Before You Know Kindness

Twenty-three

“Meat is a social food—a shared food,” Howard Mansfield told John over lunch, dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin between bites of his patty-melt sandwich on rye. “The family or the tribe gathers together after the hunt. They celebrate, they reaffirm their bonds, they rejoice in their kinship. It’s been that way forever. And though most of us these days are pretty damn far removed from the meat when it was living and breathing, we still approach it as a ritual food.”
“Thanksgiving,” John murmured. “Or the great Easter ham.”
“Or even the backyard barbecue. Nothing like the smell of a little seared flesh to awaken in all of us that great tribal need for connection.” Mansfield was a month shy of fifty. When John had first moved to Vermont, the older man had been a partner in the Burlington firm where John practiced. Then Mansfield left to be a judge and John left to be a public defender: a job John thought would be more interesting than handling the city’s municipal and real estate business—his specialty at the firm—and allow him to feel better about himself when he came home at night. And feeling good about what he did was important: He knew how entitled his childhood had been, and he understood exactly what had driven his mother to volunteer her time in the dingiest classrooms she could find in the city. Now Mansfield was on the Vermont Supreme Court, and John was running the county public defenders’ office. They saw each other infrequently, no more than once a season, but it was Mansfield who had taken him hunting last fall, and it was Mansfield who had suggested ten months ago that he simply use a ramrod to extricate the jammed cartridge from his gun’s chamber. The two of them were having lunch now at a Burlington diner with the improbable name of the Oasis, a classic aluminum-sided train car with a green rendering of a palm tree on the restaurant’s neon sign.
“My brother-in-law would argue that meat is about power,” he told Mansfield. “The only reason it became a social food was because peasants got to eat it so rarely. When they did, it was a big deal. A feast.”
“Vegetarians—people who choose not to eat meat even when it’s available—have always been comfortable with their nonconformism. They’re not social misfits, but they are social renegades. I’d wager there has always been a little distance between them and the bonfire.”
“You know, I don’t believe Spencer has a lot of friends other than his FERAL cronies. He moved a lot as a kid, so he has no buddies from childhood. And he and Catherine have been their own little world since they fell in love as freshmen, so he doesn’t have many pals from college, either.”
“Your sister’s a vegetarian, too, right?”
“Yes, but not a vegan. And, for the record, she does have friends.”
“Women friends?”
“And men.”
“Really?”
“She’s a magnificent flirt.”
“Brothers always think their sisters are flirts.”
“Are you speaking as a Freudian?”
He smiled. “Nope. As an older brother.”
Outside a dairy delivery truck began to back into an alley across the street, the vehicle’s horn automatically emitting the loud whooping cries it made whenever it moved in reverse, and the two men grew silent. When it was parked Mansfield continued, “So: You want my opinion on who your lawyer should be.”
“That’s right.”
“I hate to be predictable, but I believe your best bet is our old firm. I’d ask Chris Tuttle or perhaps even your friend Paul Maroney.”
The two attorneys were indeed among the candidates John was considering. And though he was pleased that Mansfield was validating his choices, he wanted to know why the older man had said perhaps even Paul: It suggested there was a chink in Paul’s armor that he hadn’t considered. And so he asked Mansfield whether he had a preference.
Mansfield raised his gray, beetling eyebrows, and put down his sandwich. “You and Paul are a little closer than you and Chris. True?”
“I don’t think I’ve spoken to Chris in a year. Maybe longer. I see Paul every so often for lunch or a beer and sometimes at events at Willow’s school. Paul has a son a year younger than Willow.”
“Well, they’re both equally capable. But Chris is more likely to approach your situation with complete objectivity. And that’s what you need.” Mansfield was known among Vermont attorneys for both his fairness and his preternatural patience—attributes that made him an excellent hunter as well as a justice. With the exception of his three years at law school in Pennsylvania, he had never lived anywhere but Vermont.
“And you believe I need objectivity because I can’t see my situation well enough on my own—because this is my brother-in-law and my niece?”
