Before You Know Kindness (27 page)

AT LUNCH THAT DAY
in the teachers’ lounge, Catherine finally asked Eric Miller exactly how old he was. It was a spontaneous question, triggered, she guessed, because she had just spoken to Spencer on the phone and heard that he’d thrown up in the cab and had to return home. She felt her husband’s setback acutely, experiencing not merely the disappointment he was enduring at their apartment across town but also the harrowing sense that her own life’s opportunities were continuing to dwindle. To herself (and only to herself) she could admit the truth: She, too, was trapped by her husband’s disability. Yes, she was back at school, and in the days immediately after the shooting she had seriously doubted such a thing would be possible. But there was a far bigger issue in her mind: She certainly had not admitted to Spencer that had he not been crippled by a bullet and nearly died, she would have told him she was dissatisfied with their marriage—with
him,
to be honest.

“Twenty-nine,” Eric said, after taking a sip from his bottled iced tea.

She nodded.

“Why?” he asked her, and even his eyes seemed to be laughing. He was sitting below the window, and the sun was pouring in on the back of his head and his hair seemed to shine like a freshly buffed pumpkin pine floor. Sometimes she thought his hair was only blond. Today she decided it had splashes of a red—not unlike her own hair—especially in his sideburns and the long, unruly swath of bang he had to keep pushing back off his forehead. This afternoon he looked more like a surfer than an English teacher. He had spent much of the summer on Nantucket, and his skin was the sort of deep tan she herself hadn’t had since she was a child and her mother was still oblivious to sunblock.

“I was just wondering,” she answered. “I didn’t think you’d hit thirty.”

He smiled. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Sometimes it’s nice to see a man who still has a little puppylike awkwardness. That hubris that’s really just optimism. Innocence. On the other hand, sometimes it’s also nice to see a man who’s a little more calm. Not wizened—but chastened, perhaps.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Is it good or bad that I haven’t reached thirty?”

“It isn’t either. It was just that I didn’t know.”

“Are you suggesting I’m puppylike?”

“Hah!”

“And if I were to ask you your age?”

“I’d tell you.”

“Okay: How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“No. Really?”

“Don’t try to flatter me. I know how old I look. And we both know that I have a daughter who turned thirteen last month.”

“You don’t look thirty-eight. Honest to God, if I met you in, say, a bar, and didn’t know Charlotte was your daughter, I would peg you for my age.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’m being completely sincere.”

“Any man who even tries to
peg
a woman’s age in a bar is completely incapable of sincerity.”

“Hey, you were the one who just admitted you were wondering about my age!”

“Because you’re a good teacher and I know you’re younger than I am. I was curious.”

“People get curious in bars, Catherine.”

They were alone at the moment, and suddenly she wanted them to be beyond this conversation about age before another teacher strolled in. As one certainly would. She wished she hadn’t asked him his age now in the first place, because it made her feel disloyal to Spencer. Sometimes she thought the only subject she should talk about was her husband: his disability, his pain, his attempts to regain a semblance of control over his life.

But it was hard. Often she wanted to talk about anything but his injury, especially if she was around people who knew about the way FERAL was going to make the lawsuit a cause célèbre. She never wanted to think about that, much less discuss it. It made her feel at once like a bad mother and a bad sister.

And so with an almost guilty quiver to her voice—guilty both because she hadn’t been speaking of Spencer sooner and because she was speaking of him now largely out of obligation—she brought up her husband. The transition was awkward, clunky. She guessed it was obvious to Eric that she was changing the subject because she didn’t want to flirt with him at the moment.

“Spencer tried going back to work today,” she said. “He didn’t make it.” And then she started describing for this tan younger man with a teacher’s playful smile the assortment of tools that Spencer had lined up on his bureau last night, and the hope that an item as small as a dressing stick or a button hook would give him these days.

“God,” Eric said simply when she was done. “What can I do?”

“Nothing.”

“Surely there’s something. Can I bring you guys dinner tomorrow night?”

“We don’t need dinner.”

“But you have to eat.”

“And you can cook? You?”

“Come on: Couldn’t you cook when you were twenty-nine?”

“I had been married for six years when I was twenty-nine.”

“Wow. You really did get married young.”

“Yes. I did,” she admitted, and then—concerned that her voice had lacked the angry defensiveness she had once felt whenever someone even hinted that she and Spencer may have married too young—she said quickly, “I was very fortunate. Some people have to wait half a lifetime to find a soul mate.”

He nodded. “And some people never do.”

“Indeed.”

