Before You Know Kindness (29 page)

Twenty-one

O
n Thursday afternoon Charlotte came home from school before her mother, radiant with the news that she had gotten one of the leads in the autumn musical. She was the only eighth-grader with a part—the only student, in fact, with a role who wasn’t at least in the ninth grade. She understood that she was going to play a ten-year-old girl surrounded by grown-ups, and so it helped that she was younger (and shorter) than the rest of the cast. Still, this was a real coup, and when she saw the cast list outside the drama teacher’s classroom at the end of the school day she’d raced down the Brearley corridors to her own mother’s room, demonstrating exactly the sort of unfettered enthusiasm that usually she disdained.

Now when she opened the front door to her family’s apartment across town, she was no less cheerful. She saw her father was dozing in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt in a chair by the window, and initially she was disappointed that she couldn’t tell him the news that very moment. She was still annoyed with him over what she considered the
Maurice and the Magic Banana
slight, but he had seemed so pathetic since Tuesday that she never had confronted him with either the book itself or the magazine photo she had discovered of her father and the gifted gorilla. Now she thought she would burst if she didn’t tell someone her news and so she was delighted when he opened his eyes and stared at her. His hair hung lank down his temples and he looked rather tubby. Uncharacteristically slovenly. Until Tuesday, when he had failed to make it to work, he had tried to keep up a semblance of hygiene and fashion normalcy. No more. Over the last couple of days, he had lived in sweatpants, tennis shorts, and bulky T-shirts a size too large. He hadn’t even tried to shave, and his face was covered with the gray and black stubble she associated with the homeless along Riverside Drive. She noticed that his small weights were out by the couch, and though she hoped it was because the physical therapist had been at the apartment earlier that afternoon, she was pretty sure the weights had been there for days.

“I’m really sorry if I woke you,” she said, “but I’m glad you’re awake. Guess what?”

He used his left arm to push himself up in the chair, visibly wincing, so he wasn’t slouching like biscuit dough. “Go ahead.”

“I got the part! I’m Mary Lennox!”

“Wow, that’s pretty big news. Congratulations!” He raised his eyebrows as he spoke, taking in the information.

“Yup. Can I use the phone, I’m going to call—”

“Hold on, hold on. Tell me all the details. I want to hear everything.”

“Do you really have time?” she asked, a reflex before she could stop herself. In the past, her father never had time for details. Before the accident, she either would have left this news for him on his voice mail at FERAL or told him at dinner between his own anecdotes about the ponies, dolphins, or lab rats the organization was working that moment to save. She knew he would be happy for her—and yes, proud that she was his daughter. But unless he was in one of his infrequent phases of almost manic parental involvement, the very last thing he would want would be the details. Now, of course, time was less of an issue. He seemed to have plenty of it.

“Yes,” he said with almost dreamlike serenity. “I have time.”

And so she sat on the pouf between the dormant fireplace and her father’s chair and told him all that she could remember about the audition yesterday: The high school boys from another school who were asked to audition for the parts of Archie and Neville, the songs she had been asked to sing, the dancing that was required. The number of girls she had to beat out for the part. She told him in a chirping voice that gathered momentum as she spoke, as she remembered specific details.

When she was done he surprised her yet again by asking what the rehearsal schedule would be and whether he could help her learn her lines.

“Won’t you be back at work next week?” she asked.

“I guess.”

“Then how can you help me?”

“I can fit your school play in. Parents do it all the time. Work. Play. Parenting. They do, don’t they?”

She agreed in her head that they did, and as a courtesy to her ailing father she nodded. But she couldn’t imagine him actually running her lines with her or helping her memorize song lyrics.

“It’s really incredible what you did,” he murmured when she remained silent. “But you know what? I’m not surprised you got the part. I’m not surprised at all. You’ll be stupendous. Absolutely stupendous.”

WILLOW ALREADY KNEW
that her birthday this year fell on a Monday, but she checked the calendar in the kitchen again now because she had a feeling it was going to be the day before her parents expected her to talk to that lawyer—or, perhaps, lawyers. She saw she was correct: It was. She would officially be eleven then. Barely eleven years old, she thought, and already she was being (and she hated the very phonetics of this new word) deposed.

