Before You Know Kindness (15 page)

Part II

Lobsters

Eleven

I
t was after two in the morning when John and Nan and Charlotte and Willow finally left the hospital in Hanover to return to Sugar Hill, where Patrick was sleeping and Sara was sitting in the chair by the window, wondering just what she would say to her husband if Spencer died and what kinds of things Charlotte would say a decade from now to (it was inevitable) her therapist, regardless of whether her father survived the night. She was scared, she realized, and she was feeling left out. She didn’t normally feel left out when she managed to avoid a game of golf with everyone else or a hike through the woods of Franconia Notch to the flume. Usually she felt relieved. But not this night. As she had looked through the slightly grimy screen window at the driveway and the vegetable garden, she felt—as she had at different points when she was a child and even in college—that she was on the outskirts of some place or some clique of which she wanted sincerely to be a part. She had known the feeling since the second or third grade, when her mother was the school secretary and sat right outside the principal’s office. She knew that other children in her class had secrets that they kept from her simply because of who her mother was.

Consequently, she was grateful when well past three in the morning she saw the headlights coming up the long driveway in the dark, and downright euphoric when she saw that Catherine did not emerge from the car with the rest of the family. It had to mean that Spencer was still breathing, because she believed that no wife would have left her husband at the hospital at that time of the night unless her husband had died.

There had been moments in her vigil by the window when she had wished that John or Nan would call her from the hospital, but she hadn’t thought that was likely. Everyone was hoping that she and the baby would sleep, and everyone was so stunned by the accident that they weren’t thinking sufficiently straight to realize that even a catnap was going to be impossible.

She watched her husband with particular interest as he walked from her mother-in-law’s car to the house. She wanted to see whether she could detect what he was feeling, because she wanted to be able to comfort him. Comfort them. Charlotte, Willow, her mother-in-law, too. They all had to be reeling.

She presumed John was still numb, but there was also remorse because he had never bothered to deal with the jammed bullet. He’d mentioned it off and on over the past eight or nine months, but it simply hadn’t been a top-priority errand—especially after their lives were thrown into turmoil with the arrival of Patrick. She’d told John that she didn’t like the idea of a loaded gun in the house, but he’d reassured her that the safety was on and the gun was locked away. And Willow, they both knew, would never try to break into the gun cabinet.

Tonight the fellow from Fish and Wildlife had informed her that in some states keeping a loaded long arm in the trunk of a moving vehicle was a misdemeanor offense, but her husband was lucky because neither Vermont nor New Hampshire was among them. In response she’d said that her husband hadn’t a choice: He couldn’t unload the weapon, because the bullet wouldn’t come out! She was afraid that she’d sounded defensive—almost abrasive—but she thought she detected something vaguely ominous in the uniformed man’s remark, and she wanted it known that while John should have dealt with the bullet in the chamber, this wasn’t completely his fault. She presumed—as she had since that November afternoon when John had returned from his day in the woods—that there was some minor defect with the gun, because otherwise he would have finished unloading it.

Though she still didn’t understand exactly what Charlotte had said to the state trooper because the girl had been sobbing so hard, from the conversation she overheard it sounded as if the child didn’t realize there was a bullet in the rifle. This didn’t excuse her taking the weapon from the trunk of the car and playing with it, but it did make her behavior less foolish.

Still, as frustrated as she was with her husband for failing to take the rifle to a gunsmith, she was also saddened for him because she knew that John viewed Spencer more as a very good friend than a brother-in-law. She understood that he was going to be writhing in a deep, deep trough of guilt and self-loathing. Yes, she and John both considered Spencer a trifle extreme when it came to animal rights, but it was a pretty harmless eccentricity. At the moment, in fact, it seemed to Sara as substantially more harmless than her own husband’s recent interest in hunting—an ample eccentricity in its own right.