They both were quiet for a moment, and then Eric continued, “So: dinner. How about I bring it by tomorrow night around seven?”

“People have been bringing us meals for the last couple of weeks. Neighbors in the building, our friends, people from FERAL. Since we got back from New Hampshire, I don’t think I’ve made dinner more than four or five times. Seriously: You don’t have to do this.”

“Ah, but I
get
to. There’s a difference. Okay? Is anyone bringing you dinner tomorrow night?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Good. Then I will. I won’t stay, but I’ll drop off a small feast—no animals, of course. Is dairy all right?”

“Not if you want Spencer to eat.”

“Very well, no cream sauces.”

“And no soup.”

“No soup?”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be pretty. Spencer has a very long way to go with his left hand.”

CATHERINE WAS ACTUALLY PLANNING
to play tennis this afternoon for the first time since the accident. She and her friend Angie Merullo were going to meet in the park and play an hour of singles. But once Catherine had heard that Spencer hadn’t made it to work she had called Angie and canceled and gone straight home after school. Charlotte would be a couple of hours behind her, because she had an information meeting about the autumn musical.

She got to the apartment soon after four and found Spencer sitting up in bed with Emma the cat on his legs. The cat glanced up at her when she entered the bedroom, then gazed back at Spencer. Whenever anyone in their house was ill, it was Emma who would seem most desirous of providing solace and comfort and warmth. She liked to sleep on the sick.

Spencer was wearing tennis shorts and what she presumed was the beige short-sleeved sport shirt he’d put on first thing in the morning, but then she remembered he’d thrown up in the cab and must have changed as soon as he’d returned home. The
New York Times
was a wad of crinkled papers on the floor by the bed. Before the accident, Spencer read the newspaper with meticulous care, and even on those days when she would read the paper after him she always found it looking as if it were fresh from the newsstand. No more. It was simply too difficult for him to fold the paper with only one hand.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she murmured, and she sat gently on the bed beside him.

He turned to her and sighed, but otherwise he didn’t say a word. His hair, she realized suddenly, had started going gray at the temples. There they were: white threads from a sewing box. Had this happened only this morning, or had it been changing throughout the summer and somehow she hadn’t noticed? He looked exhausted, and she wondered if he’d been doing his exercises. Nick wasn’t scheduled to be here today, but perhaps Spencer had called him and the therapist had had a free hour. Perhaps Spencer had done his reps on his own.

“You were doing your range-of-motions, weren’t you?” she said.

“No.”

“Nick wasn’t here?”

“It’s not his day.”

“I know. I just thought . . .”

“I’m too tired. And right now my shoulder hurts too much.”

She stroked his leg, because even now she was afraid to touch his back or his neck. She feared she would jostle him and cause him yet more pain.

“I saw you bought some of that cheddar-flavored soy cheese,” he said quietly. “Thank you. Around one thirty, I tried to grill some in a sandwich.”

“Good for you!”

He shook his head and said—his voice the sort of fatalistic monotone she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard from him—“Oh, it wasn’t good.” With his eyes he motioned down toward his right hand, still slung against his chest in its sling. The skin there was mottled with a series of deep red welts and watery blisters, and she saw that a line of the tawny fur along all four of his fingers was shriveled and black.

“Oh, God, Spencer,” she said, “let me get some lotion for that! Have you called the doctor?”

“It’s not that bad. In fact, I don’t feel a thing . . . obviously.”

“What happened?”

“I was leaning over the stove and I didn’t realize that my hand was resting along the edge of the frying pan. I only looked down when I smelled something burning. The hair had already curled up, and the skin may actually have been smoldering. I don’t know. It looked pretty nasty. I put cold water on it. At least I think it was cold. Who knows?”

“I think there’s some medicated lotion in the bathroom. It may be as old as Charlotte, but—”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“No, but we need to get something on it so it heals,” she said, and she carefully rose from the bed. “Some lotion or something. Let’s call the doctor.”

He breathed in deeply through his nose. “No, let’s not.”

“You’ve already called him?” she asked, a litany of names forming in her mind as she verbalized the question. Did she mean Dr. Tasker, the orthopedic and trauma surgeon they’d been referred to at Roosevelt, or Dr. Leeds, the cosmetic surgeon at Lenox Hill? Or did she mean Spencer’s primary care physician, Dr. Ives, the guy he’d been seeing for his physical exams and minor aches and pains ever since they’d moved back to Manhattan from Connecticut? She realized she wasn’t sure whom she had meant.

