Before You Know Kindness (19 page)

“Oh, Spencer—”

“Charlotte . . . listen to her.”

“I have. I have for two days.” Now she sounded like she might cry, too. Her small smile faded as she glanced at the door. He sensed how desperately she wanted to be in two places at once. With Charlotte. With him.

“Then . . . tell me. Who?”

“Spencer—”

“Please.”

“My brother,” she answered finally, her voice muted and tired. A leaf on a languid breeze in November.

“John?”

“He’s the only brother I have.” She brushed an unruly wisp of hair behind his ear. “He left the gun in the trunk of his car. That’s where Charlotte got it. But she had no idea it was loaded. She and Willow discovered it when they were getting Patrick more diapers on Saturday night.”

His mind could barely process this notion, and his anger was swamped by incredulity: John Seton with a loaded rifle in the trunk of his Volvo. Was it possible it was there because one of his clients—that endless, frightening parade of alcoholics and thugs and drug dealers—was angry at him? Did John feel the need to protect himself? But if that were the case, wouldn’t he use a handgun? Besides, what good would a rifle do John if he kept it stowed in the trunk of his car?

“Why?”

“Why was it loaded?”

“Why was . . . it . . . there?”

“My brother is a deer hunter. Was, I guess. I believe he’s done now.”

He noticed the light by the side of his bed was changing again, not unlike the way it had in the middle of the night: There was a shadow there now. It was his daughter—their daughter—returning from the hallway. Her cheeks glistened with moisture and he wanted more than anything to reach out and pull her to him. But he couldn’t. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and tried to smile. Then she nuzzled pathetically against her mother, her shoulders lurching up with one final sob.

CHARLOTTE WASN’T SURE
where she’d first learned about cutting—a movie, a Web site, a conversation between older girls she’d overheard—but she did know that the word had come to her today in the hospital elevator. A doctor had used it, though clearly not in the context she had in mind. Mutilation.

When she’d been a toddler, apparently, she would sometimes send herself to the timeout chair after she had misbehaved. She had no memory of doing this, but her parents sometimes joked about it.
Of all the things to outgrow, why did she have to stop disciplining herself in so adorable a fashion?

Well, she thought now, perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I just . . . evolved.

It was night and so she pulled down the shade in the bathroom window in case someone was out walking. Maybe Grandmother bringing in the dog. Maybe her mother or her uncle pacing. Talking about her father. About her. Then she got out the Band-Aids and the Bactine—the key was to cut yourself, not give yourself tetanus or some gross infection—and those old-fashioned razor blades she found in Grandmother’s medicine chest. She pulled her nightgown above her waist on the toilet, the lid cold even through her cotton underwear, and spread her legs. She stared for a long moment at the line of her tan, at the down bleached almost white by the sun.

This was going to be more complicated than she thought, because she had to do this in a spot that no one could see—such as the insides of her thighs. But Grandmother would continue dragging her to the club or Echo Lake as her dad convalesced, which meant she was going to have to wear a bathing suit. This ruled out her legs. Quickly she pulled off her underpants and stared at the patch of dark pubic hair and at the outline of her pelvic bone. There wasn’t room there, either, she realized.

Her stomach, however, was another story. If she wore only her Speedo tank suit for the rest of the summer, instead of her bikini, she could slice up her belly as much as she wanted and no one ever would know.

With the hem of her nightgown in her teeth, she stared for a long moment at the skin around her navel. Then she sprayed some Bactine in a line just beside it and pressed the razor against her flesh with her thumb. She was crying, though not from pain. She would have to saw or slice at the skin—or press much harder—to feel pain. She guessed she was crying yet again because of what she had done, and how she was reduced by it to . . . to this. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she? She pushed the edge deeper into her lower abdomen and then twisted her fingers. Reflexively she yelped, as a tiny red filigree the length of the blade filled quickly with blood. For a long moment she watched it bleed—the raspberry fluid dribbled down her hip and into the crevice between her legs, some getting caught in the thatch of curling hair there—and then abruptly she stood up on her toes and leaned over the sink.

