John allowed himself a small shudder. What if something had happened to Willow?
He remembered the precise moment last November when he had expelled the ammunition from the gun—most of it, anyway. Before getting into the car to drive home from the logging trail on which he had parked, he had pushed the magazine release by the trigger guard and caught the four cartridges as they rolled into the palm of his hand. He’d taken his glove off, and the brass had been cold. Next he cycled the bolt in the action to remove the live round in the chamber, only this time nothing happened. He tried it again, and then a third time. He had a visual picture in his mind of flipping the safety to fire and back to safety—as if this were a computer problem, and he could remedy the situation by simply rebooting—but still the bullet remained stubbornly lodged in the gun. When the bolt was open, he could see clearly the grooves along the rear of the shell’s casing, and he even tried freeing the cartridge with his fingers. It was evident quickly that he hadn’t a prayer.
And so he had put the four cartridges from the magazine back in their small box and the small box back in his pack. He remembered flipping on the gun’s safety and securing the rifle in the gun bag in his trunk before driving home.
He guessed if hunting and guns weren’t so new to him, so frightening and foreign, he might have done what his friend Howard Mansfield had suggested and tried to dislodge the live round with a ramrod. Or if he understood more about guns, maybe he wouldn’t have been afraid to simply fire the rifle into the sky in the woods.
Likewise, if he hadn’t been so busy he would have had the cartridge removed by a professional. If he wasn’t short one lawyer and down an investigator in his office. If he didn’t have a caseload so big that half the time he couldn’t keep his clients’ names straight as they besieged him in the corridors of the courthouse during the Wednesday afternoon calendar calls, before they were paraded before the judge. If his daughter hadn’t started piano lessons, while continuing ballet and after-school soccer. If his wife hadn’t been pregnant. If there hadn’t been a new baby in the house. If . . . if . . . if . . .
He shook his head, trying to clear from his mind the notion that he had been preoccupied this last year and therefore could sprinkle some portion of the blame on others. The idea was not simply ludicrous, it was pathetic. He was responsible, and he whispered the words to himself: “I am responsible.”
Finally, when he realized that he’d been standing in the same spot in the same aisle for close to ten minutes, he made some decisions. He would bring Catherine a small loaf of freshly baked multigrain bread and local blueberry preserves, a container of vegan granola, and a batch of oatmeal cookies filled with carob chips. It wasn’t his idea of comfort food, but he imagined it was the sort of thing Catherine would eat when she was troubled.
CATHERINE HELD THE BUN
in which sat the flattened discus of ground beef with both hands—aware that this was precisely the recommendation this very fast-food chain had made some years earlier in its advertising campaign—and took a bite. The burger was delicious. She contemplated eating it slowly so she could savor each mouthful—the wondrously bedewed pickles and lettuce, the tomato slice lacquered with mayonnaise, and, of course, the patty itself, the pieces of meat crushed by her teeth into a glorious, spumescent paste—but the consideration lasted barely seconds. She ate it with the gleeful, rapacious speed of a wild animal who hasn’t eaten in days.
When she was done, she glanced around the bright restaurant. The place was filled with the lunchtime crowd, and everyone around her who wasn’t feeding French fries to toddlers was eating burgers or fish fillets or chicken nuggets with the same gusto she had evidenced only moments before. Quickly she dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, rubbed a quarter-sized dollop of jasmine-scented antibacterial hand gel into her fingers and palms (it was the smell that mattered more to Catherine than the cleansing properties), and left.
The hospital was three blocks away, and she presumed that Spencer would be unhooked from the ventilator by now. This was good news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it meant there was less chance that Spencer’s already sizable physical troubles would be compounded by pneumonia. He was going to spend one more night in the ICU before being settled in a bed in a regular hospital room, but she had been made to understand that it was an excellent sign indeed that they were already replacing the massive breathing machine that covered his face and his mouth with a mere nasal respirator. She had been surprised, in part because he was still so groggy with anesthesia and painkillers that he was only dimly aware of what had occurred: How close to dying he had come, the reality that he probably faced a crippling disability—possibly even amputation—when he was fully conscious. The fact that his own daughter had shot him.