Her father came into the kitchen, a couple of rattles he’d found on the floor in the den in his hands. The dinner dishes were in the sink, and she watched him stare at them for a long moment—as if he were actually surprised to find the remnants of their meat loaf and mashed potatoes and spaghetti squash still present. He seemed to do this a lot these days: He would simply stop and stare for a long instant at something as if the object or the panorama (it happened outdoors as frequently as it did inside the house) were new and unfamiliar. Then he tossed the rattles in a wicker basket on a shelf below the cookbooks where he and her mother tended to toss all of the small, nonessential items that belonged to Patrick: Toe puppets. Pacifiers. The flat plastic shells in which they packed wet wipes when they went out.

Her brother was upstairs sleeping and her mother was working behind closed doors in the living room. Whenever she worked in the evening she tended to close the door, because there was a chance she was listening to a tape of a patient. Sometimes she used a headset, but as often as not—even before Patrick was born—the headset disappeared under a couch or deep in a crevice in her shoulder bag.

“A busy schedule, eh?” he murmured when he saw her looking at the calendar.

She sighed and sat down on one of the stools at the L-shaped counter around which they ate breakfast. She was already in her nightshirt, and she could feel the cool wood against the backs of her legs. “My birthday is the day before I have to talk to the lawyer,” she said.

“Oh. I’m sorry, sweetheart. It is going to be a hard month, isn’t it?” She knew he was referring to the litany of bad dates before them. Saturday was the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which was at least part of the reason why her mother was working right now: She had had extra office hours today and would have them again tomorrow. Then the week after next was the FERAL press conference that her parents and, she knew, her aunt dreaded: Even though none of them would be present, it was going to generate the media attention her uncle desired and make them all more public than they liked—especially, of course, her father and Charlotte. Her aunt had warned her father that reporters would try to reach him (and, Willow knew, they would succeed). And then the week after the press conference she and her cousin had to start meeting with lawyers to prepare for their depositions. Her first appointment was on Tuesday in Vermont and Charlotte’s was on Thursday in Manhattan.

She decided she was going to call her cousin over the weekend. She needed to know exactly what Charlotte was going to say and—perhaps of more importance—what she wasn’t. They hadn’t spoken since her own family had left for Vermont the day after Uncle Spencer had returned to Grandmother’s from the hospital, and that had been more than four weeks ago now.

Everything had grown much more complicated the moment her uncle had struggled back into the house in Sugar Hill. He was refusing to talk to her father, which was the reason why her own family had left the next day. The house was big, but not big enough for the two brothers-in-law once they weren’t speaking. She knew the two men hadn’t spoken since then, and she guessed on some level this was why she and Charlotte hadn’t called each other, either. It was awkward now.

“It’s going to be a very bad month,” she agreed.

Though her father had loosened his necktie before dinner, the rope of fabric still hung around his neck. He nodded and sat down on a stool beside her and finally untied the knot completely and pulled the long strip of silk through the collar of his shirt. He wrapped the tie around his hand as if it were a roll of Scotch tape.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

“You sound like Mom.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I guess not.”

“Really? You seem to want to—and we can talk about it right now, if you like.”

It.
She thought about the word, and wondered exactly what he meant. Did he mean the shooting? That was usually what they meant these days when they used the word
it
. Or was her dad merely referring to her deposition? That was what had led him to sit beside her just now. Or perhaps he meant the whole litany of unpleasant dates that loomed before them in the coming month.

“When do you think you and Uncle Spencer will start speaking again?” She surprised herself by asking this question first. The words just slid from her mouth the moment she parted her lips.

“I’d talk to him now, if he’d talk to me.”

“I know.”

“I hope soon. He can’t be angry with me forever.”

She almost disagreed with her father: Everyone always talked about how stubborn Uncle Spencer could be, and if anyone could decide to be mad at someone forever, it was probably him. She knew her uncle blamed her father for what happened—as would a lot of people once the press conference was behind them. She knew how much her father blamed himself.

