Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Willow was the first person to reach Uncle Spencer. She’d simply continued to run in the direction that her cousin-the other girl’s eyes wide with hysteria and insensible grief-was facing. Dimly she understood Charlotte was shrieking, “I thought it was a deer! I thought it was a deer!” but she hadn’t yet realized that the girl was actually referring to her own father. It. Later, when they were at the hospital, Willow guessed by it Charlotte had meant also the movement. The physical presence that emerged from the lupine at the edge of the garden.

Willow knew that everyone-the state trooper, that fellow from Fish and Wildlife, those two EMTs-seemed worried that what she had seen would leave her scarred. The body. Her uncle. No kid should have to see such a thing, she overheard the trooper murmuring to the officer from Fish and Wildlife. But the truth was, it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t good, either, that was for sure: She saw the deep burgundy stain spreading across her uncle’s sport shirt like an overturned glass of tomato juice-the red indeed as viscous and thick as tomato juice, especially by his shoulder and collarbone-and she had seen the faraway look in his wide-open eyes. She was scared for her uncle, and for a moment she’d been so hot and dizzy that she thought she might faint-something she’d never done before in her life. But, she realized, she had seen far, far worse things in horror movies. Every kid had.

Still, she had no plans to visit the vegetable garden on the other side of the house for a very long time. Certainly, if she could help it, for the rest of the summer.

Above her she saw a bird, the first one she had noticed since she had ventured out here to the strawberries. It was a crow, that massive black bird that Charlotte had suspected was a raven when they’d first mentioned it to Grandmother three days ago. Three days. How could things possibly have changed so much in only three days? As she watched the bird’s silent flight over the house, she guessed that it had emerged from the top of the pines-from exactly where Grandmother had said its nest was. It circled the house and the garage and then descended abruptly to a spot she couldn’t quite see. Maybe it had landed in the garden. Or seen something beside the apple trees or on the driveway. She wished she and her cousin had tried that experiment with the dime her grandmother had suggested. It would have been interesting to have come home from the club on Thursday afternoon and seen whether the coin was gone.

She supposed that Uncle Spencer would live, if only because she couldn’t imagine a world in which he could die. Yes, things could change in three days, but she couldn’t allow herself to believe they could change that much. It was going to be difficult enough for Charlotte to go through life with the knowledge that she had shot her dad, and so she was giving little credence to the possibility that her uncle wouldn’t be out of intensive care in a couple of days and back home in a couple of weeks.

Her mother saw her now, pulled her sandal in from the bulbous porch spindles, and started toward her across the grass of the badminton court. She was walking slowly, almost gingerly, her hands casually in the front pants pockets of her shorts. How are you feeling? How does that make you feel? Her conversations with her mother-the serious ones-seemed to begin with her mother asking her one of those questions, and already Willow heard the words in her head. Other children, she knew, were jealous of her mother’s apparent placidity in the midst of either crisis or misbehavior. And, she decided, they had every right to be. The way Sara actually asked how she felt about things sometimes drove her crazy-especially when she didn’t yet know how she felt about something-but it was also one of the many reasons why Willow loved her so much and knew the woman was different from other moms.

She sighed and stood up, as if she’d been caught red-handed doing something wrong. She noticed a drop of pulpy red juice on her fingertips, as well as a dimpled bit of the fruit itself, and she thought once again of her uncle.

While the two EMTs, the sergeant from the state police, and the officer from Fish and Wildlife continued to wonder on Sunday what the hell kind of moron flatlander would fail to unload his thirty-ought-six and then leave the damn thing in the trunk of his car, Nan Seton had a pressing question of her own: Where in the name of heaven were the baby wipes? John was on his way back to the hospital and Sara was outside in the strawberries with Willow. Charlotte was the only other person in the house with her and Patrick, and she was still sobbing behind closed doors.

Normally Nan would have disturbed the pair in the strawberries without hesitation, but she hadn’t seen her daughter-in-law and Willow sit still together-just the two of them-for more than ten minutes since Patrick had been born. She guessed the girl needed her mother, and she didn’t want to intrude on them.

Patrick, alas, had turned a once spongelike disposable diaper into an oozing jellyfish so sloppy that no one-not even Sara-would have been able to compact it into one of those neat little softballs that were so easy to throw away. Worse, the baby had somehow managed to coat even his little light switch of a penis with waste. He smiled up at her now from his perch on a towel on the bureau where she was changing him, and she interpreted that smile on his face to be one of pride. His diaper sat dripping on a century-old cherry dresser.

Finally, when it was clear that the wipes were not beside the opened block of diapers on the floor or anywhere on the dresser, when it was evident there were none in the medicine cabinet, she decided she’d have to do something drastic. Hoisting the infant into the air in the towel, using it like a hammock, she carried him into the bathroom. There she filled the sink and started bobbing him up and down in the water. He clucked with pleasure, and she found herself clucking back. She’d have this lad swimming with her in Echo Lake in no time.

WHEN SARA AND WILLOW wandered inside twenty minutes later, Nan didn’t tell them of her resourcefulness, but Sara noticed the clean diaper and the baby’s contentment. She kissed Patrick’s toes, which Nan guessed must have tasted agreeably clean. Then Sara brought the baby onto the porch to nurse him, and Willow collapsed into the thick couch in the living room. Nan sat down beside her and started to rub her hand in wide, slow circles along the child’s back. It felt thin and tiny to her, almost too fragile for a child less than two months shy of eleven.

“Did you have a nice chat with your mother?” Nan asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“You sound pensive.”

“No. Not really. Just tired.”

“No more questions?”

The girl turned toward her. “Well, maybe one.”

“Go ahead.”

“How angry are people going to be with Charlotte?”

She thought about this for a moment. “It was idiotic of her to do what she did. But she’s a child and she made a mistake.” Then she surprised herself by adding, “As for my son… that’s another story.”

“Mom thinks you’re pretty mad at Dad.”

“Your mother is right. Thank God your uncle is going to live. If he weren’t… well, if he weren’t I think as bad as things seem now, they’d be a thousand times worse. A thousand times. Really, I have no idea how a man as smart as your father-as smart and as organized as your father-could have done such a thing.”

“He thought the gun was broken,” the child said.

“Oh, I have no doubt about that. I’m sure it was. What I can’t fathom is why he didn’t get it fixed before now. Something like this was bound to happen.”

“Is Charlotte still upstairs in her room?”