Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "You've now cleared the magazine. See?"

  "I see."

  "A good thing to do at this point might be to close the magazine door."

  He looked at the dangling piece of thin metal. "Ah, yes. Remind me . . . please."

  "Press it upward straight into the gun. That's all. It'll click shut."

  He pushed. Sure enough, it closed.

  "That wasn't difficult, was it?" Grampbell asked, a completely rhetorical question. Keenan could tell that in Grampbell's worldview, loading and unloading a weapon was child's play. Any fool could do it--except, apparently, fools who were lawyers.

  "What remains unclear to me," Keenan said, "is why the chamber and the magazine cannot be linked. Why must unloading the rifle be this two-step process?"

  Grampbell nodded. "The chamber is, essentially, a combustion chamber. It's designed to withstand the pressures that come with firing the round. Typically, that pressure is in the neighborhood of fifty thousand pounds per square inch. In order to handle that, the chamber can't have any slots or breaks in the metal surrounding the bullet. The rifle's bolt--along with the cartridge casing on the bullet--actually completes the seal in the rear of the chamber."

  "And you need a seal . . . because . . ." Paige asked.

  "Because without one the hot gases needed to propel the bullet down the barrel would escape to the rear, creating what you would have to consider an extremely hazardous situation for the shooter. The gun might even explode. Now, what this means is that the magazine can be nothing more than a reservoir of extra rounds. That's all. And that's why you need a two-step process to unload the weapon." He shook his head, then continued, "In my opinion, that rifle you have there is still a mighty impressive engineering feat. You may not be able to unload the chamber when you unload the magazine, but I think it's nevertheless pretty remarkable that when you cycle the used cartridge you simultaneously pull a bullet into the chamber from the reservoir. That's a nifty little accomplishment, don't you think?"

  "And this two-step process is all the result of an . . . an immutable law of ballistics?" Paige asked. "There's no way to design around it?"

  "Oh, there's an exception."

  "And that is?" she asked.

  "A rifle with a fixed box magazine. Remington, Springfield, Savage--they all have a model like that. Those rifles have no floor plate like the firearm we have here, meaning the bolt must be opened to empty the rounds in the magazine. You literally cycle the cartridges one by one from the reservoir to the chamber. When you're done, there can't possibly be any rounds left in the firearm. The downside to this system, of course, is all that cycling. If not properly done, there is always the risk of an accidental discharge."

  Keenan placed the rifle down gently on his credenza. Even though they'd been using dummy ammunition, the long weapon frightened him.

  "Well, I think this is all just messy enough to give FERAL some ink," Paige said. "Especially since there is most definitely no indicator on the weapon telling you when there is or is not a bullet in the chamber."

  "And there's that girl," Grampbell added. "I'm no lawyer, but I've seen enough of these cases to know it helps the plaintiff when there's a child involved."

  Keenan thought about this, and then he thought of all those hunted deer. All those Bambis with their big dark eyes. Those animals hadn't a chance against an exploding projectile rocketed after them with--what was that number?--fifty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. No animal did. Just look at what a bullet did to the shoulder of their communications director. He made a pyramid with the fingers on both hands, and as he spoke he hoped his words didn't sound as oddly chilly to Grampbell and Paige as they did to him: "But since the lawsuit will go to the heart of one of Adirondack's best-selling rifles, I believe we can take comfort in the reality that, in this case, they will not settle right away. Which is, of course, precisely what we want."

  The mountain man looked puzzled for a moment. He was even making a small silent oh with his mouth beneath that great ruddy beard. But then Grampbell turned toward Paige Sutherland--and she looked downright petite beside him--and he stretched the seams of his blazer with one massive shrug.

  ONLY WHEN CHARLOTTE had mastered the ability to drop the final g's in her words--eatin' and drinkin' and goin'--did she start trying to spit out the t's that marked the end of some words or soften the vowels that resided in the midst of still others. Sometimes she feared that she sounded more like a Cockney aunt from a Monty Python sketch than a spoiled but unhappy little girl from the colonial aristocracy, but the drama teacher told her--in a stab at a British accent herself--that the accent was comin' along just fine.

  She was running lines now with her father on the couch in the living room. He was holding a copy of the script open with his left hand, pressing it flat against his knees at an angle that allowed them both to see the dialogue on the page. Occasionally he would lean forward to hold the pages open with the weight of his sling-enclosed forearm and use his functional left hand to reach for a toothpick pretzel in the small bowl on the end table beside them.

  "Are you goin' to be my father now?" she asked, closing her eyes after glancing quickly at Mary's line. This was how she found it easiest to learn her part: She would read the dialogue once, repeat the words in her mind, and then say them aloud with just a hint of an accent.

  "I'm your guardian. But I'm a poor one for any child," her dad answered, replicating impressively in her opinion the stoic voice of the orphan girl's tortured uncle. "I offer you my deepest sympathies on your arrival."