“Charlotte?” It was Willow on the other side of the door. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she answered, aware that her voice sounded strange and loud. “I banged my shin on the bathtub,” she lied. Quickly she doused a tissue in cold tap water and pressed it against the cut. Almost instantly the paper grew red.

“Do you want some ice?”

“No. I’m okay.”

When her cousin had retreated, she sat back down on the toilet seat. She realized that she felt as lousy as she had before she had carved a delicate little gash into her stomach, and she took some comfort in this. Mutilation might help some girls, but clearly it wasn’t going to help her. She might be screwed up, but at least she wasn’t about to become the Queen of the Band-Aids. She wiped her eyes and applied two of the adhesive bandages across the wound. Then she flushed the razor blade down the toilet.

Fifteen

D
ominique Germaine had her doubts about a lawsuit Monday morning, but she wanted to hear more. She liked suing big organizations. In her tenure FERAL had sued dairy councils, meat packers, and public school systems that hung posters encouraging children to drink their milk; they had taken legal action against circuses and aquariums and a marine science museum; they had sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture to make sure that rats, mice, and birds would be afforded protection in the Animal Welfare Act, and then (just for good measure) they had sued the cosmetics companies, the drug companies, and a couple of shoe companies, too. It astonished her that it had never crossed her mind to have her group sue a gun maker or find someone with a reason—real or imagined—to sue one: After all, she loathed hunting. In this day and age it seemed to Dominique to be an anachronism that was at once barbaric and cruel. And it certainly wasn’t a sport, since
sport
implied a competition of sorts, the certainty—or, at least, the likelihood—that each side had a fighting chance. Obviously no mallard or deer had a fighting chance against a human with a rifle. No elephant had any prospect of “winning” against a hunter armed with a Holland & Holland .500 Nitro or one of those legal monstrosities that fired armor-piercing shells into the creatures. A lawsuit was an intriguing idea, regardless of whether Spencer McCullough had a prayer in hell of receiving a penny in compensation—in or out of court—because of the way FERAL could use the family’s lawsuit to shed light on the mind-numbingly violent culture that surrounded guns and hunting and . . . 
deer camp
.

The very term gave Dominique the shivers. She had grown up in Montreal and known children whose families owned hunting shacks in the province’s eastern lakes region or in upstate New York, and so she had a pretty good idea of the way the men fell back innumerable steps on the evolutionary ladder when they were there. She doubted that they even continued to walk upright after a day or two of eating half-cooked doe meat (yes, she knew they illegally killed does the first day; it was a tradition with many hunting families).

Here before her now, some two and a half hours after he had first broached the idea of a lawsuit, was her deputy director and the organization’s general counsel. Keenan Barrett was a tall and elegant southerner with a red cob for a nose, eyes the color of cornflowers in bloom, and a great shock of white hair he kept slicked back with Brylcreem. He was probably pushing sixty, and outwardly he had the demeanor of a good-natured but slightly ponderous headmaster for a private school long past its prime. It was only after he’d spoken for a few minutes and methodically slogged his way to his point that you got a sense of how sharp he really was—which was part of the reason why he had driven John Seton into such a fury on the phone Sunday morning. He tended to still his adversaries, lulling them so they let down their guards or giving them the impression that he was nothing more than a gracious old windbag. Then he would pounce. Dominique had seen him do this in meetings with Revlon and Gillette and a Quebecois fur company, first causing the eyes of the corporate denizens across the table to glaze during his courtly preambles and then causing their blood pressures to climb like Nepalese trekkers when abruptly he put FERAL’s findings or demands (or both) on the table. He was patient as well as intelligent, and as a result he got things done. When Dominique was around him she always felt like a teenage girl who had an ill-advised crush on an older friend of the family.

