Before You Know Kindness (21 page)

Spencer, he saw, had turned his eyes toward the window and was still waiting for him to leave. And so he did. He mumbled that he’d be back in the morning, and then he left. It was only when he was in the hallway that he realized he couldn’t go home yet—he couldn’t, in fact, go home for hours—because he had to drive his sister back to Sugar Hill. He couldn’t leave until she was ready. Until she had said good-bye to Spencer for the night. And so he sat alone in one of the chairs with the carrot-colored vinyl that squeaked near the nurses’ station on Spencer’s floor and rested his head in his hands.

SARA LAID PATRICK
on the towel in the grass in the shade and pulled off the zippered bodysuit he was wearing so she could change his small diaper. Once it was off—the outfit had a large patch of an ostensibly playful-looking automobile to the left side of the zipper, with wheels that resembled eyes—she contemplated her son’s tiny shoulders. As if he were a doll, she gently lifted his right arm like a lever, then spun it slowly in its socket. The baby cooed and smiled up at her. She smiled back. She didn’t want to pull Patrick’s arm over his head and replicate the movement he would make someday soon when he threw a cereal bowl onto the floor for the first time or heaved Drool Monkey from his bed, because she was afraid she might hurt him. But she saw the exact movement in her mind: She saw the shoulder moving under a shirt, the denim strap from a pair of overalls rising up off the cotton just below it. She saw those petite fingers coming forward with a whoosh.

She couldn’t imagine her brother-in-law, Spencer, not striving to be—and here was that word again, as much an adjective as a family moniker—
vigorous.
A part of that small but oh-so-vigorous Seton tribe. He was disabled now, that was a given, but she doubted that his physical therapists would ever understand that among the greatest handicaps confronting poor Spencer would be his inability simply to hang around with Catherine and John and, yes, Nan on their level: the level of people in perpetual motion, people who are constantly busy so they never have time to reflect on . . . 

On anything.

At least when they were in New Hampshire.

Sometimes she wondered what demons lived with them here that drove them to the golf course and the tennis court, the bridge table and the vegetable garden. To cocktail parties at the Contour Club, to nature walks up and down Sugar Hill. Nan was a particular mystery to her. Exactly what was it that she didn’t want to think about? Nan was, apparently, somewhat better when she was home in Manhattan, but even there, Sara knew, she was always relentlessly busy—and she always had been.

Over the years John had revealed to her much of his childhood, but other than the death of his father at a relatively—though not horrifically—young age, there was little there that seemed likely to scar either him or his sister or their mother. Unlike so many other Manhattan childhoods (or marriages) of the era, there wasn’t any boozing or drugs (at least not to bacchanalian excess), there didn’t seem to be any adultery. Obviously there was no wrenching divorce. It was actually a life so full of privilege and entitlement it was uneventful.

No, not uneventful. Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband’s, not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction. She knew that John was going to suffer profoundly over what he had done to Spencer, and his anguish would transcend normal guilt in large measure because it was his own daughter who had first reached Spencer’s body out there by the snow peas. John’s father had been so completely irrelevant to his own childhood that he was intent on being a dad who was both present and perfect, and the fact that Willow had seen the grisly ramifications of the most egregious mistake he would ever make in his life was going to cause him serious pain. She remembered one time John offered her a partial litany of all the moments in his life that mattered to him that his own father had missed, either because he was at work or because he was dead (the former, in John’s opinion, leading directly to the latter). There was the Saturday morning when he was eight when the county swim team time trials were actually held in the Contour Club pool, a grand morning in which he placed first in the twenty-five meter crawl, first in the twenty-five meter backstroke, and was a part of the second-place one-hundred-meter medley relay team. There was his fourth-grade transition ceremony from Cub Scouts to Webelos and the tie racks the boys had made from plywood and coated with oil paint for their fathers, all of whom were present to accept the gifts that June evening . . . but one. There was the eighth-grade citywide debate competition in which his school’s team won a variety of prizes for both eloquence and good-natured feistiness. There were all the birthday parties that did not occur on either a Saturday or a Sunday, there was the first half of his high school commencement (thank God the family name began with an
S
), as well as the only high school musical in which he actually had a part with a solo and lines. And though John’s father was present for his son’s college graduation, he missed John’s induction into the Phi Beta Kappa society the day before. Richard died months after John started law school and so he had a valid excuse for missing the moments when his son received his law degree, got married, and became a father for the first time himself. But that didn’t mean that on some level John wasn’t bitter—and determined to do better with his own children.