“Yes. Also, Chris hunts. Paul doesn’t. It might be nice to have another hunter in the room with you when the lawyers from Adirondack are deposing you. They are, of course, your real adversaries.”
“I must confess, these days I feel pretty damn antagonistic toward Spencer, too. He won’t even talk to me. Refuses to take my calls, doesn’t answer my e-mails.”
“You have indeed widened that hunters versus gatherers canyon that seems the salient feature of your family’s topography.”
“Spencer and I used to be friends! Really. We used to be friends.”
“Are you and your sister speaking?”
“Yes. And the girls are talking: Willow and Charlotte. I presume they all think I’m a moron—all the women, that is. My sister. My wife. My daughter. My mother. My niece . . .”
Mansfield nodded, and John watched as he put the last three shoestring potatoes on his plate in his mouth at once. John had barely touched his own lunch, a turkey sandwich. His appetite had been decreasing ever since the accident, and these days, it seemed, he never was hungry. He’d lost ten or eleven pounds from a frame that even before the last day in July had tended toward lanky.
“You’re not a moron,” Mansfield said when he had swallowed the French fries. “You just didn’t know.”
“Actually, I just didn’t cope. There’s a difference.”
“Tell me: What kind of ammunition were you using?”
He shrugged. “Menzer Premium. Why?”
“I had a thought this morning. The lab with the gun will check this out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trouble stemmed from the shell’s casing—not the gun’s extractor. Maybe it was the casing that made it so difficult for you to remove the round.”
“I doubt that. I never loaded anything in that gun but Menzer Premiums, and they always worked fine when I was learning to use it.”
“Adirondack machine-tools their rifles with extreme precision. Same with their ammunition. In my experience, nothing works as well in an Adirondack rifle as an Adirondack cartridge. The company is a bit like Remington in that regard: Remington rifles, in my opinion, work best with Remington ammunition.”
“What are you saying, the cartridge was faulty?”
“Just conjecture. Maybe the rim on that one round was a tiny fraction of an inch too shallow for the extractor—or too wide. All it would take is one minuscule imperfection that might not make a difference with a Menzer rifle or a Winchester or perhaps even a Remington—but it did on your Adirondack. That’s all.”
Abruptly he felt a little sick, a little faint. He bowed his head against the sensation, and the sounds of all the conversations around him faded into one indistinguishable drone. A single thought dominated his mind: What if the problem were indeed with the casing, and the casing was gone? He knew the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him on the . . . the eleventh of August. He knew the date because it was the day after Spencer had returned to his mother’s house, and the very day he and his family had returned to Vermont. If, in fact, that trooper had arrived with his rifle an hour later, they already would have been on the road home.
He knew there was no reason why anyone in New Hampshire would have removed the spent casing from the chamber, but he had no recollection of seeing it in the gun when it was returned. Absolutely no visual picture whatsoever. Granted, he had barely looked at the rifle. He’d actually been repulsed by it.
But he had checked the magazine and the chamber before handing it to the paralegal who had driven up from Paige’s firm in New York to retrieve it. The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally turn a loaded rifle over to someone who’d probably never handled a gun in his life.
And though he wasn’t absolutely sure, he simply could not recall seeing the spent casing in the chamber. He could, however, see in his head exactly what the chamber looked like . . . empty.
“John?”
He opened his eyes and gazed up at Mansfield. “Yes?”
“You okay?”
“I . . .”
“Yes?”
“I actually thought I was going to faint for a moment.”
“I’d say it was something you ate, but you’ve eaten so little I’d say it was the opposite: It’s because you haven’t eaten.”
He reached for the sandwich and took a small bite, then washed it down by finishing most of the water in his glass. “I don’t recall seeing the casing in the gun when I got it back from the state police in New Hampshire,” he said.
“You checked?”
“I wanted to be sure the gun was unloaded before I turned it over to Paige’s firm.”
