Twenty
John and Sara and Willow had breakfast in silence—most of their meals were silent these days, unless Patrick was awake and felt the need to contribute. When they were finished, John stood, grabbed his attaché off the floor by the coatrack, and walked Willow to the end of their driveway. The bus stop was about fifty yards farther down the road. He kissed his daughter once on her forehead and then climbed into the Volvo (the one that would always hold for him his memories of an Adirondack rifle in the trunk), and turned the silver key in the ignition. He hadn’t spoken to Spencer since he and his family had left his mother’s house in Sugar Hill a month ago, and he guessed it might be years before they’d speak again. He glanced in the rearview mirror before starting to back the car from the driveway, and paused for a moment when he saw how bereaved and haggard the eyes were that gazed back at him from the glass.
HE WENT STRAIGHT to the courthouse this morning, because his caseload today showed a welfare fraud, a pair of unrelated larcenies (one petty, one grand), an unlawful mischief, and a sexual assault on a minor. It was almost lunchtime now as he sat in the basement of the building in an eight-by-eight-foot room made almost entirely of cement blocks painted light yellow, listening to a twenty-three-year-old named Brady Simmons tell him across a thin table, “It’s a long story, see” (arguably the most common construction any of his clients ever made with five words), before launching into his explanation as to why he had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.
Abruptly his cell phone started to ring, and he saw by the number that it was his brother-in-law’s human attack dog of a lawyer. Paige Sutherland. She had been trying to reach him for days now to update him on her plans for the lawsuit and discuss how she’d want to prep him for the deposition later that autumn. He decided he might as well get it over with—agree, at least, to a date they could meet once the lawsuit was filed—and so he asked Simmons for a minute and rapped on the door for one of the guards to let him out.
“Hello, Paige,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his blazer for his Palm as he spoke.
“You’re a hard man to reach,” she said, and though her voice was sweet he detected the slight edge of chastisement.
“Oh, you know the drill,” he murmured. “A lot of clients who are, well, not as reliable as we might like.”
“No, actually I don’t know. The sorts of people I represent are extremely reliable.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, don’t take offense.”
He ignored her and tried to find a time on his calendar when he could subject himself to the torture of a morning or afternoon discussing his role in this disaster with her.
“I’ve left a couple messages for you on your voice mail,” she went on when he was quiet. “So I guess you know why I’m calling.”
“Yes, let’s get this over with.”
“Get this over with? You make it sound like you’re the one being sued! You make it sound like we’re not on the same side. You’re helping your brother-in-law by doing this. You’re helping to make a gun company take responsibility for—”
“Paige, please. My brother-in-law doesn’t even speak to me anymore. We haven’t said a single word to each other in five weeks. You know that.”
“Time heals all wounds—”
“Except Spencer’s.”
“That was exactly what I was thinking right after I said it! Too funny. Do you have representation yet? Why don’t I schedule a meeting through them? Really, we have so much to go over.”
“I . . . haven’t finalized my choice for a lawyer yet.”
“John, really. What would you do if one of your own clients were behaving this way?”
“My clients always behave this way.”
“It will be painless. Trust me.”
“I promise you: Reliving that night will be anything but painless. Maybe if you weren’t planning on making such a big deal about this in the media, I would—”
“It’s what Spencer wants.”
“That press conference? It’s not what my sister wants. Or what I believe is in the best interests of my niece.”
“First of all, it’s Spencer’s life we’re dealing with. He is the one who has to live with this trag—”
“We all have to live with this tragedy!”
“Well, yes, but some of you have two functioning arms to help you cope. Spencer doesn’t. And as for young Charlotte, well, Spencer is her father. You’re merely her uncle. I believe you should defer to his wishes. Don’t you?”
“If Spencer and I could just talk about this.”
“Spencer and I don’t make a practice of discussing your relationship, but as you yourself just pointed out, it’s pretty clear that he’s not quite ready to resume communications with you.”
