Before You Know Kindness (40 page)

“I just don’t see why it will be relevant,” Paige was saying in response to his concern. His office didn’t have the sort of small round conference table that Dominique’s had, though this was because he liked the way his massive mission desk made everyone with whom he met look small and inconsequential. Right now Paige and Spencer were sitting across from him in two straight-back mission chairs.

“It will be relevant because they are going to want to know why John couldn’t extract the bullet,” he told her, referring to the writers and reporters who they hoped would be at the press conference next week.

“And I’ll tell them we delivered the gun to the lab,” she answered.

He glanced at Spencer, who was looking down at the fingers on his right hand. His arm was still in that sling, and since his return Keenan hadn’t seen him make any effort to take a single note with his left. Hadn’t even seen him pick up a pen. Keenan wasn’t completely sure he was listening now, or—if he was—whether he was following the nuances of their conversation. It was as if he’d been shot in the head, not the shoulder. He was so placid. So yielding. So serene. Keenan wondered if this was the result of his painkillers or whether the ache in his shoulder and back simply precluded him from concentrating on anything outside his body. Either way, this was a different Spencer from the one who had left for New Hampshire at the end of July, and Keenan wasn’t sure what he thought of him. The fellow was certainly more likable. But he wasn’t especially helpful. While the old Spencer would have had strong opinions on what they should and should not say at the press conference, this new one hadn’t offered more than a sentence or two in the last fifteen minutes.

Keenan decided that he didn’t even like his associate’s new beard. He understood why Spencer was growing it, but the sad fact was that it made him look a little dim: He resembled the cavemen Keenan saw going to Ranger ice-hockey games at nearby Madison Square Garden, the beefy, lumpish, ancient-looking hominoids who painted their chests red and blue and then took off their shirts for the cameras. This troubled Keenan for a great many reasons, though the foremost right now was the reality that in four days Spencer was going to be the focal point of a press conference.

“If that’s all you tell them,” he said, directing his response at both the other lawyer and Spencer so he could see if there was anyone home behind those whiskers, “then once the gun’s fundamental soundness is revealed—as it will be as soon as Adirondack inspects it—we will lose a sizable measure of our credibility and our message will be undermined. People will not be listening to what we have to say about hunting if they believe the legs have been cut away from beneath Spencer’s lawsuit. If the lawsuit appears groundless, we have no forum.”

“I’m not going to say the rifle didn’t function the way it was meant to. We’re contending, pure and simple, that Adirondack has been manufacturing a dangerous product because a bullet remains in the chamber once you unload the magazine. If the extractor had been defective, that would have been a nice bonus—nothing more, nothing less.”

“That isn’t my point.”

“What
is
your point, Keenan?”

“I believe it is in your client’s interest to acknowledge upfront—next Tuesday—that Mr. Seton’s weapon worked perfectly. We need to be the first to say it performed exactly as it was designed to, so reporters do not misconstrue what we are claiming and get it into their deadline-obsessed heads that we’re implying the rifle was in any way defective. We simply cannot allow Adirondack to trump us in the media in a week or a month or whenever with the announcement that the gun was inspected and no mechanical defects were discovered.”

“The gun worked?” It was Spencer, looking up finally from his useless right fingers.

“Spencer,” Paige said, smiling gently at her client, “haven’t you heard a word we’ve been saying? Haven’t you been listening?”

“I guess the reality only hit me just now.”

“Yes,” Keenan said, “the gun worked.” He couldn’t imagine how the hell they were going to put this guy on the dais in a couple of days.

“But we’re not going to say that it didn’t work,” Paige added. “Our point all along—”

“If the gun worked, then why couldn’t my brother-in-law get the bullet out?”

“That’s exactly the question we need to answer,” Keenan said.

“He’d been getting the bullets out for two weeks. Probably more when you factor in the time he spent in his hunter safety courses,” Spencer continued.

“We can ask the lab to look into that,” Paige said. “But I’m sure it was just your brother-in-law’s unfamiliarity with the gun.”

“My brother-in-law’s a pretty sharp guy. The hunting is appalling, of course. But he’s not stupid.”

“No, of course he’s not,” Paige said, though Keenan could tell that she didn’t believe that for a minute. “But it may just be that he didn’t know how to unload the weapon—which, given its apparent complexity and the fact you have to do two things to unload it, seems plausible enough to me.”

