Before You Know Kindness

  Catherine had done the unpacking and unwrapping over the weekend and pulled the items from their cardboard boxes and clear plastic sarcophagi. This work demanded two hands, one of which more times than not was using a pair of scissors or slashing strapping tape with a kitchen knife. He had done nothing as each device was unveiled other than watch the two family cats paw delightedly through the papers and climb inside the now empty shipping cartons.

  In any case, as soon as Spencer heard the front door to their apartment glide shut Tuesday morning, he swung his legs over the side of the mattress and used his one good arm to push himself to his feet. Even getting out of bed had become a chore, because he had three-plus decades of muscle memory using both hands for leverage. Now he had only his left. He still slept with his right arm held to his chest with his shoulder immobilizer, a sling with a strap that wound around his rib cage, and so he knew intellectually that his fingers and his hand would tingle like they had gone to sleep if there had been any functioning nerves remaining. There weren't, and so he felt nothing. His shoulder, of course, was stinging fiercely because it was only a few minutes ago that he had swallowed his first Percocet and his first three Advils of the day--a Percocet and Advil cocktail didn't quash completely the hot branding iron he felt every waking moment in what remained of his shoulder, but at least it made the pain bearable--and the pills hadn't kicked in yet.

  His plan was to endure the agony that came with removing the sling so he could shower, dry himself as best he could, climb back into the sling and run an electric razor over his face (never before his injury had he even contemplated using an electric razor to try to mow down the stubble that covered his cheeks and his neck like shards of steel wool), and then brush his teeth. If he accomplished this without falling back onto the bed in the torturous pain he had endured in his shoulder only yesterday when he'd forgotten that his arm would flap the moment he first removed it from the sling--he was much better off when he rested it on his lap while he pulled apart the Velcro clasps with the fingers on his left hand--he would get dressed and make breakfast on his own.

  AND HE DID INDEED manage to shower (though, as always, he was almost completely incapable of an undertaking as simple as drying his left underarm) and shave and brush his teeth--this last task proving particularly difficult because he had to hold the handle of the brush with his teeth like it was a cigar so he could apply the aquamarine gel with his one functioning hand. When he was done he gave himself license to leave the cap off (he vowed the next toothpaste they bought would have a flip top), because he figured if he held the tube in his teeth the way he'd just held the brush he would send a stream of gel spurting out onto the bathroom counter. Abruptly one of the cats, Emma, appeared on the Formica out of nowhere, saw the cap as a toy and swiped at it with her paw. Much to her apparent amazement she sent it hurtling into the wastepaper basket. Spencer knew that even if bending over weren't an exercise in excruciating torment, he wouldn't have bothered to retrieve it. Toothpaste caps were a luxury that was now beyond him.

  He didn't floss, but he made a mental note to ask Nick about ordering a device that would allow him to floss with one hand. A few times Catherine had tried to floss for him, but not only had the experience been demeaning, it had been physically unpleasant: The amount of blood Spencer spat into the sink when she was through and the way his gums felt like they'd just been worked over with the tip of a box cutter were testimony to the reality that it took genuine skill to floss someone else's teeth, and they should have more respect for the dental hygienists who did it daily.

  For a moment before getting dressed he stared at his shoulder in the mirror. He was long past squeamishness at the sight of the injury, and the tissue was actually healing quite nicely. Dr. Palmer, the self-proclaimed "upholstery guy" back in Hanover, had done a wonderful job and the wound--both the chasm where the bullet had entered his shoulder and done its dirty work, and the ravine made by the surgeons when they had climbed inside him to try to return a semblance of order to the shattered bone and twitching muscular slush--itself no longer repulsed him. Certainly it had in the second and third week in August, when he was back in Sugar Hill and that portly home health nurse who always smelled slightly of onion was changing his dressings twice a day. The first couple of times he'd showered with his sling off (Just get the soap and water right in there, don't worry, Palmer had told him), he'd practically vomited in the stall.

  Now it was starting to look like the glossy, hairless skin of a burn victim. Though his shoulder would never heal to the point where you couldn't tell it had once suffered a colossal assault--there would always be scarring--eventually it would appear as if it had endured a trauma no worse than, say, rotator cuff surgery. Maybe rotator cuff surgery with complications that had been manageable. In any case, it wouldn't be grotesque.

  What would be grotesque was the subluxation that would occur over the next year or so. It was inevitable. Because there was no bone linking his arm to his torso--and no reason to bother with a metal shoulder because there were no working nerves--it would be largely scar tissue fusing the appendage to his body. As a result, the joint would slowly come apart. It wouldn't be violent like a dislocation; it would be a slow, steady, inexorable separation so that a year from now there would in all likelihood be a two-finger-width indentation--a pothole, one doctor had called it--between his shoulder and the uppermost bone in his perpetually dangling right arm. The very idea left Spencer sickened, and no amount of physical therapy could prevent the subluxation from occurring.

