Before You Know Kindness Part 33

"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 h.e.l.l 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, 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. 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 ma.s.sive 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 gra.s.s 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. 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 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 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 rea.s.suring 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, Drink, she said to him in her mind. she said to him in her mind. Drink, drink. Drink, drink.

Thirty-one

On Monday morning, while he and Charlotte were taking Tanya for a walk before breakfast, he told her. The plan he and Catherine had agreed on the night before was that he would break the news to their daughter and then leave early for work so she and Charlotte could discuss Mom and Dad's immediate plans before heading across town to Brearley. They'd considered telling her together, but it was clear to them both that they'd end up squabbling if they tried to work as a tag team on this one. He guessed he could have been more eloquent (or, perhaps, more a.s.sertive) in his defense when he and Catherine had argued, though in hindsight it really hadn't been much of an argument. They hadn't discussed her ultimatum at all since she had presented it to him at the Cloisters. He'd thought about it, he'd thought about it all the time. But mostly it had just exhausted him. He felt simultaneously defensive, convinced that she didn't appreciate how hard he'd been trying lately, and disappointed in himself that it had taken him so long to understand that his self-absorption was gnawing away at their marriage. His life, it was clear, was now completely unraveling.

"What have you decided?" she'd asked simply when they both were in bed Sunday night.

"About?"

"Please. The press conference."

"It really has come down to that, hasn't it? Just that one...thing?" He was too tired to say more. He'd spent most of Sat.u.r.day afternoon and all of Sunday numbed by the realization that his wife wanted to leave him. He felt sorry for himself (I am crippled and in pain and my wife is leaving me), (I am crippled and in pain and my wife is leaving me), but it had been so obvious in hindsight that his marriage was trending this way that he wasn't surprised. Just fatigued. but it had been so obvious in hindsight that his marriage was trending this way that he wasn't surprised. Just fatigued.

"That one thing is a gauge of where we are-and where we're going."

"It will be fine, you know. The press conference. You can trust me. I know what I'm doing."

"You're bringing needless attention and ridicule down on our daughter and on my brother. That's what you're doing."

"No, I-"

"Yes, Spencer. That's all there is to it."

Maybe if she'd said something less adamant he would have been less stubborn. Maybe if she hadn't interrupted him he would have said something else. Who knew? Certainly he didn't. "Well, I can't cancel it," he told her in response. "Not now. It's far too late for that."

"You can cancel it. Absolutely you can. But you won't."

"Catherine-"

"No. I told you how I feel," she'd said, and she had actually climbed out of bed that moment, something she rarely did once she was settled under the sheets, and pulled out her suitcase from the back of the walk-in closet.

"You're going to pack now?" he'd murmured.

"I'm going to get a few things ready, yes. Enough to tide me over for a few days across town. Tomorrow I'll need to help Charlotte gather her things, and so I might not be able to focus on my needs."

"Your needs," he had repeated, but that was as close as he'd come to saying something hostile.

Now he watched his daughter hold Tanya back as they started east down Eighty-fifth Street, the road still in shadow and quiet since it wasn't quite 7 a.m. The air was chilly, and he was wearing his windbreaker in his usual fas.h.i.+on: His left arm was through the sleeve, but the right side of the jacket was clipped to his s.h.i.+rt as if it were an opera cape. He himself, of course, hadn't done the careful work with the safety pin: Charlotte had. He'd tried and failed.

"Your mother and I made a decision about something last night," he said once they were well beyond their building's front awning. He noticed she no longer wore the scarves that had been a crucial part of her accessorization last year. Instead, this fall she seemed to be wearing the most simple and conservative headbands she owned. He guessed this was another element in her transformation into Mary Lennox. A part of him liked this new child a lot, but he also worried that she was taking it all a bit too seriously. Then, precisely because he himself was taking her accomplishment so seriously-and the opportunity it had presented him to be with her-he wondered how he would be able to run her lines with her daily. She was doing well, but the kid seemed to be on stage practically every minute of the musical: They still had a ways to go.