  This time she didn't have to lean over to glance at the script because the next line--the very last in the scene--was one of Mary's best. "Did my mother have any other family?" she asked, emphasizing other exactly the way the young actor did on the CD she had from the original Broadway production.

  Her father removed his fingers and let the script fall shut. "Very nicely done," he said. "You're good."

  She was flattered, but reflexively she rolled her eyes. "I'm okay," she said.

  "Your grandmother--my mom--used to have an excellent ear for accents. It was mostly a party trick, but sometimes when I was a little kid she'd leave me howling with laughter."

  "But she never acted, right?"

  "Just school plays."

  "She never tried anything more?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Why?"

  He nodded, apparently pondering his response. Finally, he said, "I've always been sorry you were so young when my mother died. You would have liked her."

  "I have a couple memories of her. Once we went looking for seashells together, right? I was three, maybe. It was a windy day and the waves seemed humongous--but I'm sure they weren't."

  "No. They weren't."

  "And didn't she finger-paint with me one time? On newspapers on a glass table?"

  "She did."

  "But maybe I just remember that because you or Mom told me about it."

  "Maybe."

  "So, why do you think she never tried to become an actress?"

  "Oh, I don't know if she had the talent. Or the discipline. Or the desire. I'm not sure she ever figured out precisely what she wanted."

  "That's so sad."

  "She had her moments. She adored you," he murmured softly. Then, almost abruptly, as if waking up from a trance, he said, "Now, your mother and I have been thinking about your birthday. I know it was a couple of weeks ago, but we didn't do a whole lot and that was wrong. A birthday is still a birthday."

  "It was fine, really. I didn't mind that we didn't have a party," she said, once more trying to sound like Mary Lennox. She decided she was unhappy with the way she had just rolled the r in really (too Scottish, she thought) but immensely satisfied with the crisp way she had enunciated party. "Besides, I already have what I want." There: A girl such as Mary Lennox would most assuredly have said have instead of got.

  "This part?"

  "Yes, Father," she replied. Father. Now that was a nice British touch. S
he had never called her dad Father before, and she liked how it sounded.

  "Would you like a party now? I know it's late, but we could still have one."

  Next Tuesday was that press conference. That meant, she presumed, that her father would be crazed this coming weekend. Almost certainly he would not be around. "Well, anything we do should wait until after the press conference. So if we have a party or go someplace special--and I'm not saying we should--I'd understand if we did it the following weekend. Or even next month. Okay?"

  "Sweetheart, the press conference is a completely separate event from your birthday. And I think it's under control. At this point, it doesn't look like I'll have to do a whole lot more than show up. And so I think I can manage both--a party and my responsibilities at the office," he said, and as he spoke he accidentally knocked the ceramic bowl of pretzels onto the floor with his good arm.

  The floor was carpeted and so the dish survived its plummet intact, but the pretzels scattered everywhere like small toasted Pick-up Sticks. She watched her father reflexively lean over to start gathering them up, and she glimpsed the wince he was able neither to conceal nor control. And so instantly she knelt down and started sweeping them up with her hands, telling her dad to stay put, that she could do this.

  Much to her surprise, he did. "Fair enough," he said with a sigh, and he fell back gingerly against the cushions.

  When she had recovered the pretzels she returned to her spot on the couch, wondering if he would say something about his clumsiness or his helplessness or his simple inability to pick pretzels up off the floor. She wondered if he would be angry. Quickly she put the cap back on the yellow highlighter they'd been using to mark the script, because she knew how difficult it would be for him with one hand.

  "So: Your birthday," he continued instead, as if nothing had happened. "What would make you happy?"

  The short answer was easy: Her father to have a functioning right arm once again. To go back in time to July. To no longer live with the constant, only barely suppressed awareness of what she had done.

  This wasn't an option, however, it wasn't anything her father could give her. It wasn't anything her father was even contemplating with the question. And so she thought for a moment, wondering exactly what she did want. And she had the sense as she sat in the living room and learned her lines with her . . . father . . . a father who was at once strangely placid and uncharacteristically present . . . that right now she was indeed (and she heard Mary Lennox using precisely these words) about as content as a girl could be, given her current circumstances.

  "I'm happy," she said, and she pulled from deep within herself a smile for her father's benefit. "I really don't want anything more for my birthday. But . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Thank you, Father. Thank you for the thought."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven.

  "So Catherine really doesn't know about this?" "Nope," Spencer said. "She doesn't. I considered telling her, but then I thought I might as well surprise her, too."

  "Well, I think it's sweet. Maybe a little crazy--the not telling your wife part. Actually, that's a lot crazy. But it's certainly a lovely gift for Charlotte. You're a good dad."

  He smiled at Randy Mitchell, the former Granola Girl who had become his most senior assistant, as they walked down Fifty-ninth Street to the Humane Society of New York's animal adoption center. The shelter was a no-kill facility, which meant they only euthanized animals that were terminally ill. He had asked Randy to join him because she had a dog, a mutt she insisted was part springer spaniel and--based on the way its tail stood up like a dust mitt and folds of skin hung like drapes between its fore and hind legs--part flying squirrel. Spencer had met the dog, and the creature was among the most unattractive animals he'd ever seen outside the Discovery Channel. But she was playful and happy, and Randy adored her.