  Too bad they couldn't share that hideous deformity with the world at the press conference Paige was planning for the week after next. No, he thought, maybe that wasn't too bad. At some point people would have to see how scarred and disabled he was, but he wasn't prepared to reveal that just yet. Even for deer. Especially for deer.

  He realized that he didn't particularly like the animal. Deer and lobsters. He loathed them both, he decided, and for the briefest moment he wondered if he was in the right business. The notion passed quickly, however, and he started a litany in his mind of all the animals in the world that were abused and that he did love. He tried telling himself that if he'd been shot because people went monkey hunting in the fall, he'd be downright excited by all of Paige's plans, but he didn't quite believe it.

  Still naked (he was no longer capable of cinching a towel around his waist the way he once could), he wandered back into his and Catherine's bedroom and surveyed the tools he had lined up the night before along the top of his bureau. There they were, the Good Grips Button Hook he would use to grasp his shirt buttons with the end of a dolphin-nosed wire and pull them through the thin slats in the fabric, and the generic dressing stick with the C hook at the end he would loop through a belt loop to pull his pants over the strangely unconquerable ledge that was his right hip. Gently he fingered the rubber handle on the crowbar-long shoehorn and then gazed down at his brand-new loafers. He hadn't worn loafers since college, but he would be wearing them when he went to the office today. They were black and they were ugly, because he refused to wear the brown calfskin ones his mother-in-law had ordered for him as a get-well gift from Brooks Brothers. He had to admit, the ones Mrs. Seton had sent him were softer than any shoe he'd slipped onto his foot in the last decade and change . . . but he still wasn't going to wear them.

  These were made of something called vegetan suede, and they looked more like a pair of bedroom slippers for some unintentionally comic British fop than shoes for an ostensibly media savvy spokesperson for an organization headquartered in Manhattan. In the past he had always worn leather-free hiking boots or black canvas sneakers and felt rather hip. He sighed: He'd have to find the time when he returned to work to search out a decent pair of pigskin-free Merrells. Then he sat down on the bed, catching his breath before beginning the task--rich, he knew well, with petty humiliations--of getting dressed.

  OH, BUT AS DEMEANING and time-consuming (and painful) as it was to stuff his right arm into the slee
ve of his shirt or use his dressing stick to hoist up his khakis, getting dressed was a picnic compared to making his breakfast. Catherine had left everything out for him on the counter, but he still had to craft his meal by himself. The breakfast he envisioned would demand effort both in the preparation and the consumption. The menu? Bran flakes with soy milk, coffee, and fresh honey wheat bread from the bakery around the corner topped with the homemade blueberry jam that one of his mother-in-law's New Hampshire friends, Marguerite, had given him before he returned to New York.

  Spencer sensed that an eight-year-old with two hands easily could make this breakfast--replacing the coffee, of course, with a more appropriate beverage. Apple juice, he decided. Hell, a reasonably resourceful six-year-old could make this breakfast if the bread were already sliced and the soy milk was in a quart container the kid could lift. Nevertheless, Spencer knew he would need the brand-new kitchen tools for the disabled he and Nick had picked out.

  He began with the easy part and actually allowed himself a small smile when he managed to open and pour his cereal without spilling more than a dozen flakes around the outside of the bowl. Then he unscrewed the top of the soy milk, and left the container open on the counter. He understood that the real problem he would face with the cereal would come only when he tried to eat it. Though he was now the proud owner of a Good Grips easy-to-hold spoon that was supposed to make it easier for a right-handed person to eat with his left hand (the shaft was as wide and round as a hammer handle), he'd discovered yesterday that he still dribbled more cereal onto the table and into his lap than he managed to bring to his mouth. His left arm and hand still weren't very strong--despite the hours he'd already spent squeezing his hand exerciser--and their utter lack of coordination continued to fascinate him.

  The more difficult part of his breakfast preparation would be slicing the bread, and then spreading that jam with one hand. He would try out his Spreadboard for the first time, a device that resembled a baseball diamond's home plate, with a pair of plastic guards along the apex against which he would place his bread to hold it still while slathering on the preserves and (perhaps) a little Soy-garine.

  Even before he did that, of course, he would have to wedge the jar between his knees and then hope he could unscrew the lid with his left hand. Given the reality that these preserves had never been opened, he had a pretty good sense that the lid would be snug. He shook his head: He should have had Catherine open it for him before she and Charlotte had left for school.

  Nevertheless, he had cereal in a bowl and a loaf of bread on the cutting board. Even I can slice fresh bread, he thought to himself, and make my own breakfast.

  HE WAS, ALAS, MISTAKEN. In the cab to his office he tried not to focus on the degrading spectacle he would have made if there'd been any witnesses: the bread crushed instead of cut, crumbs on the counter and the floor and (somehow) the dish rack three feet away, soggy clumps of cereal flakes everywhere but in his bowl, the jam jar completely impregnable until finally--half in rage and half in despair--he'd thrown it into the sink, the container banging off the faucet and then (much to his horror) shattering against the white porcelain sides. He honestly wasn't sure whether it was the faucet or the sink that had actually broken the glass.

