Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“I like it fine. But I don’t want to live in her mausoleum of an apartment this fall. Especially not with the play coming up in November. Don’t I have enough to deal with as it is?”

He nodded, more to himself than to her because she was watching Tanya sniff at the side of a building as they walked. “So what would you propose?” he asked.

“I’m not worried about this press conference. What are people going to find out? That I shot you by accident? Well, duh. Like every single person at Brearley and every single person in the apartment building already knows that. I screwed up,” she said, and-there it was-he heard the tremor in her voice grow into a small sob and when he turned toward her he saw she was starting to cry. Instantly he knelt before her, a sudden ache coursing up and down his side because he had moved too quickly, and he used his one good hand like a football player to hold her. Grabbed her around her waist and brought her to him.

“I screwed up and I shot you,” she said again, crying fully now. “Fine. Well, now I’m not going to leave you alone. I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not going. She can go if she wants, but I’m not leaving-and no one can make me.”

He held her as close as he could, even though the pressure against his sling-cradled arm was causing him literal spasms of pain, and the dog was resting her paws on his knees-he was poised like a baseball catcher, and the ledge of his legs was too tempting for Tanya to resist. The pain was considerable, but the real issues were that his daughter was crying, a response that he’d certainly thought possible, and that she was refusing to leave him, a notion he hadn’t even considered.

Suddenly, despite the fact they were on the corner of Columbus and Eighty-fifth, his eyes were tearing, too.

NAN REMEMBERED a moment one morning in the vegetable garden in New Hampshire. It was either the day her children had arrived this past summer or the day before. She no longer knew which. She had been examining the damage caused by the deer and wondering how Spencer would react, and suddenly she had begun to worry about Catherine. She’d worried that Spencer was more interested in animals than in humans, and the thought had crossed her mind that someday her daughter would leave him and her marriage would end.

Well, here it was. It was happening. It was playing itself out exactly as she had feared. Spencer was putting FERAL before his family, and Catherine was leaving him and-this part, she had to admit was an unforeseen twist-coming here. With Charlotte. And that new dog. Returning to the apartment in which she had spent a large portion of her childhood.

“Why isn’t Spencer the one who’s leaving?” Nan had asked Catherine just now when her daughter had phoned with the news over breakfast. Apparently, Spencer was telling Charlotte what her parents were planning that very moment, while the two of them were taking the dog for a walk. “Normally, isn’t it the husband who moves out?”

“He’s crippled.”

“Oh.”

Nan knew there was plenty of room for everyone-even Tanya, she guessed-but she was still deeply troubled by the news that Catherine’s marriage was hemorrhaging. She was also disconcerted by the unexpected reality that Catherine’s arrival later today meant that she was going to have both of her children under her roof this evening.

“That sounded like bad news,” John said after she had hung up the phone. He had wandered into the kitchen in his pajamas, finishing a buttered English muffin as she had spoken with Catherine.

“Yes,” she said. “Very bad news indeed.”

Sara and Willow and Patrick had driven back to Vermont yesterday afternoon as planned, but John had decided to stay until tomorrow afternoon. Tuesday. He’d remained behind because he’d resolved at the very last moment that he would attend Spencer’s press conference, after all. He’d concluded, for better or worse, that he couldn’t stay away from it. He had no plans to be a bomb-throwing, deer-hunting anarchist. But if he had to be part of it, then he was going to witness the event up close and personal.

When it was over, he would take a cab to LaGuardia and catch the 5:25 flight to Burlington.

He hadn’t yet told Spencer he was going to be present, and he hadn’t decided whether he would call him at some point today or just show up tomorrow. Nan guessed that Catherine’s presence here tonight might force him to call Spencer first. But you never knew. Catherine was so angry with her husband that she might be comfortable with the idea of her brother launching what Spencer might construe as a sneak attack.

“It sounded like Sis is coming home to Mother. True?”

“True,” she murmured distractedly, her mind focused on the image that evening of John and Catherine and Charlotte and Tanya all here with her. And then she thought of Spencer alone on the West Side with his cats, and of Sara and Willow and Patrick in Vermont. How had it come to this? She’d thought when everyone had been together on Saturday that the cold war was thawing, but in reality all that had occurred was a shifting of alliances. She sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, depression insinuating itself through the creases and trim of her nightgown-it was a dowdy piece of work, she decided-and coating her skin like a lotion. What would happen when she was gone? Really? Would anything like a family remain?

“Can you give me the details?” her son was asking. She looked up at him. She didn’t feel well at all, and she honestly wasn’t sure she had the strength.

CATHERINE WAS AWARE that the dog was sliding her water bowl along the trim that ran underneath the kitchen cabinets in the pantry, an idiosyncrasy that had struck everyone as cute on Friday and Saturday when the animal had initially shown the inclination but had begun to grow tiresome yesterday when first Spencer and then she had forgotten the bowl was there and accidentally stepped on the dish. Catherine didn’t make an effort now to suggest to Tanya that she should give this practice a rest, however, because the minor inconvenience posed by a dog’s overturned water bowl was absolutely inconsequential compared to the human meltdown she was trying (and failing) to halt. Charlotte was standing beside the refrigerator and screaming at her, yelling in a manner that Catherine hadn’t witnessed in a good long time, the child’s affected British refinement a mere memory, while Spencer was squatting beside their daughter, his forehead in his one functioning hand, looking as if he had given up completely any hope that he might be able to reason with her.

“I am not leaving!” she was shrieking, her cheeks and her forehead so pink they looked sunburned, the tears descending down her face like twin waterfalls. “Tanya is not leaving! And you would be horrible if you left! Horrible! How could you even think-”

“I will not be called horrible!” she snapped back. “You will not talk to me that way!” The words were out before she could stop them. She hated herself for sounding precisely like the angry mothers she saw snapping at their children in grocery stores, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t help herself.

“You are! You don’t care about Dad, you don’t care about me! All you care about are your precious students and precious Eric-”

“That is enough!”

“Precious Eric, precious Gary, precious Hank-”

She grabbed Charlotte by her upper arms and squeezed, trying physically to rein her in. She had a vague sense that if she didn’t have something in her hands-even her daughter’s shoulders, so small and frail underneath a thin cotton sweater and the blue blouse that she wore often with her Brearley skirt-she would slap the girl. Strike the child (strike anyone) for the first time in her life.