He considered briefly asking her to give Spencer a message, but his brother-in-law wasn’t listening to his pleas through Catherine—the man’s own wife—so there was no reason to believe that Spencer would listen to whatever Paige said on his behalf.
He sighed so loudly on the phone that Paige murmured, “Oh, John, it’s not that bad,” but he had the distinct sense that she was smiling.
“Where do you want to do this? In New York or Vermont?” he asked.
“I thought we could do it in your neck of the woods. I’m going to be in New Hampshire the last week in September with the surgeons and those EMTs, and I could scoot over to Burlington on that Wednesday—the twenty-ninth. What does your schedule look like that day?”
“I don’t have to look at it to tell you that I can’t do a Wednesday. Not ever. Wednesday is the weekly calendar call, and—”
“And you have dozens of your little DWIs and pickpockets to parade before the judge. I understand.”
“Please do not demean—”
“People who drive drunk and pick other people’s pockets? Honestly, John, they don’t need me to demean them. They do a pretty good job of demeaning themselves. How about that Tuesday instead—the twenty-eighth?”
“Fine.”
“Ah, progress! Bless you, John Seton. How is midmorning? I could fly up on the first flight out of—”
“I have to go,” he said, not because he felt an overarching desire to return to a conversation with a young man who actually believed that he’d behaved responsibly (or, at least, not unreasonably) when he’d had consensual sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, but simply because he couldn’t stand to speak for another moment with Paige Sutherland.
“Get a lawyer!” he heard her shout into the cell phone, and he had the sense that she was going to add something more, but he was already pressing the small button with his thumb that ended their conversation.
A PARTNER IN SARA’S PRACTICE had asked her once in August if her niece had begun to process why in reality she had shot her father.
“She shot him because she thought he was a deer,” Sara had answered simply, hoping that she hadn’t sounded defensive. The partner—a woman whose three teenage children behaved so outrageously that Sara had always considered this other woman’s parenting skills more than a little suspect—had merely nodded and smiled.
Most of the time, what Sara had told her partner was exactly what she believed: Charlotte indeed had presumed she was shooting a deer. That’s all there was to it. Sometimes, however, the idea that her vegetarian niece—the daughter of the communications director for FERAL—was either planning or pretending (who could ever know for sure?) to shoot a wild animal suggested to Sara that her niece might actually have some unresolved conflicts with her dad. And then she would have to admit to herself that this other woman in her practice, despite her apparent difficulties raising her own children, may have been onto something.
Now, as she and Willow drove from her daughter’s elementary school to ballet practice, the September sun highlighting the first orange leaves at the very tips of the sugar maples and the dying, knee-high remains of the cow corn, she asked the child the question that off and on had passed through her mind.
“Willow?” she began, and she turned down the volume on the radio. She was careful not to turn the radio off, because she did not want her daughter to view the conversation as ominous.
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a question about your cousin?”
“Sure. What about her?”
“Oh, it’s nothing serious. I’ve just always wondered . . . I guess I’ve been curious . . . does Charlotte ever wish their family ate meat?” There, Sara thought to herself. A perfectly innocuous opening.
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“I was just thinking about the accident.”
“Plenty of people are vegetarians. I don’t think it’s a big deal for anyone in the whole world except Grandmother.”
“Oh, I know. But her dad . . . Uncle Spencer . . . what he does for a living makes it all so . . . so public. That does make it a big deal.”
“Charlotte actually likes the taste of things like his awful Soy-garine.”
“Well, what about the other parts of her life? All the things that I know she doesn’t get to do because of Uncle Spencer?”
“You mean like the time we all went to Sea World, and she wasn’t allowed to come with us?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Maybe sometimes she misses that sort of thing. But I also think she’s kind of proud of her dad.”
“You do?”
“Oh, yeah. At least she used to be. She thought it was incredibly cool when he was on The Today Show a couple years ago. She’s into that sort of thing.”
“So she never gets angry at him . . .”