She noticed in the porch light over the garage that her husband advanced alone along the blue gravel to the slate walkway with the tentative steps of a very old man, leaving their daughter and their niece to Nan. They were a few paces behind him, and the whole group was inching forward without saying a word. She heard the jingle of his keys, but their steps were oddly soundless on the stones, as if they were walking on tiptoe.

A few seconds after they had rounded the corner of the house and were no longer in view, she listened for the worn-out wheeze of the screen door as it opened. Then, glancing once at her sleeping baby—his chest raising the small comforter ever so slightly as he breathed—she went down the stairs to see exactly how Spencer was doing and what she could say that might help.

Twelve

L
ate Sunday morning Willow discovered strawberries the deer had neither devoured nor trampled. Her inclination was to kneel down and eat them, but she squatted instead because she didn’t dare get dirt on her knees—not this morning. The air felt heavy, and it was as eerily silent here at the edge of the yard as it was back in the house. Somewhere, she knew, there were birds, but they too seemed to understand that they didn’t dare make a sound. The high gray sky was creased with curlicue wisps of cirrus clouds, and the heat seemed to Willow as if it were rising up from the ground. She twisted the first strawberry she found from its vine and bit into its moist, cuneiform tip. She hadn’t had breakfast—her father had insisted on getting out the English muffins and boxes of dry cereal for her, but then the phone rang yet again and he was lost to a male voice at the other end of the line, and she hadn’t wanted to sit alone at Grandmother’s dining room table—and now, hours later, she was hungry. The strawberry was delicious, and not simply because she hadn’t eaten a thing since she’d gotten a candy bar from the vending machine at the hospital last night. She finished it off in a second bite and then tossed the cap stem into the weeds at the edge of yet more lupine.

When she’d been younger, her mother had read to her a children’s picture book about an old spinster who wanted to make the world a more beautiful place, and so she had spread lupine across some island. The spinster was called the lupine lady, and the lavender, blue, and ruby-colored flowers she planted were her gift to the world.

Grandmother’s lupine had largely peaked by the time she and her cousin had arrived here, and so the wildflower struck her as more of an aggravation than a present. It made it difficult to wade through the fields. She remembered how it had been torture to uproot it over Memorial Day Weekend.

She ate a second strawberry, this one smaller than the first, in a single bite. Then she started to paw through the plants and the flattened leaves for additional berries, and saw a whole cluster the deer had missed. It was pretty clear to her that no one in the house felt like eating, and so she figured if she wanted she could finish off the strawberries and no one would care. But she decided that certainly wasn’t what her uncle had had in mind when he’d placed these plants in the ground one by one. He’d envisioned them having feasts of berries together—as a family.

On the porch she saw her mother approaching the balustrade and leaning over the rail. She was pressing one of her feet abstractedly through the spindles and scanning the fields to the south. Any second she would turn her gaze to the west and see her. Willow knew there wasn’t time to race into the lupine—or, better still, the nearby cluster of white pine—and hide, but she wished there were. She didn’t want to be seen. She wanted to be invisible.

No, that wasn’t quite accurate. It wasn’t that she wanted to be invisible; it was that she wanted it to be nighttime again and to hear her father in the upstairs window, asking her to bring in some diapers for Patrick. If she could do it all over again—and, of course, she couldn’t—she would get the diapers while Charlotte wasn’t hovering over her shoulder, because then her cousin would never have discovered the rifle. She heard once again the colossal blast in her head. She had delivered the diapers to her parents and already come down the stairs. She was about to round the corner in the hall that led past the kitchen. Reflexively she ran toward the gunshot rather than away from it, because she knew immediately it was Charlotte. Her first thought, however, was that her cousin might have hurt herself—not someone else—but she didn’t really believe even that. When she thought back on those last precious seconds before she knew what in fact had occurred, she recalled racing outside convinced that Charlotte had accidentally fired the rifle into the air and somewhere in the distant fields a bullet was falling harmlessly to earth.

