Thirty-four
This was bad news. Unutterably bad news.
Nevertheless, Dominique had learned that sometimes with bad news it was best to do nothing. Now was one of those moments. Spencer had left to tell Paige his decision, and she was alone in her office with her erotically charged paintings of tropical birds, and for a moment she pushed her chair away from her desk and simply tried to sit quietly. So: Spencer was calling off the press conference. And dropping the lawsuit.
She sipped her tea, the mug grasped tightly in both her hands, and allowed the warm porcelain rim to rest a long moment against her lower lip. She guessed the main reason she was doing nothing was because there was absolutely nothing she could do. It was over. There would be no surprise broadside on the hunting industry, at least not this week. Or this month. Or, barring some unforeseen accident or tragedy in the hunting season, this year.
One of the things she had learned from Spencer’s injury was that it helped to have a human casualty to point out the horrors that hunting inflicted on animals. Spencer had put a human face on a bullet wound. On what it felt like to be mistaken for a deer and then shot.
In theory, it didn’t require so very much imagination to understand that sort of pain, now did it? As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country, an uncompromising extremist without any patience. Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn’t accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.
The press conference would have been a real eye-opener.
Still, the story would get out. Maybe not with the orgiastic fanfare she once had contemplated. But already the word was traveling among their friends in the animal rights community that Spencer McCullough had been shot. The story had been on the street ever since Spencer had returned to work in the middle of the month and begun to return people’s calls. We are a litigious society, she thought with bemusement, and there is little we like more than a good courtroom drama.
And Charlotte, apparently, was a wondrous little drama queen. She would have been sensational. Nevertheless, Dominique had to admit that she was relieved for the girl. She was disappointed for her group and the animals they represented, but she was sincerely happy for the girl.
She stood up, stretched, and went to try to cheer up Spencer’s young minions—an admittedly uncharacteristic gesture, but one that she told herself she had to consider more frequently—reassuring them that although this press conference was off, there would be others.
There would always, alas, be others.
THAT AFTERNOON Adirondack’s lawyer had sounded predictably mulish when he’d first taken Paige’s call, presuming—with cause, Paige readily admitted to herself—that she was phoning to torment him with still more conjecture about how a jury would respond to the presence of a traumatized thirteen-year-old girl on a witness stand.
But once he understood why she was actually calling, she could hear in his voice the way his eyes must have widened and how he couldn’t wait to finish their conversation—as if this good news might evaporate if he stayed on the line a second longer than necessary, or feared he might say the wrong thing and somehow cause this great gift to be taken back. He wanted to tell his boss. And his boss’s boss. And anyone in the manufacturing headquarters of the Adirondack Rifle Company who would listen.
Perhaps he would take credit for this change of heart on the part of Spencer McCullough and his counsel. Perhaps he would concoct a reason why Spencer McCullough and his animal rights nutballs had decided suddenly to slink silently into the night.
She really didn’t care.
She felt sunken, deflated, a little sick with sadness. It wasn’t just about the money, though lately whenever she had pondered the money that might have been theirs, she had had to breathe in slowly and deeply through her nose to calm herself, as if she were a . . . a hunter. A hunter about to squeeze a trigger. Now, the money that seemed once to demand nothing but patience and journeyman competence had vanished. Vanished completely.
And, yes, she felt bad for Keenan and Randy and Dominique.
But mostly the sorrow that tugged at her now was the result of those claws and paws and hooves, all abused, that surrounded her. That surrounded them all.
So tomorrow it wouldn’t be deer. It might be dolphins or whales, elephants—the ones who were shot in the wild or the ones who were beaten in the circus—or mink. It might be the hogs who were driven up the chutes to be clubbed to their death. It might be cattle. It might be the monkeys with their wondrous brains—gray matter perhaps fully conscious of the fact that the virus these humans had injected into their blood was slowly killing them—or the rabbits blinded by cosmetic companies. It might be the whole arks of creatures we were either endangering with our gluttony for trophies or breeding for no other reason than our insatiable desire for meat.
The litany was endless.
So what if it wasn’t the deer’s turn? It was inevitable their day would come. Somewhere out there was another John Seton. Good God, the woods were full of them.
Suddenly, her eyes were watering and she was unable to blink back her tears.
CHARLOTTE GUESSED instantly that the person leaning against the lockers twenty or twenty-five yards down the corridor was a reporter. She was her mother’s age but Charlotte knew that she wasn’t a teacher and nothing about her signaled parent. She was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and she had an attaché strapped over her shoulder. Her hair was the color of honey and it fell to her shoulders.
Given the kind of day that she’d had—a day that had begun ten hours ago with her parents trying to separate and then (much to her own astonishment) her fessing up to the marijuana—Charlotte briefly considered turning tail and running back into the auditorium, where a couple of kids from rehearsal and her drama teacher were still hanging out. She was supposed to meet her mom in her mom’s classroom, but this woman was a roadblock between the two of them.
Before she could do anything, however, before she could either retreat or plow ahead, the woman saw her. The reporter, assuming that was indeed what she was, offered a small wave and then started to march down the hall toward her.
She stood up a little taller, not that she believed that her height—such as it was—was going to help her much now, and waited.