“At her dad? Oh, she does. But as far as I can tell, mostly she gets mad at her mom.”
“Yes, we have gotten to witness Catherine and Charlotte go at it over the years, haven’t we?”
“Sure have. And Charlotte and Grandmother in the summer.”
“And heaven knows all mothers and daughters can have pretty dicey relationships, especially when the daughter is an adolescent—or almost one,” she said. Then she added quickly, her voice light, “Now, don’t you get any ideas, Willow Seton.”
“I can’t be a brat?”
“I’d rather you weren’t.”
She glanced back after she spoke, and Willow seemed to be pondering seriously the notion that heretofore unchallenged behavioral boundaries might be worth exploring. When she returned her gaze to the road, she asked, “Do you think there’s anything in particular that Aunt Catherine does that might trigger all that anger in Charlotte? Anything specific she does around your cousin or your uncle? Or maybe just around other people?”
There was a long silence, so long that Sara was about to repeat the question. Finally: “Nope.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Mom? I just told you: No. And it’s not like Charlotte and Aunt Catherine spend their whole lives fighting.”
She wasn’t sure why, but she sensed there was something here that Willow wasn’t telling her about Aunt Catherine and Charlotte, the silence not so much the filing cards in the girl’s brain riffling for an example as it was the quiet of a child trying to avoid a potentially unpleasant conversation. But she knew also not to push the girl. The important thing, she decided, was that in Willow’s opinion Charlotte wasn’t harboring any special hostility toward her father.
Or, at least, she hadn’t been venting constantly to Willow that July and August.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Go ahead.” There was a twinge of exasperation in her daughter’s voice now.
“Actually, it’s something I need to tell you.”
“What?”
Initially Sara hadn’t planned on bringing this up for days, but then John had phoned her this morning with the news that he and Paige Sutherland had set a date to begin his preparation for his deposition. That meant they would have to start prepping Willow, too. And so Sara decided that she had better tell her that, like her father, soon enough she would have to start speaking to lawyers.
“You’ve heard your father use the term deposition before, right?”
“I guess.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“No. Not really.”
Carefully she pulled into the left lane to pass a lumbering manure spreader and waited until they were back on the right side of the road to continue. “It’s like an interview. But the person asking the questions is a lawyer instead of a reporter.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’re supposed to tell the truth—just like a witness in a courtroom, you swear an oath—because the lawyer uses the information from the interview to try to figure out what happened at the scene of a . . . at an event. It’s not a big deal. We’ll go to someone’s office and we’ll—”
“I do not want to talk to a lawyer! No way!”
Only briefly was Sara surprised by how quickly Willow had determined where this conversation was heading. Her daughter was sharp, and she and John had never treated her like a baby: They’d tried always to respect her intellect and talk to her like a grown-up.
“Well—”
“No! I didn’t do anything but open the trunk to get Patrick’s diapers! How was I supposed to know there was a gun in there? And—”
“Willow—”
“And you know I told Charlotte to leave the gun alone! I told her not to touch it! I’ve told you that, I told the trooper guy that, I—”
Already Sara was braking to a stop in the patch of grass along the side of the road, grateful that the ground was flat and the farmer hadn’t put his fence too close to the asphalt.
“I’ve told anyone who will listen that! And now I’m done talking about that whole night, okay? I won’t talk to anyone anymore!”
She put the vehicle in park and turned around. “Willow? Are you finished?” she asked, her inflection, she hoped, playful and soft.
“I’m just telling you: I’m not taking any oaths and I’m not talking about that night with any lawyers.”
“A second ago you said you won’t talk about that night with anyone. Now I’m hearing it’s the presence of the lawyer that’s the deal breaker. Can you help me understand a little more why—”
“You’re using your therapist’s voice. I hate it when you use your therapist’s voice with me. I’m your daughter, not one of your patients!”