But then she heard the girl’s wail, almost at the same moment that she saw Charlotte standing in the grass near the garden with her hands empty at her sides. Already she had dropped the gun. Later that night she would learn from Charlotte’s interviews with the man from Fish and Wildlife and the state trooper that the rifle’s recoil had actually knocked her back onto her rear end—which was when she had dropped the Adirondack—but she had bounced back up as if she were a child’s inflatable, bottom-weighted punching bag. It was Aunt Catherine, arriving maybe a minute later, who’d heaved the gun against the nearby apple tree.

Willow was the first person to reach Uncle Spencer. She’d simply continued to run in the direction that her cousin—the other girl’s eyes wide with hysteria and insensible grief—was facing. Dimly she understood Charlotte was shrieking, “I thought it was a deer! I thought it was a deer!” but she hadn’t yet realized that the girl was actually referring to her own father.
It.
Later, when they were at the hospital, Willow guessed by
it
Charlotte had meant also the movement. The physical presence that emerged from the lupine at the edge of the garden.

Willow knew that everyone—the state trooper, that fellow from Fish and Wildlife, those two EMTs—seemed worried that what she had seen would leave her scarred. The body. Her uncle. No kid should have to see such a thing, she overheard the trooper murmuring to the officer from Fish and Wildlife. But the truth was, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t good, either, that was for sure: She saw the deep burgundy stain spreading across her uncle’s sport shirt like an overturned glass of tomato juice—the red indeed as viscous and thick as tomato juice, especially by his shoulder and collarbone—and she had seen the faraway look in his wide-open eyes. She was scared for her uncle, and for a moment she’d been so hot and dizzy that she thought she might faint—something she’d never done before in her life. But, she realized, she had seen far, far worse things in horror movies. Every kid had.

Still, she had no plans to visit the vegetable garden on the other side of the house for a very long time. Certainly, if she could help it, for the rest of the summer.

Above her she saw a bird, the first one she had noticed since she had ventured out here to the strawberries. It was a crow, that massive black bird that Charlotte had suspected was a raven when they’d first mentioned it to Grandmother three days ago. Three days. How could things possibly have changed so much in only three days? As she watched the bird’s silent flight over the house, she guessed that it had emerged from the top of the pines—from exactly where Grandmother had said its nest was. It circled the house and the garage and then descended abruptly to a spot she couldn’t quite see. Maybe it had landed in the garden. Or seen something beside the apple trees or on the driveway. She wished she and her cousin had tried that experiment with the dime her grandmother had suggested. It would have been interesting to have come home from the club on Thursday afternoon and seen whether the coin was gone.

She supposed that Uncle Spencer would live, if only because she couldn’t imagine a world in which he could die. Yes, things could change in three days, but she couldn’t allow herself to believe they could change that much. It was going to be difficult enough for Charlotte to go through life with the knowledge that she had shot her dad, and so she was giving little credence to the possibility that her uncle wouldn’t be out of intensive care in a couple of days and back home in a couple of weeks.

Her mother saw her now, pulled her sandal in from the bulbous porch spindles, and started toward her across the grass of the badminton court. She was walking slowly, almost gingerly, her hands casually in the front pants pockets of her shorts.
How are you feeling? How does that make you feel?
Her conversations with her mother—the serious ones—seemed to begin with her mother asking her one of those questions, and already Willow heard the words in her head. Other children, she knew, were jealous of her mother’s apparent placidity in the midst of either crisis or misbehavior. And, she decided, they had every right to be. The way Sara actually asked how she felt about things sometimes drove her crazy—especially when she didn’t yet
know
how she felt about something—but it was also one of the many reasons why Willow loved her so much and knew the woman was different from other moms.

She sighed and stood up, as if she’d been caught red-handed doing something wrong. She noticed a drop of pulpy red juice on her fingertips, as well as a dimpled bit of the fruit itself, and she thought once again of her uncle.

