Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  She considered offering Willow a small, sympathetic smile, but she feared if she did her daughter would see clearly parental condescension. The truth was that she was using her therapist's voice. "Fair enough," she said, evening her tone. "Tell me why you're getting so upset about this, without--"

  "It's because--"

  "Without interrupting me. It's my turn to speak now, okay? Here's what I want to know: Are you getting upset because you don't want to talk about that night anymore or because you might have to talk about it with a lawyer?"

  Willow cupped her hands in front of her nose and mouth like a gas mask.

  "Willow? Please? Why did my mentioning the lawyer bother you? The truth is, we've talked about that night a fair amount over the last month and it never seemed to trouble you before."

  "How do you know that? Why would you think that? Of course it troubled me! You don't know what I saw, you don't know what I'm feeling!" the child said, speaking through her hands. Sara considered prying her fingers from her face but figured this, too, would only antagonize her daughter further. She decided there was a fair amount of disingenuousness going on here: Yes, Willow had been the first to reach Uncle Spencer, but until this moment Willow had never once behaved in a manner that might suggest the vision had been traumatizing. They'd talked about that night at length when they were in New Hampshire, and--usually when John wasn't in the room--they'd talked about Uncle Spencer's likely disability when they were home in Vermont. They'd talked about what Charlotte may or may not have been experiencing in terms of guilt, and what John clearly was enduring in terms of self-loathing. At least between mother and daughter the accident certainly had not been a forbidden subject.

  No, Sara decided now, this wasn't about the shooting. This was about . . . the lawyer. And when she analyzed what had just occurred between the two of them in the car, she was pretty sure that it was precisely when she had said to Willow that she would be expected to tell the lawyer the truth--as if she were a witness in a courtroom--that the child had suddenly gone nuclear. And that might mean there was more to the accident than she knew.

  Than anyone but Willow and Charlotte knew.

  "You're right, sweetheart," she said, stalling for time while she tried to think. "I don't know what you're feeling."

  The hands came down from the mouth, but her daughter wrapped them around her chest and stared angrily out the window. In the field they could see Holsteins clustered in groups of four and five, some of the animals grazing lazily near a trough.

  She decided that she should probably get Willow to ballet and not force the issue right now. But with a pronounced ripple across her stomach and a slight fuzziness in her eyes--a sensation reminiscent of the very first wave of seasickness--she understood that she had just learned something important: She might not know as much about what had occurred that night in Sugar Hill as she thought she did.

  She took a deep breath to calm herself. Then she smiled at her daughter and put the car back into drive. She told herself that while Willow was dancing she would try to figure out exactly what to do next.

  ANDRE NADEAU, avid sportsman (Translation? Deer hunter) and single father of two, Andre Nadeau with a misdemeanor assault on his record (a fine, probation, but no time to be served), called John late that afternoon in his office. Awash in guilt John took the call, because he hadn't spoken to Andre since before he had left for New Hampshire on the second to last day of July--where he had then remained far longer than planned. Consequently, it was no thanks to John that Andre received a mere fine and probation, despite smashing a glass beer mug on the head of one Cameron Gerrity to the tune of thirty-four stitches. Andre could thank Whitney Bowerman, one of John's PDs who had pinch-hit for him while he had driven back and forth between his mother-in-law's and the hospital in Hanover those first weeks in August.

  Andre understood that John hadn't represented him because an "accident" had befallen his lawyer's brother-in-law, but he did not know the details. Consequently, he was calling now to ask simply--simply because he was decent, simply because he was a dad, simply because he still presumed that he was going to mentor John Seton in the woods that November--why he hadn't bothered to bring his rifle to that gunsmith in Essex Junction.

  "You really should take care of that bullet in the chamber," he said to John. "Something could happen."

  He wondered what he should say to Andre, how much to tell him. He did not miss the irony that one of his clients was now offering him the sort of obvious counsel--you can't drive when your license has been revoked, even if it is your own car; you can't forge someone else's name on someone else's check, even if the guy has passed away--that formed such a high percentage of the wisdom he himself volunteered daily. He was also touched that one of those women and men at whom Paige Sutherland sneered, her nose crinkled in distaste, was calling for no other reason than because he cared.

  KEENAN BARRETT walked up Fifth Avenue to Grand Central at the end of the day, and the train that was waiting to take him home. With each block the crowds grew thicker, and the city--despite the fact Labor Day was behind him--felt increasingly equatorial. He was perspiring, a rarity for him this far north in September, and he decided he had to slow down. His train didn't leave for twenty-three minutes.

  He was sorry to hear that Spencer had burned himself while trying to fry a soy cheese sandwich, but he also knew the additional injury--minor as it most likely was--could only help at the press conference. If the wound was still visible in two weeks, a reporter invariably would ask whether the marks on his hand had something to do with the shooting, and then Spencer could answer yes, indirectly, and talk about what the disability meant in terms of nerve damage: the reality that once the sling was gone the limb would dangle like a plumb line, knocking over teacups as he wandered through restaurants, getting caught in elevator doors, and banging with such frequency into door frames and desktops that his knuckles forever would be black and blue.