“I’ll bet you’re Charlotte McCullough. My name is Lorelea. Lorelea Roberts.” She stuck out her hand, and Charlotte took it. “I’m with the Times. I’m a writer.”
“I had a feeling.”
The woman smiled. “Can we talk?”
Reflexively, before she could stop herself, she glanced back toward the auditorium, hoping someone was emerging who could rescue her. But there was no sign of any help in that direction.
“I heard there was going to be a press conference tomorrow,” the woman continued, “but then it was canceled.”
“Really?” She hoped she sounded surprised, though after she spoke she honestly wasn’t sure what was supposed to have surprised her: the fact there had once been a press conference scheduled or that it had been canceled.
“It was going to be tomorrow afternoon. At some law firm. Your father’s law firm, I presume. True?”
She nodded, and as she moved her head she feared that already she had revealed too much.
“Ah, but then it was canceled.”
“I should go meet my mom,” she said quickly. “I’m supposed to catch up with her in, like, five minutes.”
“You’re meeting her in her classroom, I bet.”
“Yes.”
“Then can I have just a few of those minutes? Please? When we’re done, I could walk you to your mom and ask her a couple of questions, too. The truth is, I already have my story, and I just want to confirm the facts. That’s all. I won’t ask you anything I don’t already know, I promise. I just want to do what I can to get it right.”
“You already know what happened?”
“Uh-huh. Absolutely. I’ve talked to a lot of your father’s friends in the animal rights community—folks he’s spoken with since he got back to work. And I’ve connected with a number of people in New Hampshire.”
“Have you spoken to my father?”
“No, but I’m trying.”
Charlotte swallowed hard and tried to think. She made a production of switching her backpack from her left shoulder to her right to give herself time, because the disparate strands of an idea were starting to coalesce in her mind. Her dad had wanted a press conference because he was pissed off at the way hunters blasted a bazillion deer a year. Well, the press conference may have been off, but this Lorelea Roberts seemed nice enough. And very professional. Perhaps, she reasoned, she could use this interview to say some of the things her father would have wanted said if the event had gone forward as planned. Given her unfortunate history with firearms, she guessed she was in about as good a position as anyone to talk about the evils of guns. And she’d certainly grown up around her share of animal rights propaganda, so some of it had to have registered.
At the very least, she could make the point that, clearly, it hurt like heck to be shot.
Besides, she wouldn’t be telling this lady anything she didn’t know. Hadn’t the woman said that she already had the full story and was just checking her facts?
“So, what do you think?” Lorelea was asking, her voice a low, seductive, almost conspiratorial whisper. “Can you give me four minutes?”
“Okay,” she agreed slowly. She had the sense this could be a huge mistake if she weren’t smart. She’d have to play this one carefully.
“Good. Thank you,” the reporter said, instantly pulling a pocket-sized digital recorder from her windbreaker pocket as she spoke and clicking a button on its side. “This happened on July 31?”
“I guess so.”
“A Saturday?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought you were shooting at a deer?”
She started to nod and then caught herself. She saw the trap: If she said she was shooting at a deer, the newspaper would have the daughter of a senior FERAL executive taking a potshot at a wild animal. That would do no one any good. And so instead she changed direction and answered (and she could almost see how proud of her Father would be), “I didn’t know the gun was loaded. It was one of those horrible mistakes that, like, just happens.”
“Why were you even holding the gun?”
“Curiosity, I guess. I mean, the thing is, you saw the damage it caused. My dad practically lost his arm. He was nearly killed! That’s what a gun can do. That’s what a gun does to all those deer—to any animal. Hunting is just the most gross thing. And it’s not a sport. Please. What chance does a deer have against something like that? Like none, that’s how much. Zip, zero, nada. And my dad is in constant pain,” she said, and behind the reporter she saw her mother and the headmaster stomping down the hall, but she was on a roll and she didn’t care. This was a stage, she was discovering, she could handle.
Moreover—and this was a point that mattered to her—she was doing this for her dad.
“How does that make you feel?”
“I feel terrible, of course. And that’s the lesson here,” she said, as her mother and Mr. Holland surrounded Lorelea Roberts. “We are inflicting a lot of pain on a lot of animals. And what for? Do we need deerskins for clothing anymore? I don’t think so. Do we need to eat deer meat? No way. I mean, my parents’ freezer at home has got all kinds of imitation meat that tastes just fine. They even make imitation chicken fingers now, and—as we all know—chickens don’t even have fingers. Am I making sense?”
“You’ll have to leave,” Mr. Holland snapped, unwilling to hide his annoyance with the reporter. Normally, he was a pretty good-natured guy, especially since her mom was one of his teachers. “You didn’t check in at the front office and—”
“I’m an alumna,” the reporter said, smiling. “My mother is an alumna. My grandmother was an alumna. Lorelea Roberts.” Now she offered her hand to Mr. Holland. “You arrived five or six years after I graduated, but I’ve read in the alumnae magazine about the terrific work you’re doing here. I’m sorry we haven’t met.”
“You still should have checked in at the office, Ms. Roberts.”
