Before You Know Kindness

Seventeen

Catherine 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 Bront? 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.
“Really, nothing? Have you eaten anything at all today?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You still should eat.”
“I don’t know. Grandmother probably would be afraid if I ate now it would spoil my dinner. She’d want me to wait.”
“I think most rules are off these days. If you want something, I’d be happy to bring it out to you. Some good bread and jam? A banana?”
She seemed to consider the notion before rejecting it. “No. But thank you, Aunt Sara. I think I’ll just wait till dinner.”
Her mother-in-law’s dog ambled around the corner and up the steps onto the porch. He smelled of the fields in which he’d been wandering, an aroma that was sweet and clean. Abstractedly, Charlotte dangled one of her hands and rubbed the top of his head when he nuzzled her fingers.
Finally, in a voice as neutral as Sara could make it, she turned to the subject that had brought her to her niece in the first place: “You know your father isn’t mad at you. Don’t you?”
The girl pressed the side of her face deep into the vinyl chaise pad and pulled the edge of the quilt up to her chin. “That only makes me feel worse. I wish he’d get pissed at me. I mean, I’m sure pissed at myself.”
“Oh, he doesn’t blame you at all.”
“Well, he should.”
“Not necessarily. Obviously you shouldn’t have been playing with the gun—”
“I know that!”
She continued placidly as if her niece hadn’t interrupted her. “But you didn’t know it was loaded. You didn’t mean to hurt anyone. You mustn’t lose sight of those two facts, Charlotte. We all make mistakes—small ones, huge ones—and I’ve always felt it’s important to distinguish between those mistakes we make when we mean to be hurtful and those we make simply because we’re human. This—what happened Saturday night—falls so completely into that latter category. You weren’t trying to be hurtful or to hurt anyone. Do you see the difference?”
The girl wiped at the corners of her eyes with her pinkies. She was a beautiful child, Sara thought, but almost overnight—less than four full days, really—her cheeks had begun to hollow. Despair, almost before their eyes, was making the girl appear sickly.
“Charlotte?”
“I see the difference.”
“I’m glad.”
“But that doesn’t make things any easier for anyone. Not for my dad, not for my mom. I really did it this time.”
She heard the lawn mower as Nan pushed the old machine back and forth in the side yard, the noise growing closer and then receding. It was actually louder than the ride-on mowers that most people used in the rural corners of Vermont in which she always had lived.
“But you’re still his daughter. And Catherine’s daughter. And my niece. No one loves you any less—”
“I love me less!”
“You shouldn’t feel that way. I understand why you would. Really, I do. But I wish you wouldn’t even think such a thing. Your father and mother will need you a lot in the coming months, and one of the best things you could do for them is to get on with your own life. You’re going to need someone to talk to—”
“I figured,” she said, a tiny twinge of disgust coloring her voice.
“You make seeing a therapist sound like, I don’t know, having to wear a burlap sack to a prom.”
“That would be kind of cool, actually.”
“I’m going to give your mom the name of someone I know in Manhattan. Her practice is on the East Side, not far from your school. She’s wonderful. And you can always call me, too. You know that, right?”
She offered a small, almost imperceptible nod.
“Make no mistake: It’s okay to be sad. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t. But don’t let it become incapacitating. You were going to audition for some show in September, right?”
“The Secret Garden,” she murmured. “It’s a musical. Our school’s doing it at the end of November.”
“Your mother told me something about that. Well, you should still audition. Moping does no one any good.”
“God . . .”
“What?”
“You just sounded exactly like Grandmother.”
Abruptly she jerked upright. In her head she could indeed hear her mother-in-law saying precisely those words. Moping does no one any good. She saw her niece was looking at her and she wondered if it had something to do with the air or this house. Maybe vigorousness was contagious.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah. You did,” the girl said, and she raised her eyebrows. Sara had the distinct sense that on another day in another place—if they weren’t on this porch, perhaps, if Spencer weren’t in a hospital to the south—the two of them right now would be howling with laughter. She thought of what Willow had accomplished yesterday with the painted flies. Though her own imitation of Nan Seton had been completely unintentional, she was absolutely delighted with the gentle ripple of pleasure it had given her niece.


