Twenty-one
On Thursday afternoon Charlotte came home from school before her mother, radiant with the news that she had gotten one of the leads in the autumn musical. She was the only eighth-grader with a part—the only student, in fact, with a role who wasn’t at least in the ninth grade. She understood that she was going to play a ten-year-old girl surrounded by grown-ups, and so it helped that she was younger (and shorter) than the rest of the cast. Still, this was a real coup, and when she saw the cast list outside the drama teacher’s classroom at the end of the school day she’d raced down the Brearley corridors to her own mother’s room, demonstrating exactly the sort of unfettered enthusiasm that usually she disdained.
Now when she opened the front door to her family’s apartment across town, she was no less cheerful. She saw her father was dozing in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt in a chair by the window, and initially she was disappointed that she couldn’t tell him the news that very moment. She was still annoyed with him over what she considered the Maurice and the Magic Banana slight, but he had seemed so pathetic since Tuesday that she never had confronted him with either the book itself or the magazine photo she had discovered of her father and the gifted gorilla. Now she thought she would burst if she didn’t tell someone her news and so she was delighted when he opened his eyes and stared at her. His hair hung lank down his temples and he looked rather tubby. Uncharacteristically slovenly. Until Tuesday, when he had failed to make it to work, he had tried to keep up a semblance of hygiene and fashion normalcy. No more. Over the last couple of days, he had lived in sweatpants, tennis shorts, and bulky T-shirts a size too large. He hadn’t even tried to shave, and his face was covered with the gray and black stubble she associated with the homeless along Riverside Drive. She noticed that his small weights were out by the couch, and though she hoped it was because the physical therapist had been at the apartment earlier that afternoon, she was pretty sure the weights had been there for days.
“I’m really sorry if I woke you,” she said, “but I’m glad you’re awake. Guess what?”
He used his left arm to push himself up in the chair, visibly wincing, so he wasn’t slouching like biscuit dough. “Go ahead.”
“I got the part! I’m Mary Lennox!”
“Wow, that’s pretty big news. Congratulations!” He raised his eyebrows as he spoke, taking in the information.
“Yup. Can I use the phone, I’m going to call—”
“Hold on, hold on. Tell me all the details. I want to hear everything.”
“Do you really have time?” she asked, a reflex before she could stop herself. In the past, her father never had time for details. Before the accident, she either would have left this news for him on his voice mail at FERAL or told him at dinner between his own anecdotes about the ponies, dolphins, or lab rats the organization was working that moment to save. She knew he would be happy for her—and yes, proud that she was his daughter. But unless he was in one of his infrequent phases of almost manic parental involvement, the very last thing he would want would be the details. Now, of course, time was less of an issue. He seemed to have plenty of it.
“Yes,” he said with almost dreamlike serenity. “I have time.”
And so she sat on the pouf between the dormant fireplace and her father’s chair and told him all that she could remember about the audition yesterday: The high school boys from another school who were asked to audition for the parts of Archie and Neville, the songs she had been asked to sing, the dancing that was required. The number of girls she had to beat out for the part. She told him in a chirping voice that gathered momentum as she spoke, as she remembered specific details.
When she was done he surprised her yet again by asking what the rehearsal schedule would be and whether he could help her learn her lines.
“Won’t you be back at work next week?” she asked.
“I guess.”
“Then how can you help me?”
“I can fit your school play in. Parents do it all the time. Work. Play. Parenting. They do, don’t they?”
She agreed in her head that they did, and as a courtesy to her ailing father she nodded. But she couldn’t imagine him actually running her lines with her or helping her memorize song lyrics.
“It’s really incredible what you did,” he murmured when she remained silent. “But you know what? I’m not surprised you got the part. I’m not surprised at all. You’ll be stupendous. Absolutely stupendous.”
WILLOW ALREADY KNEW that her birthday this year fell on a Monday, but she checked the calendar in the kitchen again now because she had a feeling it was going to be the day before her parents expected her to talk to that lawyer—or, perhaps, lawyers. She saw she was correct: It was. She would officially be eleven then. Barely eleven years old, she thought, and already she was being (and she hated the very phonetics of this new word) deposed.
