Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Isn't it bad enough that I shot him by accident? Isn't that horrible enough?" she said, barely choking out her second sentence before storming off in the direction of the ladies' room.

  After a long, awkward moment, Catherine said quietly, "I can't believe she would fear for even a split second that I would think such a thing. I just can't believe it." Then she took a breath to compose herself and followed after her daughter.

  Paige nodded in agreement as a courtesy, but the truth was that the notion had come to her before, and now, she knew, it was going to remain lodged in her mind whenever the subject of that night in New Hampshire came up. Thank God the kid never would have to take a lie detector test. Who the hell knew what the child really had done--and why? Certainly, Paige understood, she didn't.

  And, as a lawyer, she was glad.

  Chapter Twenty-Two.

  The next day, Saturday, Spencer sat alone in a living room chair late in the afternoon and cataloged all the precise ways he and his wife would never make love again, all the small ways he needed both arms--and both hands--when they had sex. It was a sort of negative Kama Sutra, a litany of sexual impossibilities. Some of the losses were pretty basic: Unless he became real proficient at the one-handed push-up, he was never going to be atop Catherine in any manner that wasn't pathetically smothering--and certainly not in the variant of the old-fashioned missionary position that Catherine preferred, her legs on his shoulders, her ankles behind his head. Other losses were more idiosyncratic to the two of them, the sorts of physical eccentricities any couple with a long history together discover about one another, many of which demanded that he have the use of two hands and plenty of functioning fingers.

  And in addition to all the things he no longer could do, there was the reality that whenever he moved his body back and forth with anything that resembled an energetic motion, his arm was going to sway accordingly. Now that was sure to be an aphrodisiac for Catherine: her husband's increasingly thin and stunted arm banging against her hip, her side, or the back of her leg as he moved inside her.

  He and Catherine hadn't made love since the accident. Of course, they hadn't made love a whole lot in the months before the accident, either. They'd never talked about it, but something was happening--or, to be precise, not happening--even before his brother-in-law had left a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car. He had gotten a reminder of it the other night in their bed when he brought up the press conference.

  He was pulled from his unpleasant little musings when he heard the metallic thud of their copper-core soup pot being dropped onto the burner on the stove. At the moment, Catherine and Charlotte were preparing dinner and setting the table while he sipped a gin and tonic. So far the gin wasn't doing a whole lot to help buttress the work of the Advil and the Percocet. He still hurt like hell. At least the combination of alcohol and drugs hadn't sent him spiraling down into a coma, though he did wonder whether a painless coma might actually represent a small improvement over his current circumstances.

  The glass was cold from the ice, and he held it gently against the back of his right hand. His arm was still swathed in the sling and cradled tightly against his chest. He didn't feel a thing, even when he pressed the glass very hard against his knuckles. He didn't expect he would feel anything, but still the absolute nothingness fascinated him, especially since at the other end of his arm, the sensation--none of it good--was pretty near ceaseless.

  He knew he looked a bit scruffy--no, that wasn't right; he looked exceedingly scruffy--and he considered trying to shave before dinner. It had been days. He gazed at the russet brick wall of the apartment building across the street and the cement skirts of the windows, his mind on the logistics of shaving with his left hand with that electric razor he loathed, and quickly gave up on the idea. He'd never get an electric razor through the scrub pine growing now on his cheeks and chin.

  A moment later he heard the phone ringing in the kitchen, and then Charlotte was scooting through the living room with the cordless phone pressed against her ear. She waved at him, and he thought she had mouthed the name "Willow" as she continued past, apparently taking the phone with her to her bedroom at the very end of their apartment's thin corridor.

  WILLOW WAS HAPPY to hear that her cousin had gotten the part she wanted in the play, but it wasn't why she had phoned her. As soon as she could she brought up the depositions that loomed before them.

  "And that's why you're calling?" Charlotte was asking her now, and Willow could hear the disbelief in her cousin's voice. "They're still months away!"

  "Charlotte, I don't want to lie."

  "Look, if you're so worried about getting caught, do what I did: I simply told them I wouldn't take a lie detector test. I said it was my constitutional right. And Paige--she's my dad's lawyer--she said I wouldn't have to."

  Willow was sitting outside on the front steps of their home in Vermont, savoring the early autumn chill in the air. It wasn't quite seven, but already the sun was behind the mountains to the west, offering only a strip of red against an otherwise colorless dusk sky. She'd brought the phone out here so her parents wouldn't overhear her conversation.

  "I'm not worried about getting caught. I'm worried about having to lie in the first place. We're going to have to take oaths, you know."

  "So, what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying we should tell them everything."

  "No way. Why would you want to get Gwen in trouble?"

  "Charlotte--"

  "Look, they probably won't even ask us the sorts of questions where we'd have to lie. What are they going to do, say, 'Willow, were you smoking marijuana the night your cousin found a loaded rifle in the trunk of your dad's car?' I don't think so. They have no idea we did that."

