Thirty
When the two girls had been younger, they would run into each other’s arms when they were reunited in New York or New Hampshire and hug each other like lovers, their bodies colliding in a minor ecstasy. They would wrap their arms around each other’s backs and there had even been a time—he guessed it had been when Charlotte was seven or eight—when his niece would actually lift his daughter into the air and spin her beloved younger cousin around as if they were in a perfume commercial. Even now, however, one girl thirteen and the other on the cusp of eleven, ages when they could be self-conscious about everything, they still scampered playfully toward each other like baby colts. Charlotte no longer lifted Willow off her feet and their embraces weren’t as long as in years past, but whatever the ties were—blood, history, friendship—they still were solid. The girls held each other, and Charlotte patted her shorter cousin on the back.
A dozen yards behind Charlotte, winding their way through a small crowd surrounding a pair of musicians dressed up like Chaucerian minstrels, he saw his sister and a strange man with a beard. It took him a moment to realize it was his brother-in-law. Behind them he could see the western tower of the George Washington Bridge and the graceful, sloped curves formed by the stay ropes and suspender cables on the New York side. The families had planned to meet at the top of the stone steps at the entrance to the Cloisters itself, rather than here in the middle of Fort Tryon Park, but here they all were—even Spencer.
He’d never seen Spencer with a beard, and the combination of the whiskers and the mere fact that the man was present caused him a brief second of disbelief, then incredulity: Is that really Spencer? Has he really come along? The giveaway was the sling. Spencer’s right arm was strapped in a sling across a blue cotton tennis shirt, the fabric a pale echo of the cobalt sky above them.
John knew that even if he and Spencer hadn’t been feuding, they never would have greeted each other with anything like the exuberance of their daughters. Given, however, that they were sparring (rather, that Spencer was sparring with him), he tried to decide how much ardor and warmth he should manifest now. He felt a September breeze coming up off the Hudson, warmer than the wind in Vermont, riffling the leaves on the park’s maples and oaks.
Willow was pulling Charlotte over to them, and he and Sara both took turns hugging their niece. She looked like she had grown since New Hampshire, but then John decided it was something else. She seemed more poised. He wondered if a few weeks in eighth grade could change a girl so much. She was wearing a denim skirt and a balsam-colored cotton cardigan, and now that she was done greeting her cousin she was carrying herself as if she were . . .
And then he got it. She was carrying herself as if she were that kid in the play she was in. That proper British orphan. He thought he might even have heard the suggestion of a British accent when she had said hello.
“Heavens! Spencer has a beard!” It was Nan speaking, apparently more taken aback by her son-in-law’s facial hair than the reality that he had deigned to join them. Gently she pushed the stroller with her grandson back and forth, fearing, perhaps, that her small outburst had upset the child. Patrick wasn’t sleeping, but at the moment he was content to bat at the small plastic boats that dangled before him from the awning of the pram.
“Yes, isn’t it nice that Father chose to come along, too?” Charlotte said, allowing that small hint of a British accent to become almost overwhelming. John didn’t believe he had ever heard his niece refer to Spencer as Father, and he was quite certain that collapsing an er sound into an a was a new affectation.
He smiled at her and then offered his sister and Spencer a small wave across the crowd. His sister waved back, but Spencer remained almost completely motionless. A juggler in harlequin tights drifted through the crowd, tossing garish cloth beanbags into the air, and John remembered that Willow had expressed an interest in the jugglers. And so he made eye contact with the jester and motioned for him to join them. When he was sure that the juggler had seen them, he murmured to his mother and to Sara that he thought he would go say hello to Spencer. He didn’t know quite what he would say. But Spencer was here, and even if they resolved nothing, at least they could talk.
