Before You Know Kindness (18 page)

Spencer was still muzzy with painkillers and dazed by an anesthesia-born hangover. Apparently he wouldn’t start hurting like hell for another couple of hours, and so the physicians had recommended that Charlotte and Willow come see him now. His eyes were open, but Charlotte had the distinct sense that he was only vaguely aware of the crowd that gathered around him in his glass-enclosed ICU cubicle. Aunt Sara and Uncle John and Grandmother were sitting somberly on the boxy radiator against the window, while she and Willow and her mom were standing like columns on the side of Uncle Spencer’s bed nearest the massive glass wall that faced the nurses’ station. Everyone, Charlotte noticed, had their hands at their sides, as if they were afraid they might brush against the metal bars that ran along the mattress like a guardrail.

She wanted to tell her father that she was sorry, but the very idea of apologizing seemed so pathetically meaningless and inadequate that so far she hadn’t said a word. She feared she was behaving like a sullen teenager—a term she had heard her seventh-grade history teacher use with great frequency during the previous school year, as if a sullen teenager were the single worst thing in the world a person could become. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak. She had barely been able to bring herself to inch to this corner so close—so very close—to her father’s face and all those bandages and wires and tubes.

No one, in truth, was saying a whole lot. Her mother, her breath such a powerful windstorm of mint that it almost covered up the smell of antiseptics and her father’s own sick-person dog breath, had kissed her dad gently on his damp forehead any number of times, but even she had said very little. Apparently she had talked to him a great deal when he was first beginning to surface from his chemical coma, but now she had grown quiet.

Charlotte wondered what would happen if she even tried to open her mouth and apologize, and she guessed there was a pretty good chance she would wind up weeping again. Moreover, there were so many things for which to apologize. At the top of the list, of course, was shooting her dad, even if that had been an accident. But that accident sprang from the fact that she shouldn’t have been fooling around with the rifle while her cousin was bringing the diapers up to her aunt and uncle. And so perhaps she should begin by telling Uncle John that she was sorry for taking his gun in the first place. Clearly that had been a bad idea. A
very
bad idea.

Likewise, she could tell her cousin that she was sorry she had ignored her when Willow had asked her to leave the gun alone.

And if she really wanted to make amends, she could apologize to everyone for stealing Gwen’s joint and smoking it and for getting herself and her younger cousin both tipsy and stoned.

It was a long list. She had really screwed up this time, no doubt about it. And while she was smart enough to know that a lot of people were going to blame Uncle John for leaving a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car, she was the one who’d smoked the dope, taken the gun, and foolishly fired it at the first thing that moved in the night.

You couldn’t fix this disaster. No way.

Nevertheless, she had already started to make vows. She would never smoke pot or drink beer or say a rude word to her parents again. She would wear whatever bathing suit Grandmother wanted. She wouldn’t steal her mother’s cosmetics, she wouldn’t complain about Grandmother’s nature hikes. She would weed without complaint whenever—and whatever—her dad desired, and she would stop trying to flirt with older boys.

She would discourage her mother from flirting, too—at least with anyone other than Dad.

She would take pride in her plastic shoes, her canvas belts, her vinyl wallet. She would not dream of her own black leather jacket.

She felt the heat from the sun through the window, despite the chill in the room from the air-conditioning. She guessed they were facing west.

Suddenly her father’s eyes turned toward her, and even his head rolled a degree in her direction.

“So,” he murmured, and he started to smile. Then, his voice the shallowest of whispers, he rasped, “Guess . . . Annie . . . had it  . . . right.”

She tried to recall who they both knew named Annie, but could think of no one. Her mother, it was evident, hadn’t a clue who he was talking about either.

“Annie?” she asked him simply.

“Oakley,” he continued slowly. “You . . . know. You . . . can’t . . . get a man . . . with a gun.”

She stood motionless for another moment, absorbing his grin. He was referencing a show tune they had sung together for laughs when she’d been a little girl. Then she felt the long quivers deep in her nose that always preceded her tears, and before she knew it she had fallen against her mother’s chest—she would have put her head atop her father but she was afraid she would hurt him or break something—and, once again, she was sobbing.