Thirteen

W
hile the two EMTs, the sergeant from the state police, and the officer from Fish and Wildlife continued to wonder on Sunday what the hell kind of moron flatlander would fail to unload his thirty-ought-six and then leave the damn thing in the trunk of his car, Nan Seton had a pressing question of her own: Where in the name of heaven were the baby wipes? John was on his way back to the hospital and Sara was outside in the strawberries with Willow. Charlotte was the only other person in the house with her and Patrick, and she was still sobbing behind closed doors.

Normally Nan would have disturbed the pair in the strawberries without hesitation, but she hadn’t seen her daughter-in-law and Willow sit still together—just the two of them—for more than ten minutes since Patrick had been born. She guessed the girl needed her mother, and she didn’t want to intrude on them.

Patrick, alas, had turned a once spongelike disposable diaper into an oozing jellyfish so sloppy that no one—not even Sara—would have been able to compact it into one of those neat little softballs that were so easy to throw away. Worse, the baby had somehow managed to coat even his little light switch of a penis with waste. He smiled up at her now from his perch on a towel on the bureau where she was changing him, and she interpreted that smile on his face to be one of pride. His diaper sat dripping on a century-old cherry dresser.

Finally, when it was clear that the wipes were not beside the opened block of diapers on the floor or anywhere on the dresser, when it was evident there were none in the medicine cabinet, she decided she’d have to do something drastic. Hoisting the infant into the air in the towel, using it like a hammock, she carried him into the bathroom. There she filled the sink and started bobbing him up and down in the water. He clucked with pleasure, and she found herself clucking back. She’d have this lad swimming with her in Echo Lake in no time.

WHEN SARA AND WILLOW
wandered inside twenty minutes later, Nan didn’t tell them of her resourcefulness, but Sara noticed the clean diaper and the baby’s contentment. She kissed Patrick’s toes, which Nan guessed must have tasted agreeably clean. Then Sara brought the baby onto the porch to nurse him, and Willow collapsed into the thick couch in the living room. Nan sat down beside her and started to rub her hand in wide, slow circles along the child’s back. It felt thin and tiny to her, almost too fragile for a child less than two months shy of eleven.

“Did you have a nice chat with your mother?” Nan asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“You sound pensive.”

“No. Not really. Just tired.”

“No more questions?”

The girl turned toward her. “Well, maybe one.”

“Go ahead.”

“How angry are people going to be with Charlotte?”

She thought about this for a moment. “It was idiotic of her to do what she did. But she’s a child and she made a mistake.” Then she surprised herself by adding, “As for my son . . . that’s another story.”

“Mom thinks you’re pretty mad at Dad.”

“Your mother is right. Thank God your uncle is going to live. If he weren’t . . . well, if he weren’t I think as bad as things seem now, they’d be a thousand times worse. A thousand times. Really, I have no idea how a man as smart as your father—as smart and as organized as your father—could have done such a thing.”

“He thought the gun was broken,” the child said.

“Oh, I have no doubt about that. I’m sure it was. What I can’t fathom is why he didn’t get it fixed before now. Something like this was bound to happen.”

“Is Charlotte still upstairs in her room?”

“Yes. Still crying, I believe. Have you two spoken this morning?”

“Uh-huh. She was pretty upset. Mom talked to her, too—and I guess she will again before we go to the hospital.”

Nan nodded. There were advantages to having a therapist in the family, even if sometimes it made them all more comfortable discussing their feelings than she’d like. “Good. Has your mother said when she would like us to go?”

“No.”

“After lunch, I’d imagine,” she murmured, and then decided to broach the question that was really on her mind. “Tell me, Willow: What exactly was Charlotte thinking? Do you know? Did she honestly believe she could just take her uncle’s rifle and shoot a deer?”

Willow took a deep breath because she wanted, she realized, to tell Grandmother—to tell
anyone
—that Charlotte probably hadn’t been thinking at all (at least not particularly clearly) because she’d had a beer and helped smoke a joint. She wanted to say that she wasn’t exactly sure
what
Charlotte had believed. But she knew that Charlotte didn’t want her to tell anyone what they had done at the bonfire, because then things could get really nasty. All of a sudden drugs and alcohol would be involved, and Charlotte had managed to sniffle to Willow at the hospital in the middle of the night that she didn’t want to get Gwen in trouble, too.