“People who are a lot less capable than John do it successfully every day.”

Keenan immediately sat forward. “That, Spencer, is a sentence you need to divest yourself of instantly. Do you understand? Expurgate that very thought from your mind this very second. Please.”

“Oh, Keenan, I won’t say that on Tuesday. I’m just telling you here in the privacy of this office that I agree with you: It’s something we need to understand.” Then he placed his left hand on the front of the wide desk and pushed himself to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Paige asked. She sounded alarmed.

“To get a dog. I was going to wait till Monday, but if I bring her home today my family will get to spend the weekend bonding with her.”

“What? You can’t get a dog now,” she said, a slight tremor of panic in her voice. Keenan guessed she was afraid that her client—near catatonic for the vast majority of their meeting, and then suddenly sharp but oblivious to the party line for the rest—was losing his mind.

“Why?”

She looked at her watch. “Because it’s Friday morning.”

“That’s not a reason why I can’t get a dog, Paige. People all over the world get dogs on Friday mornings.”

“I meant we still have work to do.”

He paused in the doorway and smiled. “I think you and Keenan do. But I’m all set. I know my lines for Tuesday.”

“Do you?”

He nodded.

“So you’re just leaving to go get a . . . a companion animal?”

“No, I’m just leaving to go get a pet: a creature that will be completely dependent on my family for its food and its shelter.”

“Fine, then: You’re just leaving to go get a pet?”

“That idea really disturbs you, doesn’t it?”

“It’s just . . . weird.”

“Would it make the Puritan inside you more content if I got the dog later today?”

“Yes!”

Keenan was surprised at the enthusiasm in Paige’s voice. Apparently, she’d never seen a client excuse himself from a meeting with her to go get a dog.

“Okay, then. I’ll tell Randy we’re getting the dog later—her schedule permitting.”

“And then you’ll come back here?”

“No. I have plenty of other things to do. We have a Granola Girl on
Howard Stern
next week, and I want to make sure she knows what she’s in for—and that she doesn’t have to take her top off, no matter how many goldfish he threatens to kill if she doesn’t. And Joan’s ‘Don’t Gobble the Gobbler’ campaign needs a little work: It sounds like we disapprove of Thanksgiving, and not just eating turkey. And Dominique’s holiday fund-raising letter is pretty extreme. And you know what? Even if none of the projects on my list interests me this morning, I think I could entertain myself just fine by screwing around with my new left-handed keyboard and mouse.” When he was finished speaking he gave them a small wave and started down the corridor to his office.

After a moment Paige asked, her voice barely above a whisper, “Do you think he’s stable? He just went from a near stupor to this zeal for some dog.”

“It’s for his daughter. The dog. It’s a belated birthday present.”

“Keenan?”

“Yes?”

“I’m worried about him. I’m worried about his health.”

“You?”

“I know. I’m not just worried about his behavior at the press conference. I’m worried about whatever’s going on inside his head. He really does seem . . .”

“Different.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever happens, we have to make sure that we get a decent settlement out of Adirondack. He—his family—might really need one.”

“Well, then. Let us be certain we do two things. Let us make it absolutely clear at the press conference next Tuesday that Spencer’s lawsuit in no way rests on a malfunctioning firearm: We must say crisply and without reservation that the gun worked exactly as Adirondack designed it. Second, let us be certain that we have an explanation for John Seton’s inability to extricate that final cartridge from the chamber. Are we in agreement?”

She inhaled deeply, and he thought he detected a slight shudder of real humanity inside the fortress she built from René Lezard pinstripes and a coiffure from Richard Stein.

“We are,” she said, and he allowed himself a small smile.

SHE TALKED ABOUT BREARLEY
and the musical she was going to be in, and she talked about being a single child. She sank deep into the cushions of the easy chair opposite Dr. Warwick and told her what she liked about her summers in New Hampshire and what she found burdensome and boring. She began with short answers, not because she was trying to be difficult but because there were moments when she honestly wasn’t sure what the correct responses were. The truth was that it never had been a big deal to have her mom in the school building with her, and more times than not she actually enjoyed the sensation. But her aunt Sara once told her how much she had disliked being the school secretary’s kid when she’d been growing up, and so Charlotte found herself wondering now what it meant that she wasn’t disturbed by the fact her mom taught at Brearley.

