Thirteen
While the two EMTs, the sergeant from the state police, and the officer from Fish and Wildlife continued to wonder on Sunday what the hell kind of moron flatlander would fail to unload his thirty-ought-six and then leave the damn thing in the trunk of his car, Nan Seton had a pressing question of her own: Where in the name of heaven were the baby wipes? John was on his way back to the hospital and Sara was outside in the strawberries with Willow. Charlotte was the only other person in the house with her and Patrick, and she was still sobbing behind closed doors.
Normally Nan would have disturbed the pair in the strawberries without hesitation, but she hadn’t seen her daughter-in-law and Willow sit still together—just the two of them—for more than ten minutes since Patrick had been born. She guessed the girl needed her mother, and she didn’t want to intrude on them.
Patrick, alas, had turned a once spongelike disposable diaper into an oozing jellyfish so sloppy that no one—not even Sara—would have been able to compact it into one of those neat little softballs that were so easy to throw away. Worse, the baby had somehow managed to coat even his little light switch of a penis with waste. He smiled up at her now from his perch on a towel on the bureau where she was changing him, and she interpreted that smile on his face to be one of pride. His diaper sat dripping on a century-old cherry dresser.
Finally, when it was clear that the wipes were not beside the opened block of diapers on the floor or anywhere on the dresser, when it was evident there were none in the medicine cabinet, she decided she’d have to do something drastic. Hoisting the infant into the air in the towel, using it like a hammock, she carried him into the bathroom. There she filled the sink and started bobbing him up and down in the water. He clucked with pleasure, and she found herself clucking back. She’d have this lad swimming with her in Echo Lake in no time.
WHEN SARA AND WILLOW wandered inside twenty minutes later, Nan didn’t tell them of her resourcefulness, but Sara noticed the clean diaper and the baby’s contentment. She kissed Patrick’s toes, which Nan guessed must have tasted agreeably clean. Then Sara brought the baby onto the porch to nurse him, and Willow collapsed into the thick couch in the living room. Nan sat down beside her and started to rub her hand in wide, slow circles along the child’s back. It felt thin and tiny to her, almost too fragile for a child less than two months shy of eleven.
“Did you have a nice chat with your mother?” Nan asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“You sound pensive.”
“No. Not really. Just tired.”
“No more questions?”
The girl turned toward her. “Well, maybe one.”
“Go ahead.”
“How angry are people going to be with Charlotte?”
She thought about this for a moment. “It was idiotic of her to do what she did. But she’s a child and she made a mistake.” Then she surprised herself by adding, “As for my son . . . that’s another story.”
“Mom thinks you’re pretty mad at Dad.”
“Your mother is right. Thank God your uncle is going to live. If he weren’t . . . well, if he weren’t I think as bad as things seem now, they’d be a thousand times worse. A thousand times. Really, I have no idea how a man as smart as your father—as smart and as organized as your father—could have done such a thing.”
“He thought the gun was broken,” the child said.
“Oh, I have no doubt about that. I’m sure it was. What I can’t fathom is why he didn’t get it fixed before now. Something like this was bound to happen.”
“Is Charlotte still upstairs in her room?”
“Yes. Still crying, I believe. Have you two spoken this morning?”
“Uh-huh. She was pretty upset. Mom talked to her, too—and I guess she will again before we go to the hospital.”
Nan nodded. There were advantages to having a therapist in the family, even if sometimes it made them all more comfortable discussing their feelings than she’d like. “Good. Has your mother said when she would like us to go?”
“No.”
“After lunch, I’d imagine,” she murmured, and then decided to broach the question that was really on her mind. “Tell me, Willow: What exactly was Charlotte thinking? Do you know? Did she honestly believe she could just take her uncle’s rifle and shoot a deer?”
Willow took a deep breath because she wanted, she realized, to tell Grandmother—to tell anyone—that Charlotte probably hadn’t been thinking at all (at least not particularly clearly) because she’d had a beer and helped smoke a joint. She wanted to say that she wasn’t exactly sure what Charlotte had believed. But she knew that Charlotte didn’t want her to tell anyone what they had done at the bonfire, because then things could get really nasty. All of a sudden drugs and alcohol would be involved, and Charlotte had managed to sniffle to Willow at the hospital in the middle of the night that she didn’t want to get Gwen in trouble, too.
“I don’t know what she was thinking, Grandmother,” she answered simply.
“No idea?”
“Nope. None.”
Nan gave the girl’s shoulder one final squeeze and then stood, exhaling a long, slow breath through her nose. She gazed out the window for a moment and finally announced, “Well. We should get some food in you—and, perhaps, in your cousin. Before we know it, it will be time for us all to go to the hospital.”