She considered offering Willow a small, sympathetic smile, but she feared if she did her daughter would see clearly parental condescension. The truth was that she was using her therapist’s voice. “Fair enough,” she said, evening her tone. “Tell me why you’re getting so upset about this, without—”
“It’s because—”
“Without interrupting me. It’s my turn to speak now, okay? Here’s what I want to know: Are you getting upset because you don’t want to talk about that night anymore or because you might have to talk about it with a lawyer?”
Willow cupped her hands in front of her nose and mouth like a gas mask.
“Willow? Please? Why did my mentioning the lawyer bother you? The truth is, we’ve talked about that night a fair amount over the last month and it never seemed to trouble you before.”
“How do you know that? Why would you think that? Of course it troubled me! You don’t know what I saw, you don’t know what I’m feeling!” the child said, speaking through her hands. Sara considered prying her fingers from her face but figured this, too, would only antagonize her daughter further. She decided there was a fair amount of disingenuousness going on here: Yes, Willow had been the first to reach Uncle Spencer, but until this moment Willow had never once behaved in a manner that might suggest the vision had been traumatizing. They’d talked about that night at length when they were in New Hampshire, and—usually when John wasn’t in the room—they’d talked about Uncle Spencer’s likely disability when they were home in Vermont. They’d talked about what Charlotte may or may not have been experiencing in terms of guilt, and what John clearly was enduring in terms of self-loathing. At least between mother and daughter the accident certainly had not been a forbidden subject.
No, Sara decided now, this wasn’t about the shooting. This was about . . . the lawyer. And when she analyzed what had just occurred between the two of them in the car, she was pretty sure that it was precisely when she had said to Willow that she would be expected to tell the lawyer the truth—as if she were a witness in a courtroom—that the child had suddenly gone nuclear. And that might mean there was more to the accident than she knew.
Than anyone but Willow and Charlotte knew.
“You’re right, sweetheart,” she said, stalling for time while she tried to think. “I don’t know what you’re feeling.”
The hands came down from the mouth, but her daughter wrapped them around her chest and stared angrily out the window. In the field they could see Holsteins clustered in groups of four and five, some of the animals grazing lazily near a trough.
She decided that she should probably get Willow to ballet and not force the issue right now. But with a pronounced ripple across her stomach and a slight fuzziness in her eyes—a sensation reminiscent of the very first wave of seasickness—she understood that she had just learned something important: She might not know as much about what had occurred that night in Sugar Hill as she thought she did.
She took a deep breath to calm herself. Then she smiled at her daughter and put the car back into drive. She told herself that while Willow was dancing she would try to figure out exactly what to do next.
ANDRE NADEAU, avid sportsman (Translation? Deer hunter) and single father of two, Andre Nadeau with a misdemeanor assault on his record (a fine, probation, but no time to be served), called John late that afternoon in his office. Awash in guilt John took the call, because he hadn’t spoken to Andre since before he had left for New Hampshire on the second to last day of July—where he had then remained far longer than planned. Consequently, it was no thanks to John that Andre received a mere fine and probation, despite smashing a glass beer mug on the head of one Cameron Gerrity to the tune of thirty-four stitches. Andre could thank Whitney Bowerman, one of John’s PDs who had pinch-hit for him while he had driven back and forth between his mother-in-law’s and the hospital in Hanover those first weeks in August.
Andre understood that John hadn’t represented him because an “accident” had befallen his lawyer’s brother-in-law, but he did not know the details. Consequently, he was calling now to ask simply—simply because he was decent, simply because he was a dad, simply because he still presumed that he was going to mentor John Seton in the woods that November—why he hadn’t bothered to bring his rifle to that gunsmith in Essex Junction.
“You really should take care of that bullet in the chamber,” he said to John. “Something could happen.”
He wondered what he should say to Andre, how much to tell him. He did not miss the irony that one of his clients was now offering him the sort of obvious counsel—you can’t drive when your license has been revoked, even if it is your own car; you can’t forge someone else’s name on someone else’s check, even if the guy has passed away—that formed such a high percentage of the wisdom he himself volunteered daily. He was also touched that one of those women and men at whom Paige Sutherland sneered, her nose crinkled in distaste, was calling for no other reason than because he cared.