Mansfield was staring at him. The justice looked as if he had instantly digested this information and drawn a conclusion. He didn’t look anxious—Mansfield never looked anxious—but he did seem concerned. John sensed that the older man had thus come to the same conclusion he had: If the problem had been with the cartridge’s casing and the casing was gone, then there would be no apparent reason for his inability to extricate the cartridge other than mind-numbing incompetence. Yes, FERAL would still proceed with the lawsuit against the gun company, insisting that Adirondack was producing an inherently defective product because a live round remained in the chamber when you unloaded the magazine . . . but he himself would be crucified. It was bad enough to be perceived as a person who failed to take a broken rifle to a gunsmith; it was even worse to be viewed as a person incapable of extracting a cartridge from a functioning one.
He told himself this didn’t increase the likelihood that his own brother-in-law would sue him to see how far his insurance policy would stretch, if only because his sister wouldn’t let Spencer try such a thing . . . but anyone else in Spencer’s situation would.
“Well,” Mansfield was saying now, “maybe your memory is a little fuzzy and the casing was in the chamber after all. And maybe it won’t matter in any event, because the extractor will turn out to be the culprit.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “I think I’ll call the state police anyway and see what the police report says. Who knows? Perhaps the casing is bagged up in some evidence drawer, and some minion can track it down.”
Mansfield smiled at him and nodded, but John recognized it as the sort of smile he gave Willow when he was trying to make her feel better but didn’t believe a word he was saying.


YOU DON’T KNOW what I saw, you don’t know what I’m feeling! Her daughter’s impassioned roar at her from the backseat of the car last week when she was driving the child to ballet. Sara didn’t believe a morning or an afternoon or a 2 a.m. feeding had gone by since then when she hadn’t thought of it. Yet, so far, she had made absolutely no headway learning what was behind it—what may have occurred that awful night in New Hampshire that her daughter was keeping to herself. The girl remained uncharacteristically histrionic when the subject came up, adamant that no one could understand what she saw or what she was feeling, yet absolutely unwavering in her insistence that she was hiding nothing.
Sara was resolved to change all that now. Monday was one of the two days a week when she only saw patients in the morning so she could be home when Willow climbed off the school bus. With Patrick upstairs napping, she was determined to accomplish more in their time together this afternoon than merely help her daughter with her homework and dive into a new box of cereal with her. Cereal had become the girl’s after-school snack of choice these days, since the school nurse had used the first day of health class to remind the sixth grade to read the nutrition labels on packaged foods. Once Willow understood that she was getting 710 calories and 40 percent of her fat for the day from the Cobble Hill jumbo iced honey bun, she avoided her once favorite snack like it was infused with the Ebola virus.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked her daughter, her voice as casual and nontherapist-like as she could make it, as she poured the milk into their twin bowls. They were sitting at the kitchen counter.
“Uh-huh,” Willow said distractedly. She was reading the back of the cereal box. On the front there was a vibrantly colored cartoon creature—part lion, part human, part space alien—while the back featured the beast on its way through a labyrinth in search of all the food groups in the nutritional period. Sara tried not to analyze the Jungian sensibility behind the image.
“It will be about a subject I know you don’t like to talk about.”
“Math?”
“No.”
Willow looked up at her now, instantly understanding that—once again—her mother was going to try to discuss the accident. “I don’t want to talk about Charlotte and Uncle Spencer,” she said. “You know that.”
“I know, sweetheart. But I do.” She almost added, And my feelings count, too, but was able to stop her therapist-speak in its tracks. Instead she continued firmly, “And I’m your mother, and so we will.”
“You’re adding tension and stress to my life, you know.”
“I’m doing no such thing, and you know it.”
The girl dropped her spoon in her bowl and gazed out the window. The maples in their yard hadn’t yet started to turn, but Sara knew they would any day now. Certainly most other trees had.
“Something is bothering you, sweetheart,” she continued. “That’s painfully clear. And I mean that: painfully clear. Your father and I both know that you’re keeping something inside you, and—”
“You can’t know that. You can’t know what I saw, you can’t know—”
“What I’m feeling,” Sara said, finishing her daughter’s sentence for her. “That’s right, I can’t know what you’re feeling. We’ve been around that block, Willow. The truth is, you’re using that line the way your cousin would—as a very dramatic bit of subterfuge.”
“I don’t even know what that word means.”