WHEN, YEARS LATER, people spoke of the accident at Nan Seton’s house in Sugar Hill, Melissa Fearon—a.k.a. Missy Fearless—knew she would be a part of the story. A nameless footnote, perhaps, but she had been an EMT long enough to realize that her and Evan Seaver’s rescue of Spencer McCullough was a very impressive save.
That was not, however, why she went to the hospital to see him Wednesday afternoon. She felt no need to pat herself on the back. She drove to Hanover because she didn’t want her last memory of the man to be his glazed eyes and clammy skin and the way his shoulder the other night had been transformed into stew. She wanted instead to see him flipping the channels on the TV from his hospital bed with the remote. She wanted to watch him savoring the simple fact he was alive.
She had done this three times before in the past, each time after a scoop-and-run had been particularly gruesome (and the prospects for survival discouraging) but had learned in the following days that the patient was actually getting better.
Like Catherine, Missy was the sort of schoolteacher who didn’t trouble herself with her classroom and lesson plans until the second week in August, and so she spent most of the day gardening. She left for the hospital a little after four, confident that her husband, the manager of the Agway in Haverhill, wouldn’t mind if their dinner was a little late tonight. Roger Fearon was nothing if not flexible from his years of living with a part-time EMT. By the time she’d parked her car, gotten her visitor’s pass and wound her way through the labyrinthine corridors to Spencer’s room, it was close to five thirty. Nevertheless, she was surprised to find the room empty but for Spencer. She had expected the whole Seton clan would be present, that multigenerational throng she had seen Saturday night from the corners of her eyes while she was trying to prevent Spencer McCullough’s blood from spurting into the lupine like water from a garden hose.
It looked like Spencer was asleep, and so she reached into her purse for a pen and a piece of paper. She thought she would write him a note. From the doorway he appeared better than the other night, but that didn’t take much. The mere fact that the massive hole in his shoulder had been patched and he wasn’t hemorrhaging whole pints of blood was a sizable improvement.
“You looking for Paige?”
She glanced up and saw he had opened his eyes.
“I woke you. I’m so sorry.”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“I was going to leave you a note.”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh.” She took a step farther into the room, but without his wife or his mother-in-law present, she felt as if she were intruding. She dropped the pen back into her purse and pulled the strap over her shoulder. “I was just going to write that I was glad to see you’re getting better.”
“You can come closer. I don’t bite. Lord, I don’t move. I don’t dare.” Though his voice was subdued—almost muted—she could sense right away a distinct scrappiness in every syllable. This guy was a fighter. It was probably a big reason why he was still alive in the first place.
“Honest: I don’t bite,” he murmured again, and so she strolled all the way into the room and stood at the foot of his bed.
“You’re looking for Paige?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know any Paige. I was coming to see you.”
“I thought you were looking for my lawyer.”
She didn’t like the sound of that: a lawyer. That couldn’t be good for the family. She understood that the gun belonged to John Seton, and she wondered if he was actually planning to sue his brother-in-law.
“Nope,” she said. “Just you.”
“Forgive me, please, but . . . do I know you?”
“I didn’t expect you’d remember me. I’m Melissa Fearon. I’m with Franconia Rescue. I’m an EMT.”
“God, you saved my life, didn’t you?” His voice was slightly more animated now, and she was pleased.
“I had help.”
“Well. Thank you. God. Thank you so much.”
She saw a line of flowers along the window and atop the dresser. Some had been sent by a florist, but others had been picked by whoever had brought them—especially the twin vases of pink and white phlox. The last thing she had been focused on at the Seton house Saturday night were the flowers in the garden, but she decided those probably came from Sugar Hill. Maybe the guy’s gun-toting daughter had cut them herself. Or that niece.
“You can sit on that other bed,” he said to her. “People use it like a couch.”
She agreed and pulled herself up onto the mattress. “How are you feeling today? You look pretty good.”
“I look better than”—he paused for a wince and then continued—“the last time you saw me. But I don’t look good.”
“I’ve seen much worse four days after an accident. Trust me. Have they told you when you go home?”
“Won’t be this week. Maybe early next week.”
She nodded. “How is everyone doing?”
“You mean my family?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They’re worried. Upset.”
“I guess they were all here today.”
“They were. Catherine—my wife—just left. I’m supposed to be . . . resting now.”
