Before You Know Kindness (22 page)

“Really, nothing? Have you eaten anything at all today?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You still should eat.”

“I don’t know. Grandmother probably would be afraid if I ate now it would spoil my dinner. She’d want me to wait.”

“I think most rules are off these days. If you want something, I’d be happy to bring it out to you. Some good bread and jam? A banana?”

She seemed to consider the notion before rejecting it. “No. But thank you, Aunt Sara. I think I’ll just wait till dinner.”

Her mother-in-law’s dog ambled around the corner and up the steps onto the porch. He smelled of the fields in which he’d been wandering, an aroma that was sweet and clean. Abstractedly, Charlotte dangled one of her hands and rubbed the top of his head when he nuzzled her fingers.

Finally, in a voice as neutral as Sara could make it, she turned to the subject that had brought her to her niece in the first place: “You know your father isn’t mad at you. Don’t you?”

The girl pressed the side of her face deep into the vinyl chaise pad and pulled the edge of the quilt up to her chin. “That only makes me feel worse. I wish he’d get pissed at me. I mean, I’m sure pissed at myself.”

“Oh, he doesn’t blame you at all.”

“Well, he should.”

“Not necessarily. Obviously you shouldn’t have been playing with the gun—”

“I know that!”

She continued placidly as if her niece hadn’t interrupted her. “But you didn’t know it was loaded. You didn’t mean to hurt anyone. You mustn’t lose sight of those two facts, Charlotte. We all make mistakes—small ones, huge ones—and I’ve always felt it’s important to distinguish between those mistakes we make when we mean to be hurtful and those we make simply because we’re human. This—what happened Saturday night—falls so completely into that latter category. You weren’t trying to be hurtful or to hurt anyone. Do you see the difference?”

The girl wiped at the corners of her eyes with her pinkies. She was a beautiful child, Sara thought, but almost overnight—less than four full days, really—her cheeks had begun to hollow. Despair, almost before their eyes, was making the girl appear sickly.

“Charlotte?”

“I see the difference.”

“I’m glad.”

“But that doesn’t make things any easier for anyone. Not for my dad, not for my mom. I really did it this time.”

She heard the lawn mower as Nan pushed the old machine back and forth in the side yard, the noise growing closer and then receding. It was actually louder than the ride-on mowers that most people used in the rural corners of Vermont in which she always had lived.

“But you’re still his daughter. And Catherine’s daughter. And my niece. No one loves you any less—”

“I love me less!”

“You shouldn’t feel that way. I understand why you would. Really, I do. But I wish you wouldn’t even think such a thing. Your father and mother will need you a lot in the coming months, and one of the best things you could do for them is to get on with your own life. You’re going to need someone to talk to—”

“I figured,” she said, a tiny twinge of disgust coloring her voice.

“You make seeing a therapist sound like, I don’t know, having to wear a burlap sack to a prom.”

“That would be kind of cool, actually.”

“I’m going to give your mom the name of someone I know in Manhattan. Her practice is on the East Side, not far from your school. She’s wonderful. And you can always call me, too. You know that, right?”

She offered a small, almost imperceptible nod.

“Make no mistake: It’s okay to be sad. I’d be worried about you if you weren’t. But don’t let it become incapacitating. You were going to audition for some show in September, right?”

“The Secret Garden,”
she murmured. “It’s a musical. Our school’s doing it at the end of November.”

“Your mother told me something about that. Well, you should still audition. Moping does no one any good.”

“God . . .”

“What?”

“You just sounded exactly like Grandmother.”

Abruptly she jerked upright. In her head she could indeed hear her mother-in-law saying precisely those words.
Moping does no one any good.
She saw her niece was looking at her and she wondered if it had something to do with the air or this house. Maybe vigorousness was contagious.

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. You did,” the girl said, and she raised her eyebrows. Sara had the distinct sense that on another day in another place—if they weren’t on this porch, perhaps, if Spencer weren’t in a hospital to the south—the two of them right now would be howling with laughter. She thought of what Willow had accomplished yesterday with the painted flies. Though her own imitation of Nan Seton had been completely unintentional, she was absolutely delighted with the gentle ripple of pleasure it had given her niece.