“It means you’re hiding behind it, sweetheart. It’s your defense not to talk to me. Of course, I don’t know everything. Okay? But your father and I both believe that something is troubling you, and it has to do with the accident.”
Willow sighed, an almost impossibly long exhalation for a person so small. “Everyone is already in so much trouble, aren’t they? I feel awful for Dad. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And . . .”
“Yes?” She was sure now that her daughter was going to add that she felt bad for Charlotte, too.
“And I just wish people didn’t make such a big deal about what other people eat.” Willow turned from the window and stared at her with eyes that were fretful and intense. “We talk about food all the time: What’s good for you, what’s bad for you. White meat, red meat. Uncle Spencer’s tofu. Did you get your five fruits and vegetables? You better have. Don’t eat that honey bun: You’ll get a heart attack someday if you do.”
It took Sara a moment to register both that her daughter hadn’t continued with what she presumed was the natural connection—that she was worried about her cousin as well as her dad—and that the sixth-grader was mixing in her mind two very separate issues about food. “It’s one thing to try to eat right,” she answered carefully. “You know, to eat healthy foods—a little bit each day from all the food groups on that pyramid. It’s a different thing entirely to choose to become a vegetarian. There are people in this world who eat meat and still eat nothing but healthy foods. Likewise, there are vegetarians who eat terribly. They live on mayonnaise and cheese. Uncle Spencer isn’t a vegetarian because he believes it’s healthier. It’s because he loves animals. I’m pretty sure—”
“I know the difference, Mom. Really. All I meant is that sometimes it seems like all we care about is eating. It’s like all we think about is food.”
If Willow were a little older, Sara thought she would have said to the child, And sex. And, maybe, what our parents thought of us. Those are, alas, the big three. But she restrained herself.
“I mean,” Willow added, “this summer Grandmother was figuring out the dinner menu at nine in the morning. Can you believe it? Charlotte and I were still in our nightgowns, and she was asking us what we wanted to eat at the end of the day.”
“And that’s yet another issue: That’s your grandmother trying to be in complete control. What I want to discuss now is—”
“The accident.”
“Yes. Why don’t you want to talk about it?”
“Would you want to talk about it if you were me? I don’t even want to think about it. I just want it to go away.”
“I think it would help you to talk about it. I think you’ll forget it sooner if you don’t keep whatever’s troubling you to yourself.”
For a long moment the girl was quiet, staring down into the rainbow-colored pellets of wheat in her bowl. Then: “Even the accident was about food: Uncle Spencer’s vegetable garden and Dad’s deer hunting. Uncle Spencer just had to have a big plot of vegetables and Dad just had to start hunting. You know what I wish?”
“What?”
“I wish we could all just take one big, chewable pill in the morning—and all the pills in the world had exactly the same flavor—and that was our food for the day. Everything we needed. Not just all the vitamins and stuff: everything. All the . . . the . . .”
“The calories.”
“Yes, all the calories and all the bulk—or whatever—we need to feel full.”
She smiled. “Oh, you don’t mean that. Imagine a world without hot fudge sundaes. Or pizza. Or even crunchy, vaguely fruit-flavored cereal. I think you’d miss them.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Outside a gust of wind shook the trees, and the branches of the hydrangea—its conical bouquets of flowers salmon colored now—scratched against the bay window in the next room. When Willow had been a little girl, that tree had frightened her: When the flowers and leaves were gone the branches looked like talons.
Once the breeze had fallen away and the house had grown quiet again, Willow sat back in her chair and murmured, “You know what else?”
“What?”
“I never thought he was going to die.”
Sara nodded. “Uncle Spencer.”