“I don’t know what she was thinking, Grandmother,” she answered simply.

“No idea?”

“Nope. None.”

Nan gave the girl’s shoulder one final squeeze and then stood, exhaling a long, slow breath through her nose. She gazed out the window for a moment and finally announced, “Well. We should get some food in you—and, perhaps, in your cousin. Before we know it, it will be time for us all to go to the hospital.”

THERE WERE LOTS
of reasons for pointing Uncle John’s rifle at whatever was moving at the edge of the garden, and with her head buried underneath her pillow on her bed Charlotte could see them all. There were those hideous plastic shoes she had to wear to school, because her father wouldn’t let her wear leather ones; there was her ugly vinyl wallet and change purse; there was her dream of visiting the circus when it came to Madison Square Garden one time—once, that was all she desired—before she was really too old; there was her frustration that again this year Grandmother hadn’t been allowed to take her to the county fair in Haverhill, because among the games of chance were the baby racing pigs, and inside the 4-H tents there would be beef cows and dairy cows and the full-grown pigs that might be only days away from their slaughter. Depending upon what day they would have gone to the fair, there might also have been a milking exhibition or a horse pull—the spectacle, evil in her father’s mind, of a couple of draft horses competing to see which could pull the greatest weight across a dirt arena.

There was even this pillow itself, a flat, poly-filled sack that was nowhere near as soft and fluffy as the goose down pillows on which Grandmother, Uncle John, and Aunt Sara slept. She’d felt their inviting plumpness, she knew the difference. Willow, too. She knew that the only reason Willow didn’t have one of those comfortable pillows was because Grandmother tried not to give one granddaughter something she couldn’t give both.

And there was the desire to make her own decisions about food and clothing and animals. About what was right and wrong.

And then last night, suddenly, there was that gun. Uncle John’s gun. In her hands.

Her uncle was among the most reasonable—the most normal—grown-ups she knew, and if he hunted . . . well, truly, how bad could it be?

The truth was, she didn’t expect to actually hit the deer. She never even expected to pull the trigger. She was just aiming and curling her finger, aiming and squeezing . . . 

And the night was so quiet, she didn’t think anything was out there at first.

Oh, but then she heard the movement in the lupine. The rustling. The sound of an animal pawing its way through the tall brush—perhaps one of the very same animals that had been pillaging the garden. That was when she first envisioned herself actually pointing the rifle at something and pulling the trigger. And if she did hit the creature, well, that would certainly show her parents. Her father.
See, Dad, it’s one or the other,
she imagined herself saying.
It’s either the vegetable garden or animal rights. You can’t have both.

Yes, she had been irritated last night when they got home from the club. No doubt about that. Whether it was because of the beer or the dope or the reality that more times than not she was—she had to admit—an angry girl, she honestly didn’t know. But she was feeling downright pissy by the time they got back to Sugar Hill, and here was this sleek and powerful and (yes) handsome gun in her grasp and the chance to cause some real havoc.

She remembered saying to someone—she couldn’t recall now whether it was the state trooper or that other guy from the state animal department—that she hadn’t even known the rifle was loaded, but that wasn’t completely true. When she thought back carefully on all she remembered, she knew that safety button she kept flipping back and forth had struck her as a warning of some sort: Why would there be a safety if there weren’t a bullet? Still, only when she was curling her index finger that one last time—that final time, the time she knew she would curl it until something happened—did the notion take firm root in her mind that if there was a bullet in the rifle this might be an inadvisable course of action. Until then, she’d operated on the premise that it didn’t really matter if the gun was loaded or not, because she was just aiming it randomly out into the garden.

Until she heard that movement near the snow peas.