  Alas, the new wound probably wouldn't look like much the week after next. It might not even be noticeable. And they certainly couldn't move the press conference forward, even if they had the results from the ballistics lab, not with this Saturday the eleventh of September. He knew from experience that in the week before and the week after 9/11, with the exception of breaking news, it was difficult (and, he felt, inappropriate) to get the media to pay attention to anything that didn't commemorate the people who had died in the attacks in New York and Washington or the people who rose to the daunting task of carting away the literal mountain of rubble where the World Trade Towers once had stood. It was an annual media frenzy that Keenan found at once moving and numbing: profiles of the medical examiners and laboratory technicians who helped identify the tens of thousands of body parts, of the bond traders who were in the towers and survived, of the Baptist volunteers from Vermont who replaced the windows that were blown to pieces in the nearby apartment buildings. There would be an endless parade of images on television--the altered skyline, the twin towers, the Pentagon, the living, the dead, the missing who never were found--a ritual that was now as much a part of the memorial mores as fireworks on the Fourth of July or fighting for drumsticks on Thanksgiving.

  It was, of course, a supreme testimony to the resiliency of that great oxymoron called American culture that the anniversary of the tragedy was still observed each year with an avalanche of new books, special-edition magazines, newspaper extras, and exclusive television programming that was never in reality all that unique. Even FERAL always found a way to get into the act. This year Dominique would be photographed in Long Island on Friday with the Suffolk County SPCA at a ceremony honoring rescue dogs, some of which had wandered deep into the World Trade Center wreckage that awful September in search of survivors and then for victims throughout that nightmarish fall. She would be giving the animals a lifetime supply of vegetarian dog biscuits and poly-filled dog beds, each item embroidered with the name of one of the dogs who'd sustained an injury that had forced him to retire-
-usually respiratory disease or blindness from the powder and dust.

  He wasn't proud of what FERAL was doing, but he also believed that the organization was exploiting 9/11 for a good cause and that the dogs wouldn't mind the treats and the beds. Besides, profits and nonprofits alike would be taking advantage of the moment. He hoped the anniversary would never become an excuse for retail sales bonanzas the way Washington's Birthday and Memorial Day had, but you never knew: Perhaps in fifty years 9/11 would be commemorated always on the second Monday in September, so there would be back-to-back three-day weekends at the end of the summer. The very notion made him shudder, but he knew in this world it could happen.

  He was jostled by a young man in a blazer with a mandarin collar talking with great animation into his cell phone, and the bump brought Keenan's mind back to the press conference. Spencer, he concluded, should not be the one to discuss the ramifications of the nerve damage. A surgeon should. Spencer would sound like a medieval monk if he himself cataloged the likely future mortifications to his flesh. But a physician wouldn't be on the dais, both because Paige didn't want to risk revealing too much of her hand and because Paige had a very healthy ego--healthy even by the Rushmore-sized standards of most big-time litigators. Consequently, in addition to announcing the lawsuit, Paige should explain to the press the petty indignities that awaited Spencer McCullough--petty, of course, only in comparison to the complete loss of function. There was really nothing petty about accidentally slamming a car door on your hand and not having a clue that you've just shattered half the phalanx bones in your fingers.

  Still, Keenan guessed that Spencer was the sort who might never allow the arm to be amputated. The man was both too vain to walk through life without it (and given the complete destruction of the bones and muscle in his shoulder, he understood there was no point in a prosthetic replacement) and too in love with his daughter to subject her to a visual reminder for as long as he lived of what she had done. If he were in the same situation, Keenan presumed he would keep the arm, too.

  So, the press conference would feature Spencer, Paige, and Dominique. Keenan decided he could live without a surgeon, if Paige felt comfortable explaining the medical carnage (and he sensed that Paige would savor every gruesome detail). That team was sufficiently capable of embarrassing the hell out of Adirondack and getting Spencer on-air with the morning news anchors if the right people were in the audience. Dominique, too.

  A key, obviously, would be to make sure that those right people were there. And that was something that Spencer himself often handled. Certainly his assistants were quite capable, especially Randy Mitchell. Randy, too, knew the key producers and some of the more powerful editors. But it was Spencer who had the special rapport with them and knew which freelance writers had the clout to convince the New Yorker to let them write about the horrors of the beef industry or were capable of selling the Atlantic on the idea of an exploration about what really went on in the university labs that experimented on animals. These people were particularly important because broadcast followed print. That was the rule. And sometimes it took a few timely magazine and newspaper features to get the network news and their prime-time newsmagazines to produce those glorious exposes with their computer-generated graphics.

  Already Keenan could see in his mind the computer-generated blues, blacks, and golds of an animated cutaway diagram of the Adirondack thirty-ought-six, a moving, fluidlike image that showed the placement of the bolt, the extractor, and the ejector. He heard the reporter's even tones in a voice-over, as an image of a hook failed again and again to fasten itself into the groove in the back of the bullet in the chamber, until . . . until finally the computer zeroed in on the round. Maybe the designer would cause the bullet to flash red now, like the defective part in a passenger jet that caused the plane to crash.