“Uh-huh,” her daughter said. “Even when I found him. That night it never crossed my mind he might die. When I got there, there really wasn’t all that much blood. Maybe it would have looked worse if it hadn’t been so dark, but the only light was the spotlight outside the garage. I remember running past Charlotte—I just ran the way she was facing—and there he was on the ground. Charlotte was screaming. His eyes were open, but I don’t think he knew I was there. His skin was wet. Sweat, maybe. But maybe it was also dew from the garden leaves and the lupine. He was right at the edge of the garden. Remember? His legs were twisted, sort of. One was under the other—I don’t remember which—and his feet were in the snow peas. I wondered if they were broken—his legs, I mean—and I even thought for a second that maybe he’d been shot in a leg. But then I realized all the blood was up around his shirt. And his shirt collar. There was a big, growing spot by his shoulder. And then Dad was there. I heard people running, and then I felt Dad’s hands on me—I knew it was Dad even before I turned around—and he was pulling me aside. At first I thought it was just because he didn’t want me to see Uncle Spencer. But then I understood it was also because he wanted to see how badly Uncle Spencer was shot. Where he was shot, I guess.”
Sara reached across the edge of the table and wiped away a rebellious lock of Willow’s hair that had come loose from a small butterfly clip and was falling across the girl’s eyes. It wasn’t that the hair was offending Sara: She simply wanted an excuse to touch her daughter.
“And then you were there,” Willow continued.
“I ran outside with your father.”
“Where was Patrick?”
“Patrick?”
“You know,” she said, her voice brightening slightly at the chance to tease her mother. “Your son? My baby brother?”
“I knew who you meant, silly girl. I was just wondering why you were thinking of him.”
“Where was he?”
“I put him in the crib. He was in your father’s and my room.”
“Was he crying?”
“Probably.”
“And you left him?”
“Of course I did. My first reaction was that something terrible had happened. And while I guess I understood on some level that you were safe because you’d dropped off the diapers only a second or two earlier, I couldn’t be sure. And so I was scared to death. Petrified. Does that really surprise you?”
“Well . . .”
“Sweetheart—”
“I just didn’t realize you would leave Patrick, I guess.”
She slid her fingers down from Willow’s forehead to the girl’s hands, which looked impossibly soft and small to her now. Beautiful hands. A young ballerina’s hands. She lifted them both to her lips and kissed them, pressing the slender digits against her face. She had the vague sense that there was something more that she wanted to ask Willow. Likewise, she had the feeling that this wasn’t necessarily the direction even her daughter had anticipated the conversation would take: It was similar to the unexpected connection the child had made about food a few minutes ago. But she couldn’t bring herself to try to steer their discussion back to its original course, in part because it was possible that Willow had just revealed precisely what she was feeling that was causing her such angst—the altogether understandable belief that she was second fiddle to the new baby, an impression that must have grown more pronounced in New Hampshire in the days after the accident when it was all she and John could do to keep from having nervous breakdowns themselves—and in part because she was afraid if she tried to speak more than a dozen words she’d start to cry.
And so she simply sniffed deeply for control and then said into the little hands enmeshed with hers, “I love you, Willow Seton. I love you so, so much.”


THE WEATHER TURNED COLD overnight in northern New Hampshire, the temperature a mere thirty-five degrees when Nan Seton came downstairs in the morning, and she knew it was time to return to New York. She called up the local handyman whom she paid some seasons to drive her between Sugar Hill and Manhattan and scheduled her return for that Thursday. She would close up the house for the winter tomorrow, depending upon the same gentleman who would be driving her south to replace the screens with the storm windows and to carry the porch furniture into the garage.
She had already pulled up what was left of the garden—mostly vines and weeds that had grown back since her son had had that paroxysm in the rain in early August and uprooted whole rows of decimated tomato and bean plants, as well as the maturing potatoes and carrots and beets the deer hadn’t yet nuzzled up from the earth—but she went out there now and stood with her hands on her hips. She guessed people who took their vegetable gardens seriously would spread compost into the dirt and clay, but her family hadn’t bothered with a compost pile this summer. There had been some discussion that they would have one next year, but it had been work enough simply to get the vegetable and cutting gardens into the ground and those rows of berries planted.
She wandered to the edge of the lupine and thought of her family in New York City. She believed she was standing just about where Spencer had been when Charlotte had shot him, and she wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her chest. According to Catherine, he was doing about as well as could be expected, though Nan had been careful not to press for details: The last thing she wanted to know were the grisly particulars of either his injury or his treatment.