“No, I didn’t call anyone. And, please, let’s not bother. Okay? It’s a burn. It happens.”

“It just . . .”

“Yes?”

“It just looks so painful,” she murmured.

He took his index finger on his left hand and rubbed at the raw skin and the scorched follicles of hair. “Well, we both know that’s no longer an issue,” he said, and then she watched him do something he had begun to do with increasing frequency. He stopped touching the burn and brought his left hand before his face, no more than six or seven inches away, and he spread wide his fingers, palm toward him. And then he seemed to run his eyes over each finger, occasionally flexing one individually or curling all of them together as if they were petals on a flower that was closing for the night. Sometimes she wasn’t sure he was even conscious that he had developed this tic, and she’d considered asking him over the weekend why he did it. But she thought she understood. He was, pure and simple, amazed at the dexterity that he—most of us, she knew—always had taken for granted. He might not have anywhere near the control with his left hand that he once had with his right, but it was still an astonishing bit of machinery.

“Where’s Charlotte?” he asked, as he bent his left index finger toward him again and again, as if he were plunking a piano key.

“At school. Audition information meeting for
The Secret Garden
.” Her eyes were beginning to cross as she tried to look into his face through the cobweb of his fingers.

“Have you ever noticed how limited the ring finger is in comparison to the index finger?” he asked. “I’m not even sure it’s as helpful as the pinky.”

She looked down again at his burn. Some of the blisters looked particularly nasty: They could become infected and Spencer might never know until it was too late—though too late for what she wasn’t sure. Still, she nodded and then carefully rose from the bed. She decided she would go to the kitchen and call Dr. Ives, Spencer’s regular physician, and ask him what he thought Spencer should do.

Twenty

J
ohn and Sara and Willow had breakfast in silence—most of their meals were silent these days, unless Patrick was awake and felt the need to contribute. When they were finished, John stood, grabbed his attaché off the floor by the coatrack, and walked Willow to the end of their driveway. The bus stop was about fifty yards farther down the road. He kissed his daughter once on her forehead and then climbed into the Volvo (the one that would always hold for him his memories of an Adirondack rifle in the trunk), and turned the silver key in the ignition. He hadn’t spoken to Spencer since he and his family had left his mother’s house in Sugar Hill a month ago, and he guessed it might be years before they’d speak again. He glanced in the rearview mirror before starting to back the car from the driveway, and paused for a moment when he saw how bereaved and haggard the eyes were that gazed back at him from the glass.

HE WENT STRAIGHT
to the courthouse this morning, because his caseload today showed a welfare fraud, a pair of unrelated larcenies (one petty, one grand), an unlawful mischief, and a sexual assault on a minor. It was almost lunchtime now as he sat in the basement of the building in an eight-by-eight-foot room made almost entirely of cement blocks painted light yellow, listening to a twenty-three-year-old named Brady Simmons tell him across a thin table, “It’s a long story, see” (arguably the most common construction any of his clients ever made with five words), before launching into his explanation as to why he had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.

Abruptly his cell phone started to ring, and he saw by the number that it was his brother-in-law’s human attack dog of a lawyer. Paige Sutherland. She had been trying to reach him for days now to update him on her plans for the lawsuit and discuss how she’d want to prep him for the deposition later that autumn. He decided he might as well get it over with—agree, at least, to a date they could meet once the lawsuit was filed—and so he asked Simmons for a minute and rapped on the door for one of the guards to let him out.

“Hello, Paige,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his blazer for his Palm as he spoke.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” she said, and though her voice was sweet he detected the slight edge of chastisement.

“Oh, you know the drill,” he murmured. “A lot of clients who are, well, not as reliable as we might like.”

“No, actually I don’t know. The sorts of people I represent are extremely reliable.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, don’t take offense.”

He ignored her and tried to find a time on his calendar when he could subject himself to the torture of a morning or afternoon discussing his role in this disaster with her.

“I’ve left a couple messages for you on your voice mail,” she went on when he was quiet. “So I guess you know why I’m calling.”

“Yes, let’s get this over with.”

“Get this over with? You make it sound like you’re the one being sued! You make it sound like we’re not on the same side. You’re helping your brother-in-law by doing this. You’re helping to make a gun company take responsibility for—”

“Paige, please. My brother-in-law doesn’t even speak to me anymore. We haven’t said a single word to each other in five weeks. You know that.”

“Time heals all wounds—”

“Except Spencer’s.”

“That was exactly what I was thinking right after I said it! Too funny. Do you have representation yet? Why don’t I schedule a meeting through them? Really, we have so much to go over.”