Her father came into the kitchen, a couple of rattles he’d found on the floor in the den in his hands. The dinner dishes were in the sink, and she watched him stare at them for a long moment—as if he were actually surprised to find the remnants of their meat loaf and mashed potatoes and spaghetti squash still present. He seemed to do this a lot these days: He would simply stop and stare for a long instant at something as if the object or the panorama (it happened outdoors as frequently as it did inside the house) were new and unfamiliar. Then he tossed the rattles in a wicker basket on a shelf below the cookbooks where he and her mother tended to toss all of the small, nonessential items that belonged to Patrick: Toe puppets. Pacifiers. The flat plastic shells in which they packed wet wipes when they went out.
Her brother was upstairs sleeping and her mother was working behind closed doors in the living room. Whenever she worked in the evening she tended to close the door, because there was a chance she was listening to a tape of a patient. Sometimes she used a headset, but as often as not—even before Patrick was born—the headset disappeared under a couch or deep in a crevice in her shoulder bag.
“A busy schedule, eh?” he murmured when he saw her looking at the calendar.
She sighed and sat down on one of the stools at the L-shaped counter around which they ate breakfast. She was already in her nightshirt, and she could feel the cool wood against the backs of her legs. “My birthday is the day before I have to talk to the lawyer,” she said.
“Oh. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It is going to be a hard month, isn’t it?” She knew he was referring to the litany of bad dates before them. Saturday was the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which was at least part of the reason why her mother was working right now: She had had extra office hours today and would have them again tomorrow. Then the week after next was the FERAL press conference that her parents and, she knew, her aunt dreaded: Even though none of them would be present, it was going to generate the media attention her uncle desired and make them all more public than they liked—especially, of course, her father and Charlotte. Her aunt had warned her father that reporters would try to reach him (and, Willow knew, they would succeed). And then the week after the press conference she and her cousin had to start meeting with lawyers to prepare for their depositions. Her first appointment was on Tuesday in Vermont and Charlotte’s was on Thursday in Manhattan.
She decided she was going to call her cousin over the weekend. She needed to know exactly what Charlotte was going to say and—perhaps of more importance—what she wasn’t. They hadn’t spoken since her own family had left for Vermont the day after Uncle Spencer had returned to Grandmother’s from the hospital, and that had been more than four weeks ago now.
Everything had grown much more complicated the moment her uncle had struggled back into the house in Sugar Hill. He was refusing to talk to her father, which was the reason why her own family had left the next day. The house was big, but not big enough for the two brothers-in-law once they weren’t speaking. She knew the two men hadn’t spoken since then, and she guessed on some level this was why she and Charlotte hadn’t called each other, either. It was awkward now.
“It’s going to be a very bad month,” she agreed.
Though her father had loosened his necktie before dinner, the rope of fabric still hung around his neck. He nodded and sat down on a stool beside her and finally untied the knot completely and pulled the long strip of silk through the collar of his shirt. He wrapped the tie around his hand as if it were a roll of Scotch tape.
“You want to talk about it?” he asked.
“You sound like Mom.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Really? You seem to want to—and we can talk about it right now, if you like.”
It. She thought about the word, and wondered exactly what he meant. Did he mean the shooting? That was usually what they meant these days when they used the word it. Or was her dad merely referring to her deposition? That was what had led him to sit beside her just now. Or perhaps he meant the whole litany of unpleasant dates that loomed before them in the coming month.
“When do you think you and Uncle Spencer will start speaking again?” She surprised herself by asking this question first. The words just slid from her mouth the moment she parted her lips.
“I’d talk to him now, if he’d talk to me.”
“I know.”
“I hope soon. He can’t be angry with me forever.”
She almost disagreed with her father: Everyone always talked about how stubborn Uncle Spencer could be, and if anyone could decide to be mad at someone forever, it was probably him. She knew her uncle blamed her father for what happened—as would a lot of people once the press conference was behind them. She knew how much her father blamed himself.
