Before You Know Kindness (30 page)

CATHERINE PUT THE NOVEL
she was reading on her nightstand and was about to turn out the light. She glanced at Spencer, hoping he was finally asleep, because his breathing had been even and soft for at least the last two or three pages. He wasn’t: He looked up at her, his eyes alone moving. He was, as he was always now when he tried to sleep, flat on his back—a position that, in the month and a half since the accident, he still had not grown accustomed to. In the past, he had fallen asleep on his right side, his body facing hers. Not only did he now have to try to nod off in what was still a new and uncomfortable position for him, the two of them had switched sides of the bed: For twenty years, since they’d been freshmen in college, he had always slept on her left. No longer. She couldn’t be on his right because it meant his wounded shoulder was near her, and she couldn’t bear the thought that she might pain him further by rolling against it in her sleep.

She leaned over and kissed him on his forehead. “You’ve taken a sleeping pill, right?” she asked him. “If not, I can get you one.”

“I took one. It will kick in soon enough.”

“Okay.”

“I keep wondering about something . . .”

She had been sitting up with her knees making a tent of the sheets, but now she lay on her side so he wouldn’t be looking up at her like an invalid. Something in his tone suggested he might want to talk about his disability and his future. “Yes?”

“I keep wondering: Should we have a surgeon at the press conference? Paige says we shouldn’t because –”

“You want to talk about the press conference?” she asked. She realized she sounded shrill, but she couldn’t contain her surprise—and her disappointment. Even now, at ten thirty at night in their bed, he was thinking about the press conference. Even though he knew how much she detested the very notion of the press conference—and FERAL’s whole involvement in a lawsuit that, as far as she was concerned, was absolutely none of their business—he was bringing it up as if she supported what he was doing and was willing to discuss its particulars. She couldn’t believe it. She simply could not believe it, and reflexively she sat up again so she could have some distance from him. If they were going to have a discussion that involved FERAL, she didn’t want to be that close.

“Yes,” he said. “I was thinking—”

“No you weren’t thinking. That’s the problem. You know my opinion of that press conference, you know how unhappy it makes me. Your animal-obsessed friends want to humiliate my brother and make a spectacle of our—yes, our—daughter. I will not discuss this right now, Spencer. I’m sorry.”

“The lawsuit will benefit us. This family. That’s why I’m doing it.”

“No you’re not! You don’t need FERAL to sue Adirondack. You could sue them without all this ridiculous animal rights nonsense, without trotting out my brother—”

“No one is going to trot out your brother.”

“You could do this without Dominique or Keenan. I like Keenan fine, but lately Dominique . . . before the accident, you and Dominique . . .” She shook her head: This wasn’t about Dominique. She knew that Dominique had no romantic interest in her husband, but sometimes it seemed Spencer had an almost slavish devotion to her. The two of them shared an obsessive interest in beleaguered prairie dogs, whales, and chinchillas. They were soldiers together in their fanatical cause, and—in New York and on the road—they were often together. She wondered why, suddenly, she was jealous of Dominique, and all she could think of was that she was angry at the woman for all the hours she had kept Spencer away from his family over the last five or six years—and, yes, used him. And now she was using him again. Using his disability. Keenan was, too. They all were. That whole hideous organization that cared more about pandas than people.

“What about Dominique?” he asked.

“Nothing about Dominique.”

“No, something’s going on in your head. What?”

“Look, this isn’t about Dominique. It’s about Charlotte. It’s about John. You know how I hate this whole thing. I’m only having breakfast with Paige tomorrow morning because I don’t want her alone with our daughter. I shudder when I think of the ideas she’d put into Charlotte’s head.”

As if she hadn’t spoken just now and explained herself, he said—still staring straight up at the ceiling—“If this isn’t about Dominique, I don’t know why you brought her up. We’re friends. Just like you and Eric.”

