Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Oh, she was kidding herself. The truth was there was no design to this disaster, no conscious plan. At least she didn’t think there was. It wasn’t as if she wanted to shoot anything. Not a deer, not her dad. God, she couldn’t possibly have wanted to shoot her dad. Could she? He may not have been a perfect father, but she knew in her heart that he did what he did because he loved animals, and there were worse faults to have in this world.

She had a vague sense that when her mom had picked the gun up off the ground and hurled it away from her like it was a live hand grenade-the thing had banged against one of Grandmother’s apple trees before falling into the grass-she’d feared it was going to go off once again, and send a second bullet into whoever happened to be in its path.

She told herself now that all she wanted was for her father to survive and to forgive her. Her pillow was sodden with tears, and she wondered if she would ever stop crying.

SARA HEARD the state trooper’s vehicle rumbling up the long rocky driveway before she saw it. She was making sandwiches for the girls and her mother-in-law-Willow and Nan were upstairs now with her niece-and her first instinct was that the car was owned by a friend of Nan’s who was coming by to see what she could do. Instead, however, she saw a green and tan cruiser coasting to a stop before the garage, and the trooper they’d met the night before emerging from the vehicle. His name was Ned and he was a sergeant, and she thought his last name might have been Howland, but she wasn’t positive. He was about forty, clean-shaven, and his hair was just starting to gray: There were patches of white along his sideburns. She presumed that he was returning John’s gun, which he’d confiscated the night before. But she saw that he wasn’t reaching into the backseat or venturing around the car to the trunk. He was simply heading up the slate walkway toward the front door, a clipboard and a pad under his arm.

Patrick had actually fallen back to sleep and his body was lolling right now in his little blue chair on the floor by her feet. She didn’t want the doorbell to wake him, and so she raced outside to greet the trooper.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, and he tipped his hat. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping by. I meant to call first, but a young man rolled his father’s pickup in Lisbon. I had to take care of that before coming here, and it threw my day off a bit. The boy’s shaken-mostly because his father is furious-but otherwise he’s okay. Still, I should have called. My apologies.”

“That’s fine.”

“May I come in?”

She nodded. “Now I should apologize. My manners. I just wasn’t thinking. Of course you can come in. I was making sandwiches. We were going to have something to eat and then go to the hospital.”

“I understand your brother-in-law is going to live. That’s good news.”

“That’s what they tell us,” she said, and she opened the screen door and led the trooper into the living room. She motioned toward the couch, but Ned didn’t sit down right away.

“I was wondering, ma’am, are the girls home? And your husband? I know Mrs. McCullough is still at the hospital with Mr. McCullough, and so I’ll try and catch up with her a little later. But I would like to speak to Charlotte and Willow again-and to Mr. Seton, if he’s here.”

She felt a small shiver of alarm, and she made a conscious effort not to cross her arms before her defensively. She wanted to say, You spoke to everyone last night! but she was able to restrain herself. Still, Howland must have detected her sudden discomfort because he added quickly, “I just want to cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s, ma’am. Your niece and your daughter were pretty shaken after the accident-your husband was, too, of course-and so I wasn’t as thorough as I would have liked.”

She focused in her mind on the fact he had used the word accident and managed to force her lips into a small smile. “I understand,” she said. “My husband is actually on his way to the hospital, too. But I can get Willow and Charlotte right now.”

“One at a time, please.”

“One at a time?”

“That’s what I would prefer.”

“May I be with them?”

“Absolutely.”

She paused, wondering exactly how she should phrase the question that had formed in her mind and caused a quiver of anxiety to lodge in her stomach. Her husband was an attorney: Perhaps he would advise her to tell this Sergeant Howland that everyone would be happy to speak with him when they had a lawyer present. But not until.

“If you’d like a lawyer with them, I can come back,” he said softly, and though she knew he couldn’t possibly have read her mind it felt as if he had.

“Well. Let’s see where this questioning is going, okay? We have nothing to hide.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Should I get my daughter? Or would you like to start with my niece?”

“Whichever, ma’am.”

“Please: Call me Sara.”

He smiled. “I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

“Truth is, I’d be happy to start with you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She felt there was something vaguely antagonistic about his relentless use of the word ma’am, especially after she’d just asked him to call her Sara. It was as if the word was a small sarcastic dig.

“All right, then. But may we do this in the kitchen? I would love to finish making the family lunch.”

“That would be fine,” Howland said. Behind her she heard Nan scuffling down the stairs. Her mother-in-law must have noticed they had company.

JOHN SETON stood paralyzed in a dim aisle in a natural foods grocery store. He was supposed to be on his way back to the hospital in Hanover to keep his sister company during her vigil in the ICU waiting room, but he had spontaneously detoured here to acquire provisions. He couldn’t bear to think of Catherine trying to survive on either food from the vending machines or the hospital cafeteria. He realized now, however, that he honestly didn’t know how extreme his sister’s diet was or what she really liked to eat. And “like” was the guiding principle in his opinion, because whatever he bought was supposed to provide her comfort. He knew his niece consumed dairy products. Did her mother?

He looked at his watch and thought of the people he had left back at the house in Sugar Hill. He guessed it would be another few hours before they returned to the hospital, too. Now that Spencer was out of danger, he and his mother had agreed it was best if the whole clan didn’t crowd into that bleak waiting room until Spencer was awake. Besides, his mother had observed, it was too nice a day to be inside.

He wondered how his niece was doing. He felt that he and Charlotte suddenly shared a very special bond: the bond of idiots. The two of them had nearly killed poor Spencer and probably disabled him for life. The difference between them, of course, was that a twelve-year-old girl was afforded the opportunity to sob alone in her bedroom or (last night) in those hideous Naugahyde orange chairs in the waiting room near the hospital’s trauma center. A forty-year-old man was not. He had to rally, stifle that penitent urge to curl up in a closet where no one could see him. He had to answer questions, explain his monumental stupidity, make phone calls. This morning he’d spoken, it seemed, to half of Catherine and Spencer’s friends, Spencer’s sister, and a pair of top managers from FERAL.

The FERAL calls had actually been worse than the one to Spencer’s sister. It was no easy task to explain to vegetarians and animal rights activists that one of their tribal leaders had been shot by his own daughter with a hunting rifle because he’d been mistaken for a deer. While he had been on the phone with the group’s director-a stunningly telegenic woman named Dominique with a mane of raven black hair that fell almost to her waist and the greenest eyes he had ever seen on an animal that didn’t use a litter box-he had feared briefly that he would be responsible for a second serious injury to a member of FERAL’s senior management, by giving the director a stroke. He’d seen the woman before on The CBS Early Show, and so he knew how skilled she was at preventing anyone else from sliding a word of their own into a conversation, but he was still astounded at the way she proceeded to speak for five solid minutes without seeming to breathe after he had broken the news to her.