up to him, but you’d just had sex with him?”
“Jesus, Leda, you remember having sex with people for the first time, don’t you? Deep dives into childhood trauma sort of ruins it for everyone. Did you tell Steve about your appendix the first time you slept with him? He must have seen the scar.”
She shook her head and smiled at some private memory.
Later on, when Jonathan became True-Love Jonathan, I never found the right moment to correct myself. “If he thought Mom slammed a car into a tree, well, Jonathan never liked her anyway.”
She nodded. Had it been a tennis match, I would have gotten a point off of her. “So you want to hear something crazy?”
“These are crazy times.”
“You never told me about the car accident.”
I looked surprised. How had she forgotten? “Of course I did.”
“When?”
“When you came home from the hospital.”
“When I was seven.”
We shared a room in the little house in Winchester, twin beds with a nightstand between them, a lamp with a shade made of dotted swiss. Leda was allowed to have popsicles, Jell-O, Cream of Wheat. She was directed to rest, and when she wasn’t resting, I was directed to read her Harriet the Spy and play Go Fish. I asked her what had happened in the hospital, and she asked me what had happened in the car.
__________________________________
From Whistler by Ann Patchett. Copyright © 2026 by Ann Patchett. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