Eric, her associate from Brearley, had been at their home for dinner the night before. He’d brought with him a French green salad with basil shiitake mushrooms, a pasta dripping with a pesto he’d made of pine nuts and roasted red peppers, and a peach cobbler which he admitted he hadn’t baked himself but he assured everyone had not a drop of cream or butter in it and was built largely of soy flour and substitute eggs. He hadn’t planned to stay and eat with them, but she had insisted he remain. How could she not? He’d brought with him a small feast, every element of which (even the faux cobbler) was delicious. Had she and Eric flirted last night in front of Spencer and Charlotte? She thought not: She had been courteous and appreciative and (she hoped) charming and funny. But she didn’t believe either of them had crossed any boundaries. Sometimes, she knew, Charlotte thought she saw things that weren’t there. Her daughter didn’t realize that sometimes men and women flirted simply because they
were
friends, but there wasn’t anything to it. It was all part of being a grown-up. Everybody did it.

At least she presumed everybody did.

She wasn’t sure how she should respond to what Spencer had just said. Should she be defensive, or should she simply ignore the innuendo? She was angry, that was for sure. But it was also late and he was in pain. It was one thing to argue about the press conference, an issue that affected her child and her brother. It was quite another to squabble right now over . . . flirting.

“You’re right,” she said simply. “You’re absolutely right. And as for the press conference, I couldn’t tell you whether a surgeon should be there or not—especially since, in my opinion, there shouldn’t even be a press conference.”

He seemed to think about this, but he didn’t say anything. She considered simply turning out the light without another word, but she couldn’t bring herself to be that antagonistic. Not with him like . . . this. And so she leaned over and kissed him once more, a sisterly peck on the forehead. Then she curled up in a ball under the sheet, reached for the knob on the bedside lamp, and murmured a distant good night.

NAN MOVED CAREFULLY
up the trail in the woods, watching for tree roots and rocks with every step. She’d been careful to park her car at the edge of the lot at the trailhead so that it was visible from the road, but this little hike had been such a spontaneous decision that she hadn’t even told Marguerite she was going. No one in the world knew she was here. She’d driven to North Conway first thing in the morning to buy bed linens at the outlet mall—some of her sheets had been in need of replacement for a very long time, and the ones in which Spencer had slept (and sweated and oozed) in his convalescence were beyond salvation—and on the way home she had surprised herself by pulling into the parking lot at the base of Artists’ Bluff, a little peak across the street from Echo Lake. Why not? she had asked herself. It wasn’t quite noon, she had sneakers in the trunk of her car, and it felt like sixty or sixty-five degrees outside. Other than the short nature walks around Sugar Hill on which she had taken her granddaughters, she hadn’t gone on a single hike this summer and already it was the second week in September.

It was only now, however, when she’d been walking alone in the woods for half an hour and begun to feel a bit winded that she began to question whether this agreeable little hike was wise. She worried suddenly (and uncharacteristically) that she might trip and break an ankle or, worse, her hip. She might be stranded here for hours. Perhaps even overnight.

No, not overnight. There had been another car in the parking lot, and so there had to be somebody else somewhere along the trail. Still, it would not be pleasant to sit for hours in the woods with a broken bone, and she was glad she had parked her automobile where people could see it.

She pushed aside a branch and continued upward. The end of the trail, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes farther, was a bluff with a panoramic vista of Cannon Mountain, Echo Lake, and, looming to the east, Mount Lafayette.

She wondered if this modest ramble had been inspired in some fashion because on the way home she had driven past the cliff on which the Old Man of the Mountain had once resided. Never had she supposed she would outlive him. Never. But she had. For only the second time since he had slid down the crag to his death—and the first since the days immediately after his collapse—she had actually pulled into the viewing area off the interstate to gaze up at the spot where ledges of red granite had once formed the face of one very tough hombre.

Tough even by her standards. The Old Man of the Mountain had never been a gentle grandfather. In Nan’s mind, he had always been the sort of character who, with a bit of bombast and a cantankerous hiss, really would have insisted that he would live free or die. Maybe that was why she liked him. In the last years of his life, of course, he’d been a little long in the tooth. Everybody knew it. He’d been forced by his mere flesh and blood caretakers—young pups a tiny fraction his age—to don steel cables and turnbuckles. To smooth epoxy on his visage like face cream.

But she still hadn’t ever expected that she would live to see him gone.

