Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

That was what John had said to Sara in the small hours of the night-no more than eight or nine hours ago, now-after he had changed Patrick’s small diaper and she was nursing the baby back to sleep. It had come up because their bedroom window was open, and once Patrick had settled down they could listen to the wind in the lupine and John thought he might have heard animals rustling just outside the house. In the garden, perhaps. He wasn’t exactly talking to himself as he stood before the screen, but she knew that he didn’t expect an answer, either.

Still, with her son lolling against her breast she had felt compelled to remind him that she couldn’t imagine him shooting a deer over Spencer’s kohlrabi or green beans, anyway.

No, he’d said. Of course not.

She sat now in the cool shade in the grass near the swimming pool with Patrick in his baby seat beside her and wondered why her husband would even be thinking of such things in the middle of the night. She watched the two girls dive, and it made her forget the deer and the garden for a moment. She was impressed with their grace and their courage. How Charlotte had learned to stand on the board with her back to the water, throw her hips high into the air, curl her body back toward the fiberglass, and then dive into the water-the rear of her skull so close to the board that Sara flinched the first time her niece demonstrated an inward-was beyond her. The fact that her own daughter, still two years younger than Charlotte, had learned to do a somersault over the past two weeks was equally as amazing. She knew they had been taught by the young woman who was the lifeguard this morning, a plump girl between her junior and senior years at the high school in Littleton. She never expected overweight teens-boys as well as girls-to be sufficiently comfortable with their bodies to thrive in any activity that involved limited amounts of clothing. This girl, however, was an apparent exception. She seemed to wear a towel around her waist like a skirt when she wasn’t actually in the water, but otherwise she seemed completely at ease with the bulk she had wedged into her spandex. And she dove, Sara thought, like the small kestrels and falcons she’d seen darting through the air from the cliffs off Snake Mountain.

She politely clapped when Willow showed her a forward dive in the pike position. Her baby’s eyes followed her hands and then he cooed.

“Yes,” she murmured to him, leaning over to press her nose against his, “someday I will clap for you, too. Yes, I will.”

Her daughter emerged from the water and raced across the grass to her, wrapping herself quickly in a towel. “At the bonfire tonight,” Willow began, her sentence choppy because she was bouncing on one foot with her head angled to the side, “Charlotte said I can borrow her eye shadow. May I?”

“The stuff she was wearing last night at dinner?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why would you want to? It’s purple, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s lavender.”

“Oh.”

“So it’s okay?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Is it that you think ten is too young or you think I shouldn’t wear eye shadow to a bonfire?” She had stopped hopping, but her teeth were chattering now.

“It’s probably a little of both,” she answered, and then said-her change of mood so abrupt that Patrick looked at her and clucked-“Oh, of course it’s fine. Of course you may.”

Willow smiled and then made Sara’s morning more perfect than she had supposed it could be: The girl leaned over and kissed her warmly on her cheek, despite the nearby presence of Cousin Charlotte and the teenage lifeguard who had taught them to dive.

CATHERINE PADDED ACROSS the grass toward her sister-in-law and her nephew like a cat. Not a timid house cat: a feral cat, a mouser, the sort of strong and lithe feline that kills for a living. Her tennis sneakers barely touched the ground as she walked, and though she was sweating-it had taken her more effort to dispose of young Gary Winslow than she had expected-she wasn’t tired and she moved with an undulant allure.

“That’s Willow’s mom, right?” Gary said to her as they approached Sara.

“Yes, indeed.”

“A shrink?”

“Therapist,” she answered, and as she said the word she wondered what her sister-in-law the therapist would think when she turned around and saw her striding across the grass with this young buck of a teenager. The truth was that Gary was simply going to introduce himself to the woman who was Willow’s mom and then change into a swimsuit for his shift at the pool (and, suddenly, she thought of the swimsuit she had with her in her canvas bag and feared that it would seem matronly to this… boy). That was the only reason he was coming this way with her, after all, it wasn’t really like the two of them were… together. But Catherine wondered if someone less perceptive than Sara might presume there was something vaguely untoward about her spending time with a strange teenager, the two of them glistening with sweat.

Sara looked up from the baby at her side and held her hand flat over her wild eyebrows like a visor. And the woman did indeed have big eyebrows. Sara was attractive, but with her eyebrows in need of attention, her coffee-colored hair the length of a teenager’s-hair that was growing now the first telltale filaments of white, a few strands sprinkled in amid the brown just above her ears-and those eyeglasses even more dated than the ones worn by her own brother, John, she looked a tad too earthy for Catherine. Especially today in those sandals with clunky straps and those shorts the color of army fatigues.

Catherine remembered when John had first brought Sara to Manhattan to meet their mother and her and Spencer. John had discovered her while skiing in Vermont-within weeks, actually, of her and Spencer’s own wedding-and unlike almost everyone else in the lodge that afternoon she was actually from the Green Mountains. Had grown up in a town northeast of Burlington. Her father taught at the University of Vermont, in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and he was one of the country’s leading experts on a bug with the appalling-sounding name of the pear thrip. Being an expert on the pear thrip mattered in Vermont, because pear thrips liked to eat maple tree leaves. Sara’s mother was the secretary at the village’s elementary school, but she had recently retired. In any case, when Sara first saw the courtyard and the columns in Nan Seton’s Manhattan apartment building, the cobblestone circle into which the town cars and taxis would travel while awaiting the privileged who lived in the great monolith of a structure, the doormen-there was not a single doorman, not here; there was instead a cadre of wizened old men and enthusiastic young ones scattered throughout the courtyard and standing vigil inside the elevators, some in blue uniforms and some in gray, all of whom had thick, lyric Irish accents-and then the endless sprawl that was the apartment itself, she seemed ill at ease. She had been quiet when she was getting the tour, and when she finally said something more than a monosyllabic murmur of appreciation, she had shaken her head and announced in a voice-playful, yes, but the awe, it was clear, was real, too-“Imagine. And to think I’d thought that everybody in New York City (at least everybody I’d ever meet) lived in those teeny-tiny studios where you slept on a convertible couch by the kitchen.” Catherine remembered that her mother had been charming: She laughed and with a self-deprecating shrug explained to John’s girlfriend that she and her husband had bought the apartment in the mid-1970s, when Manhattan real estate was worth a little less than property along the Love Canal. Nevertheless, Catherine thought that while there had been wonderment in Sara’s reaction, there had also been a slight whiff of disapproval-as if Sara saw something decadent in the plates with the gold leaf in the breakfront or in the notion that although there wasn’t a live-in maid, there really were two small bedrooms in the back of the apartment near the kitchen that were referred to as the maids’ rooms. Catherine recalled experiencing an unpleasant quiver of guilt, and suddenly the Japanese screens and the Italian floor tile seemed ostentatious. Showy. Dissolute.