WHEN, YEARS LATER,
people spoke of the accident at Nan Seton’s house in Sugar Hill, Melissa Fearon—a.k.a. Missy Fearless—knew she would be a part of the story. A nameless footnote, perhaps, but she had been an EMT long enough to realize that her and Evan Seaver’s rescue of Spencer McCullough was a very impressive save.

That was not, however, why she went to the hospital to see him Wednesday afternoon. She felt no need to pat herself on the back. She drove to Hanover because she didn’t want her last memory of the man to be his glazed eyes and clammy skin and the way his shoulder the other night had been transformed into stew. She wanted instead to see him flipping the channels on the TV from his hospital bed with the remote. She wanted to watch him savoring the simple fact he was alive.

She had done this three times before in the past, each time after a scoop-and-run had been particularly gruesome (and the prospects for survival discouraging) but had learned in the following days that the patient was actually getting better.

Like Catherine, Missy was the sort of schoolteacher who didn’t trouble herself with her classroom and lesson plans until the second week in August, and so she spent most of the day gardening. She left for the hospital a little after four, confident that her husband, the manager of the Agway in Haverhill, wouldn’t mind if their dinner was a little late tonight. Roger Fearon was nothing if not flexible from his years of living with a part-time EMT. By the time she’d parked her car, gotten her visitor’s pass and wound her way through the labyrinthine corridors to Spencer’s room, it was close to five thirty. Nevertheless, she was surprised to find the room empty but for Spencer. She had expected the whole Seton clan would be present, that multigenerational throng she had seen Saturday night from the corners of her eyes while she was trying to prevent Spencer McCullough’s blood from spurting into the lupine like water from a garden hose.

It looked like Spencer was asleep, and so she reached into her purse for a pen and a piece of paper. She thought she would write him a note. From the doorway he appeared better than the other night, but that didn’t take much. The mere fact that the massive hole in his shoulder had been patched and he wasn’t hemorrhaging whole pints of blood was a sizable improvement.

“You looking for Paige?”

She glanced up and saw he had opened his eyes.

“I woke you. I’m so sorry.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“I was going to leave you a note.”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh.” She took a step farther into the room, but without his wife or his mother-in-law present, she felt as if she were intruding. She dropped the pen back into her purse and pulled the strap over her shoulder. “I was just going to write that I was glad to see you’re getting better.”

“You can come closer. I don’t bite. Lord, I don’t move. I don’t dare.” Though his voice was subdued—almost muted—she could sense right away a distinct scrappiness in every syllable. This guy was a fighter. It was probably a big reason why he was still alive in the first place.

“Honest: I don’t bite,” he murmured again, and so she strolled all the way into the room and stood at the foot of his bed.

“You’re looking for Paige?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know any Paige. I was coming to see you.”

“I thought you were looking for my lawyer.”

She didn’t like the sound of that: a lawyer. That couldn’t be good for the family. She understood that the gun belonged to John Seton, and she wondered if he was actually planning to sue his brother-in-law.

“Nope,” she said. “Just you.”

“Forgive me, please, but . . . do I know you?”

“I didn’t expect you’d remember me. I’m Melissa Fearon. I’m with Franconia Rescue. I’m an EMT.”

“God, you saved my life, didn’t you?” His voice was slightly more animated now, and she was pleased.

“I had help.”

“Well. Thank you. God. Thank you so much.”

She saw a line of flowers along the window and atop the dresser. Some had been sent by a florist, but others had been picked by whoever had brought them—especially the twin vases of pink and white phlox. The last thing she had been focused on at the Seton house Saturday night were the flowers in the garden, but she decided those probably came from Sugar Hill. Maybe the guy’s gun-toting daughter had cut them herself. Or that niece.

“You can sit on that other bed,” he said to her. “People use it like a couch.”

She agreed and pulled herself up onto the mattress. “How are you feeling today? You look pretty good.”

“I look better than”—he paused for a wince and then continued—“the last time you saw me. But I don’t look good.”

“I’ve seen much worse four days after an accident. Trust me. Have they told you when you go home?”

“Won’t be this week. Maybe early next week.”

