Twenty-six
The next morning, Wednesday, Spencer was returning to work, and so he gave in completely. He allowed Catherine to put the jam on his bread—even opening the jar for him so he didn’t have to hold the glass between his legs and hope to God that he didn’t stain his khaki pants as he struggled to unscrew the lid—and the toothpaste on his toothbrush. She held his cardigan sweater for him as he slid his left arm through the sleeve and then discreetly safety-pinned both the right side and the right sleeve to his shirt—a considerably better plan than his big idea, which was simply to try to wad the dangling sleeve into a front pants pocket. Now they were standing together on the sidewalk while the building doorman was hailing a cab. When one arrived, Catherine offered him a restrained kiss on his cheek and then stood aside while the doorman held open the door. He slid gingerly into the backseat, and he was off.
Alone, he gazed out the window at the theater ads on the buses beside him in traffic. After dinner last night neither he nor Catherine had brought up her admission that she still ate meat. In their bedroom she had helped him undress and get into his pajamas and then gotten ready for bed herself, but it was clear that neither of them had any desire to discuss her revelations further. She ate meat; now he knew it. Apparently she wasn’t going to stop and he was, by then, too tired and beaten up to fight . . . or, perhaps, even care all that much. At least about the meat. After all, the issue wasn’t that his wife desired dead things. The issue, clearly, was that she was furious with him, and those Slim Jims she was wolfing in secret were more filled with animosity and bitterness than they were beef and mechanically separated chicken. The truce had continued this morning through breakfast.
With the fingers on his left hand he gingerly adjusted his sling under his sweater. He wondered exactly what he had done to anger his wife so—was it years of being a pill or was all this hostility triggered recently?—and what it would take to make her happy again.
DOMINIQUE THOUGHT some men looked distinguished with beards, especially such elegant European actors as Sean Connery and Ian Holm. When Americans and her fellow Canadians grew them, however, it often struck her as a mistake—especially these days. The hip beard this season was a patchy heroin-addict fuzz, whiskers that seemed to struggle atop raw cheeks and chins the way bearberry or sandwort strained toward the sun on wind-blasted tundra. Spencer’s beard, when he was through growing it out, was never going to strike anyone as distinguished. It looked like it would become the sort of close-cropped beard that might, if nothing else, be neat—she recalled her favorite image of Marvin Gaye from an album she’d owned in junior high school—but it might just as easily become the kind that would hang laconically down his chest like a bib should Spencer ever stop trimming it. It was spotted with white and black and traces of red. It made his high forehead look even higher.
She watched him run the fingers of his left hand over the brand-new, left-handed keyboard they had purchased for his computer and then punch the buttons that turned on the monitor, the tower, and the printer. He looked like he had missed using them. He rolled the special left-handed mouse back and forth across the rectangular rubber pad with the FERAL logo.
“We have voice input software on order,” she told him. “You’ll be able to dictate your memos and news releases right into the computer.”
“What fun. Thank you.”
“A new sound card, too. And extra RAM. Apparently, you’ll need it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you bring your Palm with you?” she asked him.
He shook his head ever so slightly and motioned with his eyes down at his sling. “I can’t use it with my left hand. Can’t draw the characters, can’t use the stylus.”
“In time you’ll be able to.”
“Maybe.”
“How was your cab ride this morning?”
“Fine.”
“I presume you didn’t get sick?”
“Not this time.”
“That must have been a relief.”
She heard one of Spencer’s publicity minions laughing in the corridor at something Keenan had said, and wanted desperately now to be with them instead of alone in this office with Spencer. She knew she was supposed to say something about how good he looked or how wonderful it was to have him back—how happy she was just to see him alive. But she certainly wasn’t about to lie and tell him he looked terrific, because he didn’t. He looked horrid: That beard was a disaster, he had bags under his eyes that resembled marsupial pouches, and his skin was the color of whey. The idea that this was a man her organization actually used to trot out to news programs and talk shows and speeches before crowded auditoriums astonished her. Had Spencer McCullough ever once been even remotely telegenic? It seemed inconceivable.