“I should go, then. You should rest. I just wanted to check in.”
“Stay. Please. Today’s the first day I’ve really been able to talk.”
“Okay, then.”
“And I don’t want to nap. I don’t know which drugs do it, but my dreams are filled with . . . lobsters. Really big . . . lobsters. They’re nightmares. Complete and utter nightmares.”
“Do you not like lobsters?”
“I like them fine,” he said quietly.
“I love them. There used to be this restaurant on the road to the notch in Franconia. It’s closed now, but it was called the Steer by the Shore, and they had this baked stuffed lobster. You would have killed for it. They said the lobsters were one and a quarter pounds, but they always seemed bigger to me. Delicious. And the stuffing was this buttery, crackery—I know that’s not a word, but you get my drift, it was kind of like a Ritz—paste. It just melted in your mouth. The lobster, too. My husband and I used to go there at least two or three times during the summer, and we always ordered the baked stuffed lobster.”
She began to fear she was talking too much. The color was receding from Spencer’s face, visibly plummeting like the water line in the bathtub once the drain has been opened.
“You probably don’t have much of an appetite yet. I shouldn’t talk so much about food.”
“It was Ritz,” he muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“The stuffing. That was the secret ingredient. Ritz crackers. Whole stuffing was nothing but Ritz crackers and margarine. And it wasn’t even very good margarine. It was the supermarket brand. One time I tried to spice it up with celery salt. The chef saw me, and I thought he was going to have a stroke. Made me throw”—there was that wince again, his nose crinkling up toward his eyes, and his forehead a series of furrows in a newly planted vegetable garden—“the whole batch away and start again.”
“You used to work there?”
“Yeah. I did,” he said. “You know, I never told anyone that.”
“You never told anyone that you used to work at the Steer by the Shore?”
“No. About the Ritz. I never told anyone that the secret ingredient in the stuffing was Ritz. It was all so important to them. The chef. The owners.”
“It was good!”
He grunted, a lone rumble of disgust from deep in his throat. “It was appalling. The stuffing, the lobsters . . .”
“You said you like lobsters!”
“I did. I didn’t say I liked to eat them.”
“What? You’re a vegetarian?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fish, too?”
“Anything with a parent.”
“I guess you don’t eat whatever venison your brother-in-law brings home in the fall. Personally, I don’t like venison. You’re not missing anything.”
“I agree. And as for my brother-in-law . . .” He sighed. “I am hoping this appalling interest of his is just . . . a phase. Temporary insanity.”
“Yeah, I guess I heard somewhere that he hasn’t been hunting very long,” she told him. She wanted to ask him how his daughter had gotten his brother-in-law’s gun in the first place or what she thought she was doing when she pulled the trigger on Saturday night. But then that part of her that was a mother—though both of her sons were grown men now in their twenties—and a teacher wanted to know something she decided was infinitely more important: She wanted to know how the child was feeling four days after the accident.
“So,” she said, drawing the vowel out into a rope as she tried to figure out how to begin, “what’s your daughter’s name?”
“Charlotte.”
“Charlotte McCullough. That sounds very regal.”
“Charlotte is many things . . . but regal is not among them.”
“She’s playful?”
“She’s . . . she wants to be a teenager.”
“How old is she?”
“Twelve. About to turn thirteen.”
“Then she’s there. Is she badly shaken by what she did?”
“She didn’t do anything!” he answered, and Missy noticed the way he almost hissed out the pronoun in his desire to make it clear that his daughter was not responsible for what had occurred.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I was only wondering how she was doing.”
“It’s my brother-in-law who should be shaken. It’s John Seton who has to live with this.”
She nodded because she didn’t want this intense man in the bed to get any more upset than he already was. But she didn’t completely agree with him. Although she was confident that Spencer’s brother-in-law felt enormous responsibility for what had occurred, she was also quite sure that his daughter was going to struggle with the fact she had nearly killed her father for a very long time. Probably forever.
“You see a lot of gun accidents?” he asked her suddenly.
“A few.”
“I’m suing the gun company.” He said this as if he were informing her that he had just changed the oil in his car or eaten a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. She was relieved that it was a manufacturer he was suing and not, as she had feared when she first arrived, his brother-in-law. “Maybe you should talk to my lawyer,” he added.