INSIDE THE STONEWALLS of the Cloisters, Spencer stared at Bartolo’s massive The Adoration of the Shepherds, but he was less interested in the depiction of the humans’ veneration of the baby Jesus than he was in the awe that he saw in the eyes of the donkey and the cow. Arguably, they were more prominent in the painting than the shepherds. Luke, he knew, had never said specifically in his account of Christ’s birth that there were animals present, but neither did he say that the barn had been empty. Certainly it was impossible for Spencer to imagine the Nativity without them. He couldn’t envision how, years ago, Charlotte could ever have built her own crèche scenes without carefully finding a place for each creature. Their metaphoric importance to the story was profound, and certainly Bartolo had understood this. Most medieval artists did.
“I like the name Tanya. Did you choose it, or did it come with the dog?” he heard John asking him. Everyone else was outside on the terrace overlooking the Hudson River. They had fled as a group as soon as they saw that he wasn’t going to shun his brother-in-law from Vermont, in theory leaving the two men alone to iron out their differences. So far, they hadn’t said more than a dozen words about anything other than medieval altarpieces and twelfth-century wooden sculptures. Now John was bringing up the dog.
“She’s two years old. The name came with her,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the great cow eyes in the painting before him.
“Charlotte sounds very happy to have her.”
“She is.”
“She seems to be in a good phase right now. Is it the play?”
“Maybe. Maybe she’s just growing up.”
“Does she talk about what happened in New Hampshire?”
He turned away from the Bartolo. This was the first time John had deviated from small talk. He sighed. “Well, we don’t discuss it much. She’s started to see a therapist, and the first session may have opened up some doors for her.”
“Does she seem okay about it—about the accident?”
“Now, have you thought about why you’re asking me that?”
“Spencer, please. Come on.”
“I’m serious. Why do you think you’re asking? Is it so you can feel less guilty about what you did—be reassured that your niece is not going to be traumatized for life—or is it because you’re interested in my daughter’s mental health? Personally, I think the answer’s a combination of both.”
Two young women, one in a Fordham sweatshirt, pressed close to the painting. They had clipboards, and they seemed to be scribbling notes about the image.
“Yes, I’m sure my guilt is a factor. Is that what you need to hear? If so, I’m happy to admit it. But the primary motivation behind my question just now was my niece and how she’s doing. And I’ll tell you something else: As bad as I feel for Charlotte, I feel a thousand times worse when I think of how my stupidity led to your injury.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal about your question,” he said.
John looked taken aback—almost dazed—by his apology. Only after a moment did he continue, “So . . . you and Charlotte really don’t talk much about what happened?”
“Nope. But it’s not like it’s a subject we avoid, either. It is in our faces. After all, I’m still learning to eat with my left hand. I can no longer tie my own shoes. It’s impossible to hold a book open and turn the pages. A hardcover novel, I’ve learned, is really quite heavy.”
“Does she blame me? If I were her, I might.”
He resisted the urge to chastise John for bringing this all back to him. Does she blame me? Yes, they were in the midst of relics touched by the true pioneers of the hair shirt, but if only because John’s voice sounded so pathetic his question didn’t seem quite so narcissistic. “Did she seem to blame you a few minutes ago in the park?” he asked in response.
“No.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
“I’m glad.”
Spencer wandered toward the glass looking out on the garth garden and the fountain from a twelfth-century French monastery. It felt good to be strolling through here with John. Anger, always an exhausting emotion, was particularly trying when you were already investing so much energy in simply trying to button your shirt. The main reason, he guessed, he had agreed to resume speaking to his brother-in-law was precisely because not speaking to him was becoming so much work. “Can I ask you something?” he said when he felt John standing beside him once more.
“Absolutely. Ask me anything.”
“How much weight have you lost? You look like hell.”
“I don’t know. Ten, maybe fifteen pounds.”
“That’s impressive. All since mid-August?”
The man shrugged with both shoulders, a motion Spencer noticed largely because he couldn’t do it. “Early August, mid-August. I don’t know.”
“Why are you on a diet?”
“I’m not. I’m just not hungry.”
“Well, the two of us look pretty scary.”