But she knew that he had been. Recently, in fact. Seven or eight weeks ago.
Now he was a shabbily dressed, sloppily bearded, debilitated wretch in a safety-pinned cardigan. This was her director of communications? This guy was supposed to sit in one of those boxy armchairs opposite Katie Couric and Jane Pauley?
He picked up a sealed cardboard carton about half the size of a shoe box with a long serial number stenciled in black ink across the side. “What’s this?” he asked her.
“I believe that’s your headset. For your telephone. So you don’t need to hold the receiver in your hand.”
“Oh, goodie. I can be just like a telemarketer.”
“Hands-free communication.”
He put the box back down on his desk and gently rapped the lid with his knuckles. “Well. Thank you for this, too.”
“You’re welcome. We want to do everything we can to make your return to work as seamless as possible. We want—”
“Everything’s fine,” he said to her, his voice as calm and sonorous as an incoming tide. He touched her elbow when he cut her off and she was able to suppress the need to flinch. Barely. “I know what you want, and I thank you for . . . for everything. Okay?”
She glanced down at the spot where his fingers were separated from the flesh on her arm by a wisp of linen fabric. She nodded. She wished she enjoyed the touch of humans half as much as she did the warm fur of her dogs or the scratchy tongues of her cats.
JOHN THOUGHT the offices of Tuttle, DiSpiro, and Maroney, P.C., looked surprisingly unchanged from the period in his life when he’d toiled here. The only visible difference was the removal of Howard Mansfield’s name from the signage and letterhead since the older lawyer had become a justice on the Vermont Supreme Court. The offices sat in a renovated brick building on the Burlington waterfront that had once been an icehouse. When Burlington began to gentrify the area, the icehouse was one of the first structures to be transformed into office space. Howard Mansfield and Chris Tuttle were among the business visionaries who understood that its views of the lake and the mountains were sufficiently panoramic to justify moving an upscale law firm to what was then a still up-and-coming neighborhood.
As John strolled down the corridor, his feet positively sinking into the plush cobalt carpet, he realized just how squalid was the workplace four blocks to the east that housed the Chittenden County Public Defenders’ Office. The threadbare carpet there was no thicker than cardboard, the walls—an ivory so coated with fingerprints and grime that it now resembled the color of a T-shirt left too long on a subway grate—were peeling, and most of his lawyers’ offices were about the size of this firm’s coat closet in the waiting room. The difference in the two waiting rooms, in fact, said it all: The one here had a pair of leather couches so soft he could have slept on them, a postcard view of the mountains in New York, and tables with the latest issues of Forbes, Fortune, and that morning’s Wall Street Journal. There was coffee or ice water or tea if you simply raised your gaze at the receptionist, a polite young woman who could have passed for a Neiman Marcus model. The waiting room back in his world of PDs was a cramped cubicle with two badly cushioned wooden chairs and a box of half-broken toys for the children of the drunk drivers and mentally ill street people and insolvent check bouncers who hoped that, somehow, he and his associates could finagle for them yet one more chance.
Though John didn’t believe he had made a mistake leaving this splendor for the public defenders’ office, he couldn’t help but wish he could find within the organization’s state-funded budget the money to repaint the walls and perhaps buy a decent couch for the waiting room. It wasn’t simply that he believed his lawyers deserved freshly painted walls: Those forlorn denizens who depended upon the PDs deserved them, too. After all, was it too much to expect that your lawyers’ offices would be clean?
Chris Tuttle rose from behind a desk the size of a small putting green as soon as he saw John in the doorway of his office and came around it to greet him. Tuttle was a few years older than Mansfield—John guessed he was in his midfifties now—but his hair was a shade of black darker than creosote, and his eyes were a vivid chestnut brown. His face was deeply wrinkled, however, and John suspected that Tuttle was dying his hair.