  Spencer was particularly appreciative that he had Randy's help this afternoon because it was Thursday evening, a mere five days before the press conference, and Randy had better things to do than help her boss pick out a shelter dog. He imagined he would have come here alone before the accident.

  Then he guessed he wouldn't have come here at all. He would have been unwilling to get a dog before the accident. He'd always told his daughter that he believed it was cruel to keep one in a New York City apartment, but the truth was that until now he simply hadn't been willing to have his life complicated by the attention a dog needed--especially one that lived in an apartment.

  The animal was going to be a belated birthday present for Charlotte: three weeks belated, in fact, and if for that reason alone quite a surprise. The humane society didn't allow same-day adoptions, and so Spencer's plan today was to fill out the forms and choose the dog. Then on Monday he and Randy would return after work for the animal. At that point he'd really need his assistant, because he was quite sure that he was incapable of bringing a dog--and all of its accoutrements--back across town to his family's apartment with one hand.

  "I'm not a good dad," he said. "But I'm trying."

  "Oh, don't be so hard on yourself. It's a beautiful day, I bet you've got a pocketful of Percocet, and you're about to bring another companion animal into your family's life. Give yourself a break."

  Randy's FERAL-speak caused him to cringe slightly--even he viewed dogs and cats as pets rather than as companion animals--but it was a lovely day, he agreed. And his shoulder actually felt a little better this morning. He was not for one moment oblivious to the pain, but today, at least, it was tolerable: a steady ache that was considerably more pronounced than the feeling of a pebble lodged inside one's shoe but no more debilitating. According to Nick, his physical therapist, the pain probably would never, ever disappear completely, but eventually it would diminish to the point it was at now--and that would be without the gloriously buffering power of the small candy jar of painkillers he was consuming daily. Moreover, he'd gone to a barber this morning and had the whiskers on his face trimmed and shaped into something that resembled a beard. He looked less like an over-the-hill grunge rocker and more like a tweedy English professor. The beard still had a distance to go, but already he liked the air it gave him, and the way the facial hair seemed to shrink his ears to something like a normal size. Granted, his forehead seemed to stretch now into Quebec. But the ears? Almost average. For the first time since the accident, the world didn't seem quite so exhausting.

  THE DOG THAT HE CHOSE was a two-year-old combination of collie and something more petite, with dark eyes and fur that felt like satin against the fingers on his left hand. She weighed just over forty pounds. Her name was Tanya, and she'd wound up at the shelter when her owner had lost his job and a pet--especially a not insubstantial one with an appetite that could only be called impressive--suddenly seemed an unacceptable luxury. Moreover, she'd had emergency surgery the day after she arrived at the humane society, because she'd swallowed a small rubber ball and it had lodged in her intestines. Tanya was a quiet animal who, according to the young woman from the shelter who was assisting them, had always done well in an apartment.

  The decision had only been difficult for Spencer for the simple reason that there had been so many needy dogs present, and every single one of them seemed to be barking desperately for his attention. The animals in their pens were so loud that he and Randy and Heather Conn, their guide at the shelter, had to shout to be heard over the din. And while Spencer considered any number of the smaller dogs there--the mutts who seemed to be largely terrier, spaniel, or beagle--simply because they would be easier for him to manage with only one arm, he was drawn to this serene miniversion of Lassie. He decided that Tanya would have been perfect if she were ten or fifteen pounds lighter, both because of his disability and because of the finite space in their apartment. Still, his mother-in-law's dog lived in an apartment, and that animal seemed quite content.

  He had a vision now in his mind of Tanya running through the lupine in Sugar Hill with Nan's golden retriever, but then he remembered that dog h
adn't run anywhere since the last presidential administration. Still, he saw Tanya racing off the porch and onto the badminton court, jumping into the air after one of the badminton birdies. He saw the dog lounging with her nose on Charlotte's lap as the girl sat on the carpet before the fireplace in the New Hampshire living room. He saw her walking at his side as he strolled out toward those apple trees, the ones that bordered the . . . vegetable garden.

  Oh, there would be no vegetable garden. Never again. He knew that.

  But the dog might walk between his daughter and him as they strolled down his mother-in-law's driveway late in the afternoon, the sun still high because it was only the last week in July.

  As he walked the dog up First Avenue, he felt shivers of pain in his right shoulder every time Tanya pulled against her leash and yanked his left arm. The sensation rippled across his upper back and became transformed from a simple awareness of a tug to the feeling of a knife slicing through skin. It was sharp and it stung. Still, he had endured far worse over the last month and a half. Far worse. The dog sniffed everything in sight on the street, from the garbage cans to the sewer grates to the stations on which hung the antiquated pay phones.