"About what?"

"Well, we disagree about the press conference this week, and she thinks it would be best if we spent a little time apart-"

"You're separating?" She stopped so suddenly that the leash went tight as a clothesline and poor Tanya was yanked to a halt.

"I don't know if I'd say that exactly. Your mother simply thinks it would be best while we iron things out if you two moved across town to your grandmother's. But I really don't know if I'd call it a separation, and there's no reason to think all this could ever end in divorce," he said, not happy with his obvious lies but convinced it was better to ease his daughter into this-break the bad news a little at a time over the course of weeks-than drop it all like a fireplace andiron on her foot.

"You two..." she said, looking at him with eyes that had grown thin with rage. Tanya squatted and peed, half on and half off the sidewalk.

"Us two..."

"You two are so selfis.h.!.+ Do you ever think of anyone but yourselves?"

He restrained his initial instinct to remind her that she couldn't speak to either of her parents that way and responded instead in his most measured tone, "Your mother has recommended we do this precisely because she is thinking of you. She's worried that I am going to lose control of this press conference tomorrow, and you'll be embarra.s.sed."

"So she thinks the solution is to move me to Grandmother's? Well, I'm not going."

She turned and allowed the dog to pull her quickly down the street. He scampered to catch up, and once he was beside her tried to decide whether he should simply allow her to vent or tell her firmly why this was the best thing for her. The problem was that he himself didn't believe this was the best thing for her. And, speaking selfishly (Good Lord, is she right?), (Good Lord, is she right?), he did want her with him. They were having more fun together this month than they'd ever had when he was healthy. he did want her with him. They were having more fun together this month than they'd ever had when he was healthy.

"It just doesn't make any sense," she continued. "First of all, you can't live in the apartment alone. Who would feed the cats? Who would feed you? You'd all starve to death. I mean, you can't even open a can of Pepsi on your own. You couldn't even put on your windbreaker without my help."

"Oh, I'd get by," he said, though he honestly wasn't sure that he would.

"No, you wouldn't. You still need people-a lot. And that's only one of the reasons why this idea is so dumb. We both know that bringing Tanya across town wouldn't be fair to Grandmother's dog. Not at his age. And it probably wouldn't be fair to Tanya, either. She's just starting to get used to our apartment."

She was looking straight ahead, but he thought he detected a slight quiver in her voice.

"And then there's me. I don't want to go there, period. It's not that I don't love Grandmother, because obviously I do. I mean, I stay with her part of every summer, don't I?"

"Your mother and I thought you liked going to New Hamps.h.i.+re!"

"I like it fine. But I don't want to live in her mausoleum of an apartment this fall. Especially not with the play coming up in November. Don't I have enough to deal with as it is?"

He nodded, more to himself than to her because she was watching Tanya sniff at the side of a building as they walked. "So what would you propose?" he asked.

"I'm not worried about this press conference. What are people going to find out? That I shot you by accident? Well, duh. Like every single person at Brearley and every single person in the apartment building already knows that. I screwed up," she said, and-there it was-he heard the tremor in her voice grow into a small sob and when he turned toward her he saw she was starting to cry. Instantly he knelt before her, a sudden ache coursing up and down his side because he had moved too quickly, and he used his one good hand like a football player to hold her. Grabbed her around her waist and brought her to him.

"I screwed up and I shot you," she said again, crying fully now. "Fine. Well, now I'm not going to leave you alone. I don't care what Mom says, I'm not going. She can go if she wants, but I'm not leaving-and no one can make me."

He held her as close as he could, even though the pressure against his sling-cradled arm was causing him literal spasms of pain, and the dog was resting her paws on his knees-he was poised like a baseball catcher, and the ledge of his legs was too tempting for Tanya to resist. The pain was considerable, but the real issues were that his daughter was crying, a response that he'd certainly thought possible, and that she was refusing to leave him, a notion he hadn't even considered.

Suddenly, despite the fact they were on the corner of Columbus and Eighty-fifth, his eyes were tearing, too.