Unlike some of the other senior lawyers in the firm, Tuttle didn’t keep a conference table of his own in his office, and so when they sat back down Tuttle was on one side of the massive desk and John was on the other. He was reminded of those images of estranged couples in their baronial dining rooms in movies from the 1930s and 1940s, the length of table between them a signal for the viewer that this marriage had absolutely no hope of being saved. He and Tuttle had already spoken twice on the phone about his deposition, and John had told him all that he could about the rifle—including his fear that when the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him in August the casing had somehow been lost.
“So, how are the girls? Sara and young Willow?” Tuttle asked.
He answered briefly that the girls were as fine as could be expected, given the reality that his family was dealing with a waking nightmare of guilt and self-recrimination. John knew that Tuttle didn’t actually want the details of their personal lives right now; nor did he himself have any great desire to volunteer the information while on this other lawyer’s billable clock.
“So, the folks in New Hampshire tell me they’re still looking for your missing casing,” Tuttle said to him. “But I really have no more confidence than you that it will turn up. They don’t think there was a casing in the chamber when it was checked into the firearms locker.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit, of course there was. They just lost it is all.”
“I’m just telling you what they’re telling me. You still have the box the cartridge came in?”
“Yes, absolutely. Why?”
“A gun guy thought it might be worth seeing if other rounds from the box jam in the chamber. Maybe it wasn’t just that one.”
“Interesting.”
“A longshot. Obviously you loaded and unloaded the rifle a couple of times last November, and no other cartridges got stuck. Still, it’s something to consider when we get a chance to look at the gun. So, bring me that box of ammunition, okay? Now, let’s talk about the deposition,” Tuttle continued. On the lake outside the window John could see a ferry leaving the dock at the boathouse and starting its way west toward New York.
“Yes, let’s.”
“Obviously there is no justification for your . . .” Tuttle paused, searching for the right word. John considered assisting him with stupidity, irresponsibility, or carelessness, but he restrained himself. “Improvidence,” Tuttle said finally. “There is no rational reason for what you did.”
“Thank you.”
“So what I’ve told Paige I want us to focus on, first of all, is the mystery of the round in the chamber. How it simply wouldn’t pop out when you cycled the weapon, and then—and this will be very important—how you struggled and struggled to extract it.”
“I didn’t struggle. I didn’t want to shoot my hand off with a ramrod or risk blowing my head off by firing it. I didn’t know what would happen if I fired it, and I envisioned the damn thing exploding against my cheek.”
“I understand—and we’ll need to make that point. But you did try to pop out the cartridge; you did try to remove it. Multiple times. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“And it just wouldn’t come out.”
“Yes.”
“Good. It must be clear that you did what you could. Second, it must also be clear that events then conspired to prevent you from dealing with it further, i.e., bringing it to a gunsmith. All that busyness you told me about at work, the birth of young Patrick. I want the numbers, please, of exactly how many cases your office handled over the last twelve months, and the number for the previous year, too. You were down, what, two lawyers this year?”
“One. But we were also down an investigator.”
“Fine. I also want to know how many cases you managed personally, in addition to all your responsibilities running the public defenders’ office.”
“I can get you that.”
“And, lastly, I want a list of all the ways and all the hours you volunteer in the community and all the ways you help out your family—including that garden.”
“You mean the garden Spencer had us plant?”
“Yup. That one. You must have helped him weed it or something.”
“I spent all of Memorial Day Weekend over there putting the damn thing into the ground.”
“Excellent. That’s three days right there you were helping him when you could have been taking the gun to a gunsmith. That is, after all, half the problem here. You never brought the gun to a professional.”
“The other half, I presume, is leaving a live round in there in the first place?”
“Okay, the problem should be divided into thirds, not halves. Forgive me. You left a live round in the chamber. You failed to bring the weapon to a gunsmith. And then you left the rifle where a child could get it.”