  He sighed, contributing his small moan to the sultry crush on the street. Depending upon what the ballistics lab told them, the angle would be either that John Seton's individual gun had a faulty component or the contention that even used properly his Adirondack brand of rifle needlessly left a bullet in the chamber after the magazine was emptied. Either way, Keenan believed, they would make the firearms manufacturer look bad. Very bad. And they would portray hunting as the barbaric, irresponsible hobby that it was.

  As he made his way through the throngs pressing their way into the station, he wondered if Spencer was capable of calling select members of the media himself, or--even if he was--whether he should. It might be unseemly. Spencer, after all, was the focus of this tragedy. He guessed they would have to depend upon Randy Mitchell or Joan Robbins or Turner Smolens--Spencer's staff. He tried to imagine their phone presence, to recall what he could from their conversations with him and the numerous times he had overheard them on the telephone as he strolled past their cubicles.

  Then it hit him, and he actually stood still for a moment on the platform beside the very rear of his train while the thought registered: All Randy or Joan or Turner had to say to these people was that Spencer McCullough had been shot by a hunting rifle, and they would be at the press conference in a heartbeat. It wasn't that they cared so deeply for Spencer; it wasn't, in truth, that they cared for him at all. Rather, it was that same ghoulish irony that had led him to fear back on the first day of August that FERAL would wind up the butt of jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman. How could they possibly miss getting the story on this one?

  The answer? They couldn't. They wouldn't.

  The difference now--unlike his worries in early August--was that FERAL was going to control how the information was presented.

  When he started moving forward once more, it was with a gait that was brisk and confident and--for a man of his age and reserve on a sweltering train platform in the bowels of Grand Central Station--downright effervescent.

  Chapter Twenty-One.

  On Thursday afternoon Charlotte came home from school before her mother, radiant with the news that she had gotten one of the leads in the autumn musical. She was the only eighth-grader with a part--the only student, in fact, with a role who wasn't at least in the ninth grade. She understood that she was going to play a ten-year-old girl surrounded by grown-ups, and so it helped that she was younger (and shorter) than the rest of the cast. Still, this was a real coup, and when she saw the cast list outside the drama teacher's classroom at the end of the school day she'd raced down the Brearley corridors to her own mother's room, demonstrating exactly the sort of unfettered enthusiasm that usually she disdained.

  Now when she opened the front door to her family's apartment across town, she was no less cheerful. She saw her father was dozing in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt in a chair by the window, and initially she was disappointed that she couldn't tell him the news that very moment. She was still annoyed with him over what she considered the Maurice and the Magic Banana slight, but he had seemed so pathetic since Tuesday that she never had confronted him with either the book itself or the magazine photo she had discovered of her father and the gifted gorilla. Now she thought she would burst if she didn't tell someone her news and so she was delighted when he opened his eyes and stared at her. His hair hung lank down his temples and he looked rather tubby. Uncharacteristically slovenly. Until Tuesday, when he had failed to make it to work, he had tried to keep up a semblance of hygiene and fashion normalcy. No more. Over the last couple of days, he had lived in sweatpants, tennis shorts, and bulky T-shirts a size too large. He hadn't even tried to shave, and his face was covered with the gray and black stubble she associated with the homeless along Riverside Drive. She noticed that his small weights were out by the couch, and though she hoped it was because the physical therapist had been at the apartment earlier that afternoon, she was pretty sure the weights had been there for days.

  "I'm really sorry if I woke you," she said, "but I'm glad you're awake. Guess what?"

  He used his left arm to push himself up in the chair, visibly wincing, so he wasn't slouching like biscuit dough. "Go a
head."

  "I got the part! I'm Mary Lennox!"

  "Wow, that's pretty big news. Congratulations!" He raised his eyebrows as he spoke, taking in the information.

  "Yup. Can I use the phone, I'm going to call--"

  "Hold on, hold on. Tell me all the details. I want to hear everything."

  "Do you really have time?" she asked, a reflex before she could stop herself. In the past, her father never had time for details. Before the accident, she either would have left this news for him on his voice mail at FERAL or told him at dinner between his own anecdotes about the ponies, dolphins, or lab rats the organization was working that moment to save. She knew he would be happy for her--and yes, proud that she was his daughter. But unless he was in one of his infrequent phases of almost manic parental involvement, the very last thing he would want would be the details. Now, of course, time was less of an issue. He seemed to have plenty of it.

  "Yes," he said with almost dreamlike serenity. "I have time."

  And so she sat on the pouf between the dormant fireplace and her father's chair and told him all that she could remember about the audition yesterday: The high school boys from another school who were asked to audition for the parts of Archie and Neville, the songs she had been asked to sing, the dancing that was required. The number of girls she had to beat out for the part. She told him in a chirping voice that gathered momentum as she spoke, as she remembered specific details.