Fourteen

S
pencer knew the button that would propel a burst of morphine down the intravenous drip and into his blood was within inches of his left hand, and he needed only to move half an inch on his back and then stretch his fingers and press. But the very idea of that first motion—sliding over barely the width of his pinkie in his bed—filled him with dread. He feared if he did he would feel once again those excruciating spikes of pain that had filled his shut eyes with omegoid bursts of white light, caused his back and shoulders and arms to recall in all too precise detail what it felt like to be pulverized—the bone ground to powder, the muscles and tendons shredded and whisked. He spasmed at the memory, whimpered like a terrified puppy. But he knew he could use some more drugs. As it was, even lying still in the middle of the night, he was in more agony than he had ever endured in his life, and he wanted either a rush of morphine pumped into his system now or a nurse to appear in the dim light in his hospital room with one of those tiny paper cups full of meds.

Moreover, every time his shoulder sent one of those throbbing tendrils of pain through his whole body (even his head, for God’s sake: The back of his skull felt like there was a sinus infection festering there the size of a melting glacier), he would surprise himself by groaning aloud. Spencer viewed himself as many things, but a groaner had never been among them.

Occasionally, when he wasn’t focused exclusively on how much he hurt—when the pain was merely a Rorschach that elicited other memories—he would think of the lobsters he’d killed and what he presumed was the torture he’d inflicted on them. In theory, if he cleavered the creatures properly and landed the edge of the kitchen hatchet squarely on the straight line along the animal’s abdomen and carapace, in an instant the blade would slice through the body and down to the mass of brain and nerve that ran like a string along the inside of the shell, thereby rendering the lobster insensate. Of course, only rarely did he cleaver the lobsters with anything like that sort of surgical exactitude. Most of the time he was simply trying not to get gnashed by a claw that had broken free of its rubber band, and to get the damn thing into the oven so that the waiters—grown men who questioned silently (and, some days, not so silently) why a
kid
was in the kitchen—could get their dinners out to their diners.

And though Spencer did not view his situation now as karmic payback for the lobsters he’d cooked, there were moments (and he wasn’t sure whether these would be considered lucid moments or the kinds of increasingly bizarre reveries he had come to call painkiller moments) when he saw his suffering as a reminder (God, he would think then, wouldn’t a fucking Post-it note have sufficed?) of the pain that humans inflicted on millions of animals every day.

Then, more times than not, he would focus only on his own agony, and he would grow scared. He wondered if it was actually possible to die of pain, if the body could ever reach a point when it said
Enough!
and just shut down. The nerves grew tired of screaming and begged the guys running the show in the brain to start flipping off the switches that ran the lungs and the heart and everything else that kept this mass of flesh and bone (some of it suddenly gone) breathing. In his stranger painkiller moments, those guys in the brain were retro cartoons of site foremen in a construction zone. They were caricatures with the pencil-thin arms and legs and boxy torsos he recalled from the
Mad
magazines he’d read as a boy, and their hands had so little definition that they looked like they were sheathed in mittens. Then, for brief moments, he would be a boy again in the suburbs of New York City, and he would forget that he had just had a sizable part of his right shoulder pureed by a bullet.

Still, even these fleeting distractions were not without danger. At least one time the mittens on those line drawings in the control room behind his eyes began to look an awful lot to Spencer like . . . pincers. And the very notion that there were people with pincers running the show instantly brought him back to those nights at the Steer by the Shore, and because of his newfound affinity for the crustaceans—deep inside his brain, didn’t
he
have pincers, too?—he would feel guilty. And then he would feel a cleaver the length of his body slamming into his own abdomen and chest, crushing the sternum and slicing his body in two.

Once when this happened he passed out. But other times his whimpering grew abruptly into a scream that sounded a lot to the nurses at their station like the word
No!

