Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  He presumed that his refusal to speak with John was causing the man serious pain. It wasn't that he believed John put an exceptionally high value on their friendship or missed talking to him in a meaningful way. Even if his brother-in-law hadn't left a loaded gun in the trunk of his car, they probably wouldn't have spoken more than once or twice in the last two months. But Spencer understood that by refusing to talk to John he was placing a magnifying glass on the guilt that his brother-in-law was enduring, and--as if that guilt were a dry leaf--igniting it. John would never understand the pain he had lived with through August and the better part of September (and would live with forever to some degree) or the disability he would carry with him to the grave, but he would know what it was like to be shunned.

  Just thinking about his brother-in-law got him worked up, and so he sat back in his chair in his office and gazed out the window at the gold deco letters that spelled Empire State on the building across the street. His shoulder was still aching from his therapy, but he knew from experience that it would only get worse if he brought his left hand anywhere near it to massage it. It was best just to leave it alone.

  "Spencer?"

  He turned, and there was Dominique.

  "Yes?"

  "I ran into your mother-in-law last night in Central Park."

  He tried to read from her expression what Nan had said to his boss. He vaguely remembered introducing the two of them at one gathering or another, and he presumed that Nan must have taken the initiative to speak to Dominique: Heaven knew Dominique certainly wouldn't have been the one to strike up a conversation with some senior citizen of whom she had at best the haziest of recollections.

  "Really?"

  "Yes. I was jogging and she was taking a walk with a very lovely golden."

  "Her dog."

  "So I surmised."

  "She just returned to the city from New Hampshire. She couldn't have been back more than a few hours when you saw her. What did you two talk about?" This was, of course, not merely his mother-in-law they were discussing: It was also Safari Master John Seton's mom, and so he was deeply interested in whether she had broached her son's monumental idiocy.

  Dominique shrugged. "Oh, we didn't talk about much. She's a charming woman--as you know. I believe she wanted to tell me she was a member of FERAL."

  "Well, she writes us a check once a year. But she also has a mink that she loves to trot out around Christmas, and she still doesn't believe the human species can survive without meat."

  "I understand."

  "That's all you talked about?"

  She rested her index finger, its nail this morning a vibrant shade of plum, against the slightly bronzed hollow at the very top of her sternum, and seemed lost in thought. Then: "That's all I can remember. Oh, wait: She asked me to say hello to you."

  "Very nice."

  "What are you working on?"

  "A bit of everything. Thanksgiving. Our holiday fund-raising pitch . . ."

  "Well, if there is anything I can do to help, you'll let me know?"

  "I always do."

  She smiled and continued down the hall. He had the sense that there was something more to Dominique's conversation with Nan Seton, and either the woman honestly couldn't remember or didn't want to burden him with the specifics. Or, maybe, she just didn't want to tell him. He guessed if it was important he'd find out eventually, and so he returned to the pages with the recipe ideas for vegetarian Thanksgiving celebrations that Joan Robbins wanted to pitch to a variety of daily newspapers. Most of them focused way too much on tofu and squash for the mainstream media. But there were a few ideas with potential, especially her lists of halftime snacks for the football-watching crowd that were free of animals and animal-sourced products--and could be found in any local supermarket. It was the second element that made it so clever in Spencer's opinion. If you had any hope at all of keeping the average American away from the sour cream dips and Buffalo chicken wings, you had to make sure your alternatives were no more than an aisle or two away from the Budweiser and didn't demand a special trip to the natural foods grocery store.

  He had just verbalized a few suggestions for Joan into his brand-new digital recorder, when he saw that Randy was waiting for him in his doorway. The young woman was wearing a white linen broomstick skirt that fell to her ankles and a red drawstring blouse with the ties so loose he could see the front clasp of her lilac bra. Reflexively, he averted his eyes. Sometimes the part of the woman that had aspired to be a fashion model--that exuberant exhibitionist who had been so comfortable as a nearly naked FERAL Granola Girl--still dressed like a catalog tart. It was a tendency, Spencer knew, that served her well when she was working the male contingent of the press face to face.

  "Ready to become a doggie daddy?" she asked.

  "Yes, indeed," he said. He rose, surprised by the sharp ache he felt in his left wrist, and he wondered if he had overworked his left hand and arm today with his physical therapist. Fortunately, it only seemed to hurt when he bent it, and so he didn't anticipate any problems bringing their new dog across town. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty past three. Catherine and Charlotte were still at school, and would be for another two hours because rehearsals this week were lasting till almost five thirty. Assuming there were no last-minute hitches at the shelter, he and Tanya would be waiting to surprise them in the living room when they walked in the front door.

  THE PLAN WAS SIMPLE, especially since they would be taking a taxi from the humane society to the apartment. Spencer would walk the dog to and from the cab, and Randy would carry the paperwork, the ratty pillow Tanya loved, and the goody bag with plastic dog toys the shelter was giving them.