But the truth was, she didn’t think it was her dad’s fault. She blamed this nightmare on Charlotte—which, she understood so suddenly that she actually sat up a little straighter on the stool, may have been another reason why she hadn’t felt an inclination to phone her cousin over the last month. Everyone was so focused on the idea that her father hadn’t gotten around to bringing his gun to a repair shop to have a stubborn bullet removed that they were forgetting—or ignoring—the fact that it was Charlotte who had taken the gun from the trunk of the car even though she’d been told explicitly not to touch it, switched off the safety, and fired it into the night. She knew the people at FERAL and her uncle’s lawyer were going to portray her cousin as a victim, and she knew also that this was a complete fabrication: Her cousin—two weeks beyond her thirteenth birthday now—had been stoned and a little drunk when she’d pulled the trigger.
“You and Aunt Catherine are talking, right?” she asked her father. “Mom says Aunt Catherine’s not mad at you.”
“Yes, your aunt and I are talking. And while I’d say she’s not as mad at me as your uncle is, she still wishes I had . . . behaved more responsibly. After all, she loves Uncle Spencer.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” She hadn’t planned to say this, either, but she realized there was indeed a lot that she’d kept inside her for almost six weeks now. She wondered how much she was about to reveal.
“What do you mean?”
“Charlotte . . .”
“Yes?”
“Charlotte thinks her parents might someday get a divorce.”
“What? When did she say such a thing?”
“This summer. The night of the accident.”
“Have you told your mother this?”
She shook her head.
“Why does your cousin think that?” Her father dropped his necktie into his lap and rested his temple against his fingers and stared at her.
“Because . . .”
“Yes?”
“Oh, a lot of reasons. She says her mom flirts all the time, and her dad isn’t really interested in Aunt Catherine. He’s so busy with his animal causes.”
“Your aunt Catherine has always been a flirt,” he said, and although his eyes looked tired he was smiling. “Trust me. When we were growing up, I don’t think I had a friend she didn’t flirt with—especially when she was the age Charlotte is now. I think it would have killed her if I’d gone to Exeter, which your grandmother and I discussed pretty seriously, instead of staying in the city at Trinity. She wouldn’t have been able to bat her eyelashes at my friends when they came by the apartment. And as for your uncle Spencer . . .”
He paused and took off his eyeglasses. This was, Willow knew, one of his courtroom gestures. But it also meant that he was about to say something that mattered to him greatly. “And as for your uncle Spencer: He may be self-absorbed, he may be fixated on monkeys or dolphins or whatever . . . but he adores your aunt. I know that. I know Spencer. He loves your aunt Catherine very much.”
“But what if . . .”
“Go on.”
“What if she doesn’t love him? Charlotte doesn’t think she does. She says her mom and dad are always fighting, and it’s usually over nothing.”
“Your mom and I argue sometimes—”
“No, you don’t.”
He thought about this and nodded. “We don’t, do we?”
“Not like some parents I hear about. Not like Loree’s parents. Or Mr. and Mrs. Hall.” Loree King and Kristin Hall were two of Willow’s classmates, and the squabbles Willow had witnessed when she was playing at Loree’s or Kristin’s house were legendary around the Seton dinner table.
“But most parents have their arguments,” her father continued. “Just like most siblings and most friends. And most cousins.”
“Charlotte thinks this is different.”
“Your mom really doesn’t know any of this? You haven’t told her?”
She felt the sides of her eyes start to quiver. She still had math homework that was due tomorrow, she hadn’t done her required thirty minutes of reading for the day, and it was clear that her father and she were still a while away from going upstairs so he could read to her while she curled up in bed. She didn’t want to cry, and she didn’t quite understand how her innocuous peek at the calendar had led to this. But she was afraid she was about to start sobbing—not hideous Patrick-like howls, but real tears and whimpers and sniffles, nonetheless. And a lot of them. A month-and-a-half’s worth. Tears for her uncle who couldn’t ever use his right arm again, for her cousin who—even if she wasn’t getting blamed for this the way her dad was—still had to live with herself, for her aunt and uncle who might someday get a divorce, and (perhaps most of all) for her dad who she decided firmly now had done nothing wrong but was being treated like he had and always seemed sad. She felt her body starting to shake and gave in. Before she knew it she had climbed onto her father’s lap on the stool as if she were a girl half her age, her shoulders heaving with sadness. She cried into the cotton shoulder of his button-down shirt, only vaguely aware of the smell of the deodorant he wore to work and the coffee that was still on his breath, and completely unconscious of the fact that her father’s eyes had begun to water, too.
