Before You Know Kindness (44 page)

“Yes.” She considered adding more, but since her cousin had brought this up she had the instinctive sense that she should remain patient and see what Charlotte had to say.

“I’ve been thinking about them, too.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. And I know you don’t want us to lie, but I believe we have to. We have to for my father. This whole lawsuit could crash and burn—isn’t that a powerful expression? I learned it from my history teacher—if people find out I was stoned when I pulled the trigger. And that would be a disaster for him both personally and professionally. This isn’t about you or me, and it sure as heck isn’t about Gwen. It’s about my dad. Your uncle.”

She worked hard not to raise her voice. “But what about
my
dad? It isn’t fair to him if we don’t tell the truth—”

“Your dad isn’t crippled. Mine is. Your dad doesn’t have a cause here that matters to him. Mine does.”

“But lying is wrong. It’s—”

“Willow, have you ever told someone you couldn’t come over to their house because you were going to visit your grandmother? You know, told a little white lie so you didn’t hurt someone’s feelings? In my opinion, not telling the whole truth at the depo-whatever—”

“Deposition,” she said, unable to restrain herself from correcting her cousin.

“Right. Deposition. Not telling the truth at the deposition is like a white lie. It makes things better than telling the truth, which would only make people’s lives worse. Do you see the difference?”

“We’re not talking about a little white lie. We’re talking about a really big one.”

“No. The point is—”

“Here’s what I think the point is. Your dad can’t use his arm anymore and my dad is in trouble because you picked up his gun and started fooling around with it. And why were you fooling around with it? Because we were both stoned.”

“First of all, your dad is
not
in trouble. Second, I would have taken the gun even if
we
hadn’t been smoking pot,” she said evenly, her voice lowering a register and picking up a slight trace of a British accent. “That’s
my
point, and I am quite certain of it now.”

“So, you know what’s going to happen, then?” Willow responded, hoping to keep her tone equally as measured. She stared straight ahead at the chess players in their medieval garb, wondering suddenly where they’d gotten all those costumes. Everyone looked like they had just arrived here from Middle Earth. “You won’t say anything about the pot and the beer, but I will. They’ll find out anyway—everyone will—and that certainly won’t make your dad’s case look very good.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I can! I won’t lie in the deposition, Charlotte. I won’t. It’s wrong, and it’s not fair to my dad.”

“You can’t—”

“Girls, is everything okay?” It was her aunt Catherine’s voice. She turned around, and the grown women—her aunt and her mom and her grandmother with the pram before her—all looked slightly concerned. Willow didn’t believe they had overheard enough of their conversation to understand exactly what they were discussing, but clearly they’d heard their daughters fighting.

“Oh, we’re fine, Mother,” Charlotte called back in that new voice of hers. “Just two girls bickering.”

“Are you hungry? There seem to be some vendors along that road over there,” Aunt Catherine told them, and she pointed at the row of food carts on the street, closed today to automobiles, that wound its way up to the Cloisters.

“Cousin, are you hungry?” Charlotte asked her.

“No.”

“That’s probably good. I smell a lot of seared flesh,” she murmured softly. Then she raised her voice for their parents and said, “We’re both fine!”

“Okay, then. Just let us know if there’s something you want,” her aunt said.

Charlotte picked up her pace and Willow had to walk faster to keep up. When they had some distance once again on the grown-ups, Charlotte spoke: “This is very complicated, you know. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“Me, too.”

“But here’s something else,” she said firmly. “How could we be friends after you revealed everything? How could we? Telling everyone everything would be so hurtful to my dad. That’s what I don’t get: Here I am trying to make up for what I did—yes, what
I
did, I know I’m to blame—by making this lawsuit and this press conference go perfectly, and you’re trying to stop me.”

“I’m not trying to stop you.”

“Oh, but you would. You would undo everything if you talked,” Charlotte said.

