Before You Know Kindness (33 page)

“I don’t even know what that word means.”

“It means you’re hiding behind it, sweetheart. It’s your defense not to talk to me. Of course, I don’t
know
everything. Okay? But your father and I both
believe
that something is troubling you, and it has to do with the accident.”

Willow sighed, an almost impossibly long exhalation for a person so small. “Everyone is already in so much trouble, aren’t they? I feel awful for Dad. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And . . .”

“Yes?” She was sure now that her daughter was going to add that she felt bad for Charlotte, too.

“And I just wish people didn’t make such a big deal about what other people eat.” Willow turned from the window and stared at her with eyes that were fretful and intense. “We talk about food all the time: What’s good for you, what’s bad for you. White meat, red meat. Uncle Spencer’s tofu. Did you get your five fruits and vegetables? You better have. Don’t eat that honey bun: You’ll get a heart attack someday if you do.”

It took Sara a moment to register both that her daughter hadn’t continued with what she presumed was the natural connection—that she was worried about her cousin as well as her dad—and that the sixth-grader was mixing in her mind two very separate issues about food. “It’s one thing to try to eat right,” she answered carefully. “You know, to eat healthy foods—a little bit each day from all the food groups on that pyramid. It’s a different thing entirely to choose to become a vegetarian. There are people in this world who eat meat and still eat nothing but healthy foods. Likewise, there are vegetarians who eat terribly. They live on mayonnaise and cheese. Uncle Spencer isn’t a vegetarian because he believes it’s healthier. It’s because he loves animals. I’m pretty sure—”

“I know the difference, Mom. Really. All I meant is that sometimes it seems like all we care about is eating. It’s like all we think about is food.”

If Willow were a little older, Sara thought she would have said to the child,
And sex. And, maybe, what our parents thought of us. Those are, alas, the big three.
But she restrained herself.

“I mean,” Willow added, “this summer Grandmother was figuring out the dinner menu at nine in the morning. Can you believe it? Charlotte and I were still in our nightgowns, and she was asking us what we wanted to eat at the end of the day.”

“And that’s yet another issue: That’s your grandmother trying to be in complete control. What I want to discuss now is—”

“The accident.”

“Yes. Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

“Would you want to talk about it if you were me? I don’t even want to think about it. I just want it to go away.”

“I think it would help you to talk about it. I think you’ll forget it sooner if you don’t keep whatever’s troubling you to yourself.”

For a long moment the girl was quiet, staring down into the rainbow-colored pellets of wheat in her bowl. Then: “Even the accident was about food: Uncle Spencer’s vegetable garden and Dad’s deer hunting. Uncle Spencer just had to have a big plot of vegetables and Dad just had to start hunting. You know what I wish?”

“What?”

“I wish we could all just take one big, chewable pill in the morning—and all the pills in the world had exactly the same flavor—and that was our food for the day. Everything we needed. Not just all the vitamins and stuff: everything. All the . . . the . . .”

“The calories.”

“Yes, all the calories and all the bulk—or whatever—we need to feel full.”

She smiled. “Oh, you don’t mean that. Imagine a world without hot fudge sundaes. Or pizza. Or even crunchy, vaguely fruit-flavored cereal. I think you’d miss them.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Outside a gust of wind shook the trees, and the branches of the hydrangea—its conical bouquets of flowers salmon colored now—scratched against the bay window in the next room. When Willow had been a little girl, that tree had frightened her: When the flowers and leaves were gone the branches looked like talons.

Once the breeze had fallen away and the house had grown quiet again, Willow sat back in her chair and murmured, “You know what else?”

“What?”

“I never thought he was going to die.”

Sara nodded. “Uncle Spencer.”