CATHERINE PUT THE NOVEL she was reading on her nightstand and was about to turn out the light. She glanced at Spencer, hoping he was finally asleep, because his breathing had been even and soft for at least the last two or three pages. He wasn’t: He looked up at her, his eyes alone moving. He was, as he was always now when he tried to sleep, flat on his back—a position that, in the month and a half since the accident, he still had not grown accustomed to. In the past, he had fallen asleep on his right side, his body facing hers. Not only did he now have to try to nod off in what was still a new and uncomfortable position for him, the two of them had switched sides of the bed: For twenty years, since they’d been freshmen in college, he had always slept on her left. No longer. She couldn’t be on his right because it meant his wounded shoulder was near her, and she couldn’t bear the thought that she might pain him further by rolling against it in her sleep.
She leaned over and kissed him on his forehead. “You’ve taken a sleeping pill, right?” she asked him. “If not, I can get you one.”
“I took one. It will kick in soon enough.”
“Okay.”
“I keep wondering about something . . .”
She had been sitting up with her knees making a tent of the sheets, but now she lay on her side so he wouldn’t be looking up at her like an invalid. Something in his tone suggested he might want to talk about his disability and his future. “Yes?”
“I keep wondering: Should we have a surgeon at the press conference? Paige says we shouldn’t because –”
“You want to talk about the press conference?” she asked. She realized she sounded shrill, but she couldn’t contain her surprise—and her disappointment. Even now, at ten thirty at night in their bed, he was thinking about the press conference. Even though he knew how much she detested the very notion of the press conference—and FERAL’s whole involvement in a lawsuit that, as far as she was concerned, was absolutely none of their business—he was bringing it up as if she supported what he was doing and was willing to discuss its particulars. She couldn’t believe it. She simply could not believe it, and reflexively she sat up again so she could have some distance from him. If they were going to have a discussion that involved FERAL, she didn’t want to be that close.
“Yes,” he said. “I was thinking—”
“No you weren’t thinking. That’s the problem. You know my opinion of that press conference, you know how unhappy it makes me. Your animal-obsessed friends want to humiliate my brother and make a spectacle of our—yes, our—daughter. I will not discuss this right now, Spencer. I’m sorry.”
“The lawsuit will benefit us. This family. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“No you’re not! You don’t need FERAL to sue Adirondack. You could sue them without all this ridiculous animal rights nonsense, without trotting out my brother—”
“No one is going to trot out your brother.”
“You could do this without Dominique or Keenan. I like Keenan fine, but lately Dominique . . . before the accident, you and Dominique . . .” She shook her head: This wasn’t about Dominique. She knew that Dominique had no romantic interest in her husband, but sometimes it seemed Spencer had an almost slavish devotion to her. The two of them shared an obsessive interest in beleaguered prairie dogs, whales, and chinchillas. They were soldiers together in their fanatical cause, and—in New York and on the road—they were often together. She wondered why, suddenly, she was jealous of Dominique, and all she could think of was that she was angry at the woman for all the hours she had kept Spencer away from his family over the last five or six years—and, yes, used him. And now she was using him again. Using his disability. Keenan was, too. They all were. That whole hideous organization that cared more about pandas than people.
“What about Dominique?” he asked.
“Nothing about Dominique.”
“No, something’s going on in your head. What?”
“Look, this isn’t about Dominique. It’s about Charlotte. It’s about John. You know how I hate this whole thing. I’m only having breakfast with Paige tomorrow morning because I don’t want her alone with our daughter. I shudder when I think of the ideas she’d put into Charlotte’s head.”
As if she hadn’t spoken just now and explained herself, he said—still staring straight up at the ceiling—“If this isn’t about Dominique, I don’t know why you brought her up. We’re friends. Just like you and Eric.”