Reflexively, as if he were pointing a gun at her, she threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, I don’t think so. I’m happy to tell the lawyers what I saw on Saturday night. But I’m not your expert witness on guns or bullets or accidents. Okay?”
“Just a thought.”
She lowered her arms and tried to smile. “Really, I don’t believe you should be thinking about lawsuits and money right now. I think you should be putting all your energy into getting better.”
“I’m not suing for the money. I’m suing because it’s a great . . . opportunity to bring attention to the plight of hunted animals. Deer, especially. But moose and birds, too. Perhaps even elephants.”
She considered telling him that in her opinion things might be worse if people didn’t hunt. In places like northern New Hampshire the herd would grow too large for the browse. She didn’t say anything, however, because she hadn’t come here to argue.
“I’ll bet you hunt,” he continued, his tone slightly accusing.
“No.”
“But your husband does.”
“No, he doesn’t, either,” she answered, though this was a lie. She couldn’t believe that on Saturday night this guy was spewing so much blood into the clay soil of Sugar Hill that she had knelt in a puddle when she had arrived at his side—an oozy bit of bog that actually made a sucking sound as she lifted her knee the first time—and now he was proselytizing against hunting. He really was feisty.
“Ah, but you eat meat. You told me you eat lobster. You—”
“Look, I have two sons. One is a vegetarian, one isn’t. It isn’t a big deal to me, it isn’t a big deal to anyone. These days, lots of people are—”
“You ever think about what you’re eating when you eat a lobster? When you eat any animal?”
In the past these spontaneous visits had been pleasant for both her and the patient. That’s why she did it. The man or woman in the bed went on and on about how grateful they were to be alive, and she was able to go home with an image in her mind of a person on the mend. Not this character. He actually wanted to lecture her. And so she looked at her watch and expressed surprise at the time. She heard herself telling him how glad she was to see him alive and how she was sure that he would dazzle them all with his recovery. She spoke quickly so he couldn’t get a word in, and then she backed out of his room, waving as she retreated, until she was safely in the hallway.
As she raced down the long series of corridors that led to the elevators, she thought of Spencer McCullough’s twelve-year-old daughter once again. She decided if this guy were her father, she might have shot him, too. Anything to shut him up.


HOURS LATER, as Spencer was lying alone in bed, he kept thinking back on something the EMT had asked about Charlotte, and the way she had phrased the question: Is she badly shaken by what she did? It was dark now and it was raining outside, and he thought of his daughter and his niece in the room with the twin beds they shared here in the country and he wondered what they were talking about tonight. He imagined their light was still on, and in his mind he saw them in their summer nightgowns and he heard the rain drumming against the slate roof. He pictured them alone, just the two of them. In all likelihood, their grandmother was already safely ensconced in her turret for the night, John and Sara were focused on baby Patrick, and he guessed that Catherine either was soaking in the tub or curled up in bed with a book.
He worried that over the past couple of days he hadn’t told Charlotte—really made the point crystal clear—that she hadn’t done anything wrong. How could she have known there was a bullet in the gun? She was twelve, and while he had been absolutely sincere when he told the EMT that Charlotte wanted nothing more in the world than to be sixteen or seventeen, the reality was that in so many ways she was still a child. She had no idea the rifle was loaded, she had no idea her father was out walking at the edge of the garden. On some level, he decided, he was probably suing the gun company precisely because he wanted to make clear to the world that this travesty was not his daughter’s fault.
He made a mental note that in the morning when Charlotte came for a visit, the very first thing he was going to do was explain this to her. Maybe he’d ask everyone else to leave so he could have a moment alone with her. Then he would make absolutely certain that she knew she was blameless.
Well, not completely blameless. Twelve might still make her a child, but even twelve-year-olds should know not to play with guns. But then, she’d never seen a rifle before! None of their friends in Manhattan had guns lying around the house—at least that they knew of.
He imagined Charlotte and Willow were sitting together on the twin bed against the wall right now, the one that was Willow’s, and he saw the girls playing gin rummy with one of his mother-in-law’s shoe box full of bridge decks, the rain cooling the night so the windows were open only an inch. As they played they were talking about . . .