“I know. I saw in the paper today that there’s a play opening downtown about the Bataan Death March. We should have auditioned.”
He grinned in spite of himself. “I’m amazed I’m not losing more weight. I spill more food than I get to my mouth. At breakfast this morning I overturned a bowlful of cereal. Sent the whole thing somersaulting onto the floor. Fortunately, Tanya was right there. To be honest, that’s the main reason I got the dog. It wasn’t for Charlotte. It was for me. She’ll eat anything.”
“Even soy milk?”
“Oh, yeah. I checked her references. I made sure she was a vegan.”
“Really?”
“I’m kidding. The animal shelter doesn’t categorize its animals that way.”
“But you will try to make her a vegetarian—like your cats. True?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I may even pick up a few cans of Friskies for the cats one of these days. Just leave them on the kitchen counter for Catherine and Charlotte to discover one evening when they go to feed them. Everything is so much harder now, and not just for me. Sometimes I need to give in and accept the fact that I can’t do as much as I’d like.”
“You’re getting mellow in your old age.”
“You learn to compromise when you’re down to one arm. And the truth is, Catherine eats meat—did you know that?”
“She told me a few weeks ago.”
“Yup: My wife eats meat and the sun continues to rise.”
They were quiet for a moment. The garden was starting to empty, and he wondered if something special was about to occur in the park. The jousting, maybe. That would explain why people were beginning to leave.
“Spencer?”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking of staying in town for the press conference.”
“That would be interesting. Did you discuss this with Paige?”
“I’m not going to stick around. At least I don’t think I will. And I wouldn’t have been staying to help you. I was going to threaten to stay—threaten to talk about the benefits of hunting—to try to convince you not to announce your lawsuit with a press conference. It was a stupid idea. And I’m only telling you now so you understand the depth of my concern. I mean, I have no objections to the lawsuit itself. Absolutely none . . .”
Spencer circled his left index finger at John, signaling him to continue.
“But if I were at the press conference,” John said, “a lot of reporters would want to talk to me. It would be chaos. And, in the end, less time and space would be devoted to the FERAL message, because the writers and producers would have the chance to quote me—the guy who owned the gun. And I would talk very reasonably about managing the size of the deer herd through hunting, and how contraception only works in very controlled little worlds. But it was all just brinkmanship. Public relations brinkmanship. I couldn’t have gone through with it.”
He thought about this, picturing John in the rear of that large conference room in Paige’s firm where they were going to announce the lawsuit, and the vision didn’t make him angry. Certainly it would have once. Mostly, he guessed, he was surprised that John—exactly like his sister—had so little faith in what he was going to do at the event, in what he was going to say.
“You sound like Catherine,” he said after a moment.
“Was she threatening to go, too?”
“No. It’s that both of you seem to think I am going to mismanage the press conference, and my daughter is going to be humiliated. That’s not going to happen. I know what I’m doing.”
“I won’t ask what your plans are, but . . .”
“Good,” he said, “it’s too nice a day and it’s too good to see you again.” He reached into his left pants pocket for one of the Percocet he carried there loosely like change and popped it into his mouth without water. When he had swallowed it he continued, “Seriously, John, you can sleep easy. I know what I’m doing, and I would never embarrass my daughter. Now, shall we rejoin our families and see if the jousting is about to begin?”
A MAGICIAN dressed up like Merlin was throwing bolts of fire into the autumn air from his fingertips, while a group of costumed adults were performing a living chess match on the tournament field. Willow decided that her art teacher, Grace Seeley, had been correct: This festival was wonderful. She had to remind herself that the whole reason she was here was to talk to her cousin about their depositions, a conversation toward which she had made no overtures thus far. Mostly they had discussed the school musical in which Charlotte had a lead and her cousin’s new dog. When she put the two subjects together, it almost made Willow breathless with envy: How interesting her New York City cousin’s life was compared to hers!