THERE WERE LOTS of reasons for pointing Uncle John’s rifle at whatever was moving at the edge of the garden, and with her head buried underneath her pillow on her bed Charlotte could see them all. There were those hideous plastic shoes she had to wear to school, because her father wouldn’t let her wear leather ones; there was her ugly vinyl wallet and change purse; there was her dream of visiting the circus when it came to Madison Square Garden one time—once, that was all she desired—before she was really too old; there was her frustration that again this year Grandmother hadn’t been allowed to take her to the county fair in Haverhill, because among the games of chance were the baby racing pigs, and inside the 4-H tents there would be beef cows and dairy cows and the full-grown pigs that might be only days away from their slaughter. Depending upon what day they would have gone to the fair, there might also have been a milking exhibition or a horse pull—the spectacle, evil in her father’s mind, of a couple of draft horses competing to see which could pull the greatest weight across a dirt arena.
There was even this pillow itself, a flat, poly-filled sack that was nowhere near as soft and fluffy as the goose down pillows on which Grandmother, Uncle John, and Aunt Sara slept. She’d felt their inviting plumpness, she knew the difference. Willow, too. She knew that the only reason Willow didn’t have one of those comfortable pillows was because Grandmother tried not to give one granddaughter something she couldn’t give both.
And there was the desire to make her own decisions about food and clothing and animals. About what was right and wrong.
And then last night, suddenly, there was that gun. Uncle John’s gun. In her hands.
Her uncle was among the most reasonable—the most normal—grown-ups she knew, and if he hunted . . . well, truly, how bad could it be?
The truth was, she didn’t expect to actually hit the deer. She never even expected to pull the trigger. She was just aiming and curling her finger, aiming and squeezing . . .
And the night was so quiet, she didn’t think anything was out there at first.
Oh, but then she heard the movement in the lupine. The rustling. The sound of an animal pawing its way through the tall brush—perhaps one of the very same animals that had been pillaging the garden. That was when she first envisioned herself actually pointing the rifle at something and pulling the trigger. And if she did hit the creature, well, that would certainly show her parents. Her father. See, Dad, it’s one or the other, she imagined herself saying. It’s either the vegetable garden or animal rights. You can’t have both.
Yes, she had been irritated last night when they got home from the club. No doubt about that. Whether it was because of the beer or the dope or the reality that more times than not she was—she had to admit—an angry girl, she honestly didn’t know. But she was feeling downright pissy by the time they got back to Sugar Hill, and here was this sleek and powerful and (yes) handsome gun in her grasp and the chance to cause some real havoc.
She remembered saying to someone—she couldn’t recall now whether it was the state trooper or that other guy from the state animal department—that she hadn’t even known the rifle was loaded, but that wasn’t completely true. When she thought back carefully on all she remembered, she knew that safety button she kept flipping back and forth had struck her as a warning of some sort: Why would there be a safety if there weren’t a bullet? Still, only when she was curling her index finger that one last time—that final time, the time she knew she would curl it until something happened—did the notion take firm root in her mind that if there was a bullet in the rifle this might be an inadvisable course of action. Until then, she’d operated on the premise that it didn’t really matter if the gun was loaded or not, because she was just aiming it randomly out into the garden.
Until she heard that movement near the snow peas.
And continued her pressure on the trigger, this time not pausing until she heard the roar. No, she didn’t just hear the roar, she felt it: The rifle exploded like fireworks in her arms, and she was heaved up in the air like a shot put ball, arcing back to the earth and onto her butt. Only later would she and Willow discover how badly her shoulder was bruised. It was indeed nasty: a massive yellow and black and blue paint stain on—and the irony was not lost on Charlotte—the very same shoulder in which her father had taken the bullet.
It’s just a cry for attention. How many times had she overheard one of her teachers or one of her friends’ parents or her aunt Sara telling her mom that over the years? Too many to count, that was for sure. According to some of the grown-ups around her, half of what she did in this world was a cry for attention. Someone was bound to say that about this disaster, too. She was just doing it to get your attention.
Well, not this time. This wasn’t about trying to get her dad’s or her mom’s attention. This wasn’t about trying to get anyone’s attention. It wasn’t about anything. It just . . . was. It was like a plane crash or a subway fire or a toddler who falls out an apartment window and dies. It was one of those nightmarish accidents that happened all the time because people were human and made mistakes. Yes, she’d been teed off at her dad for a decade of large and small slights—the way he believed that a Broadway show or one Saturday afternoon riding made up for three or four weeks of neglect—and maybe she did want to plug a deer to piss him off. Maybe she wanted to plug a deer to piss off both of her parents.
And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to help. Maybe she thought she was frightening the deer away and saving what was left of the snow peas. Now here was an interpretation of history that might get her through this disaster, an explanation of events that might allow her to actually rise from this bed and face her grandmother and her aunt and her cousin. Her mother. Her father. Hadn’t she even told Willow last night that she wished there was something she could do about the garden? Certainly she had.
Oh, she was kidding herself. The truth was there was no design to this disaster, no conscious plan. At least she didn’t think there was. It wasn’t as if she wanted to shoot anything. Not a deer, not her dad. God, she couldn’t possibly have wanted to shoot her dad. Could she? He may not have been a perfect father, but she knew in her heart that he did what he did because he loved animals, and there were worse faults to have in this world.