She spread her hands palms up in a gesture that was a little like an apology and a lot like a dismissal. Charlotte saw the eyes of the other two adults land squarely on the small recorder.
“And you have to turn that thing off,” her mother said. “Right this second.”
“No, it’s okay,” she told her mom, surprising herself.
“Charlotte?”
“Really, I know what I’m doing and I know what I want to say,” she went on. Then she reached for Lorelea’s hand with the recorder and actually steered it toward her face. “There’s one more thing I want to add. Actually, it’s two. Can I?”
She could tell that her mother and the headmaster wanted to stop her, but either they didn’t want to make a scene in front of this reporter—who happened to be what Grandmother Seton liked to call a Brearley girl herself—or they trusted her just enough that they were going to let her plow ahead. When they remained silent, Lorelea said to her, “Looks to me like you’re good to go.”
“Okay, here we are. I think the company that made the gun should make it really obvious when the darn thing is loaded. It would have been nice to know, thank you very much, that there was a bullet in the rifle when I picked it up. Second, I made a huge mistake that night, the biggest one I will ever make in my life. At least I hope it was the worst mistake: I hate to think what worse shi—” She caught herself before she had finished the word, then resumed as if nothing had happened, “Anyway, I love my dad. I love him a ton. I would give anything in the world to be able to go back in time and give him back his right arm. Okay?”
Lorelea looked at her and seemed to be considering this. Then she nodded and clicked off the recorder.
“Good. Let’s go home, Mom,” she said, taking her mother’s long fingers in hers. With her free hand she gave the headmaster a small salute and then walked with her mother down the hall. Three words formed in her head in the almost old-fashioned courier font from her Secret Garden script, and the image in her mind made her smile:
Exit, stage right.
THAT EVENING Nan Seton had dinner alone with her dog in her dining room. Across the wide expanse of park the three McCulloughs ate with their new dog, the cats watching warily from different perches on a living room couch. Far to the north the Setons ate at an Italian restaurant near the airport in South Burlington: Sara and Willow and baby Patrick had met John there, and they all had agreed they were far too hungry to wait till they were home to dine. Patrick ate Cheerios one by one from a restaurant high chair and sucked on a bottle of milk.
None of the Setons or the McCulloughs was feeling particularly celebratory, but they all felt relieved.
Three hundred miles apart the grown men both brought up the missing casing, and each time their wives told them—gently—to drop it. Just shut up (please) and drop it.
The two girls thought of the vegetable garden in New Hampshire, and—again, similarly—hoped their parents would not get the notion into their midlife-addled brains that it could possibly be worth the effort to try once again next year. Charlotte liked the gardens the students were building for her stage play, especially the hedges. They were constructed entirely from green paper cocktail napkins and walls of mesh screen. They looked real enough, and they demanded no serious care.
But the girls also knew instinctively that they would never be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother again. It wasn’t that Grandmother couldn’t manage them: Good Lord, she probably managed them better than their own parents. Rather, it was their sense that their parents, pure and simple, were going to want them with them. Not because of their dalliance with underage drinking and dope, but because they loved them and did the best that they could.
This attention might grow tiring. Still, it was reassuring.
Some of the people ate meat that evening and some did not, but those who did were aware of the flesh on their plates. They told themselves, however, that there was enough in their small worlds about which they could feel guilty—myriad, endless failings and whole catalogs of disappointments they heaped on others—and so they chewed and smiled and swallowed.
And Spencer, at least for the moment, looked the other way. He looked only at his wife and his daughter, grateful, grasping his Good Grips easy-to-hold fork, and hoisted chickpeas and artichoke hearts across the great divide that separated his dinner plate from his mouth.
THE GIRLS WERE CORRECT when they surmised they would never again be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother: That night the old woman died. Even so vigorous a heart was not immune to the unsubtle havoc wrought by time. Besides, some hearts are better than others, and though Nan’s was generous, it was weak. Had she not been so vigorous, she might have died a decade sooner. And though it would have been simpler for everyone if she had lived another five years—even five months—she lasted just long enough. She made it by hours. The boys had reconciled in the morning, and she passed away in her sleep a mere half spin of the Earth later. And so while John and Catherine and Spencer were devastated, they were devastated together. Sara helped them all, the therapist in her surprised by the depth of her own sadness, as did Nan’s granddaughters. The girls’ presence was comforting, because they seemed so very grown up.
Nan died dreaming of a woodpecker in one of the trees that ringed her house, the drumming in actuality the last beats of her heart before it spasmed, then stopped. The sudden spike of pain woke her body, but Nan was never conscious of what the pain was or that she was dying. Her eyes opened reflexively, then shut, and she was gone. It was all very similar to the way her friend Walter Durnip had died in the country that summer, except she had her dog with her at the end instead of her spouse.
The animal, much to everyone’s surprise, actually outlived her. He spent his last days with the Setons of Vermont.
Nan was buried in the cemetery in New Hampshire, with a service beforehand at the homestead. The afternoon was raw but bearable, and the family stood together with Nan’s friends near the dead stalks of the cutting garden, the rented trellis exactly the one Sara had seen in her mind when the days had been long in July. Then they all sang a hymn and went out—but they sang only one, and it was short.