They were walking alone now, a dozen yards ahead of their mothers, their grandmother, and Patrick, when Charlotte surprised her by saying, “Are you still worried about those oaths we may have to take?”
“Yes.” She considered adding more, but since her cousin had brought this up she had the instinctive sense that she should remain patient and see what Charlotte had to say.
“I’ve been thinking about them, too.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. And I know you don’t want us to lie, but I believe we have to. We have to for my father. This whole lawsuit could crash and burn—isn’t that a powerful expression? I learned it from my history teacher—if people find out I was stoned when I pulled the trigger. And that would be a disaster for him both personally and professionally. This isn’t about you or me, and it sure as heck isn’t about Gwen. It’s about my dad. Your uncle.”
She worked hard not to raise her voice. “But what about my dad? It isn’t fair to him if we don’t tell the truth—”
“Your dad isn’t crippled. Mine is. Your dad doesn’t have a cause here that matters to him. Mine does.”
“But lying is wrong. It’s—”
“Willow, have you ever told someone you couldn’t come over to their house because you were going to visit your grandmother? You know, told a little white lie so you didn’t hurt someone’s feelings? In my opinion, not telling the whole truth at the depo-whatever—”
“Deposition,” she said, unable to restrain herself from correcting her cousin.
“Right. Deposition. Not telling the truth at the deposition is like a white lie. It makes things better than telling the truth, which would only make people’s lives worse. Do you see the difference?”
“We’re not talking about a little white lie. We’re talking about a really big one.”
“No. The point is—”
“Here’s what I think the point is. Your dad can’t use his arm anymore and my dad is in trouble because you picked up his gun and started fooling around with it. And why were you fooling around with it? Because we were both stoned.”
“First of all, your dad is not in trouble. Second, I would have taken the gun even if we hadn’t been smoking pot,” she said evenly, her voice lowering a register and picking up a slight trace of a British accent. “That’s my point, and I am quite certain of it now.”
“So, you know what’s going to happen, then?” Willow responded, hoping to keep her tone equally as measured. She stared straight ahead at the chess players in their medieval garb, wondering suddenly where they’d gotten all those costumes. Everyone looked like they had just arrived here from Middle Earth. “You won’t say anything about the pot and the beer, but I will. They’ll find out anyway—everyone will—and that certainly won’t make your dad’s case look very good.”
“You can’t do that!”
“I can! I won’t lie in the deposition, Charlotte. I won’t. It’s wrong, and it’s not fair to my dad.”
“You can’t—”
“Girls, is everything okay?” It was her aunt Catherine’s voice. She turned around, and the grown women—her aunt and her mom and her grandmother with the pram before her—all looked slightly concerned. Willow didn’t believe they had overheard enough of their conversation to understand exactly what they were discussing, but clearly they’d heard their daughters fighting.
“Oh, we’re fine, Mother,” Charlotte called back in that new voice of hers. “Just two girls bickering.”
“Are you hungry? There seem to be some vendors along that road over there,” Aunt Catherine told them, and she pointed at the row of food carts on the street, closed today to automobiles, that wound its way up to the Cloisters.
“Cousin, are you hungry?” Charlotte asked her.
“No.”
“That’s probably good. I smell a lot of seared flesh,” she murmured softly. Then she raised her voice for their parents and said, “We’re both fine!”
“Okay, then. Just let us know if there’s something you want,” her aunt said.
Charlotte picked up her pace and Willow had to walk faster to keep up. When they had some distance once again on the grown-ups, Charlotte spoke: “This is very complicated, you know. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“Me, too.”
“But here’s something else,” she said firmly. “How could we be friends after you revealed everything? How could we? Telling everyone everything would be so hurtful to my dad. That’s what I don’t get: Here I am trying to make up for what I did—yes, what I did, I know I’m to blame—by making this lawsuit and this press conference go perfectly, and you’re trying to stop me.”
“I’m not trying to stop you.”
“Oh, but you would. You would undo everything if you talked,” Charlotte said.