“It was only where a child could get it because I was actually going to see a gunsmith roughly thirty-six hours after Spencer was shot. That was the whole reason the rifle was in the trunk of my car.”
“You sound angry. You needn’t be. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t be angry at your deposition.”
He heard a small laugh escape his lips, unexpected and trilling. I’m not angry, he wanted to say. I’m depressed. His depression might have made him sound cranky, but one was only a visible manifestation of the other. Some mornings it took every bit of will he could muster to simply climb out from under the sheets on his and Sara’s bed, to emerge from the warm cocoon he had created with a little cotton and a nighttime’s worth of body heat. He might not have made it out of bed today—the depression this morning was almost a quilt, shielding him from all the nastiness the world had to offer with the cozy affection of a down comforter—if he hadn’t heard Willow calming Patrick in the kitchen (so distant, so very distant) while Sara was trying to get one child ready for school and the other for the Mother’s Love Nurture World. He had to help. He had to. If he didn’t, he understood, he would have ratcheted up the self-loathing yet one more notch, and that might have sent him so deep into his nest of percale and gloom that he would never have emerged.
“I won’t be angry,” he said to reassure Tuttle, and he tried to sit up a little higher in his chair. He realized he’d been slouching, just the way his own clients did when they were meeting with him.
He hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, but he guessed they were depressed, too.
PAIGE LEANED FORWARD in the ergonomic stool with a back that purported to be a chair. She used to have a chair that was a deep burgundy leather. Once she was the youngest lawyer in the firm who got to sit on the slick, supple skin of a dead animal. It was a big chair with plush cushions and wheels—an unmistakable sign of achievement and success. Then she started working with FERAL and she understood that the chair had to go. Now an associate who would soon be a partner (but wasn’t yet) had it, a woman from Harvard who spent lots of time suing automobile manufacturers over headrests, fuel tanks, and air bags. Nothing she did ever wound up in trial, and she made the firm mountains of money. She was likable. She was pretty. She was a rising star. Paige knew she would have detested her if she herself weren’t already a partner.
Now her eyes moved back and forth between the papers on her desk that had been faxed to her moments before and the telephone. She had known essentially what the fax was going to say for fifteen minutes before it arrived because the engineer at the ballistics lab in Maryland had called her and left a message on her voice mail. Then he’d followed up with this fax. The results? They could find nothing wrong with the extractor on the Adirondack rifle she had sent them. Not a thing. And they’d put the weapon through batteries of tests, using different brands of ammunition and test-firing the gun multiple times. Always, however, they had been able to extract both live rounds and spent casings from the chamber with ease. Never once did any round stick.
She’d called Spencer at FERAL a few minutes ago, but he was already in a meeting. She considered telling Keenan the news, but that wasn’t quite fair. Spencer was her client. Not FERAL. Spencer should get the results first.
She guessed she should not have been surprised by the findings, given how little faith she had in John Seton. Fortunately, this disappointment did not derail the lawsuit. In some ways it actually meant the stakes were even higher, because now it wasn’t simply one defective rifle, it was the whole Adirondack thirty-ought-six she was taking on: the model. They were going to sue a brand because there was a fundamental defect with the gun: A round remained in the chamber when a person emptied the magazine, and that—they would argue—was inherently dangerous. The company was putting an irresponsibly lethal weapon into the stream of commerce.
Well, it’s a gun, that little voice of reason kept muttering inside her head. Of course it’s lethal. Hello? She thought of the Shakespeare quote one of the malpractice attorneys in the firm had engraved in bronze on a plaque on his wall:
When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
Still, this was the information she needed to finalize her theory of liability and compose the complaint. Now, at least, she knew precisely what they were going to argue.