She had a vague sense that when her mom had picked the gun up off the ground and hurled it away from her like it was a live hand grenade—the thing had banged against one of Grandmother’s apple trees before falling into the grass—she’d feared it was going to go off once again, and send a second bullet into whoever happened to be in its path.
She told herself now that all she wanted was for her father to survive and to forgive her. Her pillow was sodden with tears, and she wondered if she would ever stop crying.
SARA HEARD the state trooper’s vehicle rumbling up the long rocky driveway before she saw it. She was making sandwiches for the girls and her mother-in-law—Willow and Nan were upstairs now with her niece—and her first instinct was that the car was owned by a friend of Nan’s who was coming by to see what she could do. Instead, however, she saw a green and tan cruiser coasting to a stop before the garage, and the trooper they’d met the night before emerging from the vehicle. His name was Ned and he was a sergeant, and she thought his last name might have been Howland, but she wasn’t positive. He was about forty, clean-shaven, and his hair was just starting to gray: There were patches of white along his sideburns. She presumed that he was returning John’s gun, which he’d confiscated the night before. But she saw that he wasn’t reaching into the backseat or venturing around the car to the trunk. He was simply heading up the slate walkway toward the front door, a clipboard and a pad under his arm.
Patrick had actually fallen back to sleep and his body was lolling right now in his little blue chair on the floor by her feet. She didn’t want the doorbell to wake him, and so she raced outside to greet the trooper.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, and he tipped his hat. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping by. I meant to call first, but a young man rolled his father’s pickup in Lisbon. I had to take care of that before coming here, and it threw my day off a bit. The boy’s shaken—mostly because his father is furious—but otherwise he’s okay. Still, I should have called. My apologies.”
“That’s fine.”
“May I come in?”
She nodded. “Now I should apologize. My manners. I just wasn’t thinking. Of course you can come in. I was making sandwiches. We were going to have something to eat and then go to the hospital.”
“I understand your brother-in-law is going to live. That’s good news.”
“That’s what they tell us,” she said, and she opened the screen door and led the trooper into the living room. She motioned toward the couch, but Ned didn’t sit down right away.
“I was wondering, ma’am, are the girls home? And your husband? I know Mrs. McCullough is still at the hospital with Mr. McCullough, and so I’ll try and catch up with her a little later. But I would like to speak to Charlotte and Willow again—and to Mr. Seton, if he’s here.”
She felt a small shiver of alarm, and she made a conscious effort not to cross her arms before her defensively. She wanted to say, You spoke to everyone last night! but she was able to restrain herself. Still, Howland must have detected her sudden discomfort because he added quickly, “I just want to cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s, ma’am. Your niece and your daughter were pretty shaken after the accident—your husband was, too, of course—and so I wasn’t as thorough as I would have liked.”
She focused in her mind on the fact he had used the word accident and managed to force her lips into a small smile. “I understand,” she said. “My husband is actually on his way to the hospital, too. But I can get Willow and Charlotte right now.”
“One at a time, please.”
“One at a time?”
“That’s what I would prefer.”
“May I be with them?”
“Absolutely.”
She paused, wondering exactly how she should phrase the question that had formed in her mind and caused a quiver of anxiety to lodge in her stomach. Her husband was an attorney: Perhaps he would advise her to tell this Sergeant Howland that everyone would be happy to speak with him when they had a lawyer present. But not until.
“If you’d like a lawyer with them, I can come back,” he said softly, and though she knew he couldn’t possibly have read her mind it felt as if he had.
“Well. Let’s see where this questioning is going, okay? We have nothing to hide.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Should I get my daughter? Or would you like to start with my niece?”
“Whichever, ma’am.”
“Please: Call me Sara.”
He smiled. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you.”
“Truth is, I’d be happy to start with you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She felt there was something vaguely antagonistic about his relentless use of the word ma’am, especially after she’d just asked him to call her Sara. It was as if the word was a small sarcastic dig.
“All right, then. But may we do this in the kitchen? I would love to finish making the family lunch.”
“That would be fine,” Howland said. Behind her she heard Nan scuffling down the stairs. Her mother-in-law must have noticed they had company.
JOHN SETON stood paralyzed in a dim aisle in a natural foods grocery store. He was supposed to be on his way back to the hospital in Hanover to keep his sister company during her vigil in the ICU waiting room, but he had spontaneously detoured here to acquire provisions. He couldn’t bear to think of Catherine trying to survive on either food from the vending machines or the hospital cafeteria. He realized now, however, that he honestly didn’t know how extreme his sister’s diet was or what she really liked to eat. And “like” was the guiding principle in his opinion, because whatever he bought was supposed to provide her comfort. He knew his niece consumed dairy products. Did her mother?
He looked at his watch and thought of the people he had left back at the house in Sugar Hill. He guessed it would be another few hours before they returned to the hospital, too. Now that Spencer was out of danger, he and his mother had agreed it was best if the whole clan didn’t crowd into that bleak waiting room until Spencer was awake. Besides, his mother had observed, it was too nice a day to be inside.