“But—”

“Look, we’re not going to figure this out right this second. Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Think about what I’ve said. Okay? Just think about it today, and we can talk more tonight. Deal?”

Willow couldn’t imagine she’d change her mind, but they really were getting nowhere. And so she nodded and mumbled, “Okay.” Then she halted where she was to watch a pair of tumblers who were dressed like the court jesters on her grandmother’s playing cards, while Charlotte walked on ahead.

“What were you and Charlotte talking about?” She turned and saw her mother standing beside her. Her grandmother and her aunt were continuing to walk, slowly narrowing the gap between them and her cousin. At some point her mother had taken the carriage back from Grandmother, and so Willow peeked inside now and saw her brother smiling up at her. He seemed to be batting his eyelashes like a baby flirt.

“Oh, nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing.”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, though she had no expectation that she would tell her mother the real subject at any point soon. How could she until she and Charlotte had come to some sort of resolution?

But then, maybe that shouldn’t matter. And maybe it wouldn’t matter. This had to resolve itself this weekend, because it was possible that after tomorrow she wouldn’t see Charlotte again before their depositions. And so it crossed her mind that she should simply tell her mother and father tonight what had occurred that awful evening at the club in New Hampshire. Let them figure out how to deal with the information.

An idea began to form. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or—even if it was—whether she had the courage to go through with it. But it was certainly a notion that intrigued her. With her uncle Spencer now speaking to her father, she had no doubt that later that day or that evening both families would have a meal together somewhere. Maybe a nice dinner at a Japanese or Chinese or Indian restaurant on the Upper East or West Side. Then, with everyone gathered together, she would reveal the details that both she and her cousin had withheld since that horrible night. Charlotte would be furious—there would be no dignified British orphan scene once this word got out; this would be a performance, she guessed, comprised largely of screaming and hysteria—but wouldn’t it be better to expose everything here in New York, with all the grown-ups assembled in one place, than as a complete surprise in a deposition?

And, she knew, one way or another it was going to come out. No matter how hard she tried, she could no longer keep that part of the story to herself.

HOW ODD,
Catherine thought. Spencer was here and she was walking with him, and he had just had a long talk with her brother. This was exactly what she had wanted, exactly what she had hoped would occur but hadn’t thought possible. They were strolling along the terrace that overlooked the Hudson River, while everyone else was back in the park getting something to eat. But then Spencer had told her of his conversation with John about the press conference and she had grown angry. Their family was lurching spastically toward public humiliation, estrangement, or both, and their daughter was, according to Dr. Warwick, a volcano of guilt and despair just waiting to explode—despite whatever serenity she was projecting on the surface. And here Spencer was bringing up the press conference. Again. The gentle feel of his fingers on her neck last night—their taste when she kissed them—seemed very far away to her now, and she knew exactly what she would say.

She paused against the stonewall and gazed out at the Palisades across the water.

“I’ve made a decision,” she said, and she could feel him stopping beside her, though she couldn’t imagine he knew what she was thinking.

“Oh? About what?”

She took a breath, exhaled. Took another and began: “If you go ahead with that press conference on Tuesday, I will leave you.”

“What?”

“I will pack up our daughter and we will go across town to my mother’s, and I will immediately start looking for a new home for us. For Charlotte and me.”

“Whoa. Where is—”

“You know where this is coming from. At least you should. Things haven’t been right between us for a very long time. As a matter of fact, if the accident hadn’t intervened, I was going to tell you in New Hampshire that I wanted us to start counseling. Marriage counseling. At the very least I wanted that. Certainly we
needed
it. I might even have left you then, but you got hurt and so I couldn’t. I just . . . couldn’t.”

He was leaning against the stones beside her, and she wondered why she wasn’t crying. She thought she might if she turned to look at him, and so she didn’t. She focused on the shore across the water, on a plane descending toward Newark.