  Unfortunately, Tanya wasn't real happy about the serpentine cab ride through Central Park. Twice she fell against Spencer in such a fashion that the first time he fell forward and cut the palm of his left hand against a jagged edge of the half-open ashtray that was built into the back of the front passenger seat, and the second time he bounced against his right shoulder and cried out in agony--which, in turn, caused the poor dog to dive onto the floor of the cab where she cowered for the remainder of the ride. By the time they arrived at West Eighty-fifth Street, his pants were speckled with drops of his blood, he was on the verge of vomiting in the back of a New York City cab for the second time in the month, and the dog was whimpering at his feet.

  Then when Spencer pushed open the door with his left hand, the leash wrapped carefully around his wrist, Tanya made a sudden leap for daylight. Spencer had no right arm to brace his fall, and so he was pulled down onto his knees on the sidewalk, his shins cracking so hard into the curb by the cab that he feared for an instant he'd broken both his legs. Still, even that pain was nothing compared to the excruciating, lights-flickering torture he was experiencing in his shoulder as a result of falling atop his right arm.

  "Fuck!" he hissed into the pavement. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!" He rarely swore, but this seemed an occasion on which it made little sense to bother stifling a profound and much needed desire to vent. The only good news was that he had managed to hang on to the leash, and so Tanya--though straining hard--was still with them. He had a vision of her racing down the sidewalk, dragging her leash, until someone or something spooked her and she ran into the street, where a delivery truck slammed into her and sent her cartwheeling through the air to her death.

  Randy raced around the other side of the cab and knelt before the dog, stroking her behind her ears and murmuring that she was okay, she was going to love her new home, and she wouldn't have to ride in any big, bad cars for a long, long time. She didn't, he noticed, make any effort to see if he, too, was going to be all right, but he guessed that an animal was always going to get more sympathy than a human from Randy Mitchell. She did, after all, work for FERAL.

  He slowly climbed up onto his knees, glancing briefly at the dirt and tiny pebbles that were lodged in the stinging cuts in his hand, and turned back toward the taxi. The driver had emerged from the vehicle, an
d for a moment Spencer was touched: The fellow apparently wanted to see if he was okay, and he felt a small, grateful smile forming on his lips.

  "Eight seventy-five," the cabbie said, his voice not exactly menacing, but a far cry from compassionate. "One of you two owes me eight dollars and seventy-five cents."

  Randy put down the pillow and the papers from the shelter and started to rummage inside her purse, and Spencer was about to stop her. But then he stopped himself. He couldn't imagine how he could possibly reach into his pocket for his wallet with a dog's leash wrapped around his one good wrist and his one good hand a bloody mess, while every cell in his shoulder and his shins and his left palm was screaming for mercy. And so he just turned from the cold eyes of the cabdriver to the confused and frightened ones of his dog and tried to compose himself. He could pay Randy back upstairs. She could wash out his hand for him, and--though it would incapacitate him further--cover the gashes and little cuts with gauze. He could change his pants, time-consuming as that little act might be. Or not. These khakis were goners already, so he probably wouldn't bother. Either way, soon he would be inside his home with this dog, a gift for his daughter, and he would fix himself a gin and tonic and Percocet. And then everything would be fine.

  Or, at least, as fine as things got these days.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine.

  Sara watched Nan serving the plump chicken breasts and the rice, and spooning the boiled peas and carrots from a gold-rimmed china bowl that had probably been in the family since the turn of the twentieth century. She envisioned Nan's grandmother as a young bride ladling creamed onions from it when Theodore Roosevelt had been president.

  Nan liked to sit at the head of the long cherry table, surrounded by the different components of the meal: the meat, two vegetables, and the starch. She would have the assembled family pass their plates to her one by one, the farthest from her first, and so she was always serving herself last. It was a small ballet.

  The New York table was set tonight with the usual elegance--and it was indeed a dramatically different presentation from the chaos that often reigned in New Hampshire--despite the fact that the only guests were her son and his family from Vermont. Everyone but Patrick had two pieces of Waterford crystal before them, a claret wine goblet and a water glass, each with a series of wedge-cut sparkles that resembled a castle's turret. There was sufficient silverware (and it was indeed silver, not stainless steel) bordering the linen place mats to exasperate poor Willow (why Grandmother wanted them each to have two sizes of each utensil was a frequent source of conversation on the drives back to Vermont), and they all had cloth napkins rolled neatly inside personally monogrammed silver rings. Even Patrick had a napkin ring now with his initials.

  "Spencer is not going to join you tomorrow," Nan was saying. "I don't know what his plans are exactly, but Catherine said he's not going to the Cloisters."

  "Yes, she told me he'll be at his office," John said.

  "He's being quite pigheaded," Nan continued, her exasperation evident in even the set of her mouth.

  "He's angry," Sara said, offering Patrick some applesauce. "And he believes he's punishing John."