Eric, her associate from Brearley, had been at their home for dinner the night before. He’d brought with him a French green salad with basil shiitake mushrooms, a pasta dripping with a pesto he’d made of pine nuts and roasted red peppers, and a peach cobbler which he admitted he hadn’t baked himself but he assured everyone had not a drop of cream or butter in it and was built largely of soy flour and substitute eggs. He hadn’t planned to stay and eat with them, but she had insisted he remain. How could she not? He’d brought with him a small feast, every element of which (even the faux cobbler) was delicious. Had she and Eric flirted last night in front of Spencer and Charlotte? She thought not: She had been courteous and appreciative and (she hoped) charming and funny. But she didn’t believe either of them had crossed any boundaries. Sometimes, she knew, Charlotte thought she saw things that weren’t there. Her daughter didn’t realize that sometimes men and women flirted simply because they were friends, but there wasn’t anything to it. It was all part of being a grown-up. Everybody did it.
At least she presumed everybody did.
She wasn’t sure how she should respond to what Spencer had just said. Should she be defensive, or should she simply ignore the innuendo? She was angry, that was for sure. But it was also late and he was in pain. It was one thing to argue about the press conference, an issue that affected her child and her brother. It was quite another to squabble right now over . . . flirting.
“You’re right,” she said simply. “You’re absolutely right. And as for the press conference, I couldn’t tell you whether a surgeon should be there or not—especially since, in my opinion, there shouldn’t even be a press conference.”
He seemed to think about this, but he didn’t say anything. She considered simply turning out the light without another word, but she couldn’t bring herself to be that antagonistic. Not with him like . . . this. And so she leaned over and kissed him once more, a sisterly peck on the forehead. Then she curled up in a ball under the sheet, reached for the knob on the bedside lamp, and murmured a distant good night.
NAN MOVED CAREFULLY up the trail in the woods, watching for tree roots and rocks with every step. She’d been careful to park her car at the edge of the lot at the trailhead so that it was visible from the road, but this little hike had been such a spontaneous decision that she hadn’t even told Marguerite she was going. No one in the world knew she was here. She’d driven to North Conway first thing in the morning to buy bed linens at the outlet mall—some of her sheets had been in need of replacement for a very long time, and the ones in which Spencer had slept (and sweated and oozed) in his convalescence were beyond salvation—and on the way home she had surprised herself by pulling into the parking lot at the base of Artists’ Bluff, a little peak across the street from Echo Lake. Why not? she had asked herself. It wasn’t quite noon, she had sneakers in the trunk of her car, and it felt like sixty or sixty-five degrees outside. Other than the short nature walks around Sugar Hill on which she had taken her granddaughters, she hadn’t gone on a single hike this summer and already it was the second week in September.
It was only now, however, when she’d been walking alone in the woods for half an hour and begun to feel a bit winded that she began to question whether this agreeable little hike was wise. She worried suddenly (and uncharacteristically) that she might trip and break an ankle or, worse, her hip. She might be stranded here for hours. Perhaps even overnight.
No, not overnight. There had been another car in the parking lot, and so there had to be somebody else somewhere along the trail. Still, it would not be pleasant to sit for hours in the woods with a broken bone, and she was glad she had parked her automobile where people could see it.
She pushed aside a branch and continued upward. The end of the trail, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes farther, was a bluff with a panoramic vista of Cannon Mountain, Echo Lake, and, looming to the east, Mount Lafayette.
She wondered if this modest ramble had been inspired in some fashion because on the way home she had driven past the cliff on which the Old Man of the Mountain had once resided. Never had she supposed she would outlive him. Never. But she had. For only the second time since he had slid down the crag to his death—and the first since the days immediately after his collapse—she had actually pulled into the viewing area off the interstate to gaze up at the spot where ledges of red granite had once formed the face of one very tough hombre.