“Why isn’t counseling an option now, then? Why this threat—”

“Maybe we could explore counseling once I’ve left. Maybe not. Right now I don’t know. But I am quite sure that I cannot live with you if you are capable of subjecting our daughter—and, yes, my brother—to the indignities that will follow your press conference. It’s just that simple.”

“But it will help the lawsuit,” he said, a quiver of panic marking his voice. “And it’s such a great opportunity for us to point out the horrors of hunting. Good Lord, the pain I’m enduring is precisely what deer experience—”

“I don’t care. For once I want you to put your family first. You know, those animals you live with, those animals who are a part of your very own little herd. Charlotte and me. My brother. Go ahead with the lawsuit, sue the hell out of Adirondack—though I would certainly hope that you and Paige would have the common sense not to let this thing ever get to a trial. But you hold that press conference to announce it on Tuesday—you so much as have Randy Mitchell pick up the phone to start calling people on Monday morning to tell them about the event—and your daughter and I are out the door. We are gone before the sweat from Randy’s hands has left a palm print on her phone.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you felt so strongly about the press conference sooner?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t—”

“I did! I told you every way I could! But it wasn’t registering! That’s why it has come to this.”

“An ultimatum. And all because of a press conference.”

“The press conference is just the tip of the iceberg. My God, Spencer, didn’t you hear what I just said? I considered leaving you this summer.”

A couple of seagulls swooped down onto the stone terrace and started pecking at something between the stones. Beside her she heard him breathing, and she couldn’t imagine what he would say next. She was hoping, she realized, that he was going to announce that the press conference was now a dead issue. Over, done with. He would call Paige and Dominique that afternoon to put an end to the nonsense.

Finally he spoke: “I’ve tried the last few weeks to behave better. I know how difficult I can be. Has it made any difference? Any difference at all?”

“Yes, absolutely. I’ve noticed. And I’ve seen how attentive you’ve been with Charlotte.”

“But it’s been too little too late . . .”

“That’s how it feels,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“And you’re serious about this?”

“Yes.” She almost said more, but she felt a shudder in her throat and now, finally, her eyes were starting to mist. She could feel it, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to wipe them. She knew if she did, that would be it: She would be sobbing and that was the last thing she wanted. Not here, not today.

“Okay, then.”

She tried to read meaning in those three short syllables—resignation or anger or acquiescence—but they were indecipherable. Completely impenetrable. The birds flew up past the two of them, apparently unsatisfied with the pickings in the stones at the foot of the wall, and she watched them wheel up and out over the wide river. She wanted to ask Spencer what he was going to do, but she didn’t dare open her mouth.

CHARLOTTE SIPPED
her bottle of orange juice and nibbled at a very doughy, very salty pretzel and watched the contingent from Vermont eat frozen yogurt. Nearby, another family was eating “Medieval Festival Fowl”—turkey legs the size of bowling pins. They were using their hands, and their fingers glistened with fat.

But her father didn’t seem upset. If anything, he seemed oblivious. She wondered if his shoulder was hurting more than usual.

Everyone was sitting on a massive beach blanket that her grandmother—who thought of everything—had brought with her. She and Willow hadn’t spoken any more about her cousin’s determination to tell everyone about the dope and the beer, but she, at least, hadn’t stopped thinking about it for one single minute. The whole thing was making her a little queasy.

She stood up now and looked at the stone edifice of the Cloisters itself, the museum perhaps a hundred yards away from their spot on the grass in the park. She imagined it was a real monastery for a moment and tried to envision the monks inside it doing whatever it was that monks did. She wasn’t exactly sure. But she guessed they prayed and baked bread and they chanted. It probably wasn’t a whole lot different from being a nun, except she presumed that nuns sang instead of chanted. For some reason, in her mind’s eye she could see nuns wandering among those gardens and terraces inside the Cloisters, but not small gatherings of monks. Maybe it was the name of the place itself.
Cloisters.
It sounded feminine to her. Girlish. She’d learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word
cloistered
. And that meant something else. Something more. Separation. Isolation. Purity, maybe.