And continued her pressure on the trigger, this time not pausing until she heard the roar. No, she didn’t just hear the roar, she felt it: The rifle exploded like fireworks in her arms, and she was heaved up in the air like a shot put ball, arcing back to the earth and onto her butt. Only later would she and Willow discover how badly her shoulder was bruised. It was indeed nasty: a massive yellow and black and blue paint stain on—and the irony was not lost on Charlotte—the very same shoulder in which her father had taken the bullet.

It’s just a cry for attention.
How many times had she overheard one of her teachers or one of her friends’ parents or her aunt Sara telling her mom that over the years? Too many to count, that was for sure. According to some of the grown-ups around her, half of what she did in this world was a cry for attention. Someone was bound to say that about this disaster, too.
She was just doing it to get your attention.

Well, not this time. This wasn’t about trying to get her dad’s or her mom’s attention. This wasn’t about trying to get anyone’s attention. It wasn’t
about
anything. It just . . . was. It was like a plane crash or a subway fire or a toddler who falls out an apartment window and dies. It was one of those nightmarish accidents that happened all the time because people were human and made mistakes. Yes, she’d been teed off at her dad for a decade of large and small slights—the way he believed that a Broadway show or one Saturday afternoon riding made up for three or four weeks of neglect—and maybe she did want to plug a deer to piss him off. Maybe she wanted to plug a deer to piss off both of her parents.

And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to help. Maybe she thought she was frightening the deer away and saving what was left of the snow peas. Now here was an interpretation of history that might get her through this disaster, an explanation of events that might allow her to actually rise from this bed and face her grandmother and her aunt and her cousin. Her mother. Her father. Hadn’t she even told Willow last night that she wished there was something she could do about the garden? Certainly she had.

Oh, she was kidding herself. The truth was there was no design to this disaster, no conscious plan. At least she didn’t think there was. It wasn’t as if she
wanted
to shoot anything. Not a deer, not her dad. God, she couldn’t possibly have wanted to shoot her dad. Could she? He may not have been a perfect father, but she knew in her heart that he did what he did because he loved animals, and there were worse faults to have in this world.

She had a vague sense that when her mom had picked the gun up off the ground and hurled it away from her like it was a live hand grenade—the thing had banged against one of Grandmother’s apple trees before falling into the grass—she’d feared it was going to go off once again, and send a second bullet into whoever happened to be in its path.

She told herself now that all she wanted was for her father to survive and to forgive her. Her pillow was sodden with tears, and she wondered if she would ever stop crying.

SARA HEARD
the state trooper’s vehicle rumbling up the long rocky driveway before she saw it. She was making sandwiches for the girls and her mother-in-law—Willow and Nan were upstairs now with her niece—and her first instinct was that the car was owned by a friend of Nan’s who was coming by to see what she could do. Instead, however, she saw a green and tan cruiser coasting to a stop before the garage, and the trooper they’d met the night before emerging from the vehicle. His name was Ned and he was a sergeant, and she thought his last name might have been Howland, but she wasn’t positive. He was about forty, clean-shaven, and his hair was just starting to gray: There were patches of white along his sideburns. She presumed that he was returning John’s gun, which he’d confiscated the night before. But she saw that he wasn’t reaching into the backseat or venturing around the car to the trunk. He was simply heading up the slate walkway toward the front door, a clipboard and a pad under his arm.

Patrick had actually fallen back to sleep and his body was lolling right now in his little blue chair on the floor by her feet. She didn’t want the doorbell to wake him, and so she raced outside to greet the trooper.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, and he tipped his hat. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping by. I meant to call first, but a young man rolled his father’s pickup in Lisbon. I had to take care of that before coming here, and it threw my day off a bit. The boy’s shaken—mostly because his father is furious—but otherwise he’s okay. Still, I should have called. My apologies.”

“That’s fine.”

“May I come in?”

She nodded. “Now I should apologize. My manners. I just wasn’t thinking. Of course you can come in. I was making sandwiches. We were going to have something to eat and then go to the hospital.”