He realized he couldn’t begin to conceive what they were talking about, and this lapse troubled him. He told himself it was the painkillers he was taking, but he knew this was different. Deeper. He couldn’t concoct a conversation for them in his mind because he didn’t know how badly his daughter was hurting. That EMT might have been onto something.
He felt a small freshet of fear ripple through him: He was scared. There was nothing he loved more in the world than his wife and his daughter, and alone in this bed he had to admit he was probably losing his wife. Had been for months. These days, they could fight over what to pack, where to eat, which vegetables they’d plant in the garden. Whether they should even have a garden.
Well, in this case Catherine had been right. No good had come from the garden, that was for sure. Next year they’d let the lupine return to the patch of earth they had tried to make their own. Allow all traces of the vegetables to disappear. It was ridiculous to believe they—he, this was all his idea—could maintain a garden when he and Catherine lived in Manhattan and John and Sara lived two hours to the west in Vermont.
He hoped he wouldn’t lose his daughter now, too, especially since the accident really wasn’t her fault. He thought of the little girl who once raced for hours at a time amidst the stuffed animals on the first floor of the old FAO Schwarz, that preschooler entranced by the cotton- and poly-stuffed snakes and chimpanzees and giraffes. He couldn’t lose the girl who, when she was seven, was capable of belting out “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” in a children’s cabaret as if she were Ann-Margret, or the child who on occasion could be so wondrously giving that at nine she’d taken a booth at the church rummage sale and sold all her old puzzles and Barbies and books and raised $273 for FERAL’s special fund for abused circus animals. Yes, right now she was going through a rough period. Right now she was subjecting everyone around her to her preadolescent angst . . . but this was the same child who would run into his and Catherine’s room when she was in the second grade for one last good-night kiss or who would lean against him for hours as they sat on the beach in Florida and watched seagulls and talked.
Spencer decided he hadn’t been very nice to that EMT. He wasn’t proud of his behavior, and he wondered why he had been so testy and sanctimonious with her. All she did was save his life. Was it because of his injury? The fact that he would, in all likelihood, be disabled? Or was it more basic than that: Was he cranky simply because last night he had slept poorly again—woken twice by the lobsters in his dreams—and now he was tired?
He had asked for and been given a different kind of sleeping pill tonight, but he was still wary about what sorts of dreams might await him when he dozed off. Last night there had been a couple of doozies, including one in which his hands were bound with belt-wide rubber bands, and he was trapped on his side in a crate in a walk-in refrigerator. He woke up in a sweat as he was being grabbed by a giant human hand to be either cleavered or dropped into a pot of boiling water. It was only a dream, but it had still been a pretty hideous experience.
No doubt tonight he’d start dreaming of deer. Inadvertently Catherine had put the idea into his head when she’d been commiserating with him this afternoon, trying to cheer him up. Trying to elicit a smile from him, she’d suggested that tonight he’d probably start dreaming of Bambi: The fawn would emerge from the garden, beet greens and kohlrabi on the young buck’s breath.
Well, deer were beautiful animals: graceful, athletic, and lithe. They were completely unlike lobsters, which Spencer believed were among the most vile-looking creatures on the planet. What in the name of God had the first person to eat one been thinking? He decided he was mistaken when he had told Melissa Fearon that he liked lobsters. He didn’t. He tried to appreciate all animals, and most of the time he did. But not lobsters. He couldn’t appreciate a lobster.
He stared into the blackness out the window, watching the designs the raindrops made on the glass. He would have to get the address of that EMT from someone at the hospital so he could write her a note. He wanted to apologize for being short with her, as well as, yes, to thank her for saving his life. He would be unable to write the note himself, of course. At least in the foreseeable future. He guessed eventually he would learn to write legibly with his left hand, but that day was almost unimaginable to him at the moment. He could barely lift his left arm right now because of the way any upper-body movement at all sent tectonic shudders of pain across his right side. But he would thank her. Somehow. And he would do more than write a note, because sixty or eighty dictated words were insufficient when someone has brought you back from the dead.
He told himself he shouldn’t lose sight of that. It was certainly a temptation to read more into this second chance than was most certainly there—to see it as an opportunity to make resolutions and vows, promises that he knew in his heart he would never keep for more than a week or a month—but the undeniable reality was that he very nearly had died. Bought the farm. Augured in. If the bullet had been a few inches higher, he would have been all but decapitated. A few inches in another direction, and his heart would have become a ragout. Either way, he would have been dead before his body landed back in the snow peas. As troubling as his future looked to him tonight—the considerable handicap that loomed before him, his daughter’s almost crippling remorse, the damage he had inflicted on his marriage before this accident had even occurred—the truth was that he was alive. Just about four days ago there was no reason to believe that he would be.
