Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

At first Willow didn’t think anything of the contents. She saw the diapers and she saw the jack, and she saw a moldy towel and an empty plastic bottle that once had held mineral water. But then, at the exact moment that Charlotte was opening her mouth and asking what that thing was that was shaped a lot like a rifle, she saw her dad’s lambskin gun bag. Before she could stop Charlotte-her own hands were too busy hoisting the plastic-wrapped cube of diapers as big as a television set-her cousin was reaching into the trunk and lifting Dad’s Adirondack into the air, feeling its shape through the leather and the fleece and the long metal zipper.

“What the heck is this?” Charlotte said, and though Willow dropped the diapers onto the grass and ripped the gun bag from her cousin’s hands, she knew it was too late.

“It’s nothing,” Willow said, the words useless.

“It’s a gun is what it is. Why does Uncle John have a gun?”

“Maybe it’s evidence in some case.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m sure that’s what it is.”

“Then why did you grab it out of my hands like…”

“Like what?”

“Like you knew what it was.”

“It’s Dad’s. Leave it alone.” She dropped it back into the trunk and slammed the trunk shut. She wished she had a key so she could lock it.

“Seriously, tell me: Why does your dad have a gun? Is he, like, in trouble?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is some criminal after him? I know he represents some real scary characters.”

“No!”

“Then why?”

She rubbed her eyes, and then reached down for the diapers. She picked the plush cube up, cradling it against her chest as if it were a massive stuffed animal, and said, “If you must know-and before I tell you this, you have to swear on your life you won’t tell your mom and dad, okay?”

“Fine. Whatever you want.”

“You swear?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “I am way too old for this sort of thing. But sure: I swear.”

“Since you must know, Dad sometimes go hunting. Deer hunting. He’s not superserious about it, but he started last fall.”

“Has he killed anything?”

“Not yet.”

“But he hunts,” she said, her voice an odd combination of incredulity and wonder.

“Yes. He hunts,” Willow said, and she took the diapers and started toward the house. Before she had gone inside, however, a thought crossed her mind and she called out to her cousin, “I’ll be right back, you know. So just leave my dad’s stuff alone, okay?”

WHEN THE SINGLE GUNSHOT blistered the night quiet, Catherine’s ears were under the water in the bath and she was only vaguely aware of the sound. She imagined something had fallen over in the kitchen, and she guessed her mother’s dog had toppled the metal trash can in the corner near the sink. She didn’t even pull the back of her head up from underneath the bubbles and the foam, and she continued to breathe in slowly through her nose, which was barely a fraction of an inch above the surface of the water. She was wondering which of her divorced friends she should call to get the name of a marriage counselor and then whether a divorcée was really the best route to a person who might actually be capable of preserving her and Spencer’s marriage. It was only when she heard footsteps pounding down the stairs and her nephew’s shrill cries a moment later that she pulled herself from the water, listened carefully, and then threw her nightgown over her damp body and ran to investigate.

Two rooms away young Patrick heard the blast loud and clear, and he started with his mother’s nipple in his mouth, biting down so hard with his lips and small, sharp teeth that Sara yelped-an echo, almost, of the gunshot’s lingering ping, the higher, less angry sound following the initial, concussive explosion-and she pulled her baby away from her breast. Then he let loose with a yowl. John knew instantly what the bang was, and he turned from his wife and his son, dimly aware of the milk and a tiny bit of blood puddling across Sara’s reddish brown areola, and raced to the window with the cube of diapers still in his hands. For a split second his heart had stopped, but now it was pounding so hard and fast in his chest that each thump sounded as loud in his head as the rifle’s discharge.

Upstairs on the third floor Nan heard it, too, though her first reaction was that a large vehicle had backfired. It was as if she were back in Manhattan and it was, say, early May, and a bus or a garbage truck had just passed by her apartment and she had heard the bang through an open window. But then she realized that this had nothing to do with a bus or a truck, because she was in Sugar Hill and the house was too far from the road for the sound of a vehicle backfiring to have been so disconcerting and brutish.

And, of course, Spencer heard it, as he wandered out from the lupine that bordered the remnants of the vegetable garden, but he had no time to understand what the sound was because the bullet-the Menzer Premium that John, so new and green, had been unable to remove from the chamber back in November-slammed into his upper body and sent him flying into the air in much the same way as his daughter when she was doing an inward dive (hips thrown back high and hard, arms spread wide to the sides). He landed with his legs in the lupine and his chest and his arms and his head atop the ruined tangles of peas, and though he had heard the gunshot he did not hear the scream of the child, even though the scream-then a shriek, then a wail that sounded to anyone who was listening carefully like the word No!-followed the blast by no more than a second or a second and a half.

It was after two in the morning when John and Nan and Charlotte and Willow finally left the hospital in Hanover to return to Sugar Hill, where Patrick was sleeping and Sara was sitting in the chair by the window, wondering just what she would say to her husband if Spencer died and what kinds of things Charlotte would say a decade from now to (it was inevitable) her therapist, regardless of whether her father survived the night. She was scared, she realized, and she was feeling left out. She didn’t normally feel left out when she managed to avoid a game of golf with everyone else or a hike through the woods of Franconia Notch to the flume. Usually she felt relieved. But not this night. As she had looked through the slightly grimy screen window at the driveway and the vegetable garden, she felt-as she had at different points when she was a child and even in college-that she was on the outskirts of some place or some clique of which she wanted sincerely to be a part. She had known the feeling since the second or third grade, when her mother was the school secretary and sat right outside the principal’s office. She knew that other children in her class had secrets that they kept from her simply because of who her mother was.

Consequently, she was grateful when well past three in the morning she saw the headlights coming up the long driveway in the dark, and downright euphoric when she saw that Catherine did not emerge from the car with the rest of the family. It had to mean that Spencer was still breathing, because she believed that no wife would have left her husband at the hospital at that time of the night unless her husband had died.

There had been moments in her vigil by the window when she had wished that John or Nan would call her from the hospital, but she hadn’t thought that was likely. Everyone was hoping that she and the baby would sleep, and everyone was so stunned by the accident that they weren’t thinking sufficiently straight to realize that even a catnap was going to be impossible.