He sat down in one of the four modern swivel chairs that surrounded the circular table she used for small conferences, and she emerged from behind her own desk to join him. Her office wasn’t huge—they were a nonprofit—but it was far from shabby. It looked out on the northern entrance to the Empire State Building. On two walls there were abstract paintings of tropical birds she had found in a Miami gallery, all of which looked like vaguely erotic flowers, and the polished hardwood floor was the silky color of soy milk. If the room struck some journalists and visitors as a trifle tacky, it was usually because in her desire to make certain there were no animal-based or animal-enhanced products in her sight, there was a lot of hemp on the couch and the chairs, and the coffee table, the credenza, and the desk were made from postconsumer recycled paper. It was actually pretty expensive stuff, but it looked like you wouldn’t dare put anything heavier than a paper cup of coffee or a yellow legal pad atop any of it.

“You know,” Keenan began in his soft, patient voice, “there are myriad reasons why it is just so difficult to be a parent these days. A good parent, that is. My sense is that our friend, Spencer, is going to have a lot of conversations with young Charlotte over the next couple of months that can only be called intense. Same with this John Seton fellow and his little girl. Those conversations will be rather different in nature, as you can imagine, but they will share a certain umbrella reality that may have a good deal to do with what those families read about this story in the newspapers or happen to catch on the nightly news. My guess is that although it’s unlikely we’ll ever see anything that happened up in New Hampshire go to trial, we may be able to turn what I thought was going to be a public relations nightmare to our advantage.”

“I don’t think Spencer and Charlotte have intense conversations about anything. Spencer saves his intensity for us.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe Catherine and Charlotte will have to have the hard talks.”

“Actually, I find it rather encouraging that you believe a gun manufacturer might even consider settling,” she said. “I figured this was all, I don’t know, nuisance material. Frivolous. After all, even if there is some tiny defect with the rifle, the man left it sitting around since last November with a bullet inside it. And we still don’t know whether there was a flaw or if this brother-in-law is just an imbecile. Besides, the child shouldn’t have been playing with the weapon. It’s pretty obvious that if you pull the trigger on a gun, there’s a chance that someone’s going to get hurt. Wouldn’t this be like suing a knife company because you cut yourself on the blade?”

“Oh, we can muddy things up a bit. Spencer’s lawyers, that is. Especially if the extractor was defective. Then he’s in pretty fine shape, though there won’t be a doubt in anyone’s mind that his brother-in-law should have gotten the darn thing taken care of last year. But even if the extractor doesn’t have some little ding somewhere, Spencer’s lawyers would have a shot. Pun intended. It comes down to the nature of most gun chambers and magazines. I had my assistant do a little research online this morning—intellectual curiosity, more than anything. I wanted to see the general shape of product liability with guns, and whether ol’ Spencer would have a chance of getting his bad wing in front of a jury. Then I took a walk over to that sporting goods store by Madison Square Garden and looked at the hunting rifles.”

“And?”

“Seems to me a lawyer could argue a couple of things. A strict product liability suit: the gun folks have been placing a dangerously defective product in the stream of commerce—”

“The girl fired the gun and it went off. Where’s the defect?”

“It goes back to how you unload the weapon. Even after you empty all the bullets from the magazine, there is still one in the chamber. Can you imagine? You have to remove that one separately, using the bolt of the weapon. Now, someone could contend that’s a design flaw. All you’d need is one expert—or, if we were very, very lucky, one seriously disgruntled ex-employee—who was willing to suggest that no one at the company ever bothered to link the magazine and the chamber more efficiently because it would cost too much.”

“Don’t most hunters know that?”

“About the bullet in the chamber? I expect so. But things happen. People forget. This is a route you might go if Spencer’s gun experts don’t find anything wrong with his actual weapon. If they can’t claim his particular gun was uniquely defective, then—what the hell?—you take on the whole damn Adirondack thirty-ought-six. You argue that the magazine and the chamber should be able to be unloaded simultaneously—or that there should be some sort of indication when there’s a bullet in the chamber. A light, maybe, or a flag. Perhaps we contend that the weapon needed to be childproof—have a more secure safety device.”