He wondered how his niece was doing. He felt that he and Charlotte suddenly shared a very special bond: the bond of idiots. The two of them had nearly killed poor Spencer and probably disabled him for life. The difference between them, of course, was that a twelve-year-old girl was afforded the opportunity to sob alone in her bedroom or (last night) in those hideous Naugahyde orange chairs in the waiting room near the hospital’s trauma center. A forty-year-old man was not. He had to rally, stifle that penitent urge to curl up in a closet where no one could see him. He had to answer questions, explain his monumental stupidity, make phone calls. This morning he’d spoken, it seemed, to half of Catherine and Spencer’s friends, Spencer’s sister, and a pair of top managers from FERAL.
The FERAL calls had actually been worse than the one to Spencer’s sister. It was no easy task to explain to vegetarians and animal rights activists that one of their tribal leaders had been shot by his own daughter with a hunting rifle because he’d been mistaken for a deer. While he had been on the phone with the group’s director—a stunningly telegenic woman named Dominique with a mane of raven black hair that fell almost to her waist and the greenest eyes he had ever seen on an animal that didn’t use a litter box—he had feared briefly that he would be responsible for a second serious injury to a member of FERAL’s senior management, by giving the director a stroke. He’d seen the woman before on The CBS Early Show, and so he knew how skilled she was at preventing anyone else from sliding a word of their own into a conversation, but he was still astounded at the way she proceeded to speak for five solid minutes without seeming to breathe after he had broken the news to her.
Nevertheless, the call to the deputy director was even more demeaning: Like John he was a lawyer, and he was very sharp. But it was clear on the phone that he was older than John, and he tended to speak with the slow-motion thoughtfulness of a grandfather in a family movie from the 1950s. It was only when the fellow was near the end of each deliberate, carefully considered observation or response to something John had said would he realize how coldly and precisely he had been diminished by this New York City attorney with a slight trace of a southern accent and how little this other lawyer thought of him. John felt not merely like the moron who had nearly killed his brother-in-law: He felt like the public defender from Mayberry, RFD.
The point that both FERAL officials wanted to make sure John understood wasn’t simply that his negligence had almost slain their friend and associate, Spencer McCullough: It was that his loathsome hobby and his shameful inattention (the former were the high-minded words of the director, the latter the construction of her deputy) had the potential to humiliate FERAL. It simply didn’t look good for the organization’s communications director to have a brother-in-law who hunted. It made them all look like hypocrites. And—worse, in the opinion of the lawyer—it made the group look laughable.
“But I’m the one who hunts,” John had said lamely to the lawyer, when the man had paused to consider how best to twist the knife next. He thought this was a point that should matter.
“Indeed you are, son. Indeed you are. On occasion, we’ve all made bad choices with our lives,” the lawyer responded. “It’s a particular shame, however, when those choices cause pain not simply to ourselves but to the people around us we love. Sometimes, you know, people seem sadly oblivious to the reality that their more irresponsible excursions into the realms of misbehavior reflect badly not merely on themselves, but on their families, too. If the president’s brother gets arrested for drug abuse, the president is tarnished as well. If the president’s teenage daughter gets stopped for underage drinking, the president himself will be sullied. You, John, have not simply injured your brother-in-law; you may have left a deeply troubling blemish on this organization. Sad but true. You have some education—”
“I do not have some education,” John heard himself saying. “I have a law degree from—”
“Of course you do, son. Of course you do. That’s why I am sure you can understand the way all of us with FERAL may look a tad disingenuous if we do not properly control how this information is disseminated. Have you ever seen the op-ed pages of a newspaper? The section in which there is informed commentary? Well—”
“Yes, I have seen the op-ed pages of a newspaper. I may live in Vermont—I may practice in Vermont—but I still read more than my horoscope and the comics!”
“Then I am sure you can imagine what could appear on the op-ed pages this week. Or what Jay Leno and David Letterman might be saying one day soon in their monologues. Vegan animal lover gets plugged by a deer rifle. A deer rifle, John—and fired by his own daughter. Our FERAL family would look deeply troubled. Perhaps even deceitful. At the very least, we would appear to lack the courage of our convictions and—”
“I’m sorry!” John finally shouted into the telephone, exasperated after having to listen first to Catwoman’s rage and now to the sanctimonious diatribe of this lawyer. “I’m sorry my brother-in-law was shot! But lay off this goddamn condescending, holier-than-thou, meat-eaters-are-brainless-barbarians bullshit! I really don’t give a rat’s ass about your precious FERAL reputation! I care about my brother-in-law and my friend. The truth is, most people view you as a bunch of fanatic sociopaths who try to scare little kids away from hot dogs and want cats to become vegetarians! Okay? That is your reputation!” Then he hung up.
As annoyed as he was with the FERAL attorney, he still felt considerably more angry at himself. He was sorry! He vowed he’d never pull the trigger on a rifle again. He’d prayed while he was driving to the hospital the night before, while Spencer was in surgery, and then again this morning before he had gotten out of bed. He prayed not simply that Spencer would live but that he wouldn’t be crippled when he awoke.
