Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Yes. Still crying, I believe. Have you two spoken this morning?”

“Uh-huh. She was pretty upset. Mom talked to her, too-and I guess she will again before we go to the hospital.”

Nan nodded. There were advantages to having a therapist in the family, even if sometimes it made them all more comfortable discussing their feelings than she’d like. “Good. Has your mother said when she would like us to go?”

“No.”

“After lunch, I’d imagine,” she murmured, and then decided to broach the question that was really on her mind. “Tell me, Willow: What exactly was Charlotte thinking? Do you know? Did she honestly believe she could just take her uncle’s rifle and shoot a deer?”

Willow took a deep breath because she wanted, she realized, to tell Grandmother-to tell anyone-that Charlotte probably hadn’t been thinking at all (at least not particularly clearly) because she’d had a beer and helped smoke a joint. She wanted to say that she wasn’t exactly sure what Charlotte had believed. But she knew that Charlotte didn’t want her to tell anyone what they had done at the bonfire, because then things could get really nasty. All of a sudden drugs and alcohol would be involved, and Charlotte had managed to sniffle to Willow at the hospital in the middle of the night that she didn’t want to get Gwen in trouble, too.

“I don’t know what she was thinking, Grandmother,” she answered simply.

“No idea?”

“Nope. None.”

Nan gave the girl’s shoulder one final squeeze and then stood, exhaling a long, slow breath through her nose. She gazed out the window for a moment and finally announced, “Well. We should get some food in you-and, perhaps, in your cousin. Before we know it, it will be time for us all to go to the hospital.”

THERE WERE LOTS of reasons for pointing Uncle John’s rifle at whatever was moving at the edge of the garden, and with her head buried underneath her pillow on her bed Charlotte could see them all. There were those hideous plastic shoes she had to wear to school, because her father wouldn’t let her wear leather ones; there was her ugly vinyl wallet and change purse; there was her dream of visiting the circus when it came to Madison Square Garden one time-once, that was all she desired-before she was really too old; there was her frustration that again this year Grandmother hadn’t been allowed to take her to the county fair in Haverhill, because among the games of chance were the baby racing pigs, and inside the 4-H tents there would be beef cows and dairy cows and the full-grown pigs that might be only days away from their slaughter. Depending upon what day they would have gone to the fair, there might also have been a milking exhibition or a horse pull-the spectacle, evil in her father’s mind, of a couple of draft horses competing to see which could pull the greatest weight across a dirt arena.

There was even this pillow itself, a flat, poly-filled sack that was nowhere near as soft and fluffy as the goose down pillows on which Grandmother, Uncle John, and Aunt Sara slept. She’d felt their inviting plumpness, she knew the difference. Willow, too. She knew that the only reason Willow didn’t have one of those comfortable pillows was because Grandmother tried not to give one granddaughter something she couldn’t give both.

And there was the desire to make her own decisions about food and clothing and animals. About what was right and wrong.

And then last night, suddenly, there was that gun. Uncle John’s gun. In her hands.

Her uncle was among the most reasonable-the most normal-grown-ups she knew, and if he hunted… well, truly, how bad could it be?

The truth was, she didn’t expect to actually hit the deer. She never even expected to pull the trigger. She was just aiming and curling her finger, aiming and squeezing…

And the night was so quiet, she didn’t think anything was out there at first.

Oh, but then she heard the movement in the lupine. The rustling. The sound of an animal pawing its way through the tall brush-perhaps one of the very same animals that had been pillaging the garden. That was when she first envisioned herself actually pointing the rifle at something and pulling the trigger. And if she did hit the creature, well, that would certainly show her parents. Her father. See, Dad, it’s one or the other, she imagined herself saying. It’s either the vegetable garden or animal rights. You can’t have both.

Yes, she had been irritated last night when they got home from the club. No doubt about that. Whether it was because of the beer or the dope or the reality that more times than not she was-she had to admit-an angry girl, she honestly didn’t know. But she was feeling downright pissy by the time they got back to Sugar Hill, and here was this sleek and powerful and (yes) handsome gun in her grasp and the chance to cause some real havoc.

She remembered saying to someone-she couldn’t recall now whether it was the state trooper or that other guy from the state animal department-that she hadn’t even known the rifle was loaded, but that wasn’t completely true. When she thought back carefully on all she remembered, she knew that safety button she kept flipping back and forth had struck her as a warning of some sort: Why would there be a safety if there weren’t a bullet? Still, only when she was curling her index finger that one last time-that final time, the time she knew she would curl it until something happened-did the notion take firm root in her mind that if there was a bullet in the rifle this might be an inadvisable course of action. Until then, she’d operated on the premise that it didn’t really matter if the gun was loaded or not, because she was just aiming it randomly out into the garden.

Until she heard that movement near the snow peas.

And continued her pressure on the trigger, this time not pausing until she heard the roar. No, she didn’t just hear the roar, she felt it: The rifle exploded like fireworks in her arms, and she was heaved up in the air like a shot put ball, arcing back to the earth and onto her butt. Only later would she and Willow discover how badly her shoulder was bruised. It was indeed nasty: a massive yellow and black and blue paint stain on-and the irony was not lost on Charlotte-the very same shoulder in which her father had taken the bullet.

It’s just a cry for attention. How many times had she overheard one of her teachers or one of her friends’ parents or her aunt Sara telling her mom that over the years? Too many to count, that was for sure. According to some of the grown-ups around her, half of what she did in this world was a cry for attention. Someone was bound to say that about this disaster, too. She was just doing it to get your attention.

Well, not this time. This wasn’t about trying to get her dad’s or her mom’s attention. This wasn’t about trying to get anyone’s attention. It wasn’t about anything. It just… was. It was like a plane crash or a subway fire or a toddler who falls out an apartment window and dies. It was one of those nightmarish accidents that happened all the time because people were human and made mistakes. Yes, she’d been teed off at her dad for a decade of large and small slights-the way he believed that a Broadway show or one Saturday afternoon riding made up for three or four weeks of neglect-and maybe she did want to plug a deer to piss him off. Maybe she wanted to plug a deer to piss off both of her parents.

And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to help. Maybe she thought she was frightening the deer away and saving what was left of the snow peas. Now here was an interpretation of history that might get her through this disaster, an explanation of events that might allow her to actually rise from this bed and face her grandmother and her aunt and her cousin. Her mother. Her father. Hadn’t she even told Willow last night that she wished there was something she could do about the garden? Certainly she had.