Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

“You’re hurting me!”

“Charlotte, you must settle down!”

“Just go, then! You-just go! Get out!”

She felt the girl struggling, but she wouldn’t release her. It was, she realized, a test of wills, and her ability to reason was slipping away. She tried to think of what she wanted to say, but she couldn’t. She understood on some level that when Spencer and Charlotte had returned from walking Tanya, they both had been crying. But then they were quiet, very quiet, the two of them. And somehow-in the space of, what, sixty seconds?-a little moment of domestic sadness had been transmogrified into this cataclysm of accusations and rage, and the bubbling up from deep inside their daughter’s mind of all these… issues… that had nothing to do with her parents’ problems. At least in Catherine’s opinion, they didn’t. Dr. Warwick might view it all somewhat differently.

“Get out! You want to leave, well, leave!”

“Charlotte,” Spencer began, his voice muffled slightly because his fingers were still on his forehead and so he was speaking down into the tile floor. “Charlotte…”

It was apparent he, too, wasn’t sure what to say, but still Catherine was grateful that at least now she had an ally.

“Charlotte…” he murmured once more.

“What!” It was a screech, not a question.

“You need to calm down. To stop yelling. Your mother and I-”

“Don’t you dare!” she said, and abruptly she wrestled free of Catherine’s grasp and whirled across the kitchen, one foot flipping the water dish-which, inevitably, had wound up precisely in the girl’s path-into the air like a giant tiddly-wink, sending the water into a spray that coated them all. “Don’t change your mind! You said outside I didn’t have to go. You said I could stay right here!”

“Yes, Charlotte, you’re not going anywhere,” he said, and Catherine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The notion of Charlotte staying here was inconceivable. Unthinkable. Spencer could barely care for himself. How in the name of God could he care for their thirteen-year-old daughter, too? What was he thinking telling the girl she could remain with him at this apartment? More important, how could she-the child’s mother-allow Charlotte to stay ensconced in the home of the man who was going to use her so shamelessly in a press conference tomorrow?

“Spencer, did you just tell Charlotte she didn’t have to come with me across town?” The horrible shrillness in her voice disgusted her.

“Yes, I did.”

“Spencer-”

“Mom, I’m staying! You can leave, if you want to-”

“I don’t want to! I’m not leaving-we’re not leaving-because I want to!” she said, and some small part of her actually began to focus on how wet her stockings were. Thank God it was only water, because she’d never have time to change before school. “We’re leaving because your father and I have agreed that it’s best-”

“Catherine, no: I don’t want you to go, either.”

She turned from her daughter to her husband and saw there on his face an almost unrecognizable hangdog look of despair.

“This isn’t something we agreed on,” he was saying. “It’s something I am enduring because I don’t know what else to do. But I don’t want you to leave. You don’t know…”

She wondered what she didn’t know, and she was about to ask him if only to give herself time to think. To refocus on this-and as the words formed in her head and she felt the chilly dog water on her legs she almost nodded at their rightness-sloppy mess.

“What don’t I know?” she murmured. “Tell me.”

“Neither of you knows anything!” It was Charlotte this time, still crying, still angry, her face still that ugly pink mask of despair, but at least she hadn’t shrieked this accusation. She’d actually spoken with sufficient quiet that Tanya nosed her way closer: The dog was seeming to decide whether it was worth the possible noise-induced hearing loss to venture any nearer this odd little group that constituted her new pack. “Neither of you knows anything,” she said again, sniffing in a manner that was at once dramatic and necessary: All that crying had made her nose run like a softening glacier.

“Charlotte,” Spencer said. “What don’t we know? Tell us.”

“You don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “You two-and Uncle John and Aunt Sara-you don’t know what I did. No one but Willow does. This is all my fault, and you two can’t get a divorce because of me. You just can’t”-her voice a plea now-“because I couldn’t stand it if I caused that, too!”

The girl’s small sobs and sniffles made it difficult for Catherine to understand every single word, but she was getting the point. She crabbed over to her daughter and held her again, this time not grasping her shoulders as if she were about to shake some sense into her but instead enfolding her in her arms and pulling her head to her chest. The dog came over to the two of them and started trying to wedge her snout in between them, and Catherine didn’t stop her. Any moisture left on her skirt or her blouse by a wet dog nose was nothing compared to the impressive stream of tears flooding against her chest.

“I was stoned when I fired the gun, and drunk,” Charlotte was saying. “I’d been smoking marijuana and I’d drunk a whole beer. Maybe I would have tried to shoot a deer anyway, I don’t know, but I do know I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to get Gwen-”

“Gwen? Who’s Gwen?” Spencer asked.

“She’s a lifeguard at the club,” Charlotte answered, hiccupping as she cried. “I stole the joint from her bag at the bonfire that night. At first I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to get Gwen in trouble. But then, when I saw what you and FERAL were doing, I didn’t tell you because I was afraid if I did you couldn’t sue the gun company and hold your press conference. And that seemed so important! And after I’d ruined your life by shooting you, I had to make sure I didn’t wreck anything else. I had to! But, please, don’t get a divorce now because of this! Please! I am so sorry for everything, and I’ve tried to hold it together, but, no, no, not this too, not this, don’t make me have to live with this, too! I couldn’t handle it, really, I couldn’t! Please, no! Please-no!” and her voice rose into an almost classically tragic ululation-the widows of all those ancient Greek sailors-before trailing off into nothing but those wrenching, pathetic sobs. Gently Catherine rubbed her child’s back, her hands making slow, tender circles. She looked across the floor and Spencer raised his eyebrows and shook his head. Then he, too, scooted over the damp tile to them, wincing once when he must have moved his shoulder too quickly, and there the three of them-and their dog-held each other as if they were the most fragile objects in the apartment.

Which, Catherine decided suddenly, they were.

Paige liked this conference room. She liked it a lot, and not simply because it was massive. It sat on a corner of the twenty-ninth floor, high enough that the east-facing windows offered an ashy view of the East River and the dusky, saddle brown warehouses, industrial waste, and municipal detritus that stretched toward the sunrise-and, indeed, the sun was rising now-on the water’s far bank. There were panels in the walls behind which sat a wireless Panasonic projector, a Polycom view station for teleconferencing, a prohibitively expensive Toshiba DVD player, a forty-two-inch Sanyo plasma display screen, and an Advantage Electrol matte white panel that descended from the ceiling and offered a perfectly square field for presentations that was a dauntingly impressive eight by eight feet. The firm rarely used these high-tech toys, but everyone enjoyed knowing they were there. Especially the litigation group. And tomorrow, after she announced the lawsuit-lambasting Adirondack for profiteering at the expense of safety-and turned the press conference over to Dominique, they were going to use a good many of these audiovisual baubles. There would be images of motherless fawn, eviscerated deer, and Spencer McCullough’s shoulder, including some of the photographs she’d had taken in New Hampshire the Tuesday after the shooting. They’d swamp the group with all manner of statistics about deer hunting that would convey the sheer size and brutality of the slaughter, the numbers of humans and dogs that were killed and wounded every year, the figures that supported their contention that buck-only laws actually resulted in wildlife overpopulation.