It pained Nan to admit it, but she was scared of dying. She had absolutely no confidence that anything awaited her once the old ticker broke down. And though some people, such as Walter Durnip, were fortunate enough to glissade away in their sleep—none of the pain or mess or dreadful inconvenience that came with a long illness—most were not. Most people went slowly, their vigor sapped from them bit by bit in small, degrading increments.

For all she knew, a year from now an impulsive jaunt such as this to the top of Artists’ Bluff would be impossible. For all she knew, a year from now she would be dead.

When the Old Man had first crumbled, she had scoffed at the sentimental outpouring she had witnessed. The memorial service, the obituaries. The hundreds of e-mails of condolence that in the days after his demise people sent to the Web site for the state’s Division of Parks and Recreation. At the time, it had struck her as more than a little ridiculous.

It seemed less absurd to her now, and she guessed this had something to do with the way her own family was ailing. Aging. Separating. She understood that some pieces of earth transcended mere rock and vista and were capable of summoning a particular place in time. A precise memory, an echo of a season in one’s life. She knew that the view that awaited her at the end of this walk would conjure for her a picnic from thirty years ago, when she and Richard and their two young children had eaten egg-salad sandwiches on boulders on the summit. She would recall the August afternoon when from this peak they had seen a mother black bear and her cub saunter contentedly across a ski trail on Cannon. She would see clearly those bears in her mind, watch them amble once more across the lush green trace in the side of the mountain opposite them.

Apparently, all that remained of the Old Man was a part of his right ear. If she had brought binoculars, she might have been able to see it. Then again, maybe not. Besides, a bit of ear is not very interesting.

She was glad that her granddaughters had seen the Old Man over the years, but it grieved her that Patrick had been born too late. She didn’t, she decided, mourn the Old Man so much as she mourned the memories he evoked.

She stepped gingerly over a sprain-causing crevice in a stone and wiped the sweat away from her brow with the sleeve of her sweater. Then she stopped and took her sweater off and tied it girlishly around her neck. She was seventy years old, and she was alone. She was tired. Very, very tired. She had raised her children and most of the time she thought she had raised them well. She was proud that one was a public defender and one was a teacher. Oh, there were certainly moments when they disappointed her or when she questioned their abilities as parents: She recalled her feelings that awful last night in July. Usually, however, she looked upon them with quiet satisfaction.

But she was nonetheless left wondering: Was this all there was to her life?

She considered whether she would live to see John and Spencer—the McCulloughs and the Setons, her children—reconcile. She doubted it. She seriously doubted it.

She stood absolutely still in the path, because she was experiencing an emotion so alien to her that it took her a long moment to understand what it was. When she figured it out, she only half-believed it: dread. Nan Seton knew from many things, but dread had never been among them. It was almost incapacitating. She had the unmistakable feeling that she was dying and a fear that it was not going to be pretty.

She couldn’t possibly stand still, not for a moment more. She considered turning around and returning to the car, but nearly seven decades’ worth of persistence and intractability made that impossible, too. And so she did the only thing she could, the only thing she had ever done with her life. She continued forward. She remained on task.

But the anxiety was with her the rest of the day.

PAIGE WATCHED CHARLOTTE
slather blueberry preserves on her scone and then she noticed Catherine glance at her sideways, and so she smiled. She knew Catherine despised her, but she really didn’t care. Spencer liked her and Keenan liked her, and that was all that mattered right now. Hell, it really didn’t matter if even they liked her. Besides, it was natural for Catherine to feel conflicted: Though her brother wasn’t a defendant, he might wind up looking pretty foolish.

The three of them were sitting in an elegant little restaurant with great waterfalls of ferns and white linen napkins not far from Brearley that was open for breakfast, because she wanted to discuss with Charlotte—with Charlotte and Catherine, actually—the reality that after the press conference, there might be eager beaver reporters who would want to get the girl in their sights. And she wanted to prevent that. She guessed that Catherine would be her ally on this one, and she was glad: She needed the woman to take on the role of mother lioness. If she were a reporter and the child’s parents consistently refused an interview—which Spencer and Catherine had been instructed to do—she might consider making an end-around and try meeting the girl at school for a comment or two. Fortunately, both mother and daughter were at Brearley, so even that would be difficult if Catherine had her guard up.