“But—”
“Look, we’re not going to figure this out right this second. Would you do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Think about what I’ve said. Okay? Just think about it today, and we can talk more tonight. Deal?”
Willow couldn’t imagine she’d change her mind, but they really were getting nowhere. And so she nodded and mumbled, “Okay.” Then she halted where she was to watch a pair of tumblers who were dressed like the court jesters on her grandmother’s playing cards, while Charlotte walked on ahead.
“What were you and Charlotte talking about?” She turned and saw her mother standing beside her. Her grandmother and her aunt were continuing to walk, slowly narrowing the gap between them and her cousin. At some point her mother had taken the carriage back from Grandmother, and so Willow peeked inside now and saw her brother smiling up at her. He seemed to be batting his eyelashes like a baby flirt.
“Oh, nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“I’ll tell you later,” she said, though she had no expectation that she would tell her mother the real subject at any point soon. How could she until she and Charlotte had come to some sort of resolution?
But then, maybe that shouldn’t matter. And maybe it wouldn’t matter. This had to resolve itself this weekend, because it was possible that after tomorrow she wouldn’t see Charlotte again before their depositions. And so it crossed her mind that she should simply tell her mother and father tonight what had occurred that awful evening at the club in New Hampshire. Let them figure out how to deal with the information.
An idea began to form. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or—even if it was—whether she had the courage to go through with it. But it was certainly a notion that intrigued her. With her uncle Spencer now speaking to her father, she had no doubt that later that day or that evening both families would have a meal together somewhere. Maybe a nice dinner at a Japanese or Chinese or Indian restaurant on the Upper East or West Side. Then, with everyone gathered together, she would reveal the details that both she and her cousin had withheld since that horrible night. Charlotte would be furious—there would be no dignified British orphan scene once this word got out; this would be a performance, she guessed, comprised largely of screaming and hysteria—but wouldn’t it be better to expose everything here in New York, with all the grown-ups assembled in one place, than as a complete surprise in a deposition?
And, she knew, one way or another it was going to come out. No matter how hard she tried, she could no longer keep that part of the story to herself.
HOW ODD, Catherine thought. Spencer was here and she was walking with him, and he had just had a long talk with her brother. This was exactly what she had wanted, exactly what she had hoped would occur but hadn’t thought possible. They were strolling along the terrace that overlooked the Hudson River, while everyone else was back in the park getting something to eat. But then Spencer had told her of his conversation with John about the press conference and she had grown angry. Their family was lurching spastically toward public humiliation, estrangement, or both, and their daughter was, according to Dr. Warwick, a volcano of guilt and despair just waiting to explode—despite whatever serenity she was projecting on the surface. And here Spencer was bringing up the press conference. Again. The gentle feel of his fingers on her neck last night—their taste when she kissed them—seemed very far away to her now, and she knew exactly what she would say.
She paused against the stonewall and gazed out at the Palisades across the water.
“I’ve made a decision,” she said, and she could feel him stopping beside her, though she couldn’t imagine he knew what she was thinking.
“Oh? About what?”
She took a breath, exhaled. Took another and began: “If you go ahead with that press conference on Tuesday, I will leave you.”
“What?”
“I will pack up our daughter and we will go across town to my mother’s, and I will immediately start looking for a new home for us. For Charlotte and me.”
“Whoa. Where is—”
“You know where this is coming from. At least you should. Things haven’t been right between us for a very long time. As a matter of fact, if the accident hadn’t intervened, I was going to tell you in New Hampshire that I wanted us to start counseling. Marriage counseling. At the very least I wanted that. Certainly we needed it. I might even have left you then, but you got hurt and so I couldn’t. I just . . . couldn’t.”
He was leaning against the stones beside her, and she wondered why she wasn’t crying. She thought she might if she turned to look at him, and so she didn’t. She focused on the shore across the water, on a plane descending toward Newark.
