Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

“Look, don’t say another word: I’m canceling the press conference.”

“Are you serious?” He wasn’t sure whether he heard mere incredulity or giddiness in his voice. He supposed there was a little of both.

“Yup. I haven’t told anyone but Catherine yet. I tried Dominique at her home before leaving, but I missed her. She’ll be disappointed, of course, but-”

“Disappointed? Catwoman? She’ll be furious!”

“She’s not a bad person, John. She simply sees things in black and white. Once she knows that I’m doing this because of my family-when I tell her about Charlotte this morning-she’ll understand.” He raised his eyebrows. “I’m actually supposed to be at Paige’s office right now. Paige and Keenan are talking to our gun experts about why you couldn’t get the bullet out of your rifle. I need to break the news to Paige later when she’s alone.”

“Your ballistics lab has had the gun since mid-August! How can they not know what the problem is?”

“They couldn’t find anything wrong with the rifle. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“No!”

“Paige didn’t tell your lawyer?”

“No, but in all fairness there’s no reason she would have. I’m not her client. I’m sure she would have gotten around to it eventually,” he said, working consciously to answer Spencer’s question, because if he didn’t-if he focused only on the reality that his worst fears about the gun were coming true-he thought he would faint. He heard a tiny ringing in his ears, and his vision was growing slightly fuzzy.

“You okay?” Spencer was asking, the voice sounding almost as if it were on the other side of a large wall of ice.

He nodded, put his head between his legs, and breathed slowly and carefully.

“I’ll get you some water,” Spencer said.

Still he said nothing. He heard his crippled brother-in-law rising from the couch, and then walking-the click of the dog’s toenails on the tile in the hall an indication that he was being followed-to the other side of the apartment for a glass.

WHILE SPENCER was getting him water, John forced himself to concentrate on what this news about the gun meant. He saw a couple of ways Adirondack might respond. They might argue the lawsuit was so completely frivolous-so monumentally groundless-that it should be dismissed. At the same time, they might point out that Spencer should be suing his brother-in-law in Vermont. The guy who left a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car.

Or they might see this as a trifling nuisance to be disposed of quickly. They would convince Paige Sutherland that it would be impossible to wrest a sizable chunk of change from them in court because she would be unable to contend the gun was defective. It was thus in her client’s best interest to accept a token payment and go away.

It was not, of course, in Paige Sutherland’s best interest to acquiesce to a token payment. Not by a long shot. She might care as deeply about the rights of animals as Spencer or Keenan or Dominique, but there was also a big pile of money on Adirondack’s side of the table, and her goal was to convince them to slide it over to her.

Besides, Spencer didn’t want a token payment. Actually, John wasn’t sure that he wanted any payment. Oh, he understood the damages could be enormous, but for Spencer this nightmare had never been about the money. It had been about animals and hunting and violence.

He looked up when he saw Spencer returning with his water. He took a sip and wished he felt better than he did. Spencer sat down and watched him.

If only they had the casing, he thought, and it had a definitive ding or dent. A rim that was defective.

“I wish we had the casing,” he murmured simply. He half-emptied the water in his glass and placed it down on one of the coasters he remembered from his childhood. It had an artist’s rendering of the Mayflower on it. “I might look a little less foolish. And your lawsuit might be more viable.”

“John, it’s fine. Let it go.”

“No, it’s not fine. With the gun working perfectly, this lawsuit-”

“There isn’t going to be a lawsuit.”

“What?”

Spencer pushed himself to the edge of the couch, and John saw a glimpse of the intensity that once ran through his brother-in-law like river water in March.

“There’s something you need to know. Something Catherine and I just found out this morning.”

His mind was still centered on Adirondack; he couldn’t imagine what Spencer was about to tell him.

“Go on.”

“Charlotte was stoned when she shot me.”

“Stoned? What are you talking about?”

“Charlotte had been smoking dope that night and she’d had a beer. A whole beer. She’d stolen a joint from some older kid’s bag at the bonfire the teenagers were having, and she and Willow-yes, little Willow-were wasted. Maybe not falling-down-drunk wasted, but somewhere between careless and unthinking. You’ve been there, John. Me, too. God, we’ve been there together.”

“Not at ten years old,” he said. “Not at twelve, even!”

“If it makes you feel any better, your daughter has been trying to get mine to come clean for almost two months,” Spencer said, shaking his head slightly, before continuing with details John understood he was only half-hearing. Something about two beers, a bottle for each girl, and a joint that, according to Charlotte, was as thick and round as a crayon.

The image of his daughter, her tiny legs in her shorts, passing a joint to her cousin on a summer night in New Hampshire disgusted him. He wasn’t angry with her-the child was ten, for God’s sake, still a week shy of eleven-but he was furious with himself. How had it come to this? he thought, and then he decided he knew. He knew.

Here was one more thing for which he could feel guilt and remorse, one more reason to kick himself in the ass. Unlike the weapon he’d left loaded for eight long months, however, this was a gaffe he could fix. He and Sara both. He didn’t know whether it was before Patrick was born or after, he didn’t know whether shipping their girl off to her grandmother’s in the summer was a mere symptom or a part of the cause, but he was confident now that at some point he and his wife had managed to lose sight of their daughter.

“Who knows what she was thinking when she shot me,” Spencer concluded. “All I can say is that it’s evident she wasn’t thinking real clearly.”

“Oh, you can say more,” John said. “Me, too.”

Spencer began to use his left fingers to toy with the ones on his right, and John had the sense that this wasn’t an unconscious mannerism. He wondered if his brother-in-law was supposed to do this to keep the blood circulating. Spencer then offered the smallest of smiles: Resignation. Capitulation. Fatigue. “Anyway,” he said, “this little bit of information sealed the deal in my mind. There can’t be a lawsuit. Not now. I doubt we could win if this information were known, and we certainly can’t try to bury it and proceed. I’m going to tell Paige this morning.”

“Are you going to mention the marijuana?”

“Yes. And I’ll explain that I don’t want my daughter and my brother-in-law to become public spectacles-Catherine’s concern all along. I’ll tell her how Catherine almost left me this morning.”

A few minutes ago, John thought, he had been speculating on how little interest Paige would have in a token payment. But dropping the lawsuit completely? He hadn’t even contemplated that. He started to estimate how many billable hours she might have amassed but quickly turned off the calculator in his head. He didn’t want to know. Besides, she was bound by a fiduciary duty to follow her clients’ instructions. If Spencer McCullough wanted the suit dropped, then dropped it would be.