Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "You see a lot of gun accidents?" he asked her suddenly.

  "A few."

  "I'm suing the gun company." He said this as if he were informing her that he had just changed the oil in his car or eaten a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. She was relieved that it was a manufacturer he was suing and not, as she had feared when she first arrived, his brother-in-law. "Maybe you should talk to my lawyer," he added.

  Reflexively, as if he were pointing a gun at her, she threw her hands up in the air. "Oh, I don't think so. I'm happy to tell the lawyers what I saw on Saturday night. But I'm not your expert witness on guns or bullets or accidents. Okay?"

  "Just a thought."

  She lowered her arms and tried to smile. "Really, I don't believe you should be thinking about lawsuits and money right now. I think you should be putting all your energy into getting better."

  "I'm not suing for the money. I'm suing because it's a great . . . opportunity to bring attention to the plight of hunted animals. Deer, especially. But moose and birds, too. Perhaps even elephants."

  She considered telling him that in her opinion things might be worse if people didn't hunt. In places like northern New Hampshire the herd would grow too large for the browse. She didn't say anything, however, because she hadn't come here to argue.

  "I'll bet you hunt," he continued, his tone slightly accusing.

  "No."

  "But your husband does."

  "No, he doesn't, either," she answered, though this was a lie. She couldn't believe that on Saturday night this guy was spewing so much blood into the clay soil of Sugar Hill that she had knelt in a puddle when she had arrived at his side--an oozy bit of bog that actually made a sucking sound as she lifted her knee the first time--and now he was proselytizing against hunting. He really was feisty.

  "Ah, but you eat meat. You told me you eat lobster. You--"

  "Look, I have two sons. One is a vegetarian, one isn't. It isn't a big deal to me, it isn't a big deal to anyone. These days, lots of people are--"

  "You ever think about what you're eating when you eat a lobster? When you eat any animal?"

  In the past these spontaneous visits had been pleasant for both her and the patient. That's why she did it. The man or woman in the bed went on and on about how grateful they were to be alive, and she was able to go home with an image in her mind of a person on the mend. Not this character. He actually wanted to lecture her. And so she looked at her watch and expressed surprise at the time. She heard herself telling him how glad she was to see him alive and how she was sure that he would dazzle them all with his recovery. She spoke quickly so he couldn't get a word in, and then she backed out of his room, waving as she retreated, until she was safely in the hallway.

  As she raced down the long series of corridors that led to the elevators, she thought of Spencer McCullough's twelve-year-old daughter once again. She decided if this guy were her father, she might have shot him, too. Anything to shut him up.

  HOURS LATER, as Spencer was lying alone in bed, he kept thinking back on something the EMT had asked about Charlotte, and the way she had phrased the question: Is she badly shaken by what she did? It was dark now and it was raining outside, and he thought of his daughter and his niece in the room with the twin beds they shared here in the country and he wondered what they were talking about tonight. He imagined their light was still on, and in his mind he saw them in their summer nightgowns and he heard the rain drumming against the slate roof. He pictured them alone, just the two of them. In all likelihood, their grandmother was already safely ensconced in her turret for the night, John and Sara were focused on baby Patrick, and he guessed that Catherine either was soaking in the tub or curled up in bed with a book.

  He worried that over the past couple of days he hadn't told Charlotte--really made the point crystal clear--that she hadn't done anything wrong. How could she have known there was a bullet in the gun? She was twelve, and while he had been absolutely sincere when he told the EMT that Charlotte wanted nothing more in the world than to be sixteen or seventeen, the reality was that in so many ways she was still a child. She had no idea the rifle was loaded, she had no idea her father was out walking at the edge of the garden. On some level, he decided, he was probably suing the gun company precisely because he wanted to make clear to the world that this travesty was not his daughter's fault.

  He made a mental note that in the morning when Charlotte came for a visit, the very first thing he was going to do was explain this to her. Maybe he'd ask everyone else to leave so he could have a moment alone with her. Then he would make absolutely certain that she knew she was blameless.

  Well, not completely blameless. Twelve might still make her a child, but even twelve-year-olds should know not to play with guns. But then, she'd never seen a rifle before! None of their friends in Manhattan had guns lying around the house--at least that they knew of.

  He imagined Charlotte and Willow were sitting together on the twin bed against the wall right now, the one that was Willow's, and he saw the girls playing gin rummy with one of his mother-in-law's shoe box full of bridge decks, the rain cooling the night so the windows were open only an inch. As they played they were talking about . . .

  He realized he couldn't begin to conceive what they were talking about, and this lapse troubled him. He told himself it was the painkillers he was taking, but he knew this was different. Deeper. He couldn't concoct a conversation for them in his mind because he didn't know how badly his daughter was hurting. That EMT might have been onto something.

  He felt a small freshet of fear ripple through him: He was scared. There was nothing he loved more in the world than his wife and his daughter, and alone in this bed he had to admit he was probably losing his wife. Had been for months. These days, they could fight over what to pack, where to eat, which vegetables they'd plant in the garden. Whether they should even have a garden.