Tough even by her standards. The Old Man of the Mountain had never been a gentle grandfather. In Nan’s mind, he had always been the sort of character who, with a bit of bombast and a cantankerous hiss, really would have insisted that he would live free or die. Maybe that was why she liked him. In the last years of his life, of course, he’d been a little long in the tooth. Everybody knew it. He’d been forced by his mere flesh and blood caretakers—young pups a tiny fraction his age—to don steel cables and turnbuckles. To smooth epoxy on his visage like face cream.
But she still hadn’t ever expected that she would live to see him gone.
It pained Nan to admit it, but she was scared of dying. She had absolutely no confidence that anything awaited her once the old ticker broke down. And though some people, such as Walter Durnip, were fortunate enough to glissade away in their sleep—none of the pain or mess or dreadful inconvenience that came with a long illness—most were not. Most people went slowly, their vigor sapped from them bit by bit in small, degrading increments.
For all she knew, a year from now an impulsive jaunt such as this to the top of Artists’ Bluff would be impossible. For all she knew, a year from now she would be dead.
When the Old Man had first crumbled, she had scoffed at the sentimental outpouring she had witnessed. The memorial service, the obituaries. The hundreds of e-mails of condolence that in the days after his demise people sent to the Web site for the state’s Division of Parks and Recreation. At the time, it had struck her as more than a little ridiculous.
It seemed less absurd to her now, and she guessed this had something to do with the way her own family was ailing. Aging. Separating. She understood that some pieces of earth transcended mere rock and vista and were capable of summoning a particular place in time. A precise memory, an echo of a season in one’s life. She knew that the view that awaited her at the end of this walk would conjure for her a picnic from thirty years ago, when she and Richard and their two young children had eaten egg-salad sandwiches on boulders on the summit. She would recall the August afternoon when from this peak they had seen a mother black bear and her cub saunter contentedly across a ski trail on Cannon. She would see clearly those bears in her mind, watch them amble once more across the lush green trace in the side of the mountain opposite them.
Apparently, all that remained of the Old Man was a part of his right ear. If she had brought binoculars, she might have been able to see it. Then again, maybe not. Besides, a bit of ear is not very interesting.
She was glad that her granddaughters had seen the Old Man over the years, but it grieved her that Patrick had been born too late. She didn’t, she decided, mourn the Old Man so much as she mourned the memories he evoked.
She stepped gingerly over a sprain-causing crevice in a stone and wiped the sweat away from her brow with the sleeve of her sweater. Then she stopped and took her sweater off and tied it girlishly around her neck. She was seventy years old, and she was alone. She was tired. Very, very tired. She had raised her children and most of the time she thought she had raised them well. She was proud that one was a public defender and one was a teacher. Oh, there were certainly moments when they disappointed her or when she questioned their abilities as parents: She recalled her feelings that awful last night in July. Usually, however, she looked upon them with quiet satisfaction.
But she was nonetheless left wondering: Was this all there was to her life?
She considered whether she would live to see John and Spencer—the McCulloughs and the Setons, her children—reconcile. She doubted it. She seriously doubted it.
She stood absolutely still in the path, because she was experiencing an emotion so alien to her that it took her a long moment to understand what it was. When she figured it out, she only half-believed it: dread. Nan Seton knew from many things, but dread had never been among them. It was almost incapacitating. She had the unmistakable feeling that she was dying and a fear that it was not going to be pretty.
She couldn’t possibly stand still, not for a moment more. She considered turning around and returning to the car, but nearly seven decades’ worth of persistence and intractability made that impossible, too. And so she did the only thing she could, the only thing she had ever done with her life. She continued forward. She remained on task.
But the anxiety was with her the rest of the day.
PAIGE WATCHED CHARLOTTE slather blueberry preserves on her scone and then she noticed Catherine glance at her sideways, and so she smiled. She knew Catherine despised her, but she really didn’t care. Spencer liked her and Keenan liked her, and that was all that mattered right now. Hell, it really didn’t matter if even they liked her. Besides, it was natural for Catherine to feel conflicted: Though her brother wasn’t a defendant, he might wind up looking pretty foolish.