But the truth was, she didn’t think it was her dad’s fault. She blamed this nightmare on Charlotte—which, she understood so suddenly that she actually sat up a little straighter on the stool, may have been another reason why she hadn’t felt an inclination to phone her cousin over the last month. Everyone was so focused on the idea that her father hadn’t gotten around to bringing his gun to a repair shop to have a stubborn bullet removed that they were forgetting—or ignoring—the fact that it was Charlotte who had taken the gun from the trunk of the car even though she’d been told explicitly not to touch it, switched off the safety, and fired it into the night. She knew the people at FERAL and her uncle’s lawyer were going to portray her cousin as a victim, and she knew also that this was a complete fabrication: Her cousin—two weeks beyond her thirteenth birthday now—had been stoned and a little drunk when she’d pulled the trigger.

“You and Aunt Catherine are talking, right?” she asked her father. “Mom says Aunt Catherine’s not mad at you.”

“Yes, your aunt and I are talking. And while I’d say she’s not as mad at me as your uncle is, she still wishes I had . . . behaved more responsibly. After all, she loves Uncle Spencer.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” She hadn’t planned to say this, either, but she realized there was indeed a lot that she’d kept inside her for almost six weeks now. She wondered how much she was about to reveal.

“What do you mean?”

“Charlotte . . .”

“Yes?”

“Charlotte thinks her parents might someday get a divorce.”

“What? When did she say such a thing?”

“This summer. The night of the accident.”

“Have you told your mother this?”

She shook her head.

“Why does your cousin think that?” Her father dropped his necktie into his lap and rested his temple against his fingers and stared at her.

“Because . . .”

“Yes?”

“Oh, a lot of reasons. She says her mom flirts all the time, and her dad isn’t really interested in Aunt Catherine. He’s so busy with his animal causes.”

“Your aunt Catherine has always been a flirt,” he said, and although his eyes looked tired he was smiling. “Trust me. When we were growing up, I don’t think I had a friend she didn’t flirt with—especially when she was the age Charlotte is now. I think it would have killed her if I’d gone to Exeter, which your grandmother and I discussed pretty seriously, instead of staying in the city at Trinity. She wouldn’t have been able to bat her eyelashes at my friends when they came by the apartment. And as for your uncle Spencer . . .”

He paused and took off his eyeglasses. This was, Willow knew, one of his courtroom gestures. But it also meant that he was about to say something that mattered to him greatly. “And as for your uncle Spencer: He may be self-absorbed, he may be fixated on monkeys or dolphins or whatever . . . but he adores your aunt. I know that. I know Spencer. He loves your aunt Catherine very much.”

“But what if . . .”

“Go on.”

“What if she doesn’t love him? Charlotte doesn’t think she does. She says her mom and dad are always fighting, and it’s usually over nothing.”

“Your mom and I argue sometimes—”

“No, you don’t.”

He thought about this and nodded. “We don’t, do we?”

“Not like some parents I hear about. Not like Loree’s parents. Or Mr. and Mrs. Hall.” Loree King and Kristin Hall were two of Willow’s classmates, and the squabbles Willow had witnessed when she was playing at Loree’s or Kristin’s house were legendary around the Seton dinner table.

“But most parents have their arguments,” her father continued. “Just like most siblings and most friends. And most cousins.”

“Charlotte thinks this is different.”

“Your mom really doesn’t know any of this? You haven’t told her?”

She felt the sides of her eyes start to quiver. She still had math homework that was due tomorrow, she hadn’t done her required thirty minutes of reading for the day, and it was clear that her father and she were still a while away from going upstairs so he could read to her while she curled up in bed. She didn’t want to cry, and she didn’t quite understand how her innocuous peek at the calendar had led to this. But she was afraid she was about to start sobbing—not hideous Patrick-like howls, but real tears and whimpers and sniffles, nonetheless. And a lot of them. A month-and-a-half’s worth. Tears for her uncle who couldn’t ever use his right arm again, for her cousin who—even if she wasn’t getting blamed for this the way her dad was—still had to live with herself, for her aunt and uncle who might someday get a divorce, and (perhaps most of all) for her dad who she decided firmly now had done nothing wrong but was being treated like he had and always seemed sad. She felt her body starting to shake and gave in. Before she knew it she had climbed onto her father’s lap on the stool as if she were a girl half her age, her shoulders heaving with sadness. She cried into the cotton shoulder of his button-down shirt, only vaguely aware of the smell of the deodorant he wore to work and the coffee that was still on his breath, and completely unconscious of the fact that her father’s eyes had begun to water, too.