THAT AFTERNOON, Keenan pulled back the bolt on the rifle an intern in Paige’s firm had purchased the day before at a sporting goods store on Long Island. It was the exact same model John Seton owned. Keenan was familiarizing himself with the weapon in his office while Paige watched, and a surprisingly articulate mountain man from some small, smoggy city in northern Pennsylvania patiently explained to them why the chamber and the magazine on a bolt action rifle could not be unloaded simultaneously. Dan Grampbell must have been six and a half feet tall, and Keenan would have been shocked if he tipped the scale at an ounce below three hundred pounds. His eyes were green, his mouth—what Keenan could see of it behind the massive beaver beard that swallowed up cheek and neck—was pink, and his hair, all of it, was the sort of orangish red he’d once seen on poppies at the botanical gardens. He was wearing an ill-fitting blue blazer over a worn flannel shirt.
Yet Grampbell also had a degree in criminal science from Penn State, and he spoke with the soft voice of a poet. Moreover, Dan Grampbell knew about guns. He knew a lot about guns. That was why he was here and why he was being paid an hourly rate commensurate with that received by the associates in Paige’s own firm.
“It’s a two-step process for a reason,” Grampbell was saying quietly. “If Adirondack chooses to settle, it will be because in their opinion settling is less expensive than the cost of a trial or enduring the negative publicity that would surround the case.”
“Let me try unloading it for myself one more time,” Keenan said. He was afraid that his clumsiness with the weapon in front of Paige was unmanly, and he was surprised at himself for giving a damn.
“Fine. It’s now fully loaded,” Grampbell observed. “There is a full magazine and a round in the chamber.”
Paige was grinning mischievously, and she looked to him a bit like a schoolgirl. Twice when he’d been trying to load the weapon he’d fumbled the dummy ammunition, one of the cartridges dinging off the dark oak of his precious mission desk.
“You’re on safety. Correct?” Grampbell asked.
He looked to make sure. “Yes.”
“Now, pull back the bolt—that’s right—and, voilà. The round will pop—”
Sure enough, it popped right into his nose, ejecting like a pilot from a doomed fighter jet. He yelped, and Paige’s pixielike chuckles were turned into a single burst of full-throated laughter. He wasn’t smiling, however, and so she put a cap on her mirth and extended her hands to him, open-armed, as if to say, What did you expect? Really, now, what did you expect?
“The bullet certainly popped,” he murmured to Grampbell. He hoped he sounded liked a good sport.
“Next, you are going to push the magazine release by the trigger guard.”
He pressed the small knob and instantly four cartridges cascaded onto the floor, a pair rolling under the chair in which Paige was sitting, two others disappearing near the credenza. He’d forgotten to place his cupped hand beneath the magazine to catch them, even though Grampbell had warned him earlier that he should.
“You’ve now cleared the magazine. See?”
“I see.”
“A good thing to do at this point might be to close the magazine door.”
He looked at the dangling piece of thin metal. “Ah, yes. Remind me . . . please.”
“Press it upward straight into the gun. That’s all. It’ll click shut.”
He pushed. Sure enough, it closed.
“That wasn’t difficult, was it?” Grampbell asked, a completely rhetorical question. Keenan could tell that in Grampbell’s worldview, loading and unloading a weapon was child’s play. Any fool could do it—except, apparently, fools who were lawyers.
“What remains unclear to me,” Keenan said, “is why the chamber and the magazine cannot be linked. Why must unloading the rifle be this two-step process?”
Grampbell nodded. “The chamber is, essentially, a combustion chamber. It’s designed to withstand the pressures that come with firing the round. Typically, that pressure is in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds per square inch. In order to handle that, the chamber can’t have any slots or breaks in the metal surrounding the bullet. The rifle’s bolt—along with the cartridge casing on the bullet—actually completes the seal in the rear of the chamber.”
“And you need a seal . . . because . . .” Paige asked.
“Because without one the hot gases needed to propel the bullet down the barrel would escape to the rear, creating what you would have to consider an extremely hazardous situation for the shooter. The gun might even explode. Now, what this means is that the magazine can be nothing more than a reservoir of extra rounds. That’s all. And that’s why you need a two-step process to unload the weapon.” He shook his head, then continued, “In my opinion, that rifle you have there is still a mighty impressive engineering feat. You may not be able to unload the chamber when you unload the magazine, but I think it’s nevertheless pretty remarkable that when you cycle the used cartridge you simultaneously pull a bullet into the chamber from the reservoir. That’s a nifty little accomplishment, don’t you think?”