  "But we did. And that's important. We were both stoned. You wouldn't have shot your dad if you weren't stoned."

  "Don't put it that way. It makes me sound dreadful. And I feel lousy enough as it is. Besides . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Besides, none of this would have happened if your dad hadn't left a loaded gun sitting around in the first place."

  "I realize that. He feels terrible, too, you know."

  "Well, so do I."

  "Look, Charlotte, I didn't call to fight. I called because I'm scared. I'm scared I'm either going to have to lie under oath or I'm going to have to tell the truth--and I don't know which would be worse."

  "I do. Trust me: Lie."

  "But I don't want to, this is too important. My dad's a lawyer and I know about oaths. I know how these things work. And . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "And it would be wrong. That's all. It would be wrong."

  "Telling the truth would only make things worse. I know that doesn't seem possible, but--believe it or not--it is. Things actually could get worse. A lot worse."

  Willow sensed someone was standing behind her in the mudroom just inside the screen door, and when she turned around her mother held up two fingers to signal that dinner was about two minutes away. Her mother was smiling, and Willow thought she had mouthed the sentence, "Say hi to Charlotte for us."

  "Look, I don't believe this accident would have happened if you hadn't been a little bit tipsy and a little bit stoned," she said to her cousin when her mother once more was out of earshot. "And maybe more than a little bit."

  Charlotte sighed, a gust of wind she heard in her ear. "I don't know about that."

  "What?"

  "I said, I don't know."

  "What do you mean you don't know?"

  "This week I start seeing a psychiatrist--a friend of your mom's, I guess. And I'm really glad, because sometimes I wonder if I have even the slightest idea of just how screwed up I am. Sometimes I think I'm keeping it together really well, and then when I'm alone I'll just lose it completely. And while most of the time I'm only mad at myself, there are other times when I'll find myself mad at my dad, and then I'll wonder . . ."

  "You'll wonder what?"

  "I'll wonder if I would have ta
ken the gun even if I hadn't been stoned."

  "You think so?"

  "Sometimes, yeah. Maybe I wouldn't have fired it. Then again, maybe I would have. Sometimes I even wonder if I really thought I was firing at a . . ."

  Her cousin's voice trailed off, and she was about to ask Charlotte to continue when the older girl abruptly resumed speaking, her voice once more rich with its characteristic flippancy.

  "Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the shrink. Excuse me, the therapist. It'll be good for me! It'll be good for my dad's lawsuit, it'll be good for the work he does for FERAL. So, I'm serious about this, my country cousin: You don't need to get Gwen involved, you don't need to bring up the teenagers. You don't need to say anything--not a word--about the marijuana or the beer. Your dad's gun would still have been in the trunk of your car even if we hadn't smoked a little dope and had a couple of beers, and I still would have taken it. Okay?"

  "I don't know," she said, aware they had hit some sort of impasse. "I should go in for dinner."

  "You do that. We're about to have dinner here, too."

  Before hanging up Charlotte announced that she would be busy memorizing lines and songs and doing the mountains of homework demanded of someone in the eighth grade, but they could still talk next week if the prospect of the deposition continued to frighten her.

  At dinner that night Willow's parents wanted to know all about Charlotte and The Secret Garden--and, simply, how the child was bearing up--and she was sorry that despite the length of their phone call, there was very little she could report.

  CHARLOTTE HAD TROUBLE falling asleep that Saturday night, because she was aware that she had made an important connection: Initially she hadn't wanted Willow to tell anyone about the marijuana and the beer for the simple reasons that she was afraid she would get in even more trouble and because she didn't want to imperil what she considered her friendship with the older teenager. Now, however, she understood that secrecy mattered for another reason: She feared if it came out that she had been a little bit high, a little bit drunk, it would jeopardize both her father's lawsuit against the gun company and the way FERAL was using the accident to tell people that hunting was disgusting and guns were unsafe. And after what had happened (oh, hell, after what she had done) she owed it to her father not to imperil either the lawsuit or his organization's antihunting media campaign.

  It was the strangest thing: Her father had spent forty-five minutes with her that afternoon helping her start learning her lines. He'd spent another half hour on the Web finding her photos of the original Broadway production of the musical, so she could see what Mary and Martha and Colin and Dickon had looked like on the stage at the St. James Theater. He would never have taken the time to do either before the accident.

  He'd even marked the date--the dates, all five performances of the show--on the calendar in the kitchen, and painstakingly typed e-mails with his left hand to his assistants at FERAL and to Dominique informing them that he absolutely could not be booked anywhere on those days.

  Outside her open bedroom window she heard the sirens and the garbage trucks and the occasional car alarm that filled the night, and she wondered why this evening they seemed so very loud and intrusive.

  Chapter Twenty-Three.

