Three
John Seton was lying happily on the floor of his living room in Vermont, a wisp of black bang across his eyeglasses, watching enrapt as his son pedaled the pudgy water balloons that passed for his legs like an upside-down bicyclist. Patrick was not quite five months old, and any day now John was sure that his cherubic baby boy was going to dazzle him by overcoming his turtlelike inability to roll over and start spinning like a dervish on a ski slope. It could happen this very second, if only because the child might grow tired of feeling the Dijon mustard that in the last moment he had let loose into his diaper with the power and sound of a fire hose.
Upstairs he heard Sara in the boy’s nursery, and he presumed she was getting the baby monitor off the nightstand and throwing a couple more onesies and doll-sized socks into the baby’s suitcase. He and his wife—260 pounds of grown-ups—would share a single overnight bag, while their thirteen-pound eleven-ounce son would have to himself a piece of luggage the size of a steamer trunk. The clothes the boy wore might not be big, but he sure needed a lot of them. And then there were the pillows and the blankets and the menagerie of stuffed animals from his room here so his crib in New Hampshire would smell like his crib in Vermont.
The boy stared up at the ceiling and gurgled contentedly. He smiled at something John could neither see nor understand, and John smiled back. Then he sighed. Young Patrick was not going to roll over today—at least not this morning—and so he scooped his son up and carried him to the bathroom to change him.
As he passed through the kitchen with his boy in his arms the phone rang. He wanted to let the answering machine get it because in all likelihood it was either his office or Sara’s answering service, and today was supposed to be a day off. They were driving to his mother’s in New Hampshire, and they were hoping to leave by nine thirty—ten at the latest—so that they could stop by the club and surprise everyone while they were having lunch or whacking tennis balls or whatever it was that Mother had the girls doing at boot camp today. But he knew that if he didn’t answer the phone Sara would. She’d only been back at work for two months, and so she was still in that professional’s postpartum phase in which anything she did with one of her patients was more satisfying—and, in truth, easier—than hooking up a Hoover (either Patrick or the pump) to one of her breasts, or waking at one or five in the morning to feed the child, or trying (and failing) to quell the aneurysm-inducing stress that both of them felt when one or the other was trapped behind a hay wagon or dump truck and they were late for Patrick’s 5:30 pickup at the day-care center in their village. The place was run by two women who were loving and gentle and kind during the day, but like werewolves were transformed into something unspeakably ugly at precisely 5:31. The family of any child remaining at the Mother’s Love Nurture World at 5:45 would be charged an extra half day; three tardy pickups in a month and the child was subject to dismissal.
With his one free hand he picked the receiver from the wall like an apple and heard the secretary he shared with two other public defenders on the other end of the line.
“Hi, John. Sorry to bother you. I didn’t know if you saw the newspaper yet.”
“No,” he murmured, shaking his head despite the reality that the woman couldn’t see him. Patrick happily grabbed his nose with fingers that still resembled tiny pinchers and made a sound like a giggle.
“I hear Patrick,” Sally said.
“Yes, you do.”
“You sound like you have a cold.”
“No. I have a baby who thinks my nose is a rattle.”
“Oh, that’s cute.”
Actually, John thought, it was more painful than cute: The baby was trying to move his skull the way he himself had a moment earlier when he’d been shaking his head, and he was surprised at the amount of strength in that small hand and arm. The kid couldn’t roll over yet, but his motor skills for exactly this maneuver had been perfected with weeks of practice on a stuffed animal the size of a butternut squash that he and Sara had christened Drool Monkey.
“What’s in the paper?” he asked.
“Dickie Ames was busted last night. It was another DUI—”
“Oh, Jesus, he didn’t hurt anyone, did he?”
“No. But he took out a fire hydrant. And because it was the zillionth time—”
“It was not the zillionth time,” John corrected her. Sally was an excellent secretary, but she was twenty-three and her tendency to speak with adolescent hyperbole sometimes annoyed him. “It was, I believe, the third.”
“Well, he blew a mighty impressive point-one. And, oh by the way, he was driving with a suspended license: He wasn’t due to get it back until the week after next.”