Except, strangely enough, when he was here in Sugar Hill.

Here it was more important to be vigorous in the eyes of his mother—and, yes, in his own eyes when he shaved or combed his thinning hair in the mirror—than to spend serious time with Willow or Patrick. That man who had spent all Friday morning rolling around on their living room floor with his son while she’d packed had barely seen the boy since they’d arrived—and that was true even before their lives had been thrown into turmoil on Saturday night. That father who once took three planes home from a conference in Minneapolis after his original flight was canceled and then ran like a madman between terminals D and B at Logan Airport—terminals usually linked only by shuttle buses—so he could sprint onto a plane to Vermont that was going to give him at least a fighting chance (if he sped all the way home once he landed) of arriving in time to witness his daughter’s transition ceremony from Daisy to Brownie, didn’t say more than a few dozen words to the girl on Friday and Saturday. (And, Sara feared, most of those words involved appeals to Willow to try to pacify Patrick—as well as, of course, that now infamous request on Saturday night that she bring into the house the new block of diapers from the trunk of the car.)

She pressed the Velcro tabs on the corners of Patrick’s fresh diaper together and left him on the towel—blowing him a kiss and reassuring him that she would be right back—and started toward the green garbage can against the side wall of the clubhouse with the dirty one. As she walked, she watched her free arm sway with her body. It was a good thing that Catherine and Spencer didn’t seem likely to have another child, because there was no way that Spencer would ever be able to change a diaper. It was one of the many tasks that Sara was beginning to realize were completely unmanageable with one hand.

She guessed Spencer’s energy would be a real asset to him now. That quintessential drive to be hale and hearty and strong. His nostril-flaring frustration at being disabled would help him with the tortures of physical therapy—though it would also, alas, make the indignities of having to have someone else button his shirts and zip up his fly yet more irksome.

At the garbage can she heard the chirping of girls through a glazed window into the clubhouse. The window was open only an inch or two, but the children were giggling and she knew instantly that the voices belonged to Willow and Charlotte. She took a step back and gazed at the building. She’d always presumed it was the clubhouse men’s room that was against this wall and that the casement before her was therefore one of the windows into the men’s room. For a moment she decided she must have been mistaken all those years, and this was actually the ladies’ room. After all, why in heaven would the children be in the men’s room? Then she knew. The flies. They were drawn into the men’s room by the flies that hippie bookseller had painted years ago on the urinals. Somehow Willow and Charlotte had heard about the bugs and they had to see them for themselves.

She considered going into the clubhouse to extricate the cousins from the men’s room since it was only a matter of time before someone (no doubt, someone cranky) walked in and discovered them, but she had an idea she liked more. The last thing either child needed right now was to be chastised. And so she crouched just below the windowsill, took a deep breath, and proceeded to buzz. She placed her tongue just behind her front teeth and tried her very best to imitate the loud, annoying drone of the insect.

Instantly the girls went silent. And barely ten or fifteen seconds after that, Sara saw them racing around the side of the clubhouse toward her, their eyes wide, determined to catch the culprit who had sent them scurrying from the two urinals with their meticulous renderings of a pair of black flies. It was, as far as Sara knew, the first time her niece had run playfully—a spontaneous smile on her face—in almost three days.

Seventeen

C
atherine never viewed herself as the sort of girl—now woman—who thought she could smother her troubles beneath frozen moguls of ice cream or half-thawed clubs of freezer-case cookie dough. There was the secret meat thing, of course, but she presumed this had more to do with the body’s natural desire for animal protein than an attempt to overpower her anxieties with junk food.