  "Meat is a social food--a shared food," Howard Mansfield told John over lunch, dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin between bites of his patty-melt sandwich on rye. "The family or the tribe gathers together after the hunt. They celebrate, they reaffirm their bonds, they rejoice in their kinship. It's been that way forever. And though most of us these days are pretty damn far removed from the meat when it was living and breathing, we still approach it as a ritual food."

  "Thanksgiving," John murmured. "Or the great Easter ham."

  "Or even the backyard barbecue. Nothing like the smell of a little seared flesh to awaken in all of us that great tribal need for connection." Mansfield was a month shy of fifty. When John had first moved to Vermont, the older man had been a partner in the Burlington firm where John practiced. Then Mansfield left to be a judge and John left to be a public defender: a job John thought would be more interesting than handling the city's municipal and real estate business--his specialty at the firm--and allow him to feel better about himself when he came home at night. And feeling good about what he did was important: He knew how entitled his childhood had been, and he understood exactly what had driven his mother to volunteer her time in the dingiest classrooms she could find in the city. Now Mansfield was on the Vermont Supreme Court, and John was running the county public defenders' office. They saw each other infrequently, no more than once a season, but it was Mansfield who had taken him hunting last fall, and it was Mansfield who had suggested ten months ago that he simply use a ramrod to extricate the jammed cartridge from his gun's chamber. The two of them were having lunch now at a Burlington diner with the improbable name of the Oasis, a classic aluminum-sided train car with a green rendering of a palm tree on the restaurant's neon sign.

  "My brother-in-law would argue that meat is about power," he told Mansfield. "The only reason it became a social food was because peasants got to eat it so rarely. When they did, it was a big deal. A feast."

  "Vegetarians--people who choose not to eat meat even when it's available--have always been comfortable with their nonconformism. They're not social misfits, but they are social renegades. I'd wager there has always been a little distance between them and the bonfire."

  "You know, I don't believe Spencer has a lot of friends other than his FERAL cronies. He moved a lot as a kid, so he has no buddies from childhood. And he and Catherine have been their own little world since they fell in love as freshmen, so he doesn't have many pals from college, either."

  "Your sister's a vegetarian, too, right?"

  "Yes, but not a vegan. And, for the record, she does have friends."

  "Women friends?"

  "And men."

  "Really?"

  "She's a magnificent flirt."

  "Brothers always think their sisters are flirts."

  "Are you speaking as a Freudian?"

  He smiled. "Nope. As an older brother."

  Outside a dairy delivery truck began to back into an alley across the street, the vehicle's horn automatically emitting the loud whooping cries it made whenever it moved in reverse, and the two men grew silent. When it was parked Mansfield continued, "So: You want my opinion on who your lawyer should be."

  "That's right."

  "I hate to be predictable, but I believe your best bet is our old firm. I'd ask Chris Tuttle or perhaps even your friend Paul Maroney."

  The two attorneys were indeed among the candidates John was considering. And though he was pleased that Mansfield was validating his choices, he wanted to know why the older man had said perhaps even Paul: It suggested there was a chink in Paul's armor that he hadn't considered. And so he asked Mansfield whether he had a preference.

  Mansfield raised his gray, beetling eyebrows, and put down his sandwich. "You and Paul are a little closer than you and Chris. True?"

  "I don't think I've spoken to Chris in a year. Maybe longer. I see Paul every so often for lunch or a beer and sometimes at events at Willow's school. Paul has a son a year younger than Willow."

  "Well, they're both equally capable. But Chris is more likely to approach your situation with complete objectivity. And that's what you need." Mansfield was known among Vermont attorneys for both his fairness and his preternatural patience--attributes that made him an excellent hunter as well as a justice. With the exception of his three years at law school in Pennsylvania, he had never lived anywhere but Vermont.

  "And you believe I need objectivity because I can't see my situation well enough on my own--because this is my brother-in-law and my niece?"

  "Yes. Also, Chris hunts. Paul doesn't. It might be nice to have another hunter in the room with you when the lawyers from Adirondack are deposing you. They are, of course, your real adversaries."

  "I must confess
, these days I feel pretty damn antagonistic toward Spencer, too. He won't even talk to me. Refuses to take my calls, doesn't answer my e-mails."

  "You have indeed widened that hunters versus gatherers canyon that seems the salient feature of your family's topography."

  "Spencer and I used to be friends! Really. We used to be friends."

  "Are you and your sister speaking?"

  "Yes. And the girls are talking: Willow and Charlotte. I presume they all think I'm a moron--all the women, that is. My sister. My wife. My daughter. My mother. My niece . . ."

  Mansfield nodded, and John watched as he put the last three shoestring potatoes on his plate in his mouth at once. John had barely touched his own lunch, a turkey sandwich. His appetite had been decreasing ever since the accident, and these days, it seemed, he never was hungry. He'd lost ten or eleven pounds from a frame that even before the last day in July had tended toward lanky.