Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

After all, though Charlotte had fired the weapon, it was he who had knowingly left a live round in the chamber for eight and a half months. What was he thinking? He envisioned the way the gun must have bounced around in the trunk of the car on the way here only two days ago, and he wondered what would have happened if somehow a first pothole had loosened the safety and a second had caused the gun to discharge. What if one of Willow’s friends had decided to break one of the house’s cardinal rules and had unlocked the cabinet in the guest bedroom in which the rifle was stored? Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been cataclysmic because he kept his ammunition in a separate lockbox in his armoire. But what if some child-that rowdy kid in Willow’s class who wound up playing at their home once in a while because he lived only two houses away, Gregg, for instance-had gotten a hold of the gun with the live round inside it? Willow had nicknamed the kid Little Hoodlum, and the boy took pride in the moniker.

John allowed himself a small shudder. What if something had happened to Willow?

He remembered the precise moment last November when he had expelled the ammunition from the gun-most of it, anyway. Before getting into the car to drive home from the logging trail on which he had parked, he had pushed the magazine release by the trigger guard and caught the four cartridges as they rolled into the palm of his hand. He’d taken his glove off, and the brass had been cold. Next he cycled the bolt in the action to remove the live round in the chamber, only this time nothing happened. He tried it again, and then a third time. He had a visual picture in his mind of flipping the safety to fire and back to safety-as if this were a computer problem, and he could remedy the situation by simply rebooting-but still the bullet remained stubbornly lodged in the gun. When the bolt was open, he could see clearly the grooves along the rear of the shell’s casing, and he even tried freeing the cartridge with his fingers. It was evident quickly that he hadn’t a prayer.

And so he had put the four cartridges from the magazine back in their small box and the small box back in his pack. He remembered flipping on the gun’s safety and securing the rifle in the gun bag in his trunk before driving home.

He guessed if hunting and guns weren’t so new to him, so frightening and foreign, he might have done what his friend Howard Mansfield had suggested and tried to dislodge the live round with a ramrod. Or if he understood more about guns, maybe he wouldn’t have been afraid to simply fire the rifle into the sky in the woods.

Likewise, if he hadn’t been so busy he would have had the cartridge removed by a professional. If he wasn’t short one lawyer and down an investigator in his office. If he didn’t have a caseload so big that half the time he couldn’t keep his clients’ names straight as they besieged him in the corridors of the courthouse during the Wednesday afternoon calendar calls, before they were paraded before the judge. If his daughter hadn’t started piano lessons, while continuing ballet and after-school soccer. If his wife hadn’t been pregnant. If there hadn’t been a new baby in the house. If… if… if…

He shook his head, trying to clear from his mind the notion that he had been preoccupied this last year and therefore could sprinkle some portion of the blame on others. The idea was not simply ludicrous, it was pathetic. He was responsible, and he whispered the words to himself: “I am responsible.”

Finally, when he realized that he’d been standing in the same spot in the same aisle for close to ten minutes, he made some decisions. He would bring Catherine a small loaf of freshly baked multigrain bread and local blueberry preserves, a container of vegan granola, and a batch of oatmeal cookies filled with carob chips. It wasn’t his idea of comfort food, but he imagined it was the sort of thing Catherine would eat when she was troubled.

CATHERINE HELD THE BUN in which sat the flattened discus of ground beef with both hands-aware that this was precisely the recommendation this very fast-food chain had made some years earlier in its advertising campaign-and took a bite. The burger was delicious. She contemplated eating it slowly so she could savor each mouthful-the wondrously bedewed pickles and lettuce, the tomato slice lacquered with mayonnaise, and, of course, the patty itself, the pieces of meat crushed by her teeth into a glorious, spumescent paste-but the consideration lasted barely seconds. She ate it with the gleeful, rapacious speed of a wild animal who hasn’t eaten in days.

When she was done, she glanced around the bright restaurant. The place was filled with the lunchtime crowd, and everyone around her who wasn’t feeding French fries to toddlers was eating burgers or fish fillets or chicken nuggets with the same gusto she had evidenced only moments before. Quickly she dabbed at her mouth with the napkin, rubbed a quarter-sized dollop of jasmine-scented antibacterial hand gel into her fingers and palms (it was the smell that mattered more to Catherine than the cleansing properties), and left.

The hospital was three blocks away, and she presumed that Spencer would be unhooked from the ventilator by now. This was good news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it meant there was less chance that Spencer’s already sizable physical troubles would be compounded by pneumonia. He was going to spend one more night in the ICU before being settled in a bed in a regular hospital room, but she had been made to understand that it was an excellent sign indeed that they were already replacing the massive breathing machine that covered his face and his mouth with a mere nasal respirator. She had been surprised, in part because he was still so groggy with anesthesia and painkillers that he was only dimly aware of what had occurred: How close to dying he had come, the reality that he probably faced a crippling disability-possibly even amputation-when he was fully conscious. The fact that his own daughter had shot him.

She put on her sunglasses as she started to walk and popped an Altoids mint into her mouth. She knew she would crunch plenty more once she was in the hospital elevator.

She wondered why she wasn’t furious, and why, in fact, she hadn’t been furious once in the past fifteen or sixteen hours. Partly, she decided, it was because initially she had been frightened as hell. Then, once it was likely that Spencer would live, she was relieved. She had vomited in the ladies’ room at the hospital, and at that moment she’d felt a twinge of anger at her brother; but once she emerged back into the waiting room and saw him leaning pathetically against the kiosk for the pay phone-not actually using it, but gripping the faux cubicle walls like they were the sides of a ladder-her hostility had evaporated almost instantly.

She was thankful that she and Spencer had never gotten around to having a serious discussion on Saturday about their marriage-or, to be precise, her deepening sense that their marriage was in trouble. As complicated as her life with Spencer was about to become, it would be even worse if it were encumbered as well by his knowledge that she was unhappy. What kind of convalescence would that be for him? Imagine knowing that your caregiver, the person on whom you are completely dependent, would rather be elsewhere?

She told herself that this accident most assuredly did not mean she was now facing a life sentence in a marriage that hadn’t been working or a lifetime of dinners in which she and Spencer barely spoke. It couldn’t. Things would get better, or they would end. That hadn’t changed… had it?

Charlotte, meanwhile, seemed to be vacillating between inconsolability and catatonia. As a mother she guessed this was normal, and any time Charlotte behaved in a manner that was outwardly normal and age appropriate Catherine took comfort. Still, Charlotte’s eyes had grown so red so quickly last night that if her daughter had been a couple of years older Catherine knew she would have assumed that the deep color change was due more to dope than regret.