Finally his need to be zapped by morphine outstripped his fear of moving the fraction of an inch that it would take to reach the button that would undam the drug in the plastic bag above him, and he prepared himself for the woe that awaited him when he slid his body a hair to his left. He gritted his teeth and was about to do it—really, really do it this time, he was going to make it, he was going to move—when he detected motion in the doorway. The light was changing. Someone was nearing his bed. It was that nice guy with the unruly mustache, the nurse who’d come on duty a couple of hours ago.

“You’re awake,” the nurse said, and he offered Spencer a smile.

He nodded, but he honestly wasn’t sure if he’d spoken.

“Well, this will knock you back out,” the nurse said, and he reached for the small dial—a wheel the size of a dime—that seemed to float on a tube that linked one of the intravenous bags to his arm. For the briefest moment Spencer thought that he was about to get what he wanted more than anything else in the world and he might have opened his mouth to say thank you if he hadn’t opened his mouth to scream instead—he was no longer merely a groaner, now he was a screamer, too!—because the nurse was not reaching for the dial with the fingers on his hand. No, where there should have been human flesh and a wrist emerging from his hospital whites there was instead a lobster’s massive, ocean brown crusher claw, and the nurse was using its sharp-as-shell crushing teeth to snip the clear tube that linked him with his morphine and his fluids and everything else that was, apparently, going to keep him alive.

HE WASN’T SURE
whether this was a memory or a dream, whether he was waking or sleeping, but here he was now, once again jumping into a half-frozen creek in Scarsdale as a teenager to rescue a raccoon. The animal had been hit by a vehicle a few moments before the McCulloughs—his mother and his father and his sister were in the car with him—passed it, the creature a quivering lump at the side of the road. Spencer insisted they stop, and he climbed from the car. Not only was the raccoon still alive, but as soon as he got within three feet of it, the animal bolted into the thin strip of snow-dusted bushes and shrubs along the asphalt and slid down the embankment into the icy creek just below. Spencer slipped down the side of the hill after it, his parents yelling for him to stop, falling knee deep into the water and slush and thin skin of ice. He grabbed the raccoon off the rock on which it was cowering, wrapped it in his own snow jacket, and the four McCulloughs drove twenty or twenty-five miles to the only veterinary hospital in the county that was open that late on a Saturday afternoon. The doctor lectured him about rabies. He called a Fish and Wildlife officer. But the raccoon hadn’t had rabies, and in fact had escaped being mashed by a fender or tires (or both) with a mere broken leg. The creature lived, and a month later Spencer himself released the animal back into the woods.

He couldn’t have done any of it, he knew with a dispiriting clarity, with only one hand.

SPENCER WAS A LITTLE
better by midmorning when he was settled in his new hospital room—a
regular
hospital room—and the Torquemada-like torture of being transported on a gurney was behind him. Around six thirty, almost at daybreak, they had informed him that there were a couple of bypass surgeries occurring that very moment, and within hours there would be patients who would need his ICU bed far more than he. Then they had sent him and his IV drips packing.

Now that the sun was high in the sky, he was no longer confusing his nightmares with reality. It was Monday, someone had told him, and he thought back on his family’s visit the day before. He had a vague recollection that he had tried to cheer up his daughter by saying something silly about
Annie Get Your Gun,
but he wasn’t sure if this, too, had really happened or whether it had merely been a part of a dream. He wasn’t completely certain what had occurred Saturday night when he’d wandered through the lupine toward the garden. He knew he’d been shot and that his daughter had pulled the trigger while aiming at what she supposed was a deer. But what he didn’t understand was where in the name of God his daughter had gotten a loaded rifle in the first place and what in the name of heaven would lead her to believe that shooting a deer was a good idea. At one point Catherine had started to tell him something (maybe, he decided, she had told him everything), but whatever explanation she had offered had been swallowed up both by painkiller moments and the pain of the injury itself.

He guessed it was approaching ten o’clock (though he didn’t dare turn his head to glance at the clock on the table by the bed), and so he figured Catherine and Charlotte would arrive any moment. A nurse—a woman this time who most assuredly did not have a lobster claw for a hand—had told him the surgeon would drop by this morning, too.