  "He's punishing the whole family. Think of how much fun you'd have at that festival tomorrow if you were all there together--like the old days!"

  "Mother, Spencer was never the life of the party!"

  "No," Nan said, "of course he wasn't. But his absence will be a damper, precisely because we will all know why he's not there. And the same goes for this Sunday. I want to take my granddaughters someplace special for their birthdays, and this . . . spat--"

  "Call it a feud," John said, his voice edged with sardonic resignation. "This constitutes a feud, not a spat."

  "Fine, then. This feud is complicating everything. What is Spencer going to do, mope the whole time you're here?"

  "He'll be working, Mother. It's how he deals with adversity. He'll do whatever it is that he can right now, whether it's writing a speech or telling the French not to eat foie gras or planning that nightmarish press conference," John said.

  "Dad?" It was Willow.

  "Yes, sweetheart?"

  "You're not going to the press conference because it's not till Tuesday. Right?"

  "I'm not going to the press conference because I don't want to be there. Even if we happened to be in town for some reason, I wouldn't be going. You don't actually want to go, do you?"

  "You will most assuredly not be at that press conference," Nan said to her granddaughter. "And neither will your cousin."

  "No, Nan, of course they won't," Sara told her mother-in-law.

  "And I don't want to go," Willow said. "I was just wondering: Will the people at the press conference have to take an oath?"

  Sara studied her daughter intently. Though the child was only a week and a half shy of eleven, she looked tiny. Small, petite. A pipsqueak. She was smart and she was articulate and she was wise beyond her years . . . but she was still a pipsqueak.

  "No," John said, answering slowly and carefully, "they won't. The press conference is not simply to announce that your uncle is suing a gun company. It's also about propaganda. Your uncle and whomever else FERAL has up there won't be lying, but they are going to offer an extremely selective compilation of the facts. It's very different from a deposition. I certainly don't want to romanticize the law, but the purpose of a deposition is to reconstruct history and learn as precisely as we can what actually occurred."

  "Which is why they make you take an oath," Willow murmured. She picked up the bigger of her two forks, and started pushing the rice around on her plate.

  "Which is why they make you take an oath," her husband repeated abstractedly. He seemed only to have half-heard the melancholy in their daughter's voice. Sara wondered what he was thinking--what both her husband and her daughter were thinking--but sensed that she shouldn't ask either right now.

  CATHERINE STOOD for a long moment, the plastic bags full of groceries dangling like weights at the ends of both of her arms. She watched her daughter drop her knapsack and the grocery bag she was carrying onto the rug just inside the front door and run across the living room toward her father. He looked insane right now, a complete madman. His hair was a mess, there were bloodstains all over the legs of his trousers, and his one good hand was swaddled in white hospital tape and gauze. But he was sitting serenely in the easy chair by the fireplace as if he were hosting Masterpiece Theatre, his legs crossed, cradling a drink in his working fingers. And perched attentively by his feet was a dog, an animal that looked a bit like a collie but was considerably smaller. It started to shrink at Charlotte's imminent approach, but then it figured out this human meant it no harm and began to sniff the child energetically. Then it started to lick Charlotte's face, practically painting her cheeks with its tongue.

  Though a small part of Catherine was holding out the feeble hope that the animal belonged to someone at FERAL and it was only going to be a weekend guest at their home--though even that would have demonstrated, in her opinion, a colossal indifference on her husband's part to the amount of work she already was doing as well as to the feelings of their two cats--she knew instinctively that this was supposed to be a keeper. And so despite the reality that she understood she was about to say exactly the wrong thing, she put down her plastic bags beside the one Charlotte had been carting and said, her voice a robust combination of pique and disgust, "Where are the cats?"

  "And good evening to you, too. Welcome home." He raised his glass in a mock toast.

  She saw then that the doorway that led down the hall to their bedrooms was closed. "Are they in our room?" she asked.

  "They are."

  "What's her name?" Charlotte was asking, the three short syllables merged into one blissful cry. "Does she have one yet? How old is she?"

  "Her name is Tanya, and she's two. I got her at the humane society." He put his glass down on the side table, the tumbler balanced precariously on the coaster because he had failed to center it atop the s
mall wicker mat. Then he labored to his feet, his bandaged palm pressing hard against the armrest of the chair. "She's very good with cats," he said, directing this last statement at his wife. "I watched her with some."

  "That may be," Catherine said, "but our cats are not necessarily very good with dogs. And they were here first."

  "They'll be okay."

  "Are we keeping her?" Charlotte asked, though it was hard to understand precisely what she had said because her face was buried in the thick ruffles of fur that surrounded the dog's collar and neck.

  "Yes, of course, we are. Happy birthday."

  "She's a birthday present?" the girl asked.

  "A belated one, yes. I was going to bring her home next week, but then I decided a Friday was best because this way you can spend more time with her. You won't have to desert her first thing in the morning for school, and you won't be gone until nearly dinner with rehearsals."