He remembered how the hardest part last night hadn’t been having to look Catherine in the eye. It had been having to gaze at Willow—especially when she was looking back at him. At one point his daughter was in the chair beside Charlotte, who was crying. He and Catherine were leaning aimlessly against the walls, but he watched Willow as she patted Charlotte’s bare arm. Her touch, in much the same way that it seemed to calm Patrick, soothed her: She put her head down on Willow’s lap, and her crying grew silent.
He feared that for as long as he lived he would be an imbecile in the eyes of his daughter, and he couldn’t imagine how he could possibly regain a semblance of the admiration she must once—a mere day earlier—have had for him. Sara would understand, he guessed, if only because she was a grown-up and whatever delusions she had of his competence had evaporated in all the years they had been married. She knew his strengths (and almost desperately he tried to remind himself that he did have some), and she wouldn’t lose sight of them in this one mistake.
He thought also of his clients, the women and men—invariably guilty but invariably scarred—and their mistakes. The nineteen-year-old heroin addict who lifted cash from the convenience store where she worked and over the course of eight weeks was alleged to have stolen three thousand dollars. The carpenter who tried to make a quick score by bringing a couple blocks of hashish into Vermont from Montreal. The kid from the Northeast Kingdom who took the checkbook of an older neighbor who’d died and thought he could get away with using the checks to catch up on two months of back rent and treat himself to a couple new CDs.
There were the men and women who drove drunk (too many to count in his head) and the women who were nothing more than unemployable—uneducated or obese or mentally ill—and thus fell into mischief.
Most of these individuals didn’t make one mistake, they made many: Their whole lives were studies in their own bad choices and someone older’s unforgivable negligence. And, John realized with both clarity and sadness, they had grown up in broken homes or they had been abused as children or they had been seduced early by drugs . . . and he had no such excuse.
But then, he reminded himself, he hadn’t done what they had. He had committed no crime in either the state where the accident had occurred or the state in which he lived. The state trooper and the officer from Fish and Wildlife were clear on this. Yes, the trooper had confiscated his weapon, but Sara told him that after the two men had inspected the gun by the light in his mother’s garage she’d overheard them mumbling that perhaps something they called the extractor was faulty and would turn out to be the real culprit in this disaster.
Consequently, John told himself that he shouldn’t be comparing himself to his clients. If he should be comparing himself to anyone, he decided, it should be to those myriad drivers who lead busy lives (he’d become a father again this year) and thus fail to get snow tires on their vehicles before the first winter blizzard and then careen off the road—though even this thought, in the end, offered precious little comfort.
He understood that if anyone other than Spencer had been wounded this way, the civil suit facing him now would be enormous. Gargantuan. Quite likely to test the upper limits of even the umbrella atop his homeowner’s insurance policy. He and the gun company might even have wound up as codefendants. Consequently, he guessed that in a twisted, self-interested sort of way he should actually take some comfort in the fact this horror had occurred to his brother-in-law and not to an acquaintance or neighbor. Then he most likely would have been sued.
After all, though Charlotte had fired the weapon, it was he who had knowingly left a live round in the chamber for eight and a half months. What was he thinking? He envisioned the way the gun must have bounced around in the trunk of the car on the way here only two days ago, and he wondered what would have happened if somehow a first pothole had loosened the safety and a second had caused the gun to discharge. What if one of Willow’s friends had decided to break one of the house’s cardinal rules and had unlocked the cabinet in the guest bedroom in which the rifle was stored? Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been cataclysmic because he kept his ammunition in a separate lockbox in his armoire. But what if some child—that rowdy kid in Willow’s class who wound up playing at their home once in a while because he lived only two houses away, Gregg, for instance—had gotten a hold of the gun with the live round inside it? Willow had nicknamed the kid Little Hoodlum, and the boy took pride in the moniker.
John allowed himself a small shudder. What if something had happened to Willow?
He remembered the precise moment last November when he had expelled the ammunition from the gun—most of it, anyway. Before getting into the car to drive home from the logging trail on which he had parked, he had pushed the magazine release by the trigger guard and caught the four cartridges as they rolled into the palm of his hand. He’d taken his glove off, and the brass had been cold. Next he cycled the bolt in the action to remove the live round in the chamber, only this time nothing happened. He tried it again, and then a third time. He had a visual picture in his mind of flipping the safety to fire and back to safety—as if this were a computer problem, and he could remedy the situation by simply rebooting—but still the bullet remained stubbornly lodged in the gun. When the bolt was open, he could see clearly the grooves along the rear of the shell’s casing, and he even tried freeing the cartridge with his fingers. It was evident quickly that he hadn’t a prayer.
And so he had put the four cartridges from the magazine back in their small box and the small box back in his pack. He remembered flipping on the gun’s safety and securing the rifle in the gun bag in his trunk before driving home.
He guessed if hunting and guns weren’t so new to him, so frightening and foreign, he might have done what his friend Howard Mansfield had suggested and tried to dislodge the live round with a ramrod. Or if he understood more about guns, maybe he wouldn’t have been afraid to simply fire the rifle into the sky in the woods.