“I . . . haven’t finalized my choice for a lawyer yet.”

“John, really. What would you do if one of your own clients were behaving this way?”

“My clients always behave this way.”

“It will be painless. Trust me.”

“I promise you: Reliving that night will be anything but painless. Maybe if you weren’t planning on making such a big deal about this in the media, I would—”

“It’s what Spencer wants.”

“That press conference? It’s not what my sister wants. Or what I believe is in the best interests of my niece.”

“First of all, it’s Spencer’s life we’re dealing with. He is the one who has to live with this trag—”

“We all have to live with this tragedy!”

“Well, yes, but some of you have two functioning arms to help you cope. Spencer doesn’t. And as for young Charlotte, well, Spencer is her father. You’re merely her uncle. I believe you should defer to his wishes. Don’t you?”

“If Spencer and I could just talk about this.”

“Spencer and I don’t make a practice of discussing your relationship, but as you yourself just pointed out, it’s pretty clear that he’s not quite ready to resume communications with you.”

He considered briefly asking her to give Spencer a message, but his brother-in-law wasn’t listening to his pleas through Catherine—the man’s own wife—so there was no reason to believe that Spencer would listen to whatever Paige said on his behalf.

He sighed so loudly on the phone that Paige murmured, “Oh, John, it’s not that bad,” but he had the distinct sense that she was smiling.

“Where do you want to do this? In New York or Vermont?” he asked.

“I thought we could do it in your neck of the woods. I’m going to be in New Hampshire the last week in September with the surgeons and those EMTs, and I could scoot over to Burlington on that Wednesday—the twenty-ninth. What does your schedule look like that day?”

“I don’t have to look at it to tell you that I can’t do a Wednesday. Not ever. Wednesday is the weekly calendar call, and—”

“And you have dozens of your little DWIs and pickpockets to parade before the judge. I understand.”

“Please do not demean—”

“People who drive drunk and pick other people’s pockets? Honestly, John, they don’t need me to demean them. They do a pretty good job of demeaning themselves. How about that Tuesday instead—the twenty-eighth?”

“Fine.”

“Ah, progress! Bless you, John Seton. How is midmorning? I could fly up on the first flight out of—”

“I have to go,” he said, not because he felt an overarching desire to return to a conversation with a young man who actually believed that he’d behaved responsibly (or, at least, not unreasonably) when he’d had consensual sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, but simply because he couldn’t stand to speak for another moment with Paige Sutherland.

“Get a lawyer!” he heard her shout into the cell phone, and he had the sense that she was going to add something more, but he was already pressing the small button with his thumb that ended their conversation.

A PARTNER IN SARA’S PRACTICE
had asked her once in August if her niece had begun to process why in reality she had shot her father.

“She shot him because she thought he was a deer,” Sara had answered simply, hoping that she hadn’t sounded defensive. The partner—a woman whose three teenage children behaved so outrageously that Sara had always considered this other woman’s parenting skills more than a little suspect—had merely nodded and smiled.

Most of the time, what Sara had told her partner was exactly what she believed: Charlotte indeed had presumed she was shooting a deer. That’s all there was to it. Sometimes, however, the idea that her vegetarian niece—the daughter of the communications director for FERAL—was either planning or pretending (who could ever know for sure?) to shoot a wild animal suggested to Sara that her niece might actually have some unresolved conflicts with her dad. And then she would have to admit to herself that this other woman in her practice, despite her apparent difficulties raising her own children, may have been onto something.

Now, as she and Willow drove from her daughter’s elementary school to ballet practice, the September sun highlighting the first orange leaves at the very tips of the sugar maples and the dying, knee-high remains of the cow corn, she asked the child the question that off and on had passed through her mind.

“Willow?” she began, and she turned down the volume on the radio. She was careful not to turn the radio off, because she did not want her daughter to view the conversation as ominous.

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you a question about your cousin?”

“Sure. What about her?”

“Oh, it’s nothing serious. I’ve just always wondered . . . I guess I’ve been curious . . . does Charlotte ever wish their family ate meat?”
There,
Sara thought to herself.
A perfectly innocuous opening.

“No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“I was just thinking about the accident.”

“Plenty of people are vegetarians. I don’t think it’s a big deal for anyone in the whole world except Grandmother.”

“Oh, I know. But her dad . . . Uncle Spencer . . . what he does for a living makes it all so . . . so public. That does make it a big deal.”

“Charlotte actually likes the taste of things like his awful Soy-garine.”