The three of them were sitting in an elegant little restaurant with great waterfalls of ferns and white linen napkins not far from Brearley that was open for breakfast, because she wanted to discuss with Charlotte—with Charlotte and Catherine, actually—the reality that after the press conference, there might be eager beaver reporters who would want to get the girl in their sights. And she wanted to prevent that. She guessed that Catherine would be her ally on this one, and she was glad: She needed the woman to take on the role of mother lioness. If she were a reporter and the child’s parents consistently refused an interview—which Spencer and Catherine had been instructed to do—she might consider making an end-around and try meeting the girl at school for a comment or two. Fortunately, both mother and daughter were at Brearley, so even that would be difficult if Catherine had her guard up.
Outside it was raining, and the showers had broken the heat wave. It was the tenth, and Paige thought the gray skies and mist might actually make tomorrow’s anniversary easier for New Yorkers to bear: There weren’t the cloudless, cerulean blue skies everyone associated with the attacks or the image of silver planes hurtling unfettered through the air just above the long, polygonal lines of skyscrapers. She could overhear the diners at the other tables discussing the anniversary—playing the game of one-upmanship that colored so many conversations, the contestants each trying to find personal connections to the tragedy that all too often were as tenuous as they were insulting to the people who’d suffered real loss—and she was glad the three of them were focused largely on FERAL’s plans and where this child fit in. She felt almost admirable.
“So, suppose some guy shows up after play practice? I have one of the leads in the show we’re doing. Can you believe it? Eighth grade, and I have one of the two or three best parts. It’s The Secret Garden, and I’m Mary Lennox—the little British girl who is so very contrary.”
Paige smiled, at once appreciating the irony that Charlotte was already typecast as a little bitch and that the kid was going to play a girl saved, in part, by a garden.
“Anyway,” the child continued, “suppose there’s a reporter waiting for me outside the auditorium. What am I supposed to do, give him a judo chop?”
“Go find a grown-up. And don’t say a word.”
The girl took a healthy bite of her scone, chewed it, and then said, “Be rude?”
“As rude as you like.”
“No, sweetheart,” her mother said. “You don’t need to be rude. Ever. You can simply tell the reporter that you have nothing to say, and ask to be excused.”
“Now, Catherine—”
“Now, Paige. First of all, she doesn’t need to be rude. She can leave graciously. Second, given what my husband does for a living, the last thing he would want would be for his daughter to alienate a reporter.”
She started to reach across the tablecloth to touch Catherine’s arm, but she had a sense the gesture would be unappreciated right now.
“What are you so worried about? What do you think they would ask me?” Charlotte said.
There was a silver pot of coffee between her and Catherine, and so she refilled her cup. “They might ask you about the accident, they might ask you about your father. They might ask you about being a vegetarian.”
“And why don’t you want me to talk about that? It’s not like I have any secrets, you know.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Then why all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?”
“I want you to save it for the lawyers.”
The child paused with her scone in the air and surveyed it for a moment. Then: “Someday I want restaurants to have butter it’s okay for me to eat. I don’t like my scones with just jam.”
“You can have butter, sweetheart. Butter’s not meat, and—”
“You know Dad doesn’t want me to have dairy.”
“And you know your dad and I don’t completely agree on that. I want to be sure you get enough calcium.”
Charlotte put the scone down and looked at her nails. This morning they were painted a robin’s egg blue that Paige thought looked quite nice with the navy skirt the child had to wear while in the middle school at Brearley.
“These conversations with lawyers,” the girl said. “I’ve wanted to ask you about that. Will they be in a courtroom?”
“Maybe down the road. Far down the road. But at this point I just meant in an office. Probably my office. It’s all part of the process: your way of helping people to learn how dangerous guns are and how evil deer hunting is.”
“The thing is,” the girl began, turning toward her with eyes that were wide and slightly bewildered. “I don’t think deer hunting is all that evil. Really. I think Uncle John is a pretty normal guy.”
Paige looked quickly at Catherine, but the girl’s mom, it was clear, may actually have agreed with the child. “I wasn’t aware you felt that way about hunting, Charlotte. Thank you. You’re entitled to your opinions. I’ll be sure not to ask you for your thoughts on that subject. And I think we can assume that Adirondack won’t either. Mostly the lawyers will want to know exactly what you recall about the night the accident occurred,” she said, resorting—as she did always—to the passive when discussing the shooting. She did not believe she had ever used the construction “when you shot your father” or “when your daughter shot you” or even the vaguely innocuous “when Charlotte inadvertently discharged the firearm” around any of the McCulloughs.