Likewise, if he hadn’t been so busy he would have had the cartridge removed by a professional. If he wasn’t short one lawyer and down an investigator in his office. If he didn’t have a caseload so big that half the time he couldn’t keep his clients’ names straight as they besieged him in the corridors of the courthouse during the Wednesday afternoon calendar calls, before they were paraded before the judge. If his daughter hadn’t started piano lessons, while continuing ballet and after-school soccer. If his wife hadn’t been pregnant. If there hadn’t been a new baby in the house. If . . . if . . . if . . .
He shook his head, trying to clear from his mind the notion that he had been preoccupied this last year and therefore could sprinkle some portion of the blame on others. The idea was not simply ludicrous, it was pathetic. He was responsible, and he whispered the words to himself: “I am responsible.”
Finally, when he realized that he’d been standing in the same spot in the same aisle for close to ten minutes, he made some decisions. He would bring Catherine a small loaf of freshly baked multigrain bread and local blueberry preserves, a container of vegan granola, and a batch of oatmeal cookies filled with carob chips. It wasn’t his idea of comfort food, but he imagined it was the sort of thing Catherine would eat when she was troubled.
CATHERINE HELD THE BUN in which sat the flattened discus of ground beef with both hands—aware that this was precisely the recommendation this very fast-food chain had made some years earlier in its advertising campaign—and took a bite. The burger was delicious. She contemplated eating it slowly so she could savor each mouthful—the wondrously bedewed pickles and lettuce, the tomato slice lacquered with mayonnaise, and, of course, the patty itself, the pieces of meat crushed by her teeth into a glorious, spumescent paste—but the consideration lasted barely seconds. She ate it with the gleeful, rapacious speed of a wild animal who hasn’t eaten in days.
When she was done, she glanced around the bright restaurant. The place was filled with the lunchtime crowd, and everyone around her who wasn’t feeding French fries to toddlers was eating burgers or fish fillets or chicken nuggets with the same gusto she had evidenced only moments before. Quickly she dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, rubbed a quarter-sized dollop of jasmine-scented antibacterial hand gel into her fingers and palms (it was the smell that mattered more to Catherine than the cleansing properties), and left.
The hospital was three blocks away, and she presumed that Spencer would be unhooked from the ventilator by now. This was good news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it meant there was less chance that Spencer’s already sizable physical troubles would be compounded by pneumonia. He was going to spend one more night in the ICU before being settled in a bed in a regular hospital room, but she had been made to understand that it was an excellent sign indeed that they were already replacing the massive breathing machine that covered his face and his mouth with a mere nasal respirator. She had been surprised, in part because he was still so groggy with anesthesia and painkillers that he was only dimly aware of what had occurred: How close to dying he had come, the reality that he probably faced a crippling disability—possibly even amputation—when he was fully conscious. The fact that his own daughter had shot him.
She put on her sunglasses as she started to walk and popped an Altoids mint into her mouth. She knew she would crunch plenty more once she was in the hospital elevator.
She wondered why she wasn’t furious, and why, in fact, she hadn’t been furious once in the past fifteen or sixteen hours. Partly, she decided, it was because initially she had been frightened as hell. Then, once it was likely that Spencer would live, she was relieved. She had vomited in the ladies’ room at the hospital, and at that moment she’d felt a twinge of anger at her brother; but once she emerged back into the waiting room and saw him leaning pathetically against the kiosk for the pay phone—not actually using it, but gripping the faux cubicle walls like they were the sides of a ladder—her hostility had evaporated almost instantly.
She was thankful that she and Spencer had never gotten around to having a serious discussion on Saturday about their marriage—or, to be precise, her deepening sense that their marriage was in trouble. As complicated as her life with Spencer was about to become, it would be even worse if it were encumbered as well by his knowledge that she was unhappy. What kind of convalescence would that be for him? Imagine knowing that your caregiver, the person on whom you are completely dependent, would rather be elsewhere?
She told herself that this accident most assuredly did not mean she was now facing a life sentence in a marriage that hadn’t been working or a lifetime of dinners in which she and Spencer barely spoke. It couldn’t. Things would get better, or they would end. That hadn’t changed . . . had it?
Charlotte, meanwhile, seemed to be vacillating between inconsolability and catatonia. As a mother she guessed this was normal, and any time Charlotte behaved in a manner that was outwardly normal and age appropriate Catherine took comfort. Still, Charlotte’s eyes had grown so red so quickly last night that if her daughter had been a couple of years older Catherine knew she would have assumed that the deep color change was due more to dope than regret.
As she approached the hospital, she sighed. She thought of the floors and floors of pain in that building right now and the misery that awaited her own husband when he was—finally—completely awake.