Nevertheless, Wednesday afternoon as she sat around the table in the bar at the Hanover Inn with these two lawyers from New York, she realized she wanted nothing more right now than a cheeseburger. No, make it a hamburger. Screw the cheese. Make it meat and nothing but meat. Like the burger she’d had at the fast-food restaurant on Sunday afternoon, but bigger. Thicker. Juicier. She guessed this was because she was scared. She had no idea anymore what sort of future awaited her or just how debilitating Spencer’s injury would be. Every time she tried to get even the smallest glimmer of hope from the surgeons or these lawyers, however, they were cruelly adamant in their prognoses. Her husband was going to be severely disabled, and he was going to find his “floppy arm” so annoying and unattractive (they kept talking about the way the muscles would shrink from disuse) that he might choose to have it amputated in two or three years. Apparently, most people with this sort of injury chose exactly that path.

She had begun to wonder if she would even be in the classroom in September and—if indeed she weren’t—what a September without students would be like. She almost couldn’t imagine, because she’d been teaching in one capacity or another since her very first autumn after college. Over a decade and a half now. The only year she hadn’t been in the classroom in September was the year that Charlotte was born.

And though she knew she hadn’t thought about school a whole lot in the last couple of weeks, July was an exceptional month: It was the one period in the course of the year when she didn’t focus on her students and her lesson plans and the simple presentation of her classroom—what it looked like, what decorated the walls. The truth was, she enjoyed teaching. She liked children: It was why she had gone into teaching in the first place. The only reason Charlotte was an only child was because for a decade now she and Spencer had always concluded, for one reason or another, that the timing was wrong for a second child—a decision that in hindsight probably had more to do with the subterranean fissures in their marriage than the busyness of their lives. Moreover, Catherine knew that she especially liked high school girls—their insights and their angst, the way their desperate insecurities waffled with their profound self-absorption—and she enjoyed the relationships that she had with their parents (and, yes, especially the relationships that she had with their fathers). Though she worried on occasion that she wasn’t doing a very good job with her own daughter, she knew that the older girls in her classes listened to her; likewise, they knew that she listened to them and cared about what they had to say. She was confident that she helped them as much with their self-esteem as she did with Brontë and Austin and Dickens, and in this world that was an undeniably meaningful contribution.

It dawned on her that this coming autumn, however, she might be trapped in the apartment with Spencer. She felt bad that the word
trapped
had come to her, but there it was, a blinking neon warning light in her mind. Trapped, these days, was precisely how she would feel if she were alone for weeks at a time with her husband. All afternoon Catherine had sensed the way her fear was being compounded by resentment, and now at the bar she felt that bitterness pounding away at the insides of her temples. Yes, she remained grateful that she hadn’t yet told Spencer how tired she was of his fussy correctness, of the way he put anonymous animals before his wife and his daughter. But she also wasn’t sure she could find it within herself to be the crutch and the cheerleader he was going to need in the coming year. This . . . this mess . . . was her brother’s fault, and if anyone should become Spencer McCullough’s nursemaid and whipping boy (good Lord, she thought, how did crutch and cheerleader become nursemaid and whipping boy so fast?), it should be John.

“Catherine?”

She turned to Paige Sutherland, the attorney her age who had flown to New Hampshire that morning with Spencer’s friend, Keenan. The woman had honey in her voice and seemed capable of making any subject sound lewd. She was petite and her hair had a tam-o’-shanter wave rising up from the side of her horseshoe-shaped headband. She looked elfin, but Catherine knew the type: She was a barracuda.

“Catherine, you need a drink,” Paige said to her, resting two of her cold-blooded fingers gently on her wrist.

She nodded. A few moments ago when they’d been handed what the young waitress called the café menus, she’d stared at it eagerly. In theory, they weren’t going to eat now because it was four in the afternoon. They were just going to drink. Besides, she couldn’t possibly order a burger in front of these lawyers. Certainly she couldn’t in front of Keenan. She’d known him for years. And so she decided that if she couldn’t have meat then she’d have something powerful to drink and ordered a martini.