  Well, in this case Catherine had been right. No good had come from the garden, that was for sure. Next year they'd let the lupine return to the patch of earth they had tried to make their own. Allow all traces of the vegetables to disappear. It was ridiculous to believe they--he, this was all his idea--could maintain a garden when he and Catherine lived in Manhattan and John and Sara lived two hours to the west in Vermont.

  He hoped he wouldn't lose his daughter now, too, especially since the accident really wasn't her fault. He thought of the little girl who once raced for hours at a time amidst the stuffed animals on the first floor of the old FAO Schwarz, that preschooler entranced by the cotton- and poly-stuffed snakes and chimpanzees and giraffes. He couldn't lose the girl who, when she was seven, was capable of belting out "A Lot of Livin' to Do" in a children's cabaret as if she were Ann-Margret, or the child who on occasion could be so wondrously giving that at nine she'd taken a booth at the church rummage sale and sold all her old puzzles and Barbies and books and raised $273 for FERAL's special fund for abused circus animals. Yes, right now she was going through a rough period. Right now she was subjecting everyone around her to her preadolescent angst . . . but this was the same child who would run into his and Catherine's room when she was in the second grade for one last good-night kiss or who would lean against him for hours as they sat on the beach in Florida and watched seagulls and talked.

  Spencer decided he hadn't been very nice to that EMT. He wasn't proud of his behavior, and he wondered why he had been so testy and sanctimonious with her. All she did was save his life. Was it because of his injury? The fact that he would, in all likelihood, be disabled? Or was it more basic than that: Was he cranky simply because last night he had slept poorly again--woken twice by the lobsters in his dreams--and now he was tired?

  He had asked for and been given a different kind of sleeping pill tonight, but he was still wary about what sorts of dreams might await him when he dozed off. Last night there had been a couple of doozies, including one in which his hands were bound with belt-wide rubber bands, and he was trapped on his side in a crate in a
walk-in refrigerator. He woke up in a sweat as he was being grabbed by a giant human hand to be either cleavered or dropped into a pot of boiling water. It was only a dream, but it had still been a pretty hideous experience.

  No doubt tonight he'd start dreaming of deer. Inadvertently Catherine had put the idea into his head when she'd been commiserating with him this afternoon, trying to cheer him up. Trying to elicit a smile from him, she'd suggested that tonight he'd probably start dreaming of Bambi: The fawn would emerge from the garden, beet greens and kohlrabi on the young buck's breath.

  Well, deer were beautiful animals: graceful, athletic, and lithe. They were completely unlike lobsters, which Spencer believed were among the most vile-looking creatures on the planet. What in the name of God had the first person to eat one been thinking? He decided he was mistaken when he had told Melissa Fearon that he liked lobsters. He didn't. He tried to appreciate all animals, and most of the time he did. But not lobsters. He couldn't appreciate a lobster.

  He stared into the blackness out the window, watching the designs the raindrops made on the glass. He would have to get the address of that EMT from someone at the hospital so he could write her a note. He wanted to apologize for being short with her, as well as, yes, to thank her for saving his life. He would be unable to write the note himself, of course. At least in the foreseeable future. He guessed eventually he would learn to write legibly with his left hand, but that day was almost unimaginable to him at the moment. He could barely lift his left arm right now because of the way any upper-body movement at all sent tectonic shudders of pain across his right side. But he would thank her. Somehow. And he would do more than write a note, because sixty or eighty dictated words were insufficient when someone has brought you back from the dead.

  He told himself he shouldn't lose sight of that. It was certainly a temptation to read more into this second chance than was most certainly there--to see it as an opportunity to make resolutions and vows, promises that he knew in his heart he would never keep for more than a week or a month--but the undeniable reality was that he very nearly had died. Bought the farm. Augured in. If the bullet had been a few inches higher, he would have been all but decapitated. A few inches in another direction, and his heart would have become a ragout. Either way, he would have been dead before his body landed back in the snow peas. As troubling as his future looked to him tonight--the considerable handicap that loomed before him, his daughter's almost crippling remorse, the damage he had inflicted on his marriage before this accident had even occurred--the truth was that he was alive. Just about four days ago there was no reason to believe that he would be.

  And so while he wasn't about to see more of a spiritual second chance here than was probably warranted, neither would he forget that he still had a future. It might not be the future he once had imagined. But when the sun rose in the morning over the mountains just east of his mother-in-law's house in Sugar Hill, he would still be around. Tomorrow--and the day after tomorrow and the day after that--he would try to be less careless with his time.

  IN THE HOUSE IN SUGAR HILL, Sara stood above the crib in which Patrick was sleeping and watched the small blanket rise almost imperceptibly off his chest with each inhalation. She wondered if he was going to have her husband's elegant, patrician slide of a nose. People said they saw as much of her in the baby as they did John, but she knew they were just being polite. Right now the child looked like nothing more than a John Seton clone. She closed the window completely and for a moment gazed out into the garden. The rain had resumed a few minutes ago, soon after her husband had left for a walk. She didn't think John had brought an umbrella with him. She thought she saw something move in the dark and the mist, guessed it was probably the deer, and decided to go outside to turn on the floodlights by the garage. Scare the creatures away: frighten the hell out of the animals that, inadvertently, had brought so much pain on her family.