“Well, what about the other parts of her life? All the things that I know she doesn’t get to do because of Uncle Spencer?”

“You mean like the time we all went to Sea World, and she wasn’t allowed to come with us?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Maybe sometimes she misses that sort of thing. But I also think she’s kind of proud of her dad.”

“You do?”

“Oh, yeah. At least she used to be. She thought it was incredibly cool when he was on
The Today Show
a couple years ago. She’s into that sort of thing.”

“So she never gets angry at him . . .”

“At her dad? Oh, she does. But as far as I can tell, mostly she gets mad at her mom.”

“Yes, we have gotten to witness Catherine and Charlotte go at it over the years, haven’t we?”

“Sure have. And Charlotte and Grandmother in the summer.”

“And heaven knows all mothers and daughters can have pretty dicey relationships, especially when the daughter is an adolescent—or almost one,” she said. Then she added quickly, her voice light, “Now, don’t you get any ideas, Willow Seton.”

“I can’t be a brat?”

“I’d rather you weren’t.”

She glanced back after she spoke, and Willow seemed to be pondering seriously the notion that heretofore unchallenged behavioral boundaries might be worth exploring. When she returned her gaze to the road, she asked, “Do you think there’s anything in particular that Aunt Catherine does that might trigger all that anger in Charlotte? Anything specific she does around your cousin or your uncle? Or maybe just around other people?”

There was a long silence, so long that Sara was about to repeat the question. Finally: “Nope.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Mom? I just told you: No. And it’s not like Charlotte and Aunt Catherine spend their whole lives fighting.”

She wasn’t sure why, but she sensed there was something here that Willow wasn’t telling her about Aunt Catherine and Charlotte, the silence not so much the filing cards in the girl’s brain riffling for an example as it was the quiet of a child trying to avoid a potentially unpleasant conversation. But she knew also not to push the girl. The important thing, she decided, was that in Willow’s opinion Charlotte wasn’t harboring any special hostility toward her father.

Or, at least, she hadn’t been venting constantly to Willow that July and August.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead.” There was a twinge of exasperation in her daughter’s voice now.

“Actually, it’s something I need to tell you.”

“What?”

Initially Sara hadn’t planned on bringing this up for days, but then John had phoned her this morning with the news that he and Paige Sutherland had set a date to begin his preparation for his deposition. That meant they would have to start prepping Willow, too. And so Sara decided that she had better tell her that, like her father, soon enough she would have to start speaking to lawyers.

“You’ve heard your father use the term
deposition
before, right?”

“I guess.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“No. Not really.”

Carefully she pulled into the left lane to pass a lumbering manure spreader and waited until they were back on the right side of the road to continue. “It’s like an interview. But the person asking the questions is a lawyer instead of a reporter.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you’re supposed to tell the truth—just like a witness in a courtroom, you swear an oath—because the lawyer uses the information from the interview to try to figure out what happened at the scene of a . . . at an event. It’s not a big deal. We’ll go to someone’s office and we’ll—”

“I do not want to talk to a lawyer! No way!”

Only briefly was Sara surprised by how quickly Willow had determined where this conversation was heading. Her daughter was sharp, and she and John had never treated her like a baby: They’d tried always to respect her intellect and talk to her like a grown-up.

“Well—”

“No! I didn’t do anything but open the trunk to get Patrick’s diapers! How was I supposed to know there was a gun in there? And—”

“Willow—”

“And you know I told Charlotte to leave the gun alone! I told her not to touch it! I’ve told you that, I told the trooper guy that, I—”

Already Sara was braking to a stop in the patch of grass along the side of the road, grateful that the ground was flat and the farmer hadn’t put his fence too close to the asphalt.

“I’ve told anyone who will listen that! And now I’m done talking about that whole night, okay? I won’t talk to anyone anymore!”

She put the vehicle in park and turned around. “Willow? Are you finished?” she asked, her inflection, she hoped, playful and soft.

“I’m just telling you: I’m not taking any oaths and I’m not talking about that night with any lawyers.”

“A second ago you said you won’t talk about that night with anyone. Now I’m hearing it’s the presence of the lawyer that’s the deal breaker. Can you help me understand a little more why—”

“You’re using your therapist’s voice. I hate it when you use your therapist’s voice with me. I’m your daughter, not one of your patients!”

She considered offering Willow a small, sympathetic smile, but she feared if she did her daughter would see clearly parental condescension. The truth was that she
was
using her therapist’s voice. “Fair enough,” she said, evening her tone. “Tell me why you’re getting so upset about this, without—”