“Spencer can be very, very focused. You know that as well as anyone,” Keenan was saying as the waitress smiled and left the table. She realized she, too, needed to . . . focus . . .  and so she apologized and asked him to repeat what he was explaining. She saw that he had scribbled some notes on a paper cocktail napkin with a fountain pen, and some of the characters looked more like inkblots than letters.

He smiled at her sympathetically. She knew she was going to see that sort of smile a lot in the coming months.

“I was describing secondary gain. You know the concept?”

She shook her head.

“Normally when you get hurt, you try to get better. Right? Real basic notion. Well, that’s not always the case with folks when there’s a lawsuit and they see the chance for some reasonable recompense for all they’ve endured—and perhaps will endure for as long as they live. Sometimes the unconscious seems to take over, and the body doesn’t seem to fully heal until the trial is done or there’s a settlement. It’s as if an important part of the brain knows it’s in the body’s best interest to look a little disabled, a little sickly, until the money’s safely in the bank.”

“Spencer’s a fighter,” Catherine said simply.

“Yes, he is. He is a very determined individual. And I know a lot of trial lawyers who believe the whole idea of secondary gain is a myth. Course, it’s in
their
best interests to believe that.”

“Spencer will want to get better as quickly as possible. He’ll want to get back whatever movement he can.”

“Catherine, that is certainly what he’s going to believe on a conscious level. I am quite sure of that. Paige and I were merely saying that with some individuals in this situation—perhaps even with Spencer—it’s only when the legal tumult is completely behind them that they regain their health.”

“Spencer wouldn’t even be considering a lawsuit, if you—”

“I think we’re beyond contemplation,” Paige said, and Catherine felt just the tiniest, not unpleasant pressure on her wrist. She looked down and saw Paige’s fingers were still there.

She sighed and tried again. “Spencer wouldn’t be planning to sue the gun company if you hadn’t come up with the idea in the first place.”

“Then he would have sued your brother,” Paige murmured, in the tone of voice that Catherine knew the younger teachers in the school used with the younger students at recess.
Marissa, do you really think it’s a good idea to put the hermit crabs inside the printer? No, Brandy, let’s not play fifty-two card pickup with the phonics flash cards.

“I don’t think the word
sue
had crossed his mind until it crossed yours,” she said, taking back her arm.

“When Spencer is feeling a little better and you can worry a little less about him, you’ll be glad we’re doing this,” Paige said. “After all, it doesn’t sound like it was your brother’s fault any more than it was your daughter’s. The bullet was just stuck in the chamber!”

“You’ve contacted the laboratory, haven’t you?” Keenan asked Paige.

“I have, but they can’t do much until the state police release the gun. Still, one engineer I spoke with there is going to see what they know about the extractor on John Seton’s model—if they’ve come across any problems before with that type of gun.”

“The laboratory?” Catherine asked.

“I—excuse me—we,” Paige said, “hope to learn why your brother was unable to extract the cartridge. We want to know if there was a tiny flaw in the gun.”

The waitress returned with their order and doled out the drinks like party favors. When she was gone, Paige took a sip of wine and then said, “Besides, Catherine, there are financial realities here. A lawsuit makes sense for that reason alone.”

“Obviously we have insurance,” Catherine snapped. “And, if we must talk about such things, my family has”—she paused for just the briefest of seconds while she found the right euphemism—“assets. We have insurance and we have assets.”

“Injury like this? You’d be amazed how much you’re going to need,” Keenan said. “And we all want Spencer to have the very best care.”

“Besides, why should your assets have to cover the costs of something that wasn’t your fault and should never have happened in the first place?”

“I only want what’s best for my husband. And I understand you believe that either the gun or the gun’s design has a flaw. But there is another issue here. Another person,” Catherine said, and she took a sip of her drink.
Cleaning fluid,
she thought as the alcohol tumbled over her tongue and burned the back of her throat.
This is cleaning fluid and I could use it to clean toilets.
“I have to look out for my daughter. All that publicity, having to testify before strangers about what she did: None of that will do anything but make her feel worse. A lot worse. I think once Spencer and I really talk about this, he’ll agree. He’s not himself yet.”