“And it’s conceivable that the gun company might settle?”

“Gun companies—Adirondack, Winchester, Browning—have insurance for exactly this sort of thing. It’s a cost of doing business.”

“What if Spencer refuses?”

“To settle?”

“Uh-huh.” Dominique was aware that she sounded hopeful. She could already imagine the publicity that would surround a trial.

Keenan wrote with a fountain pen, and for a long moment he seemed to be staring at the budlike gold nib as he formulated his answer in his mind. His fingers were elegant: not effeminate but as long and slender as a pianist’s, and each nail was an immaculate seashell pink box with four rounded corners. He had, Dominique thought, the perfect hands for a fountain pen. Finally he answered her. “It goes to court in three or four years,” he said, “and then Spencer wins or loses. Who can say? It would depend upon his experts—and theirs. And if Spencer’s little girl is sufficiently telegenic, and if Spencer doesn’t look downright evil to the jury—”

“Spencer, evil? I can think of many words to describe Spencer, but
evil
isn’t exactly top of the list.”

“Evil either because he looks like someone trying to recoup from an injury caused by his own daughter—that can certainly put off a jury—or evil because he works for us. Obviously we’ve never done anything as outrageous as, say, the Animal Freedom Front, but we’ve irritated our share of folks in this world who believe our opinions are a tad extreme. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get some doctor or scientist from that medical school on the jury—someone who still hasn’t forgiven FERAL for getting their research labs shut down a couple years back.”

“They were giving cats AIDS and crystal meth—and then killing them.”

He shrugged. “And we might be surprised if somehow we could prevent his brother-in-law from coming across as a moron of Herculean proportions. After all, we’d have an attractive, remorseful teenage girl—Charlotte is what now, twelve?—whom we can portray as desperately traumatized by what happened and a small-town lawyer from Vermont. They might look pretty good to a jury.”

“And even if the manufacturer does eventually settle, we still get three or four years’ worth of media coverage, right?”

“Probably not that long,” he answered. “At some point the judge puts us all under a gag order. Or they settle quickly to make this whole incident go away.”

Dominique thought about this and wondered suddenly if Spencer might actually need a windfall settlement. She didn’t think so: He came from some money, and Catherine was absolutely loaded. His mother-in-law lived in some massive Park Avenue apartment, and the Setons owned that baronial place on a hill up in the White Mountains. She’d seen Spencer’s pictures. And it wasn’t as if this injury—even if the poor guy did lose his right arm—was going to affect his ability to do his job. It wasn’t like you needed two hands to rewrite an assistant’s news release or plan a press conference or make catty comments about bunny-tested eyeliner on TV talk shows.

Besides, that was the McCullough family’s decision to make, not hers. Her only responsibility was to FERAL. For all she knew, nothing would come of this, anyway. But she decided that she liked the notion of a lawsuit against a gun manufacturer. She liked it very much.

“It’s too bad you can’t be Spencer’s lawyer,” she said.

“Oh, product liability isn’t exactly my specialty. But obviously I’d be happy to work with the right person.”

“You know who that might be?”

“I’d recommend Paige Sutherland.”

“I like Paige.”

“Course you do,” he said, and he slipped the cap back on his fountain pen. “Want me to call her?”

“And Spencer.”

He raised his eyebrows mischievously. “Yes. We can’t forget to tell Spencer.”

“No.”

“I’ll call him right now,” Barrett said. “Besides, I want someone to photograph his shoulder in the next day or two—before it gets any better.”

“I don’t believe there’s much chance of that.”

“Pardon me. Before it outwardly begins to look less repulsive. We want images that show Spencer at his absolute worst.”

For a moment she tried to envision what the wound must look like and the sort of agony her communications director was probably enduring, but her mind kept offering images instead of the deer she had seen in the countryside beyond Montreal—upstate New York, the Laurentians—the animals shot and disemboweled and left hanging on the families’ front porches. She wanted to be sympathetic to people, too, but the truth was that she just didn’t have it in her.