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.“Oh, God, Spencer,” she said, “let me get some lotion for that! Have you called the doctor?”“It’s not that bad.In fact, I don’t feel a thing.obviously.”“What happened?”“I was leaning over the stove and I didn’t realize that my hand was resting along the edge of the frying pan.I only looked down when I smelled something burning.The hair had already curled up, and the skin may actually have been smoldering.I don’t know.It looked pretty nasty.I put cold water on it.At least I think it was cold.Who knows?”“I think there’s some medicated lotion in the bathroom.It may be as old as Charlotte, but—”“It doesn’t hurt.”“No, but we need to get something on it so it heals,” she said, and she carefully rose from the bed.“Some lotion or something.Let’s call the doctor.”He breathed in deeply through his nose.“No, let’s not.”“You’ve already called him?” she asked, a litany of names forming in her mind as she verbalized the question.Did she mean Dr.Tasker, the orthopedic and trauma surgeon they’d been referred to at Roosevelt, or Dr.Leeds, the cosmetic surgeon at Lenox Hill? Or did she mean Spencer’s primary care physician, Dr.Ives, the guy he’d been seeing for his physical exams and minor aches and pains ever since they’d moved back to Manhattan from Connecticut? She realized she wasn’t sure whom she had meant.“No, I didn’t call anyone.And, please, let’s not bother.Okay? It’s a burn.It happens.”“It just.”“Yes?”“It just looks so painful,” she murmured.He took his index finger on his left hand and rubbed at the raw skin and the scorched follicles of hair.“Well, we both know that’s no longer an issue,” he said, and then she watched him do something he had begun to do with increasing frequency.He stopped touching the burn and brought his left hand before his face, no more than six or seven inches away, and he spread wide his fingers, palm toward him.And then he seemed to run his eyes over each finger, occasionally flexing one individually or curling all of them together as if they were petals on a flower that was closing for the night.Sometimes she wasn’t sure he was even conscious that he had developed this tic, and she’d considered asking him over the weekend why he did it.But she thought she understood.He was, pure and simple, amazed at the dexterity that he—most of us, she knew—always had taken for granted.He might not have anywhere near the control with his left hand that he once had with his right, but it was still an astonishing bit of machinery.“Where’s Charlotte?” he asked, as he bent his left index finger toward him again and again, as if he were plunking a piano key.“At school.Audition information meeting for The Secret Garden.” Her eyes were beginning to cross as she tried to look into his face through the cobweb of his fingers.“Have you ever noticed how limited the ring finger is in comparison to the index finger?” he asked.“I’m not even sure it’s as helpful as the pinky.”She looked down again at his burn.Some of the blisters looked particularly nasty: They could become infected and Spencer might never know until it was too late—though too late for what she wasn’t sure.Still, she nodded and then carefully rose from the bed.She decided she would go to the kitchen and call Dr.Ives, Spencer’s regular physician, and ask him what he thought Spencer should do.TwentyJohn and Sara and Willow had breakfast in silence—most of their meals were silent these days, unless Patrick was awake and felt the need to contribute.When they were finished, John stood, grabbed his attaché off the floor by the coatrack, and walked Willow to the end of their driveway.The bus stop was about fifty yards farther down the road.He kissed his daughter once on her forehead and then climbed into the Volvo (the one that would always hold for him his memories of an Adirondack rifle in the trunk), and turned the silver key in the ignition.He hadn’t spoken to Spencer since he and his family had left his mother’s house in Sugar Hill a month ago, and he guessed it might be years before they’d speak again.He glanced in the rearview mirror before starting to back the car from the driveway, and paused for a moment when he saw how bereaved and haggard the eyes were that gazed back at him from the glass.HE WENT STRAIGHT to the courthouse this morning, because his caseload today showed a welfare fraud, a pair of unrelated larcenies (one petty, one grand), an unlawful mischief, and a sexual assault on a minor.It was almost lunchtime now as he sat in the basement of the building in an eight-by-eight-foot room made almost entirely of cement blocks painted light yellow, listening to a twenty-three-year-old named Brady Simmons tell him across a thin table, “It’s a long story, see” (arguably the most common construction any of his clients ever made with five words), before launching into his explanation as to why he had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.Abruptly his cell phone started to ring, and he saw by the number that it was his brother-in-law’s human attack dog of a lawyer.Paige Sutherland.She had been trying to reach him for days now to update him on her plans for the lawsuit and discuss how she’d want to prep him for the deposition later that autumn.He decided he might as well get it over with—agree, at least, to a date they could meet once the lawsuit was filed—and so he asked Simmons for a minute and rapped on the door for one of the guards to let him out.“Hello, Paige,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his blazer for his Palm as he spoke.“You’re a hard man to reach,” she said, and though her voice was sweet he detected the slight edge of chastisement.“Oh, you know the drill,” he murmured.“A lot of clients who are, well, not as reliable as we might like.”“No, actually I don’t know.The sorts of people I represent are extremely reliable.”“Uh-huh.”“Oh, don’t take offense.”He ignored her and tried to find a time on his calendar when he could subject himself to the torture of a morning or afternoon discussing his role in this disaster with her.“I’ve left a couple messages for you on your voice mail,” she went on when he was quiet.“So I guess you know why I’m calling.”“Yes, let’s get this over with.”“Get this over with? You make it sound like you’re the one being sued! You make it sound like we’re not on the same side.You’re helping your brother-in-law by doing this.You’re helping to make a gun company take responsibility for—”“Paige, please.My brother-in-law doesn’t even speak to me anymore.We haven’t said a single word to each other in five weeks.You know that.”“Time heals all wounds—”“Except Spencer’s.”“That was exactly what I was thinking right after I said it! Too funny.Do you have representation yet? Why don’t I schedule a meeting through them? Really, we have so much to go over.”“I.haven’t finalized my choice for a lawyer yet.”“John, really.What would you do if one of your own clients were behaving this way?”“My clients always behave this way.”“It will be painless.Trust me.”“I promise you: Reliving that night will be anything but painless.Maybe if you weren’t planning on making such a big deal about this in the media, I would—”“It’s what Spencer wants.”“That press conference? It’s not what my sister wants.Or what I believe is in the best interests of my niece.”“First of all, it’s Spencer’s life we’re dealing with.He is the one who has to live with this trag—”“We all have to live with this tragedy!”“Well, yes, but some of you have two functioning arms to help you cope.Spencer doesn’t.And as for young Charlotte, well, Spencer is her father.You’re merely her uncle
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