“Why isn’t counseling an option now, then? Why this threat—”
“Maybe we could explore counseling once I’ve left. Maybe not. Right now I don’t know. But I am quite sure that I cannot live with you if you are capable of subjecting our daughter—and, yes, my brother—to the indignities that will follow your press conference. It’s just that simple.”
“But it will help the lawsuit,” he said, a quiver of panic marking his voice. “And it’s such a great opportunity for us to point out the horrors of hunting. Good Lord, the pain I’m enduring is precisely what deer experience—”
“I don’t care. For once I want you to put your family first. You know, those animals you live with, those animals who are a part of your very own little herd. Charlotte and me. My brother. Go ahead with the lawsuit, sue the hell out of Adirondack—though I would certainly hope that you and Paige would have the common sense not to let this thing ever get to a trial. But you hold that press conference to announce it on Tuesday—you so much as have Randy Mitchell pick up the phone to start calling people on Monday morning to tell them about the event—and your daughter and I are out the door. We are gone before the sweat from Randy’s hands has left a palm print on her phone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you felt so strongly about the press conference sooner?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t—”
“I did! I told you every way I could! But it wasn’t registering! That’s why it has come to this.”
“An ultimatum. And all because of a press conference.”
“The press conference is just the tip of the iceberg. My God, Spencer, didn’t you hear what I just said? I considered leaving you this summer.”
A couple of seagulls swooped down onto the stone terrace and started pecking at something between the stones. Beside her she heard him breathing, and she couldn’t imagine what he would say next. She was hoping, she realized, that he was going to announce that the press conference was now a dead issue. Over, done with. He would call Paige and Dominique that afternoon to put an end to the nonsense.
Finally he spoke: “I’ve tried the last few weeks to behave better. I know how difficult I can be. Has it made any difference? Any difference at all?”
“Yes, absolutely. I’ve noticed. And I’ve seen how attentive you’ve been with Charlotte.”
“But it’s been too little too late . . .”
“That’s how it feels,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“And you’re serious about this?”
“Yes.” She almost said more, but she felt a shudder in her throat and now, finally, her eyes were starting to mist. She could feel it, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to wipe them. She knew if she did, that would be it: She would be sobbing and that was the last thing she wanted. Not here, not today.
“Okay, then.”
She tried to read meaning in those three short syllables—resignation or anger or acquiescence—but they were indecipherable. Completely impenetrable. The birds flew up past the two of them, apparently unsatisfied with the pickings in the stones at the foot of the wall, and she watched them wheel up and out over the wide river. She wanted to ask Spencer what he was going to do, but she didn’t dare open her mouth.
CHARLOTTE SIPPED her bottle of orange juice and nibbled at a very doughy, very salty pretzel and watched the contingent from Vermont eat frozen yogurt. Nearby, another family was eating “Medieval Festival Fowl”—turkey legs the size of bowling pins. They were using their hands, and their fingers glistened with fat.
But her father didn’t seem upset. If anything, he seemed oblivious. She wondered if his shoulder was hurting more than usual.
Everyone was sitting on a massive beach blanket that her grandmother—who thought of everything—had brought with her. She and Willow hadn’t spoken any more about her cousin’s determination to tell everyone about the dope and the beer, but she, at least, hadn’t stopped thinking about it for one single minute. The whole thing was making her a little queasy.
She stood up now and looked at the stone edifice of the Cloisters itself, the museum perhaps a hundred yards away from their spot on the grass in the park. She imagined it was a real monastery for a moment and tried to envision the monks inside it doing whatever it was that monks did. She wasn’t exactly sure. But she guessed they prayed and baked bread and they chanted. It probably wasn’t a whole lot different from being a nun, except she presumed that nuns sang instead of chanted. For some reason, in her mind’s eye she could see nuns wandering among those gardens and terraces inside the Cloisters, but not small gatherings of monks. Maybe it was the name of the place itself. Cloisters. It sounded feminine to her. Girlish. She’d learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word cloistered. And that meant something else. Something more. Separation. Isolation. Purity, maybe.