KEENAN BARRETT walked up Fifth Avenue to Grand Central at the end of the day, and the train that was waiting to take him home. With each block the crowds grew thicker, and the city—despite the fact Labor Day was behind him—felt increasingly equatorial. He was perspiring, a rarity for him this far north in September, and he decided he had to slow down. His train didn’t leave for twenty-three minutes.
He was sorry to hear that Spencer had burned himself while trying to fry a soy cheese sandwich, but he also knew the additional injury—minor as it most likely was—could only help at the press conference. If the wound was still visible in two weeks, a reporter invariably would ask whether the marks on his hand had something to do with the shooting, and then Spencer could answer yes, indirectly, and talk about what the disability meant in terms of nerve damage: the reality that once the sling was gone the limb would dangle like a plumb line, knocking over teacups as he wandered through restaurants, getting caught in elevator doors, and banging with such frequency into door frames and desktops that his knuckles forever would be black and blue.
Alas, the new wound probably wouldn’t look like much the week after next. It might not even be noticeable. And they certainly couldn’t move the press conference forward, even if they had the results from the ballistics lab, not with this Saturday the eleventh of September. He knew from experience that in the week before and the week after 9/11, with the exception of breaking news, it was difficult (and, he felt, inappropriate) to get the media to pay attention to anything that didn’t commemorate the people who had died in the attacks in New York and Washington or the people who rose to the daunting task of carting away the literal mountain of rubble where the World Trade Towers once had stood. It was an annual media frenzy that Keenan found at once moving and numbing: profiles of the medical examiners and laboratory technicians who helped identify the tens of thousands of body parts, of the bond traders who were in the towers and survived, of the Baptist volunteers from Vermont who replaced the windows that were blown to pieces in the nearby apartment buildings. There would be an endless parade of images on television—the altered skyline, the twin towers, the Pentagon, the living, the dead, the missing who never were found—a ritual that was now as much a part of the memorial mores as fireworks on the Fourth of July or fighting for drumsticks on Thanksgiving.
It was, of course, a supreme testimony to the resiliency of that great oxymoron called American culture that the anniversary of the tragedy was still observed each year with an avalanche of new books, special-edition magazines, newspaper extras, and exclusive television programming that was never in reality all that unique. Even FERAL always found a way to get into the act. This year Dominique would be photographed in Long Island on Friday with the Suffolk County SPCA at a ceremony honoring rescue dogs, some of which had wandered deep into the World Trade Center wreckage that awful September in search of survivors and then for victims throughout that nightmarish fall. She would be giving the animals a lifetime supply of vegetarian dog biscuits and poly-filled dog beds, each item embroidered with the name of one of the dogs who’d sustained an injury that had forced him to retire—usually respiratory disease or blindness from the powder and dust.
He wasn’t proud of what FERAL was doing, but he also believed that the organization was exploiting 9/11 for a good cause and that the dogs wouldn’t mind the treats and the beds. Besides, profits and nonprofits alike would be taking advantage of the moment. He hoped the anniversary would never become an excuse for retail sales bonanzas the way Washington’s Birthday and Memorial Day had, but you never knew: Perhaps in fifty years 9/11 would be commemorated always on the second Monday in September, so there would be back-to-back three-day weekends at the end of the summer. The very notion made him shudder, but he knew in this world it could happen.
He was jostled by a young man in a blazer with a mandarin collar talking with great animation into his cell phone, and the bump brought Keenan’s mind back to the press conference. Spencer, he concluded, should not be the one to discuss the ramifications of the nerve damage. A surgeon should. Spencer would sound like a medieval monk if he himself cataloged the likely future mortifications to his flesh. But a physician wouldn’t be on the dais, both because Paige didn’t want to risk revealing too much of her hand and because Paige had a very healthy ego—healthy even by the Rushmore-sized standards of most big-time litigators. Consequently, in addition to announcing the lawsuit, Paige should explain to the press the petty indignities that awaited Spencer McCullough—petty, of course, only in comparison to the complete loss of function. There was really nothing petty about accidentally slamming a car door on your hand and not having a clue that you’ve just shattered half the phalanx bones in your fingers.