SERGEANT NED HOWLAND had been a state trooper for nineteen years, and he had every expectation that he would be promoted to lieutenant within the next eighteen months. He was supremely competent, the principal chink in his armor being his inability to suffer fools gladly. Alas, most of his job was spent with fools, which was why he guessed he wasn’t a lieutenant already. Either they were poor, rural fools who rolled their dad’s trucks because they thought they could navigate a sharp Lisbon turn at seventy-five or they were wealthy flatlander fools who moved to northern New England and decided they wanted to bag themselves a ten-pointer but didn’t have the slightest idea how to remove a cartridge from a thirty-ought-six when the bolt didn’t extract it normally—and then, an even worse sin in Howland’s opinion, they viewed themselves as so bloody busy and supremely entitled that they never bothered to take the damn rifle to a gunsmith and thus left it sitting around their house or in the trunk of their car. Loaded. Was it any wonder that some poor guy wound up spending the night on a ventilator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock? The miracle was that no one was killed.
And while he was fairly confident this was indeed just a stupid—SRS-stupid, as in stupid-really-stupid—accident, he figured he better make absolutely certain that there wasn’t more going on beneath the surface here. Treat it like an attempted homicide until he knew otherwise. Be thorough. Maybe the daughter hated her dad and plugged him on purpose. Maybe that cousin was involved in some fashion. Maybe the great white hunter from Vermont had fabricated the whole story and loaded the weapon only yesterday because he wanted to . . .
Howland couldn’t finish the sentence, a further indication in his mind that while it was unlikely the state’s attorney would want to file criminal charges, it was better to know too much than too little. That was why he took the weapon with him last night and had it stored safely now in the firearms locker. Picked it up off the ground by that apple tree where he found it. If they ever did want to send it to the state firearms laboratory, he wanted to be sure that they had it in their possession.
Now he sat in the red wool easy chair in this Nan Seton’s living room, the woman’s daughter-in-law and older granddaughter sitting across from him on the couch.
“So you didn’t know the weapon had a bullet in the chamber?” he asked the girl, Charlotte, one more time.
The girl nodded sheepishly.
“But you did know the gun had a safety. Correct?”
“I guess.”
“You had to switch it from S to F. At least according to your uncle, you did. Before he left for the hospital last night, he told us he was sure the gun was on safety. Do you remember doing that? Switching a little lever from S to F?”
“Sort of.”
He could see the girl had been crying, and he was relieved. He really did want this interview now to be nothing more than compulsive busywork.
“Sort of?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you know that you were releasing the safety?”
“No.”
“But Charlotte: You just told me that you knew the gun was on safety. So if you didn’t know you were releasing it, what did you think you were doing when you switched the lever from S to F?”
“I was just . . .”
“Go on.”
“I was just, I don’t know, flipping it back and forth. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. Willow and I had just been at that party, and I was . . .”
“Yes?”
“I was tired. I’d never seen a gun before—a rifle, anyway—and I was just playing around. I know you shouldn’t play with guns, but I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry about all of this,” she said, and she shook her head and started to cry. Her aunt squeezed her bare knee reassuringly.
“Is there anything else, Sergeant Howland?” The woman’s voice was soothing and serene. He wondered if she sang in a church choir.
“You’re a vegetarian, right? Like your dad?” he asked the girl simply. He put his clipboard on the floor and leaned forward in his chair.
“Yes.”
“Don’t eat any meat?”
“None.”
“You love animals?”
“Yes!”
“Then tell me something: Why were you even pretending to shoot a deer? I understand you presumed the weapon was unloaded, but why were you pointing it at what you thought was an animal in the first place?”
She heaved up her shoulders through her tears and said nothing.
“Why were you taking a rifle and aiming it at what you believed was a deer?”
She looked at the rug, at her aunt, and finally at him. She wiped at her cheeks with her fingers. “I guess I was thinking about the garden. I don’t know. The vegetable garden. The deer were eating everything, and I just . . . I just . . .”
“You just . . .”
The room grew quiet, except for the girl’s sniffles.
“You were just goofing, huh?” he asked her, unsure why he was letting her off the hook. He didn’t have children of his own—he had a girlfriend, but in his opinion they were a long way away from even considering marriage, much less starting a family—but he did have a niece about this child’s age. Maybe this was why he was throwing her a lifeline now.
“I guess.”
He sighed. “That’s about what I figured.” Then, before another wave of mercy could overwhelm him, he asked quickly—almost abruptly—“Do you and your dad get along?”
There was another long pause while Charlotte gathered herself. He half-expected that the next voice he would hear would be the aunt, and he thought it very possible that she would end the interview right now. She was, after all, married to a lawyer. But then Charlotte was speaking, and she was telling him through her tears, “How can you even ask that? God, don’t you get it? I will never, ever be able to forgive myself for what I did! Never!”
He nodded and picked up his clipboard off the floor. Regardless of what this kid really thought of her father, he decided that she hadn’t meant to nearly blow off his arm. She’d simply been screwing around with a gun and accidentally wounded her dad. That was it, case closed. Yes, he would talk to Willow since he was already here, and at some point he would talk to the grown-ups. But he knew there would be nothing in his report that would suggest they file criminal charges, and in the next week or so they would return the gun to that idiot public defender.
At times like these, he concluded, the country didn’t merely need stronger handgun laws: It needed laws as well that would demand a knucklehead like John Seton prove he could handle and store a firearm before being allowed to bring one into his home.