And so while he wasn’t about to see more of a spiritual second chance here than was probably warranted, neither would he forget that he still had a future. It might not be the future he once had imagined. But when the sun rose in the morning over the mountains just east of his mother-in-law’s house in Sugar Hill, he would still be around. Tomorrow—and the day after tomorrow and the day after that—he would try to be less careless with his time.


IN THE HOUSE IN SUGAR HILL, Sara stood above the crib in which Patrick was sleeping and watched the small blanket rise almost imperceptibly off his chest with each inhalation. She wondered if he was going to have her husband’s elegant, patrician slide of a nose. People said they saw as much of her in the baby as they did John, but she knew they were just being polite. Right now the child looked like nothing more than a John Seton clone. She closed the window completely and for a moment gazed out into the garden. The rain had resumed a few minutes ago, soon after her husband had left for a walk. She didn’t think John had brought an umbrella with him. She thought she saw something move in the dark and the mist, guessed it was probably the deer, and decided to go outside to turn on the floodlights by the garage. Scare the creatures away: frighten the hell out of the animals that, inadvertently, had brought so much pain on her family.
At the top of the stairs she could hear the murmurs of Willow’s and Charlotte’s small voices, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She’d kissed them good night and turned out their lights perhaps fifteen minutes ago. She hoped they were talking about something silly—not the accident or poor Spencer’s injuries. As she passed the kitchen, she saw Nan glancing at the catalogs and the bills and the solicitations (did no one write letters anymore?) that somehow had managed to amass in the few days her mother-in-law had been shuttling her brood back and forth between the hospital in Hanover and the Contour Club.
The house was linked to the garage by a path made of slate, and the slabs tonight were cold and slippery and wet. Sara’s feet were bare, and despite the rain she walked slowly. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t want to fall: Suddenly she wanted to catch the deer in the floodlights and watch them freeze before fleeing. The light switch was just inside the side door to the garage—what Willow had referred to as the people door when she’d been younger, her means of differentiating it from the massive overhead doors for the vehicles, which even now she had to struggle to lift.
Sara found the switch with her fingers, and turned toward the garden before flipping the lights on. She wanted to be sure she had the patch of badly mauled vegetables fixed in her gaze.
In the instant of illumination she spied not deer, however, nor a dog or raccoons or even a black bear. She saw instead John, his hair plastered so flat on his head by the rain that it looked as if he had just emerged from the pool at the club. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and before she saw he was still clad in his khaki shorts she thought he was naked. He had a pair of metal tomato cages in one hand and the cherry tomato plants that moments earlier had been growing inside them—easily three feet high now—in the other, their stalks and roots dangling in the air like the spindly legs of unimaginably giant insects. On the ground beside him she observed that he had upended the other tomato cages as well, and ripped those plants from the ground, too. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as if he had yanked up the corn plants the family had meticulously replanted on Friday and Saturday, and savaged the peas, the string beans, the beets, the pumpkins, and the squash. It appeared as if he had ripped up everything the deer hadn’t already nibbled to death in the garden.
She couldn’t tell if he could see her—if he could determine exactly who it was who had just turned on the lights—both because she was in the dark and because at some point he had taken off his eyeglasses (perhaps, she worried, when he had ripped off his shirt). He looked unsteady on his feet, but he squinted and stared in her general direction.
“Mother? Sara? Who’s there?” he cried, and it was indeed a sob that he was offering up through the wind and the rain and the night.
She tried to answer but her voice caught in her throat. She tried one more time but was struck dumb by the sight of her husband and the half-mad waste he had inflicted on the vegetables and—now she glimpsed the edge of the cutting garden, partly illuminated by the floodlights—the flowers the family had planted Memorial Day Weekend. She was incapable of offering anything but a desperately sad little whimper.
“Sara?”
She wiped the rain from her eyes and nodded though he couldn’t see her, and then she ran to him across the driveway and soggy carpet of lawn.