“Uh-huh,” her daughter said. “Even when I found him. That night it never crossed my mind he might die. When I got there, there really wasn’t all that much blood. Maybe it would have looked worse if it hadn’t been so dark, but the only light was the spotlight outside the garage. I remember running past Charlotte—I just ran the way she was facing—and there he was on the ground. Charlotte was screaming. His eyes were open, but I don’t think he knew I was there. His skin was wet. Sweat, maybe. But maybe it was also dew from the garden leaves and the lupine. He was right at the edge of the garden. Remember? His legs were twisted, sort of. One was under the other—I don’t remember which—and his feet were in the snow peas. I wondered if they were broken—his legs, I mean—and I even thought for a second that maybe he’d been shot in a leg. But then I realized all the blood was up around his shirt. And his shirt collar. There was a big, growing spot by his shoulder. And then Dad was there. I heard people running, and then I felt Dad’s hands on me—I knew it was Dad even before I turned around—and he was pulling me aside. At first I thought it was just because he didn’t want me to see Uncle Spencer. But then I understood it was also because he wanted to see how badly Uncle Spencer was shot. Where he was shot, I guess.”

Sara reached across the edge of the table and wiped away a rebellious lock of Willow’s hair that had come loose from a small butterfly clip and was falling across the girl’s eyes. It wasn’t that the hair was offending Sara: She simply wanted an excuse to touch her daughter.

“And then you were there,” Willow continued.

“I ran outside with your father.”

“Where was Patrick?”

“Patrick?”

“You know,” she said, her voice brightening slightly at the chance to tease her mother. “Your son? My baby brother?”

“I knew who you meant, silly girl. I was just wondering why you were thinking of him.”

“Where was he?”

“I put him in the crib. He was in your father’s and my room.”

“Was he crying?”

“Probably.”

“And you left him?”

“Of course I did. My first reaction was that something terrible had happened. And while I guess I understood on some level that you were safe because you’d dropped off the diapers only a second or two earlier, I couldn’t be sure. And so I was scared to death. Petrified. Does that really surprise you?”

“Well . . .”

“Sweetheart—”

“I just didn’t realize you would leave Patrick, I guess.”

She slid her fingers down from Willow’s forehead to the girl’s hands, which looked impossibly soft and small to her now. Beautiful hands. A young ballerina’s hands. She lifted them both to her lips and kissed them, pressing the slender digits against her face. She had the vague sense that there was something more that she wanted to ask Willow. Likewise, she had the feeling that this wasn’t necessarily the direction even her daughter had anticipated the conversation would take: It was similar to the unexpected connection the child had made about food a few minutes ago. But she couldn’t bring herself to try to steer their discussion back to its original course, in part because it was possible that Willow had just revealed precisely what she was feeling that was causing her such angst—the altogether understandable belief that she was second fiddle to the new baby, an impression that must have grown more pronounced in New Hampshire in the days after the accident when it was all she and John could do to keep from having nervous breakdowns themselves—and in part because she was afraid if she tried to speak more than a dozen words she’d start to cry.

And so she simply sniffed deeply for control and then said into the little hands enmeshed with hers, “I love you, Willow Seton. I love you so, so much.”

THE WEATHER TURNED COLD
overnight in northern New Hampshire, the temperature a mere thirty-five degrees when Nan Seton came downstairs in the morning, and she knew it was time to return to New York. She called up the local handyman whom she paid some seasons to drive her between Sugar Hill and Manhattan and scheduled her return for that Thursday. She would close up the house for the winter tomorrow, depending upon the same gentleman who would be driving her south to replace the screens with the storm windows and to carry the porch furniture into the garage.

She had already pulled up what was left of the garden—mostly vines and weeds that had grown back since her son had had that paroxysm in the rain in early August and uprooted whole rows of decimated tomato and bean plants, as well as the maturing potatoes and carrots and beets the deer hadn’t yet nuzzled up from the earth—but she went out there now and stood with her hands on her hips. She guessed people who took their vegetable gardens seriously would spread compost into the dirt and clay, but her family hadn’t bothered with a compost pile this summer. There had been some discussion that they would have one next year, but it had been work enough simply to get the vegetable and cutting gardens into the ground and those rows of berries planted.

She wandered to the edge of the lupine and thought of her family in New York City. She believed she was standing just about where Spencer had been when Charlotte had shot him, and she wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her chest. According to Catherine, he was doing about as well as could be expected, though Nan had been careful not to press for details: The last thing she wanted to know were the grisly particulars of either his injury or his treatment.