  Finally he just put his left hand into the box of cereal and grabbed a few fistfuls, and then wiped a wad of bread against the Soy-garine that was starting to melt on the counter. He was astonished at how tired his left arm had become in the failed effort and how much his right side had wound up hurting. The pain, exacerbated he knew by anxiety and exhaustion, was a soaring, white hot stinging in his shoulder and upper back, that--unfortunately--was now so pronounced that his head was starting to ache, his ears were ringing, and he wanted to put his head down in the cab that very moment and vomit.

  He took in deep breaths through his nose and tried to concentrate on the sports radio talk station the cabbie was listening to softly on the radio. God, was Don Imus already off the air? Was it already after ten? Had it taken him that long to get dressed and make the kitchen look like a chimpanzee had just tried to make breakfast? When the cab braked abruptly before a red traffic light, he conked his head against the insufficiently padded rear of the front seat, and--despite the sling--his right hand swung forward just enough to cause the pain in his shoulder to slide off the charts for a moment. He heard himself cry out "Shit!" with such a pathetic shrillness to his voice that he grew embarrassed.

  But even that embarrassment paled a moment later, when the cab jerked forward with the green light and he was pushed back in his seat. The cattle prod of pain deep inside him simultaneously pressed downward from his shoulder to his back and upward from his neck to his head, and though he brought his left hand to his mouth with impressive rapidity there was no stopping the vomit that was spewing up from his stomach, burning his throat and his mouth and his tongue, and spraying through his fingers like water sent full blast through a partly plugged faucet.

  "What the fuck?" the cabbie was saying, "I can't stop here! What the fuck are you doing?"

  He opened his mouth--the acid on his lips a minor annoyance compared to the spikes of agony everywhere else in his body and the humiliation and disgust he felt when he looked down and saw the vomit on the knees of his slacks and the front of his shirt--and heard himself murmur, "Just turn around please. I want to go home."

  Chapter Nineteen.

  Charlotte understood that her father was in excruciating pain most of the time and that he was trying to hide it from her: He didn't want her to feel any worse than she already did. But she knew how much he hurt. She knew he was popping Percocet and Advil like they were M&M's, and she doubted fifteen minutes went by when she herself didn't think in some way about the accident and what she had done. She might recall the blast of the gun--and the feeling that she was flying backward--with a vividness that would cause her to flinch while performing a task as habitual as setting the dinner table or brushing the cats, or while in the midst of an endeavor that demanded serious concentration: reading through the scene from The Secret Garden that she was going to use in her audition for Brearley's fall musical or trying to decide exactly which of her blouses were appropriate now that she was in the eighth grade and had a full year's distance from that nightmarish elementary school jumper. She thought her father's tolerance for pain was downright heroic.

  This morning, however, on what they presumed would be his triumphant return to work, she had come across a photo of him in a magazine and for the first time since the accident she had grown angry. Furious. The magazine was four and a half years old, and she was really only skimming it to kill a minute or two while her mother made absolutely certain that Dad didn't need anything before they left together for Brearley. She'd found the periodical wedged upright into the mass of glossy pulp in the brass magazine rack in the den, the one that sat beside the fireplace they never used.

  In the journal was a photo essay about reading in America, in which dozens of photographers had captured all kinds of people reading in one twenty-four-hour span. Some were authors giving readings at universities or bookstores, and some were cameos of actors or politicians holding in their hands whatever book they happened to be enjoying at the moment. There were a few of small book groups gathered in suburban living rooms to discuss a novel they had just read together. And there in the midst of it was one of Molly the gorilla in her five-thousand-square-foot Woodside, California, pen with--of all people--Spencer McCullough beside her.

  Over and over Charlotte read the photo caption:

  Molly, a thirty-one-year-old female gorilla, and Spencer McCullough, the thirty-three-year-old communications director for the animal rights organization FERAL, savor one of both Molly's and McCullough's favorite children's books, Maurice and the Magic Banana. Though McCullough read the popular children's book aloud to the western lowland gorilla, Molly is capable of reading about Maurice's adventures with the enchanted fruit on her own. Molly understands well over two thousand words.

/>   "Molly's and my DNA are 97.7 percent identical," says McCullough, an obvious fan of both the very real gorilla and the fictional Maurice. "Should it really be all that surprising that the two of us share a taste in children's literature, as well?"

  No one had ever told her about the picture and when she saw it instantly she guessed why: When Maurice had enjoyed his brief stay atop the children's best-seller lists--nudging aside Harry Potter and Violet Baudelaire--her father had refused to read it aloud to her because he said it was completely idiotic and (in some way she didn't understand at the time) vaguely obscene. Certainly he hadn't viewed Maurice and the Magic Banana as "children's literature" when she'd been younger. Here he was, however, reading it aloud quite happily with some gorilla because he could use the opportunity to get some ink for FERAL. To make a point that gorillas were smart and should be respected.