The gardens and the terraces reminded her of the secret garden: that walled garden from the play, that secluded little world of magic and—what were the words in one of the songs in the musical?—spirit and charm. When Mary Lennox tries to get the little crippled boy to rise up out of his wheelchair in the second act of the show, she sings precisely that: Come spirit, come charm.
She saw Willow pushing up off the ground now and walking toward her. She acted as if she hadn’t noticed and wandered a dozen yards closer to the Cloisters itself. Her cousin followed, exactly as Charlotte suspected she would.
“Have you ever met a nun?” she asked Willow when the younger girl was beside her.
“No. I don’t think so. You?”
“No. How about a monk?”
“No. I know I’ve never met a monk.”
“Me neither,” she said. Then: “The gardens in there made me think of the secret garden. Maybe it was the little walkways and stonewalls. It’s like in the play.”
“And the novel.”
“Yes, in the novel. I don’t mean to relate everything back to the play.” She finished her pretzel and put the paper napkin in her pocket. Willow looked so little to her right now, but also so strong. So courageous. So much more like that fictional Mary Lennox than she was. “You’re really going to tell them, aren’t you?” she said.
“About what we did? Yes. I’m sorry, Charlotte. Really I am. But I can’t lie.”
She nodded. “During the deposition later this year?”
“Actually,” her cousin said carefully, “I thought I might do it before the deposition.”
“So it isn’t a complete surprise for everyone.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was beginning to suspect that,” she said. “If possible . . .”
“Yes?”
“If possible, would you wait until after the press conference? Let my father have that?” She could see that her cousin was pondering the idea, and so she added, “After all, the depositions won’t be for a little while. But the press conference is this Tuesday. You’ll have plenty of time to tell everyone what happened afterward.”
“I could do that.”
“Thank you.”
The girl licked at a drop of frozen yogurt on the back of her spoon. “What about you?”
“What about me?” Charlotte wondered.
“Are you going to tell your parents—or wait until they hear it from mine?”
“Oh, I’ll have to think about that,” she said, but her sense immediately was that it would be better for them to hear it from her than from Uncle John. Or from Uncle John’s lawyer. Or, perhaps, from Paige. “But I’ll probably tell them myself,” she added.
“Do you want to pick a day now?”
“No, I’d rather not,” she said in her most mannered, most adult voice. “Is that okay?”
“Sure. Charlotte?”
“Yes?”
“We’re still friends, right?”
“Yes, Cousin. We’re still friends.” She knew she should say something more reassuring to Willow, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She was not happy with this turn of events, and she felt as if she had been needlessly cornered by . . .
Not exactly by her cousin. But by the events themselves. What had happened. On the one hand, she understood that her cousin was correct and they shouldn’t lie; on the other hand, telling the truth seemed to be almost a betrayal of her father. First she shot him. Now it comes out that she’d been smoking dope and drinking beer, and—worse—she hadn’t told anybody. She had seen enough courtroom dramas on television to hear in her head some lawyer from the gun company telling a jury that while this was all real sad, the fact was that Charlotte McCullough was stoned when she ignored her cousin and shot her father. This was a real tragedy, but it sure as heck wasn’t the fault of the Adirondack Rifle Company.
She turned back to her family on the beach blanket and stared for a long moment at her father. He still looked a little dazed to her, as if he weren’t listening to a word of whatever Aunt Sara and Grandmother were saying. She saw he had an unopened can of Diet Pepsi by his left leg, and she noticed that he was the only one there who wasn’t drinking anything.
Afraid that her father was thirsty but was unwilling to be a bother, she loped over to the blanket and knelt beside him, and there she popped the top of his can of soda and held it to him like an offering. The goblet of wine at communion. That gold chalice she had just seen inside the Cloisters. Drink, she said to him in her mind. Drink, drink.