Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

As she approached the hospital, she sighed. She thought of the floors and floors of pain in that building right now and the misery that awaited her own husband when he was-finally-completely awake.

SERGEANT NED HOWLAND had been a state trooper for nineteen years, and he had every expectation that he would be promoted to lieutenant within the next eighteen months. He was supremely competent, the principal chink in his armor being his inability to suffer fools gladly. Alas, most of his job was spent with fools, which was why he guessed he wasn’t a lieutenant already. Either they were poor, rural fools who rolled their dad’s trucks because they thought they could navigate a sharp Lisbon turn at seventy-five or they were wealthy flatlander fools who moved to northern New England and decided they wanted to bag themselves a ten-pointer but didn’t have the slightest idea how to remove a cartridge from a thirty-ought-six when the bolt didn’t extract it normally-and then, an even worse sin in Howland’s opinion, they viewed themselves as so bloody busy and supremely entitled that they never bothered to take the damn rifle to a gunsmith and thus left it sitting around their house or in the trunk of their car. Loaded. Was it any wonder that some poor guy wound up spending the night on a ventilator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock? The miracle was that no one was killed.

And while he was fairly confident this was indeed just a stupid-SRS-stupid, as in stupid-really-stupid-accident, he figured he better make absolutely certain that there wasn’t more going on beneath the surface here. Treat it like an attempted homicide until he knew otherwise. Be thorough. Maybe the daughter hated her dad and plugged him on purpose. Maybe that cousin was involved in some fashion. Maybe the great white hunter from Vermont had fabricated the whole story and loaded the weapon only yesterday because he wanted to…

Howland couldn’t finish the sentence, a further indication in his mind that while it was unlikely the state’s attorney would want to file criminal charges, it was better to know too much than too little. That was why he took the weapon with him last night and had it stored safely now in the firearms locker. Picked it up off the ground by that apple tree where he found it. If they ever did want to send it to the state firearms laboratory, he wanted to be sure that they had it in their possession.

Now he sat in the red wool easy chair in this Nan Seton’s living room, the woman’s daughter-in-law and older granddaughter sitting across from him on the couch.

“So you didn’t know the weapon had a bullet in the chamber?” he asked the girl, Charlotte, one more time.

The girl nodded sheepishly.

“But you did know the gun had a safety. Correct?”

“I guess.”

“You had to switch it from S to F. At least according to your uncle, you did. Before he left for the hospital last night, he told us he was sure the gun was on safety. Do you remember doing that? Switching a little lever from S to F?”

“Sort of.”

He could see the girl had been crying, and he was relieved. He really did want this interview now to be nothing more than compulsive busywork.

“Sort of?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you know that you were releasing the safety?”

“No.”

“But Charlotte: You just told me that you knew the gun was on safety. So if you didn’t know you were releasing it, what did you think you were doing when you switched the lever from S to F?”

“I was just…”

“Go on.”

“I was just, I don’t know, flipping it back and forth. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing. Willow and I had just been at that party, and I was…”

“Yes?”

“I was tired. I’d never seen a gun before-a rifle, anyway-and I was just playing around. I know you shouldn’t play with guns, but I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry about all of this,” she said, and she shook her head and started to cry. Her aunt squeezed her bare knee reassuringly.

“Is there anything else, Sergeant Howland?” The woman’s voice was soothing and serene. He wondered if she sang in a church choir.

“You’re a vegetarian, right? Like your dad?” he asked the girl simply. He put his clipboard on the floor and leaned forward in his chair.

“Yes.”

“Don’t eat any meat?”

“None.”

“You love animals?”

“Yes!”

“Then tell me something: Why were you even pretending to shoot a deer? I understand you presumed the weapon was unloaded, but why were you pointing it at what you thought was an animal in the first place?”

She heaved up her shoulders through her tears and said nothing.

“Why were you taking a rifle and aiming it at what you believed was a deer?”

She looked at the rug, at her aunt, and finally at him. She wiped at her cheeks with her fingers. “I guess I was thinking about the garden. I don’t know. The vegetable garden. The deer were eating everything, and I just… I just…”

“You just…”

The room grew quiet, except for the girl’s sniffles.

“You were just goofing, huh?” he asked her, unsure why he was letting her off the hook. He didn’t have children of his own-he had a girlfriend, but in his opinion they were a long way away from even considering marriage, much less starting a family-but he did have a niece about this child’s age. Maybe this was why he was throwing her a lifeline now.

“I guess.”

He sighed. “That’s about what I figured.” Then, before another wave of mercy could overwhelm him, he asked quickly-almost abruptly-“Do you and your dad get along?”

There was another long pause while Charlotte gathered herself. He half-expected that the next voice he would hear would be the aunt, and he thought it very possible that she would end the interview right now. She was, after all, married to a lawyer. But then Charlotte was speaking, and she was telling him through her tears, “How can you even ask that? God, don’t you get it? I will never, ever be able to forgive myself for what I did! Never!”

He nodded and picked up his clipboard off the floor. Regardless of what this kid really thought of her father, he decided that she hadn’t meant to nearly blow off his arm. She’d simply been screwing around with a gun and accidentally wounded her dad. That was it, case closed. Yes, he would talk to Willow since he was already here, and at some point he would talk to the grown-ups. But he knew there would be nothing in his report that would suggest they file criminal charges, and in the next week or so they would return the gun to that idiot public defender.

At times like these, he concluded, the country didn’t merely need stronger handgun laws: It needed laws as well that would demand a knucklehead like John Seton prove he could handle and store a firearm before being allowed to bring one into his home.

EVEN WITHOUT AN OXYGEN MASK covering much of his face, Spencer was still in an ICU bed that terrified both children when they arrived that afternoon, and looked especially horrific to Charlotte. He lay immobile on his back, his whole upper torso swathed in bandages, his wrecked arm encased in a plaster strip and draped across his abdomen. It looked a bit like he was supposed to be saying the Pledge of Allegiance but had gotten lazy with his right hand and hadn’t brought it all the way up to his heart. His face, for reasons neither girl understood-the bullet had hit him just below his shoulder, right?-was oddly swollen, making even the catcher’s mitts that posed as his ears seem just about the right size for his head. His heartbeat was monitored, there was a crystal clear tube uncoiling up into his nose-the fluid coursing inside it was a disturbingly gastric yellowish brown-and there were a pair of IV drips attached to the arm he could move. His left one. His right arm, it was clear, was in no condition even to scratch an itch that happened to crop up on the skin within half an inch of those fingers.