Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

She stroked the back of his hand and his good arm, and when she leaned over him he detected peppermint on her breath. There were many small things that he appreciated about Catherine, and one of them was the way her breath always seemed to smell like a candy jar. It never ceased to please him. Even now. He was grateful that they had removed those horrible tubes from his nose when they’d brought him here, and he was no longer having to breathe with a pair of clear prongs up his nostrils.

“What are… you girls doing… later today?” he asked, carefully enunciating each syllable both because his tongue felt like a large soggy English muffin in his mouth and because the mere act of forming a half-dozen syllables was exhausting. Catherine was standing beside him and Charlotte was sitting, thank God, at a safe distance from the odors-innards and antiseptic and simple sweat-that he presumed were oozing from his body and his wound. She had hopped onto the empty bed.

“I’ll be with you, sweetheart. Right here. Maybe Charlotte and Willow will go to the club after lunch. We’ll see.”

He thought about this and was relieved. The club. Going to the club seemed a clear confirmation that there wasn’t a deathwatch going on.

“How are you doing?” Catherine asked.

“I hurt.”

“A lot?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Has the surgeon been here yet?”

“No.”

He heard Catherine sigh.

“Vacation,” he said. “It’s our… vacation. So… sorry.”

“Oh, God, you have nothing to apologize for,” Catherine said, and she smiled down at him like one of those wondrous seraphs on the borders of the Christmas card the family received every year from a Unitarian minister in Connecticut who was also an animal rights activist: The borders had deer and sheep along with angels with great, dark doe eyes, and eyebrows-angels and animals alike, actually-that were raised in adoration, tenderness, and love. For a split second he forgot that his right arm was immobilized and he attempted to reach for her hand. He didn’t get far. His arm didn’t move, and the mere act of even trying caused him to squeeze shut his eyes and cry out in pain. A moment later when he could open his eyes-when they were no longer being dazzled by the phantasmagoric light show on the insides of his lids-he detected movement behind his wife. His daughter was jumping off that other bed and running from the room. He heard a choking sob from the corridor and the sound of her struggling to breathe as she wept.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN HER like this,” Catherine said, once more rubbing his unhurt forearm softly.

He wondered if he was actually in the midst of yet another waking dream. Probably not. Everything seemed to have the concrete tangibility he associated with full consciousness: soft pillow, firm mattress, solid aluminum rails. Certainly his daughter’s inconsolable cries in the hallway sounded pretty damn authentic.

“Catherine?”

Her gaze moved from the window to his face. She arched her eyebrows and smiled for him. “Yes?”

“Gun… where she get… it?”

“It can wait, sweetheart. It can wait.”

“No.” How could it wait when it sounded like Charlotte’s heart was breaking? As much as he hurt, as disabled as he was, he felt a tide of anger cascading up from deep inside him: a father’s righteous rage. He wanted to know who’d given his daughter a rifle, and-here was a word he hadn’t thought of in years, a word he guessed the painkillers had helped him to retrieve-smite him. Smite him into the ground.

“Oh, Spencer-”

“Charlotte… listen to her.”

“I have. I have for two days.” Now she sounded like she might cry, too. Her small smile faded as she glanced at the door. He sensed how desperately she wanted to be in two places at once. With Charlotte. With him.

“Then… tell me. Who?”

“Spencer-”

“Please.”

“My brother,” she answered finally, her voice muted and tired. A leaf on a languid breeze in November.

“John?”

“He’s the only brother I have.” She brushed an unruly wisp of hair behind his ear. “He left the gun in the trunk of his car. That’s where Charlotte got it. But she had no idea it was loaded. She and Willow discovered it when they were getting Patrick more diapers on Saturday night.”

His mind could barely process this notion, and his anger was swamped by incredulity: John Seton with a loaded rifle in the trunk of his Volvo. Was it possible it was there because one of his clients-that endless, frightening parade of alcoholics and thugs and drug dealers-was angry at him? Did John feel the need to protect himself? But if that were the case, wouldn’t he use a handgun? Besides, what good would a rifle do John if he kept it stowed in the trunk of his car?

“Why?”

“Why was it loaded?”

“Why was… it… there?”

“My brother is a deer hunter. Was, I guess. I believe he’s done now.”

He noticed the light by the side of his bed was changing again, not unlike the way it had in the middle of the night: There was a shadow there now. It was his daughter-their daughter-returning from the hallway. Her cheeks glistened with moisture and he wanted more than anything to reach out and pull her to him. But he couldn’t. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and tried to smile. Then she nuzzled pathetically against her mother, her shoulders lurching up with one final sob.

CHARLOTTE WASN’T SURE where she’d first learned about cutting-a movie, a Web site, a conversation between older girls she’d overheard-but she did know that the word had come to her today in the hospital elevator. A doctor had used it, though clearly not in the context she had in mind. Mutilation.

When she’d been a toddler, apparently, she would sometimes send herself to the timeout chair after she had misbehaved. She had no memory of doing this, but her parents sometimes joked about it. Of all the things to outgrow, why did she have to stop disciplining herself in so adorable a fashion?

Well, she thought now, perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps I just… evolved.

It was night and so she pulled down the shade in the bathroom window in case someone was out walking. Maybe Grandmother bringing in the dog. Maybe her mother or her uncle pacing. Talking about her father. About her. Then she got out the Band-Aids and the Bactine-the key was to cut yourself, not give yourself tetanus or some gross infection-and those old-fashioned razor blades she found in Grandmother’s medicine chest. She pulled her nightgown above her waist on the toilet, the lid cold even through her cotton underwear, and spread her legs. She stared for a long moment at the line of her tan, at the down bleached almost white by the sun.

This was going to be more complicated than she thought, because she had to do this in a spot that no one could see-such as the insides of her thighs. But Grandmother would continue dragging her to the club or Echo Lake as her dad convalesced, which meant she was going to have to wear a bathing suit. This ruled out her legs. Quickly she pulled off her underpants and stared at the patch of dark pubic hair and at the outline of her pelvic bone. There wasn’t room there, either, she realized.

Her stomach, however, was another story. If she wore only her Speedo tank suit for the rest of the summer, instead of her bikini, she could slice up her belly as much as she wanted and no one ever would know.

With the hem of her nightgown in her teeth, she stared for a long moment at the skin around her navel. Then she sprayed some Bactine in a line just beside it and pressed the razor against her flesh with her thumb. She was crying, though not from pain. She would have to saw or slice at the skin-or press much harder-to feel pain. She guessed she was crying yet again because of what she had done, and how she was reduced by it to… to this. Well, she deserved it, didn’t she? She pushed the edge deeper into her lower abdomen and then twisted her fingers. Reflexively she yelped, as a tiny red filigree the length of the blade filled quickly with blood. For a long moment she watched it bleed-the raspberry fluid dribbled down her hip and into the crevice between her legs, some getting caught in the thatch of curling hair there-and then abruptly she stood up on her toes and leaned over the sink.