Likewise, she certainly had tried to find excuses not to work in her dad’s vegetable garden this summer (and everyone did seem to view it as Dad’s Vegetable Garden), but if she revealed this to her psychiatrist, would the woman presume she was so angry with her dad on a subconscious level that she’d shot him on purpose just so she could escape a little weeding? That was ridiculous. But she’d heard enough from her New York friends who were in therapy to know that grown-ups seemed to love to blame the subconscious and were thrilled when it could take the fall for their kids’ misbehavior.

And, she had to admit, she had no idea herself just how murky her subconscious might be when it came to her dad. Who could say what sort of ooze was deep in there, what kind of roiling animosity was festering in the gray matter behind her eyes? She loved the way he was there for her now—this week, this month—but this serious interest in her life was a new phenomenon.

No doubt about it: This conversation was a tightrope. She thought she had managed to keep her balance so far. Thank God, Dr. Warwick hadn’t ushered her over to the corner of the room with the dolls and the blocks and the trucks and subjected her to toy therapy. If this nightmare had occurred two or three years earlier, Charlotte guessed, she and the shrink might be on the floor right now dressing Barbies.

“Do you want to talk about what happened in New Hampshire?” the doctor was asking. Her voice was silken, soft. It reminded her of a female hypnotist she had once seen interviewed on the Discovery Channel.

“Sure.”

“Do you think about it often?”

“Every time I see my dad I think about it.”

“Because of his sling?”

“And his beard.”

“He didn’t use to have a beard?”

“No. It’s really hard for him to shave now, so he just stopped. His beard isn’t in all the way yet. But it’s getting there. It’s mostly black, but it’s got some white and some red in it, too. The red is really surprising, because he doesn’t have any red in his hair.”

“What do you think about when you see him?”

She considered this for a moment and didn’t say a word. Unlike many adults, silence didn’t seem to disturb Dr. Warwick. She just sat there and waited.

“Well, I think about how much he must hurt,” she said finally, both because she did think about the pain he was enduring and because this response seemed appropriate. She guessed it was what she was supposed to say.

“What else?”

“I think about how his life has changed. All the stuff he can’t do.”

“Is there a lot?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons. He’s right-handed. He can barely open a bottle of ketchup these days.”

The doctor rested her chin in her hand and smiled. Charlotte suddenly detected a trace of perfume and she recognized it from . . . from New Hampshire. It wasn’t a perfume that her mother or her aunt or Grandmother wore, that wasn’t why it was familiar. Rather, it was an aroma that reminded her of one of the flowers in the cutting garden they’d put in. The tall purple ones, she guessed, but she wasn’t positive. She wished she knew the plant’s name.

“Has that changed your relationship with him?”

“The fact he can’t open a bottle of ketchup?”

“That’s right.”

She shrugged. “Sure. I do a lot of stuff for him I never did before—stuff he would never have let me do before. At first, he thought he was going to be superindependent—despite the injury. Then he figured out he didn’t have a prayer. And so I tie his sneakers for him. I make his coffee for him. I don’t do the real personal stuff, like flossing his teeth and helping him get dressed and undressed. Mom does that. When he burnt the crap—excuse me—when he burnt the heck out of his hand, she was the one who kept putting the lotion on it. But I always feed the cats now—which is a real production, because of course we’re not a normal family that feeds the cats normal canned cat food. That has meat in it, so we can’t. It used to be that whoever happened to be in the kitchen would feed the kitties, but now it’s always Mom or me. And because Mom is so busy making sure that Dad’s zipper is up or something, I try to be the one to feed them. And that means getting down the vegan vegetable stew, the Foney Baloney, the seitan, and the vitamin supplements and then mixing them all together. And our cats are so finicky, we can’t mix up a huge batch ahead of time and then store it in the refrigerator. It has to be room temperature, which means opening a fresh can of the stew each and every time and then mushing in the other ingredients, including the Foney Baloney which
does
have to be refrigerated and so it really has to be blended into the canned stuff. It is only completely impossible to do it all with one hand. Mom just wants to start buying them Friskies or something to make our lives a little easier, but I know that isn’t what Dad wants, and so I figure I better be the cat chef for now.”