Keenan sat back in his seat, crossed his legs, and wrapped his hands around his seersucker-clad knees. He looked like a college professor from Mississippi. “Oh, Spencer’s himself. He sees the opportunity here.”

“He sees an opportunity for your organization! Once he—”

“Your husband is a very dedicated man. Very dedicated.”

She wasn’t sure what to make of his repeating the words. Was this irony?

“And your little girl will be fine,” Paige was saying, “especially when she understands that this is all about punishing the company that disabled her daddy. Your little girl—”

“Charlotte is not a little girl. She is fast approaching thirteen.”

“All the better. All I meant was that this lawsuit will actually help Charlotte because it will show her that we don’t believe she’s responsible. This tragedy is the fault of a company that makes a product that’s inherently dangerous.”

“It’s a gun. Of course it’s dangerous!”

Paige leaned toward her and purred, “It’s a gun that—even when it functions properly—leaves a round in the chamber when you empty the magazine. And this one, it sounds like, was broken.”

“Catherine, we know you love animals, too,” Keenan added. “We know you love them as much as your husband. Don’t forget, this lawsuit will help FERAL with its efforts to educate people.”

“How could I forget that? It’s the whole reason you’re doing this!”

“We’re doing this because we care for Spencer. Frankly, the Spencer I work with would want to talk about the accident with Harry Smith or Ted Koppel—especially if the network had some talking head lawyer from the rifle’s manufacturer on-air to argue with him. No one is, forgive my choice of words, putting a gun to his head to make him do this.” He reached for his drink and his expression grew unreadable behind the glass, but she had the distinct sense that he was completely oblivious to what her family was suffering. Suddenly, despite having been acquainted with this man since her husband had joined FERAL, she realized that in fact she didn’t know him at all.

SARA GUESSED NO ONE
had set foot on the badminton court since Saturday afternoon. That was four days ago now. It almost defied belief.

On the other side of the house she heard the lawn mower. Her mother-in-law, despite driving to Hanover to see Spencer—an hour-plus drive each way—playing nine holes of golf, and swimming laps across the roped-off section of Echo Lake, was now cutting the grass. Sara was quite sure that Nan was the only seventy-year-old woman she knew who actually pushed a lawn mower through the thick field grass that passed for lawn here in northern New England. Certainly her own mother and her own mother’s friends weren’t about to. When John had offered, she had shooed him away, reminding him that she cut it herself when he wasn’t here. In a desperate stab at normalcy, he had decided then to take Willow to the club for a swim.

She sat down now at the end of the chaise lounge on which her niece was curled up, half under a small quilt Nan had made some years earlier. The sky was a heavy gray sheet shielding the mountains, but it was really quite humid: She sensed that Charlotte’s need for the comforter had more to do with a yearning to cocoon than a craving for warmth. She stroked the child’s back.

“Can I get you something to eat?” she asked the girl. “It’s almost five. I was thinking of getting myself a glass of wine. Would you like a soda? A ginger ale?”

Charlotte shook her head and gnawed at the cuticle of her thumb. The tips of her fingers were flecked with dried blood and raw splinters of skin. Other than visiting her father, she hadn’t left the house today. She hadn’t even been willing to join her uncle and her cousin for a quick dip in the pool a half hour ago. Yesterday, when Sara had caught Charlotte and Willow sneaking into the men’s room to see the painted flies on the urinals, she had begun to hope that perhaps the girl was emerging from the shell of self-hatred and guilt that was enveloping her, but she understood now that wasn’t happening. Only briefly had the flies taken her mind off what she’d done, only briefly had even Willow—sweet, serene, magical Willow—been capable of soothing her grieving, disablingly penitent cousin. The child was little better now than she’d been Sunday morning, when she’d spent hours sobbing on her bed in her room. She had made a half effort at showering last night, but she’d forgotten to rinse the conditioner from her hair and so today it was greasy and flat and she looked like a waif.