Part II
Lobsters
Eleven
It 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.