John wasn’t defending Dickie Ames, but he needed the man to be a credible witness in a misdemeanor assault in a bar. Ames was a drinking and deer-hunting pal of Andre Nadeau and was supposed to explain to the judge at a bail review on Monday that Nadeau was acting in self-defense when he’d broken a heavy glass beer mug against the side of Cameron Gerrity’s face in a fight—which, John believed, was exactly the truth. It was self-defense. Gerrity may have been the one to wind up with the thirty-four stitches in his cheek and a nose that would look forever like a boxer’s, but John was quite confident that Nadeau had been provoked. Ames saw it all and he said so. Besides, there were extenuating circumstances John hoped the judge would consider. Nadeau was a single dad. John had seen him with his boys, and although Nadeau may have had a problem with drinking (yes, like his pal, Dickie Ames) he certainly didn’t have one with aggression. He had no history of pummeling people in bars. He had no history of pummeling people anywhere.
If given the chance, Dickie Ames was also going to tell the judge what a fine father Nadeau was to those two boys and that whenever he had been together with the family at deer camp, the man was loving, gentle, and preternaturally responsible—especially when it came to teaching a couple of junior high school kids not to kill themselves with the family arsenal the grown men used to kill deer and moose and bears and any other mammals they happened to stumble across in the woods. John liked Nadeau—and not simply in the protective, fatherly way he liked all the pathetic drinkers and substance abusers and petty thieves who wound up at the office of the public defender. He liked Nadeau because the guy was raising his boys pretty much on his own since his wife had left him. The man had offered to take him deer hunting at his family’s camp this November—help him track and kill a 250-pounder, perhaps—and John had readily agreed. Nadeau liked him, too, and respected what he did as a lawyer: He wouldn’t mind that John was a complete moron in the woods and was still learning to hold a rifle and hunt. Nadeau had even told him about a friend of his in Essex Junction, a gunsmith, who would be able to remove the bullet—cartridge, to be precise—that seemed to be stuck in the chamber of John’s rifle. It had been there since last November, since the last day of John’s first hunting season. Periodically he’d tried to extract it since then, retrieving the gun from the locked cabinet in the guest bedroom and cycling the bolt over and over, but the bullet had never popped out. His older friend, the justice Howard Mansfield, had suggested he simply shove a ramrod down the barrel and force the live round from the chamber, but there was no way in the world John was going to try that little maneuver. That was exactly how newcomers to the sport—especially newcomer flatlanders—blew off their fingers or hands. He’d considered simply driving to the edge of the forest and discharging the weapon into the sky, but he feared that perhaps whatever was causing the bullet to lodge in the chamber would prevent it from leaving the barrel as well. The thing just might explode in his face. He understood he’d have to deal with the bullet before hunting season, but since he only used the rifle during those two weeks in November he hadn’t seriously focused on the problem until Nadeau suggested his buddy, the gunsmith.
He sighed now so loudly at the reality that Dickie Ames had spent the night behind bars that Patrick turned his little boy eyes on his father’s face. At least, John told himself, he wasn’t Dickie Ames’s lawyer, and he took some comfort in this.
“Anything else I should know about?” he asked Sally. “Sara and I were about to leave.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, thank you.”
“I guess you didn’t need to know about Dickie Ames. I guess it could have waited.”
“No, you were right to call. I appreciate it.”
“Tell you what: For the rest of today I’ll only call you if I have good news.”
“You have the number at my mother’s house, right? The cell phone never works over there.”
“I do.”
He thanked her once again, pulled his nose from between Patrick’s viselike fingers, and then continued on his way to the bathroom on the first floor of the house. After he had changed his son’s diaper, he decided, he would toss the gun bag with his Adirondack rifle into the trunk of the car. On Monday they would be driving through Essex Junction on their way home from his mother’s, and he could drop the weapon off with that gunsmith.
JOHN’S WIFE, SARA, hadn’t spoken to Catherine and Spencer since Memorial Day Weekend, when they had all met at the Seton summer home to plant the vegetable garden, the cutting garden, and the beds and beds of berries: strawberries in a western field, blueberries along the house’s southern foundation, and raspberries to the east. John and his sister, Catherine, seemed to speak weekly, however, and the two siblings spoke at least that often with their mother.
At first Sara had taken it as a compliment that she was allowed to call the family matriarch Nan while Spencer, Catherine’s husband, had to call her Mrs. Seton. It was almost comic: Spencer had known the woman since he was eighteen, and still he was required to address her with Victorian courtesy and old-money solemnity. He and her husband each received Valentine’s cards from Nan in February, and even after all these years the one to Spencer was signed “Sincerely, Mrs. Seton.” It was only after she and John had been married for a couple of years that it dawned on Sara why she might be allowed to refer to her mother-in-law as Nan and Spencer was not: Perhaps it made Nan feel younger—as if the two of them were girlfriends—if they called each other by their first names.