She gazed at the clay soil and wondered if ever again it would grow more than lupine and weeds. She rather doubted they would have a vegetable garden here next summer. She presumed that Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte would return for their summer vacation, if only because this house was a part of Catherine’s cultural legacy, her childhood. And—at least until he was shot—certainly Spencer had loved the place, too. But she guessed there would be no energetic descent on this house over Memorial Day Weekend, with the McCulloughs and the Setons arriving en masse with their trowels and their spades and their big green boxes of Miracle-Gro.
The foreboding she had experienced the other day on her hike in the woods had since grown more pronounced. She was becoming more certain all the time that the next time everyone in that younger generation would be together here in the country would be at her funeral: a little ceremony amid the astilbe, the daisies, and the phlox, the mourners expressly forbidden from sharing their memories or singing any hymns. She understood that Spencer was still refusing to speak with John, and she wished she had the matriarchal clout of either her late mother or late mother-in-law. Forty years ago, young adults still listened to their mothers and mothers-in-law. Lord knows, she sure did. Neither of those strong-willed women from a more simple era would have tolerated this sort of nonsense: A raised eyebrow or spoken dagger from either of them, and Spencer and John would have been back at the Thanksgiving table together, their egos curbed and their tails between their legs. They might not have liked each other, but they would have tolerated each other. They would have been civil.
And that was what counted. Civility.
She sighed and stared at the mountains, their peaks hidden today by a heavy layer of leaden white clouds. She imagined it might be sleeting right now atop Lafayette, and perhaps the first snow was falling on Washington. She tried not to be morbid and was only rarely, but she couldn’t push from her mind the vision of snow falling on a tombstone in the Sugar Hill cemetery. There was her name carved into the marble beside Richard’s. She reminded herself that she still felt no pain, was enduring just a constant shortness of breath. Was weary. Constantly weary. Her heart? Perhaps. She guessed she would schedule an appointment with her doctor when she was back in Manhattan, but she had the fatalistic confidence that she was at the beginning of the end.
Suddenly, at the edge of the woods at the base of the hill, the far perimeter of the sweeping tangles of old lupine, she sensed something move. At first she wasn’t sure what she had seen because she’d barely glimpsed it from the corner of her eye. She lowered her gaze from the clouds shielding Lafayette and remained perfectly still. She squinted, wishing she had her eyeglasses looped around her neck as she usually did, and grew annoyed with herself for leaving them by the sink after washing her face before coming outside. Nevertheless, she could see that the animals were deer, even if she couldn’t make out the details of their markings. There were three of them, none with antlers impressive enough that she could distinguish the branches this far away. One of the creatures, it was clear, was watching her, standing guard while the other two ate.
“Go away!” she screamed unexpectedly, surprising herself. When she was alone she barely made a sound. She never spoke aloud—she certainly wasn’t the sort who would talk to herself—but here she was . . . screaming.
“Go away! Shoo!” She stamped her foot, though she knew it caused no tremor they could feel at this distance.
Still, her voice was enough: Almost as one the animals bolted into the wall of pines, their white tails as prominent for one brief second as the flags on the greens at the Contour Club golf course. Then they were gone.
She turned toward the house and started in, steaming. Hadn’t they done enough? Really, hadn’t they brought enough ruin on her family? She was fearful that she would never again see her two granddaughters together in the pool at the Contour Club or in the gloriously crisp waters of Echo Lake. She was afraid that she would never again witness John mixing gin and tonics at the end of the day for Sara and Catherine and Spencer or see the four grown-ups battling together on the tennis court. And while her son and her granddaughter certainly had their parts to play in this travesty—and, perhaps, even Spencer himself, with his dogged opinions about everything—the deer were far from blameless. They had the whole world in which they might browse, the miles and miles of forest that sloped slowly up into the White Mountains. Why in the name of heaven did they have to have her family’s Swiss chard and kohlrabi, too?
Oh, how she missed the summer, and those long and wondrous days in July when she had no greater challenges before her than getting Charlotte into a decent swimsuit or figuring out what she could serve her difficult eaters for dinner.