She nodded. “How is everyone doing?”

“You mean my family?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’re worried. Upset.”

“I guess they were all here today.”

“They were. Catherine—my wife—just left. I’m supposed to be . . . resting now.”

“I should go, then. You
should
rest. I just wanted to check in.”

“Stay. Please. Today’s the first day I’ve really been able to talk.”

“Okay, then.”

“And I don’t want to nap. I don’t know which drugs do it, but my dreams are filled with . . . lobsters. Really big . . . lobsters. They’re nightmares. Complete and utter nightmares.”

“Do you not like lobsters?”

“I like them fine,” he said quietly.

“I love them. There used to be this restaurant on the road to the notch in Franconia. It’s closed now, but it was called the Steer by the Shore, and they had this baked stuffed lobster. You would have killed for it. They said the lobsters were one and a quarter pounds, but they always seemed bigger to me. Delicious. And the stuffing was this buttery, crackery—I know that’s not a word, but you get my drift, it was kind of like a Ritz—paste. It just melted in your mouth. The lobster, too. My husband and I used to go there at least two or three times during the summer, and we always ordered the baked stuffed lobster.”

She began to fear she was talking too much. The color was receding from Spencer’s face, visibly plummeting like the water line in the bathtub once the drain has been opened.

“You probably don’t have much of an appetite yet. I shouldn’t talk so much about food.”

“It
was
Ritz,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“The stuffing. That was the secret ingredient. Ritz crackers. Whole stuffing was nothing but Ritz crackers and margarine. And it wasn’t even very good margarine. It was the supermarket brand. One time I tried to spice it up with celery salt. The chef saw me, and I thought he was going to have a stroke. Made me throw”—there was that wince again, his nose crinkling up toward his eyes, and his forehead a series of furrows in a newly planted vegetable garden—“the whole batch away and start again.”

“You used to work there?”

“Yeah. I did,” he said. “You know, I never told anyone that.”

“You never told anyone that you used to work at the Steer by the Shore?”

“No. About the Ritz. I never told anyone that the secret ingredient in the stuffing was Ritz. It was all so important to them. The chef. The owners.”

“It was good!”

He grunted, a lone rumble of disgust from deep in his throat. “It was appalling. The stuffing, the lobsters . . .”

“You said you like lobsters!”

“I did. I didn’t say I liked to eat them.”

“What? You’re a vegetarian?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fish, too?”

“Anything with a parent.”

“I guess you don’t eat whatever venison your brother-in-law brings home in the fall. Personally, I don’t like venison. You’re not missing anything.”

“I agree. And as for my brother-in-law . . .” He sighed. “I am hoping this appalling interest of his is just . . . a phase. Temporary insanity.”

“Yeah, I guess I heard somewhere that he hasn’t been hunting very long,” she told him. She wanted to ask him how his daughter had gotten his brother-in-law’s gun in the first place or what she thought she was doing when she pulled the trigger on Saturday night. But then that part of her that was a mother—though both of her sons were grown men now in their twenties—and a teacher wanted to know something she decided was infinitely more important: She wanted to know how the child was feeling four days after the accident.

“So,” she said, drawing the vowel out into a rope as she tried to figure out how to begin, “what’s your daughter’s name?”

“Charlotte.”

“Charlotte McCullough. That sounds very regal.”

“Charlotte is many things . . . but regal is not among them.”

“She’s playful?”

“She’s . . . she wants to be a teenager.”

“How old is she?”

“Twelve. About to turn thirteen.”

“Then she’s there. Is she badly shaken by what she did?”

“
She
didn’t do anything!” he answered, and Missy noticed the way he almost hissed out the pronoun in his desire to make it clear that his daughter was not responsible for what had occurred.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I was only wondering how she was doing.”

“It’s my brother-in-law who should be shaken. It’s John Seton who has to live with this.”

She nodded because she didn’t want this intense man in the bed to get any more upset than he already was. But she didn’t completely agree with him. Although she was confident that Spencer’s brother-in-law felt enormous responsibility for what had occurred, she was also quite sure that his daughter was going to struggle with the fact she had nearly killed her father for a very long time. Probably forever.