EVEN WITHOUT AN OXYGEN MASK covering much of his face, Spencer was still in an ICU bed that terrified both children when they arrived that afternoon, and looked especially horrific to Charlotte. He lay immobile on his back, his whole upper torso swathed in bandages, his wrecked arm encased in a plaster strip and draped across his abdomen. It looked a bit like he was supposed to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance but had gotten lazy with his right hand and hadn’t brought it all the way up to his heart. His face, for reasons neither girl understood—the bullet had hit him just below his shoulder, right?—was oddly swollen, making even the catcher’s mitts that posed as his ears seem just about the right size for his head. His heartbeat was monitored, there was a crystal clear tube uncoiling up into his nose—the fluid coursing inside it was a disturbingly gastric yellowish brown—and there were a pair of IV drips attached to the arm he could move. His left one. His right arm, it was clear, was in no condition even to scratch an itch that happened to crop up on the skin within half an inch of those fingers.
Spencer was still muzzy with painkillers and dazed by an anesthesia-born hangover. Apparently he wouldn’t start hurting like hell for another couple of hours, and so the physicians had recommended that Charlotte and Willow come see him now. His eyes were open, but Charlotte had the distinct sense that he was only vaguely aware of the crowd that gathered around him in his glass-enclosed ICU cubicle. Aunt Sara and Uncle John and Grandmother were sitting somberly on the boxy radiator against the window, while she and Willow and her mom were standing like columns on the side of Uncle Spencer’s bed nearest the massive glass wall that faced the nurses’ station. Everyone, Charlotte noticed, had their hands at their sides, as if they were afraid they might brush against the metal bars that ran along the mattress like a guardrail.
She wanted to tell her father that she was sorry, but the very idea of apologizing seemed so pathetically meaningless and inadequate that so far she hadn’t said a word. She feared she was behaving like a sullen teenager—a term she had heard her seventh-grade history teacher use with great frequency during the previous school year, as if a sullen teenager were the single worst thing in the world a person could become. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak. She had barely been able to bring herself to inch to this corner so close—so very close—to her father’s face and all those bandages and wires and tubes.
No one, in truth, was saying a whole lot. Her mother, her breath such a powerful windstorm of mint that it almost covered up the smell of antiseptics and her father’s own sick-person dog breath, had kissed her dad gently on his damp forehead any number of times, but even she had said very little. Apparently she had talked to him a great deal when he was first beginning to surface from his chemical coma, but now she had grown quiet.
Charlotte wondered what would happen if she even tried to open her mouth and apologize, and she guessed there was a pretty good chance she would wind up weeping again. Moreover, there were so many things for which to apologize. At the top of the list, of course, was shooting her dad, even if that had been an accident. But that accident sprang from the fact that she shouldn’t have been fooling around with the rifle while her cousin was bringing the diapers up to her aunt and uncle. And so perhaps she should begin by telling Uncle John that she was sorry for taking his gun in the first place. Clearly that had been a bad idea. A very bad idea.
Likewise, she could tell her cousin that she was sorry she had ignored her when Willow had asked her to leave the gun alone.
And if she really wanted to make amends, she could apologize to everyone for stealing Gwen’s joint and smoking it and for getting herself and her younger cousin both tipsy and stoned.
It was a long list. She had really screwed up this time, no doubt about it. And while she was smart enough to know that a lot of people were going to blame Uncle John for leaving a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car, she was the one who’d smoked the dope, taken the gun, and foolishly fired it at the first thing that moved in the night.
You couldn’t fix this disaster. No way.
Nevertheless, she had already started to make vows. She would never smoke pot or drink beer or say a rude word to her parents again. She would wear whatever bathing suit Grandmother wanted. She wouldn’t steal her mother’s cosmetics, she wouldn’t complain about Grandmother’s nature hikes. She would weed without complaint whenever—and whatever—her dad desired, and she would stop trying to flirt with older boys.
She would discourage her mother from flirting, too—at least with anyone other than Dad.
She would take pride in her plastic shoes, her canvas belts, her vinyl wallet. She would not dream of her own black leather jacket.
She felt the heat from the sun through the window, despite the chill in the room from the air-conditioning. She guessed they were facing west.
Suddenly her father’s eyes turned toward her, and even his head rolled a degree in her direction.
“So,” he murmured, and he started to smile. Then, his voice the shallowest of whispers, he rasped, “Guess . . . Annie . . . had it . . . right.”
She tried to recall who they both knew named Annie, but could think of no one. Her mother, it was evident, hadn’t a clue who he was talking about either.
“Annie?” she asked him simply.
“Oakley,” he continued slowly. “You . . . know. You . . . can’t . . . get a man . . . with a gun.”
She stood motionless for another moment, absorbing his grin. He was referencing a show tune they had sung together for laughs when she’d been a little girl. Then she felt the long quivers deep in her nose that always preceded her tears, and before she knew it she had fallen against her mother’s chest—she would have put her head atop her father but she was afraid she would hurt him or break something—and, once again, she was sobbing.