As she and John and their baby drove now to New Hampshire, Sara decided that although she wasn’t dreading the weekend before her, she wasn’t looking forward to it, either. She was beginning to feel that her own house was getting back into some kind of order for the first time since before Patrick was born and she would have enjoyed a weekend at home. Moreover, the child was cutting a tooth—though he was sleeping right now in his infant car seat in the back—and poor John was exhausted. Could barely keep his eyes open at the dinner table last night and had spent most of the morning lying on the floor with the baby.
She was also troubled by the sheer amount she had felt compelled to pack. They’d be in New Hampshire a whopping sixty-eight to seventy hours, but between the excessive athleticism her mother-in-law cheerfully inflicted on the family (she had to remember tennis rackets and golf clubs and bathing suits, though she wanted to play neither golf nor tennis nor swim in that frigid alpine slush that Nan called a lake or that club pool that reeked of chlorine) and the accrual of health and beauty aids—sunscreens and powders and shampoos and lotions and teething gel and ointment and hair glitter and, alas, even lipstick for Willow because Nan had them all going to the club on Saturday night for a soiree of some sort and Willow had said on the phone that Charlotte would be wearing lipstick and so she wanted to wear some now, too—it felt to her as if she were packing for a monthlong expedition into a lost world without drugstores and shopping malls.
She thought she might be overthinking this because she was a therapist, but the problem with Nan—and with John and Catherine and, yes, Spencer when they were all together—was that they could never just . . . be. They didn’t sit still well as a family. When she and John had been younger they’d smoked a little dope, and sometimes she longed to buy a bag of the most mellow stuff she could find and bring it with her to Sugar Hill. Sedate the whole bunch of them so they’d all sit on that wraparound porch and just stare at the beauty of the lupine. Maybe open the windows, point the speakers outside, and listen to music on that antique record player Nan kept in the living room. Play some of those old Sammy Davis Jr. and Mel Tormé albums that her daughter had presumed were oddly flat Frisbees when she’d been a first-grader.
Her daughter. Now, that was the part of the weekend that excited her. Though she spoke with Willow on the phone at least every other night, she hadn’t seen her in just about two weeks now—twelve days to be precise—and she missed almost every aspect of having the girl in her life on a daily basis. She missed reading to the child in bed in the evenings or having the child read to her; she missed the way Willow moved slowly through the house with the grace of a ballet dancer, sometimes seeming to barely touch the stairs when she glided down them on her bare feet; she missed the way the girl managed somehow to eat cereal without making a sound—the spoon never touched the sides of the bowl, and Willow seemed to loathe the insectival sound of a slurp as much as any grown-up—and she missed the way Willow could calm Patrick with an almost paranormal gentleness. When the baby was in nuclear meltdown and neither breast milk nor rocking would silence the child’s earsplitting siren of a shriek, somehow Willow knew precisely how to hold him or tickle him or rub him to bring both parents and newborn back from the brink. She also changed diapers, which certainly made things easier when Sara was trying to get something that resembled dinner on the table.
Willow was not a perfect child, of course, and Sara did not for a moment delude herself into believing that she was. She gave up quickly on math problems, it was easier to pull the witchgrass from the front garden than it was to convince her to clean her room or put her dirty clothes in the hamper, and she spent more time in front of a mirror than Sara thought any ten-year-old should. But she was sweet and sensitive and Sara loved her madly—so much more, she feared on occasion, than she would ever learn to love her baby boy with his tendency to pee straight into the air like a geyser.
“Did we remember the nightlight?” John was asking her now.
“Darn it, we didn’t,” she said. She honestly didn’t know how much Patrick needed the nightlight, but his parents sure did. It was bad enough to be awake at one or two in the morning, but it was hell when you slammed your shin into the crib, or nearly poked out an eye on one of the airplane wings in the mobile that dangled just beyond the lad’s reach.
“Well, we can pick one up in Littleton.”
“That means getting off the highway,” she said, an issue in her mind only because getting off the highway would slow them down and thereby decrease their chances of getting to the club in time for lunch.
“Maybe I can get one this afternoon, then,” John said. “I’ll be happy to pick one up while Patrick’s napping. I’ll want to get a new can of tennis balls, anyway. You know the ones Mother has are going to be so old they’ll bounce like rocks.”
She nodded and glanced back at Patrick, resisting the urge to squeeze his toes in his socks. Then she closed her eyes, flexed her own toes once against the straps of her sandals, and started to make an inventory in her mind of everything she had packed and John had wedged into the backseat and the trunk of the Volvo. She was asleep before she had even finished with the items in the diaper bag resting now beside the baby behind her.