She put on her sunglasses as she started to walk and popped an Altoids mint into her mouth. She knew she would crunch plenty more once she was in the hospital elevator.
She wondered why she wasn’t furious, and why, in fact, she hadn’t been furious once in the past fifteen or sixteen hours. Partly, she decided, it was because initially she had been frightened as hell. Then, once it was likely that Spencer would live, she was relieved. She had vomited in the ladies’ room at the hospital, and at that moment she’d felt a twinge of anger at her brother; but once she emerged back into the waiting room and saw him leaning pathetically against the kiosk for the pay phone—not actually using it, but gripping the faux cubicle walls like they were the sides of a ladder—her hostility had evaporated almost instantly.
She was thankful that she and Spencer had never gotten around to having a serious discussion on Saturday about their marriage—or, to be precise, her deepening sense that their marriage was in trouble. As complicated as her life with Spencer was about to become, it would be even worse if it were encumbered as well by his knowledge that she was unhappy. What kind of convalescence would that be for him? Imagine knowing that your caregiver, the person on whom you are completely dependent, would rather be elsewhere?
She told herself that this accident most assuredly did not mean she was now facing a life sentence in a marriage that hadn’t been working or a lifetime of dinners in which she and Spencer barely spoke. It couldn’t. Things would get better, or they would end. That hadn’t changed . . . had it?
Charlotte, meanwhile, seemed to be vacillating between inconsolability and catatonia. As a mother she guessed this was normal, and any time Charlotte behaved in a manner that was outwardly normal and age appropriate Catherine took comfort. Still, Charlotte’s eyes had grown so red so quickly last night that if her daughter had been a couple of years older Catherine knew she would have assumed that the deep color change was due more to dope than regret.
As she approached the hospital, she sighed. She thought of the floors and floors of pain in that building right now and the misery that awaited her own husband when he was—finally—completely awake.
SERGEANT NED HOWLAND
had been a state trooper for nineteen years, and he had every expectation that he would be promoted to lieutenant within the next eighteen months. He was supremely competent, the principal chink in his armor being his inability to suffer fools gladly. Alas, most of his job was spent with fools, which was why he guessed he wasn’t a lieutenant already. Either they were poor, rural fools who rolled their dad’s trucks because they thought they could navigate a sharp Lisbon turn at seventy-five or they were wealthy flatlander fools who moved to northern New England and decided they wanted to bag themselves a ten-pointer but didn’t have the slightest idea how to remove a cartridge from a thirty-ought-six when the bolt didn’t extract it normally—and then, an even worse sin in Howland’s opinion, they viewed themselves as so bloody busy and supremely entitled that they never bothered to take the damn rifle to a gunsmith and thus left it sitting around their house or in the trunk of their car. Loaded. Was it any wonder that some poor guy wound up spending the night on a ventilator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock? The miracle was that no one was killed.
And while he was fairly confident this was indeed just a stupid—SRS-stupid, as in stupid-really-stupid—accident, he figured he better make absolutely certain that there wasn’t more going on beneath the surface here. Treat it like an attempted homicide until he knew otherwise. Be thorough. Maybe the daughter hated her dad and plugged him on purpose. Maybe that cousin was involved in some fashion. Maybe the great white hunter from Vermont had fabricated the whole story and loaded the weapon only yesterday because he wanted to . . .
Howland couldn’t finish the sentence, a further indication in his mind that while it was unlikely the state’s attorney would want to file criminal charges, it was better to know too much than too little. That was why he took the weapon with him last night and had it stored safely now in the firearms locker. Picked it up off the ground by that apple tree where he found it. If they ever did want to send it to the state firearms laboratory, he wanted to be sure that they had it in their possession.
Now he sat in the red wool easy chair in this Nan Seton’s living room, the woman’s daughter-in-law and older granddaughter sitting across from him on the couch.
“So you didn’t know the weapon had a bullet in the chamber?” he asked the girl, Charlotte, one more time.
The girl nodded sheepishly.
“But you did know the gun had a safety. Correct?”
“I guess.”
“You had to switch it from S to F. At least according to your uncle, you did. Before he left for the hospital last night, he told us he was sure the gun was on safety. Do you remember doing that? Switching a little lever from S to F?”