“They’ll just ask me what happened?”
“Uh-huh. They’ll want you to reconstruct what occurred that night. Exactly what you did at the country club, exactly what you did when you got home. There will be other questions, of course. Other things will surely come up. General things, like I said. But most of it will be about the night your father was injured.”
The girl’s gaze returned to its normal eighth-grade pout. She wiped at her lips with her fingers. “Will there be a lie detector?”
“A lie detector?”
“You know, one of those things that tells people if you’re lying. It monitors your heartbeat or your sweat or something.”
“I know what a lie detector is. I was only repeating the question because I was surprised you’d even worry about such a thing. There will most certainly not be a lie detector. I can promise you that.”
“Good.”
“You sound relieved,” Paige said, her antennae now up.
“No. But I still wouldn’t take one.”
“Any special reason why not?”
“I just wouldn’t,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s, like, my constitutional right or something.”
Slowly Catherine turned toward her daughter, and she was looking at her with apprehension: as if the child were a stranger on the street whose intentions were suspect. Paige knew that if this girl were her daughter, she would be reacting exactly the same way. It was the way the kid had snapped “Good” a moment ago and then announced that she wouldn’t take a lie detector test. Paige began to wonder if she really did know exactly what had gone on that night in New Hampshire. If, for that matter, any of the grown-ups did.
And maybe that was the problem: These parents—Spencer and Catherine, Sara and John—farmed their daughters out to Charlotte’s grandmother for a major chunk of the summer, and maybe that was indicative of their parenting attitudes in general. Paige had no delusions that she would be a better parent than any of these people, but then she also didn’t have any expectations that she would have to try . . . at least not in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, she liked to believe that educated people who chose to become parents would not become so absorbed in their own lives that they would grow oblivious to whatever it was their children were thinking. Or doing. Especially if they were going to leave loaded weapons in the trunks of their cars.
But, of course, they became less mindful over time. It was inevitable. Often people like the Setons and the McCulloughs were particularly impressive when it came to finding interests other than their own children: Their careers—clients and causes, patients and students. Their marriages. Gardens. Guns.
Nevertheless, Paige decided now there was definitely something curdling in the back of this kid’s head that her parents weren’t exploring with sufficient resolve, and something had occurred that last night in July that no one knew about except this girl. Perhaps this girl and her cousin.
“It is my constitutional right . . . right?” Charlotte was asking her.
“I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” she answered carefully, not wanting to lie but still hoping to plant a small seed of fear in the child’s mind. “Nevertheless, I don’t believe the men who framed the Constitution even envisioned such a device as a lie detector machine.”
“Well, I won’t take one.”
“Charlotte?” her mother said, a nervous tinniness to her voice. “Did something else happen that night you haven’t told us about? Is there something more we need to know?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Like what? You think I shot Dad on purpose? Is that what you’re thinking? Well, I didn’t, and I can’t believe you’d even accuse me of such a thing!”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything. That idea hadn’t even crossed my mind,” Catherine said, but Charlotte clearly wasn’t listening. The girl pulled her napkin from her lap and heaved it in a messy ball on the tablecloth.
“Isn’t it bad enough that I shot him by accident? Isn’t that horrible enough?” she said, barely choking out her second sentence before storming off in the direction of the ladies’ room.
After a long, awkward moment, Catherine said quietly, “I can’t believe she would fear for even a split second that I would think such a thing. I just can’t believe it.” Then she took a breath to compose herself and followed after her daughter.
Paige nodded in agreement as a courtesy, but the truth was that the notion had come to her before, and now, she knew, it was going to remain lodged in her mind whenever the subject of that night in New Hampshire came up. Thank God the kid never would have to take a lie detector test. Who the hell knew what the child really had done—and why? Certainly, Paige understood, she didn’t.
And, as a lawyer, she was glad.