She gazed at the clay soil and wondered if ever again it would grow more than lupine and weeds. She rather doubted they would have a vegetable garden here next summer. She presumed that Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte would return for their summer vacation, if only because this house was a part of Catherine’s cultural legacy, her childhood. And—at least until he was shot—certainly Spencer had loved the place, too. But she guessed there would be no energetic descent on this house over Memorial Day Weekend, with the McCulloughs and the Setons arriving en masse with their trowels and their spades and their big green boxes of Miracle-Gro.

The foreboding she had experienced the other day on her hike in the woods had since grown more pronounced. She was becoming more certain all the time that the next time everyone in that younger generation would be together here in the country would be at her funeral: a little ceremony amid the astilbe, the daisies, and the phlox, the mourners expressly forbidden from sharing their memories or singing any hymns. She understood that Spencer was still refusing to speak with John, and she wished she had the matriarchal clout of either her late mother or late mother-in-law. Forty years ago, young adults still listened to their mothers and mothers-in-law. Lord knows, she sure did. Neither of those strong-willed women from a more simple era would have tolerated this sort of nonsense: A raised eyebrow or spoken dagger from either of them, and Spencer and John would have been back at the Thanksgiving table together, their egos curbed and their tails between their legs. They might not have liked each other, but they would have tolerated each other. They would have been civil.

And that was what counted. Civility.

She sighed and stared at the mountains, their peaks hidden today by a heavy layer of leaden white clouds. She imagined it might be sleeting right now atop Lafayette, and perhaps the first snow was falling on Washington. She tried not to be morbid and was only rarely, but she couldn’t push from her mind the vision of snow falling on a tombstone in the Sugar Hill cemetery. There was her name carved into the marble beside Richard’s. She reminded herself that she still felt no pain, was enduring just a constant shortness of breath. Was weary. Constantly weary. Her heart? Perhaps. She guessed she would schedule an appointment with her doctor when she was back in Manhattan, but she had the fatalistic confidence that she was at the beginning of the end.

Suddenly, at the edge of the woods at the base of the hill, the far perimeter of the sweeping tangles of old lupine, she sensed something move. At first she wasn’t sure what she had seen because she’d barely glimpsed it from the corner of her eye. She lowered her gaze from the clouds shielding Lafayette and remained perfectly still. She squinted, wishing she had her eyeglasses looped around her neck as she usually did, and grew annoyed with herself for leaving them by the sink after washing her face before coming outside. Nevertheless, she could see that the animals were deer, even if she couldn’t make out the details of their markings. There were three of them, none with antlers impressive enough that she could distinguish the branches this far away. One of the creatures, it was clear, was watching her, standing guard while the other two ate.

“Go away!” she screamed unexpectedly, surprising herself. When she was alone she barely made a sound. She never spoke aloud—she certainly wasn’t the sort who would talk to herself—but here she was . . . screaming.

“Go away! Shoo!” She stamped her foot, though she knew it caused no tremor they could feel at this distance.

Still, her voice was enough: Almost as one the animals bolted into the wall of pines, their white tails as prominent for one brief second as the flags on the greens at the Contour Club golf course. Then they were gone.

She turned toward the house and started in, steaming. Hadn’t they done enough? Really, hadn’t they brought enough ruin on her family? She was fearful that she would never again see her two granddaughters together in the pool at the Contour Club or in the gloriously crisp waters of Echo Lake. She was afraid that she would never again witness John mixing gin and tonics at the end of the day for Sara and Catherine and Spencer or see the four grown-ups battling together on the tennis court. And while her son and her granddaughter certainly had their parts to play in this travesty—and, perhaps, even Spencer himself, with his dogged opinions about everything—the deer were far from blameless. They had the whole world in which they might browse, the miles and miles of forest that sloped slowly up into the White Mountains. Why in the name of heaven did they have to have her family’s Swiss chard and kohlrabi, too?