“And this two-step process is all the result of an . . . an immutable law of ballistics?” Paige asked. “There’s no way to design around it?”
“Oh, there’s an exception.”
“And that is?” she asked.
“A rifle with a fixed box magazine. Remington, Springfield, Savage—they all have a model like that. Those rifles have no floor plate like the firearm we have here, meaning the bolt must be opened to empty the rounds in the magazine. You literally cycle the cartridges one by one from the reservoir to the chamber. When you’re done, there can’t possibly be any rounds left in the firearm. The downside to this system, of course, is all that cycling. If not properly done, there is always the risk of an accidental discharge.”
Keenan placed the rifle down gently on his credenza. Even though they’d been using dummy ammunition, the long weapon frightened him.
“Well, I think this is all just messy enough to give FERAL some ink,” Paige said. “Especially since there is most definitely no indicator on the weapon telling you when there is or is not a bullet in the chamber.”
“And there’s that girl,” Grampbell added. “I’m no lawyer, but I’ve seen enough of these cases to know it helps the plaintiff when there’s a child involved.”
Keenan thought about this, and then he thought of all those hunted deer. All those Bambis with their big dark eyes. Those animals hadn’t a chance against an exploding projectile rocketed after them with—what was that number?—fifty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. No animal did. Just look at what a bullet did to the shoulder of their communications director. He made a pyramid with the fingers on both hands, and as he spoke he hoped his words didn’t sound as oddly chilly to Grampbell and Paige as they did to him: “But since the lawsuit will go to the heart of one of Adirondack’s best-selling rifles, I believe we can take comfort in the reality that, in this case, they will not settle right away. Which is, of course, precisely what we want.”
The mountain man looked puzzled for a moment. He was even making a small silent oh with his mouth beneath that great ruddy beard. But then Grampbell turned toward Paige Sutherland—and she looked downright petite beside him—and he stretched the seams of his blazer with one massive shrug.
ONLY WHEN CHARLOTTE had mastered the ability to drop the final g’s in her words—eatin’ and drinkin’ and goin’—did she start trying to spit out the t’s that marked the end of some words or soften the vowels that resided in the midst of still others. Sometimes she feared that she sounded more like a Cockney aunt from a Monty Python sketch than a spoiled but unhappy little girl from the colonial aristocracy, but the drama teacher told her—in a stab at a British accent herself—that the accent was comin’ along just fine.
She was running lines now with her father on the couch in the living room. He was holding a copy of the script open with his left hand, pressing it flat against his knees at an angle that allowed them both to see the dialogue on the page. Occasionally he would lean forward to hold the pages open with the weight of his sling-enclosed forearm and use his functional left hand to reach for a toothpick pretzel in the small bowl on the end table beside them.
“Are you goin’ to be my father now?” she asked, closing her eyes after glancing quickly at Mary’s line. This was how she found it easiest to learn her part: She would read the dialogue once, repeat the words in her mind, and then say them aloud with just a hint of an accent.
“I’m your guardian. But I’m a poor one for any child,” her dad answered, replicating impressively in her opinion the stoic voice of the orphan girl’s tortured uncle. “I offer you my deepest sympathies on your arrival.”
This time she didn’t have to lean over to glance at the script because the next line—the very last in the scene—was one of Mary’s best. “Did my mother have any other family?” she asked, emphasizing other exactly the way the young actor did on the CD she had from the original Broadway production.
Her father removed his fingers and let the script fall shut. “Very nicely done,” he said. “You’re good.”
She was flattered, but reflexively she rolled her eyes. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Your grandmother—my mom—used to have an excellent ear for accents. It was mostly a party trick, but sometimes when I was a little kid she’d leave me howling with laughter.”