Still, Keenan guessed that Spencer was the sort who might never allow the arm to be amputated. The man was both too vain to walk through life without it (and given the complete destruction of the bones and muscle in his shoulder, he understood there was no point in a prosthetic replacement) and too in love with his daughter to subject her to a visual reminder for as long as he lived of what she had done. If he were in the same situation, Keenan presumed he would keep the arm, too.
So, the press conference would feature Spencer, Paige, and Dominique. Keenan decided he could live without a surgeon, if Paige felt comfortable explaining the medical carnage (and he sensed that Paige would savor every gruesome detail). That team was sufficiently capable of embarrassing the hell out of Adirondack and getting Spencer on-air with the morning news anchors if the right people were in the audience. Dominique, too.
A key, obviously, would be to make sure that those right people were there. And that was something that Spencer himself often handled. Certainly his assistants were quite capable, especially Randy Mitchell. Randy, too, knew the key producers and some of the more powerful editors. But it was Spencer who had the special rapport with them and knew which freelance writers had the clout to convince the New Yorker to let them write about the horrors of the beef industry or were capable of selling the Atlantic on the idea of an exploration about what really went on in the university labs that experimented on animals. These people were particularly important because broadcast followed print. That was the rule. And sometimes it took a few timely magazine and newspaper features to get the network news and their prime-time newsmagazines to produce those glorious exposés with their computer-generated graphics.
Already Keenan could see in his mind the computer-generated blues, blacks, and golds of an animated cutaway diagram of the Adirondack thirty-ought-six, a moving, fluidlike image that showed the placement of the bolt, the extractor, and the ejector. He heard the reporter’s even tones in a voice-over, as an image of a hook failed again and again to fasten itself into the groove in the back of the bullet in the chamber, until . . . until finally the computer zeroed in on the round. Maybe the designer would cause the bullet to flash red now, like the defective part in a passenger jet that caused the plane to crash.
He sighed, contributing his small moan to the sultry crush on the street. Depending upon what the ballistics lab told them, the angle would be either that John Seton’s individual gun had a faulty component or the contention that even used properly his Adirondack brand of rifle needlessly left a bullet in the chamber after the magazine was emptied. Either way, Keenan believed, they would make the firearms manufacturer look bad. Very bad. And they would portray hunting as the barbaric, irresponsible hobby that it was.
As he made his way through the throngs pressing their way into the station, he wondered if Spencer was capable of calling select members of the media himself, or—even if he was—whether he should. It might be unseemly. Spencer, after all, was the focus of this tragedy. He guessed they would have to depend upon Randy Mitchell or Joan Robbins or Turner Smolens—Spencer’s staff. He tried to imagine their phone presence, to recall what he could from their conversations with him and the numerous times he had overheard them on the telephone as he strolled past their cubicles.
Then it hit him, and he actually stood still for a moment on the platform beside the very rear of his train while the thought registered: All Randy or Joan or Turner had to say to these people was that Spencer McCullough had been shot by a hunting rifle, and they would be at the press conference in a heartbeat. It wasn’t that they cared so deeply for Spencer; it wasn’t, in truth, that they cared for him at all. Rather, it was that same ghoulish irony that had led him to fear back on the first day of August that FERAL would wind up the butt of jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman. How could they possibly miss getting the story on this one?
The answer? They couldn’t. They wouldn’t.
The difference now—unlike his worries in early August—was that FERAL was going to control how the information was presented.
When he started moving forward once more, it was with a gait that was brisk and confident and—for a man of his age and reserve on a sweltering train platform in the bowels of Grand Central Station—downright effervescent.