Twelve
Late 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.