  At the top of the stairs she could hear the murmurs of Willow's and Charlotte's small voices, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. She'd kissed them good night and turned out their lights perhaps fifteen minutes ago. She hoped they were talking about something silly--not the accident or poor Spencer's injuries. As she passed the kitchen, she saw Nan glancing at the catalogs and the bills and the solicitations (did no one write letters anymore?) that somehow had managed to amass in the few days her mother-in-law had been shuttling her brood back and forth between the hospital in Hanover and the Contour Club.

  The house was linked to the garage by a path made of slate, and the slabs tonight were cold and slippery and wet. Sara's feet were bare, and despite the rain she walked slowly. It wasn't simply that she didn't want to fall: Suddenly she wanted to catch the deer in the floodlights and watch them freeze before fleeing. The light switch was just inside the side door to the garage--what Willow had referred to as the people door when she'd been younger, her means of differentiating it from the massive overhead doors for the vehicles, which even now she had to struggle to lift.

  Sara found the switch with her fingers, and turned toward the garden before flipping the lights on. She wanted to be sure she had the patch of badly mauled vegetables fixed in her gaze.

  In the instant of illumination she spied not deer, however, nor a dog or raccoons or even a black bear. She saw instead John, his hair plastered so flat on his head by the rain that it looked as if he had just emerged from the pool at the club. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and before she saw he was still clad in his khaki shorts she thought he was naked. He had a pair of metal tomato cages in one hand and the cherry tomato plants that moments earlier had been growing inside them--easily three feet high now--in the other, their stalks and roots dangling in the air like the spindly legs of unimaginably giant insects. On the ground beside him she observed that he had upended the other tomato cages as well, and ripped those plants from the ground, too. She wasn't sure, but it looked as if he had yanked up the corn plants the family had meticulously replanted on Friday and Saturday, and savaged the peas, the string beans, the beets, the pumpkins, and the squash. It appeared as if he had ripped up everything the deer hadn't already nibbled to death in the garden.

  She couldn't tell if he could see her--if he could determine exactly who it was who had just turned on the lights--both because she was in the dark and because at some point he had taken off his eyeglasses (perhaps, she worried, when he had ripped off his shirt). He looked unsteady on his feet, but he squinted and stared in her general direction.

  "Mother? Sara? Who's there?" he cried, and it was indeed a sob that he was offering up through the wind and the rain and the night.

  She tried to answer but her voice caught in her throat. She tried one more time but was struck dumb by the sight of her husband and the half-mad waste he had inflicted on the vegetables and--now she glimpsed the edge of the cutting garden, partly illuminated by the floodlights--the flowers the family had planted Memorial Day Weekend. She was incapable of offering anything but a desperately sad little whimper.

  "Sara?"

  She wiped the rain from her eyes and nodded though he couldn't see her, and then she ran to him across the driveway and soggy carpet of lawn.

  *

  Part III

  Eat What You Kill

  Chapter Eighteen.

  On a Tuesday in early September, a full five weeks and three days since he'd taken a .30-caliber bullet in his shoulder, Spencer began the time-consuming ordeal of getting ready for work. Catherine and Charlotte both wanted to help him, as they had in different ways throughout the entire month of August and those still-balmy days of September. They had each felt a particular desire to assist him this morning since today he would be returning to the FERAL offices for the first time since before their disastrous family vacation in New Hampshire. But Spencer made it clear that this Tuesday he wanted to be completely on his own. He wanted to be a free agent: Capable. Confident. Independent. He understood that this image lacked a certain fidelity to his actual circumstances, since Ch
arlotte had been tying his sneakers for him for most of the last month and slathering his plaque-fighting gel on his toothbrush. Likewise, it had been Catherine who had been pulling up his socks and his pants (it was almost impossible, he had discovered, to get a pair of slacks on without his right hand, because the fabric along the waistband kept bunching up just below his right hip), and opening the small prescription bottles with the Allegra he depended upon this time of the year for his allergy and the Percocet he needed these days like air. But it was an image toward which, he told himself, he could aspire.

  Spencer knew his independence would not be a pretty sight and would take mind-numbing amounts of time, and so he'd told Dominique on the phone the previous Friday not to expect him until midmorning. And because he wanted no witnesses to the embarrassing struggles that loomed before him, he was still in bed when his wife and his daughter ventured into the bedroom one last time to kiss him good-bye before leaving for their separate classrooms at the Brearley School across town. They asked--for, he guessed, the hundredth time that morning--what they could do for him.

  "I'm really okay," he said, feigning a self-assurance he didn't feel. He was, after all, about to try to conquer Everest. "Go, go, go--I'll be fine!"