He didn’t know whether his mother-in-law or John or Sara or Willow would be coming to visit. He understood that he certainly wasn’t getting out of here today or tomorrow, and so he decided that what John and Sara did now would offer a barometer of just how serious this bullet wound was. If they went back to work in Vermont—perhaps after a brief visit this morning—that would be an indication that this injury might hurt like hell, but he was out of danger. On the other hand, if they planned on hanging around for a couple of days, then he might still have reason to worry.

About quarter to eleven he got his answer when the entire household arrived. He didn’t get to see them all at once, because the nurses on this floor weren’t allowing more than two people into the room. He recalled four and five people at a time crowding around him when he’d been in the ICU, and he wondered briefly if he really had been close to death yesterday and the hospital had wanted the whole family to be present—just in case. In any event, now his wife and his daughter were sidling into his room, and the first thing Catherine told him was that everyone was with them at the hospital. His mother-in-law and the Setons were downstairs in either the gift shop or the cafeteria.

She stroked the back of his hand and his good arm, and when she leaned over him he detected peppermint on her breath. There were many small things that he appreciated about Catherine, and one of them was the way her breath always seemed to smell like a candy jar. It never ceased to please him. Even now. He was grateful that they had removed those horrible tubes from his nose when they’d brought him here, and he was no longer having to breathe with a pair of clear prongs up his nostrils.

“What are . . . you girls doing . . . later today?” he asked, carefully enunciating each syllable both because his tongue felt like a large soggy English muffin in his mouth and because the mere act of forming a half-dozen syllables was exhausting. Catherine was standing beside him and Charlotte was sitting, thank God, at a safe distance from the odors—innards and antiseptic and simple sweat—that he presumed were oozing from his body and his wound. She had hopped onto the empty bed.

“I’ll be with you, sweetheart. Right here. Maybe Charlotte and Willow will go to the club after lunch. We’ll see.”

He thought about this and was relieved. The club. Going to the club seemed a clear confirmation that there wasn’t a deathwatch going on.

“How are you doing?” Catherine asked.

“I hurt.”

“A lot?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Has the surgeon been here yet?”

“No.”

He heard Catherine sigh.

“Vacation,” he said. “It’s our . . . vacation. So . . . sorry.”

“Oh, God, you have nothing to apologize for,” Catherine said, and she smiled down at him like one of those wondrous seraphs on the borders of the Christmas card the family received every year from a Unitarian minister in Connecticut who was also an animal rights activist: The borders had deer and sheep along with angels with great, dark doe eyes, and eyebrows—angels and animals alike, actually—that were raised in adoration, tenderness, and love. For a split second he forgot that his right arm was immobilized and he attempted to reach for her hand. He didn’t get far. His arm didn’t move, and the mere act of even trying caused him to squeeze shut his eyes and cry out in pain. A moment later when he could open his eyes—when they were no longer being dazzled by the phantasmagoric light show on the insides of his lids—he detected movement behind his wife. His daughter was jumping off that other bed and running from the room. He heard a choking sob from the corridor and the sound of her struggling to breathe as she wept.

“
I’VE NEVER SEEN HER
like this,” Catherine said, once more rubbing his unhurt forearm softly.

He wondered if he was actually in the midst of yet another waking dream. Probably not. Everything seemed to have the concrete tangibility he associated with full consciousness: soft pillow, firm mattress, solid aluminum rails. Certainly his daughter’s inconsolable cries in the hallway sounded pretty damn authentic.

“Catherine?”

Her gaze moved from the window to his face. She arched her eyebrows and smiled for him. “Yes?”

“Gun . . . where she get . . . it?”

“It can wait, sweetheart. It can wait.”

“No.” How could it wait when it sounded like Charlotte’s heart was breaking? As much as he hurt, as disabled as he was, he felt a tide of anger cascading up from deep inside him: a father’s righteous rage. He wanted to know who’d given his daughter a rifle, and—here was a word he hadn’t thought of in years, a word he guessed the painkillers had helped him to retrieve—
smite
him. Smite him into the ground.