“But she never acted, right?”
“Just school plays.”
“She never tried anything more?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
He nodded, apparently pondering his response. Finally, he said, “I’ve always been sorry you were so young when my mother died. You would have liked her.”
“I have a couple memories of her. Once we went looking for seashells together, right? I was three, maybe. It was a windy day and the waves seemed humongous—but I’m sure they weren’t.”
“No. They weren’t.”
“And didn’t she finger-paint with me one time? On newspapers on a glass table?”
“She did.”
“But maybe I just remember that because you or Mom told me about it.”
“Maybe.”
“So, why do you think she never tried to become an actress?”
“Oh, I don’t know if she had the talent. Or the discipline. Or the desire. I’m not sure she ever figured out precisely what she wanted.”
“That’s so sad.”
“She had her moments. She adored you,” he murmured softly. Then, almost abruptly, as if waking up from a trance, he said, “Now, your mother and I have been thinking about your birthday. I know it was a couple of weeks ago, but we didn’t do a whole lot and that was wrong. A birthday is still a birthday.”
“It was fine, really. I didn’t mind that we didn’t have a party,” she said, once more trying to sound like Mary Lennox. She decided she was unhappy with the way she had just rolled the r in really (too Scottish, she thought) but immensely satisfied with the crisp way she had enunciated party. “Besides, I already have what I want.” There: A girl such as Mary Lennox would most assuredly have said have instead of got.
“This part?”
“Yes, Father,” she replied. Father. Now that was a nice British touch. She had never called her dad Father before, and she liked how it sounded.
“Would you like a party now? I know it’s late, but we could still have one.”
Next Tuesday was that press conference. That meant, she presumed, that her father would be crazed this coming weekend. Almost certainly he would not be around. “Well, anything we do should wait until after the press conference. So if we have a party or go someplace special—and I’m not saying we should—I’d understand if we did it the following weekend. Or even next month. Okay?”
“Sweetheart, the press conference is a completely separate event from your birthday. And I think it’s under control. At this point, it doesn’t look like I’ll have to do a whole lot more than show up. And so I think I can manage both—a party and my responsibilities at the office,” he said, and as he spoke he accidentally knocked the ceramic bowl of pretzels onto the floor with his good arm.
The floor was carpeted and so the dish survived its plummet intact, but the pretzels scattered everywhere like small toasted Pick-up Sticks. She watched her father reflexively lean over to start gathering them up, and she glimpsed the wince he was able neither to conceal nor control. And so instantly she knelt down and started sweeping them up with her hands, telling her dad to stay put, that she could do this.
Much to her surprise, he did. “Fair enough,” he said with a sigh, and he fell back gingerly against the cushions.
When she had recovered the pretzels she returned to her spot on the couch, wondering if he would say something about his clumsiness or his helplessness or his simple inability to pick pretzels up off the floor. She wondered if he would be angry. Quickly she put the cap back on the yellow highlighter they’d been using to mark the script, because she knew how difficult it would be for him with one hand.
“So: Your birthday,” he continued instead, as if nothing had happened. “What would make you happy?”
The short answer was easy: Her father to have a functioning right arm once again. To go back in time to July. To no longer live with the constant, only barely suppressed awareness of what she had done.
This wasn’t an option, however, it wasn’t anything her father could give her. It wasn’t anything her father was even contemplating with the question. And so she thought for a moment, wondering exactly what she did want. And she had the sense as she sat in the living room and learned her lines with her . . . father . . . a father who was at once strangely placid and uncharacteristically present . . . that right now she was indeed (and she heard Mary Lennox using precisely these words) about as content as a girl could be, given her current circumstances.
“I’m happy,” she said, and she pulled from deep within herself a smile for her father’s benefit. “I really don’t want anything more for my birthday. But . . .”
“Yes?”
“Thank you, Father. Thank you for the thought.”