“Sort of.”
He could see the girl had been crying, and he was relieved. He really did want this interview now to be nothing more than compulsive busywork.
“Sort of?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you know that you were releasing the safety?”
“No.”
“But Charlotte: You just told me that you knew the gun was on safety. So if you didn’t know you were releasing it, what did you think you were doing when you switched the lever from S to F?”
“I was just . . .”
“Go on.”
“I was just, I don’t know, flipping it back and forth. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. Willow and I had just been at that party, and I was . . .”
“Yes?”
“I was tired. I’d never seen a gun before—a rifle, anyway—and I was just playing around. I know you shouldn’t play with guns, but I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry about all of this,” she said, and she shook her head and started to cry. Her aunt squeezed her bare knee reassuringly.
“Is there anything else, Sergeant Howland?” The woman’s voice was soothing and serene. He wondered if she sang in a church choir.
“You’re a vegetarian, right? Like your dad?” he asked the girl simply. He put his clipboard on the floor and leaned forward in his chair.
“Yes.”
“Don’t eat any meat?”
“None.”
“You love animals?”
“Yes!”
“Then tell me something: Why were you even pretending to shoot a deer? I understand you presumed the weapon was unloaded, but why were you pointing it at what you thought was an animal in the first place?”
She heaved up her shoulders through her tears and said nothing.
“Why were you taking a rifle and aiming it at what you believed was a deer?”
She looked at the rug, at her aunt, and finally at him. She wiped at her cheeks with her fingers. “I guess I was thinking about the garden. I don’t know. The vegetable garden. The deer were eating everything, and I just . . . I just . . .”
“You just . . .”
The room grew quiet, except for the girl’s sniffles.
“You were just goofing, huh?” he asked her, unsure why he was letting her off the hook. He didn’t have children of his own—he had a girlfriend, but in his opinion they were a long way away from even considering marriage, much less starting a family—but he did have a niece about this child’s age. Maybe this was why he was throwing her a lifeline now.
“I guess.”
He sighed. “That’s about what I figured.” Then, before another wave of mercy could overwhelm him, he asked quickly—almost abruptly—“Do you and your dad get along?”
There was another long pause while Charlotte gathered herself. He half-expected that the next voice he would hear would be the aunt, and he thought it very possible that she would end the interview right now. She was, after all, married to a lawyer. But then Charlotte was speaking, and she was telling him through her tears, “How can you even ask that? God, don’t you get it? I will never, ever be able to forgive myself for what I did! Never!”
He nodded and picked up his clipboard off the floor. Regardless of what this kid really thought of her father, he decided that she hadn’t meant to nearly blow off his arm. She’d simply been screwing around with a gun and accidentally wounded her dad. That was it, case closed. Yes, he would talk to Willow since he was already here, and at some point he would talk to the grown-ups. But he knew there would be nothing in his report that would suggest they file criminal charges, and in the next week or so they would return the gun to that idiot public defender.
At times like these, he concluded, the country didn’t merely need stronger handgun laws: It needed laws as well that would demand a knucklehead like John Seton prove he could handle and store a firearm before being allowed to bring one into his home.
EVEN WITHOUT AN OXYGEN MASK
covering much of his face, Spencer was still in an ICU bed that terrified both children when they arrived that afternoon, and looked especially horrific to Charlotte. He lay immobile on his back, his whole upper torso swathed in bandages, his wrecked arm encased in a plaster strip and draped across his abdomen. It looked a bit like he was supposed to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance but had gotten lazy with his right hand and hadn’t brought it all the way up to his heart. His face, for reasons neither girl understood—the bullet had hit him just below his shoulder, right?—was oddly swollen, making even the catcher’s mitts that posed as his ears seem just about the right size for his head. His heartbeat was monitored, there was a crystal clear tube uncoiling up into his nose—the fluid coursing inside it was a disturbingly gastric yellowish brown—and there were a pair of IV drips attached to the arm he could move. His left one. His right arm, it was clear, was in no condition even to scratch an itch that happened to crop up on the skin within half an inch of those fingers.