Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

No, not uneventful. Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband’s, not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction. She knew that John was going to suffer profoundly over what he had done to Spencer, and his anguish would transcend normal guilt in large measure because it was his own daughter who had first reached Spencer’s body out there by the snow peas. John’s father had been so completely irrelevant to his own childhood that he was intent on being a dad who was both present and perfect, and the fact that Willow had seen the grisly ramifications of the most egregious mistake he would ever make in his life was going to cause him serious pain. She remembered one time John offered her a partial litany of all the moments in his life that mattered to him that his own father had missed, either because he was at work or because he was dead (the former, in John’s opinion, leading directly to the latter). There was the Saturday morning when he was eight when the county swim team time trials were actually held in the Contour Club pool, a grand morning in which he placed first in the twenty-five meter crawl, first in the twenty-five meter backstroke, and was a part of the second-place one-hundred-meter medley relay team. There was his fourth-grade transition ceremony from Cub Scouts to Webelos and the tie racks the boys had made from plywood and coated with oil paint for their fathers, all of whom were present to accept the gifts that June evening… but one. There was the eighth-grade citywide debate competition in which his school’s team won a variety of prizes for both eloquence and good-natured feistiness. There were all the birthday parties that did not occur on either a Saturday or a Sunday, there was the first half of his high school commencement (thank God the family name began with an S), as well as the only high school musical in which he actually had a part with a solo and lines. And though John’s father was present for his son’s college graduation, he missed John’s induction into the Phi Beta Kappa society the day before. Richard died months after John started law school and so he had a valid excuse for missing the moments when his son received his law degree, got married, and became a father for the first time himself. But that didn’t mean that on some level John wasn’t bitter-and determined to do better with his own children.

Except, strangely enough, when he was here in Sugar Hill.

Here it was more important to be vigorous in the eyes of his mother-and, yes, in his own eyes when he shaved or combed his thinning hair in the mirror-than to spend serious time with Willow or Patrick. That man who had spent all Friday morning rolling around on their living room floor with his son while she’d packed had barely seen the boy since they’d arrived-and that was true even before their lives had been thrown into turmoil on Saturday night. That father who once took three planes home from a conference in Minneapolis after his original flight was canceled and then ran like a madman between terminals D and B at Logan Airport-terminals usually linked only by shuttle buses-so he could sprint onto a plane to Vermont that was going to give him at least a fighting chance (if he sped all the way home once he landed) of arriving in time to witness his daughter’s transition ceremony from Daisy to Brownie, didn’t say more than a few dozen words to the girl on Friday and Saturday. (And, Sara feared, most of those words involved appeals to Willow to try to pacify Patrick-as well as, of course, that now infamous request on Saturday night that she bring into the house the new block of diapers from the trunk of the car.)

She pressed the Velcro tabs on the corners of Patrick’s fresh diaper together and left him on the towel-blowing him a kiss and reassuring him that she would be right back-and started toward the green garbage can against the side wall of the clubhouse with the dirty one. As she walked, she watched her free arm sway with her body. It was a good thing that Catherine and Spencer didn’t seem likely to have another child, because there was no way that Spencer would ever be able to change a diaper. It was one of the many tasks that Sara was beginning to realize were completely unmanageable with one hand.

She guessed Spencer’s energy would be a real asset to him now. That quintessential drive to be hale and hearty and strong. His nostril-flaring frustration at being disabled would help him with the tortures of physical therapy-though it would also, alas, make the indignities of having to have someone else button his shirts and zip up his fly yet more irksome.

At the garbage can she heard the chirping of girls through a glazed window into the clubhouse. The window was open only an inch or two, but the children were giggling and she knew instantly that the voices belonged to Willow and Charlotte. She took a step back and gazed at the building. She’d always presumed it was the clubhouse men’s room that was against this wall and that the casement before her was therefore one of the windows into the men’s room. For a moment she decided she must have been mistaken all those years, and this was actually the ladies’ room. After all, why in heaven would the children be in the men’s room? Then she knew. The flies. They were drawn into the men’s room by the flies that hippie bookseller had painted years ago on the urinals. Somehow Willow and Charlotte had heard about the bugs and they had to see them for themselves.

She considered going into the clubhouse to extricate the cousins from the men’s room since it was only a matter of time before someone (no doubt, someone cranky) walked in and discovered them, but she had an idea she liked more. The last thing either child needed right now was to be chastised. And so she crouched just below the windowsill, took a deep breath, and proceeded to buzz. She placed her tongue just behind her front teeth and tried her very best to imitate the loud, annoying drone of the insect.

Instantly the girls went silent. And barely ten or fifteen seconds after that, Sara saw them racing around the side of the clubhouse toward her, their eyes wide, determined to catch the culprit who had sent them scurrying from the two urinals with their meticulous renderings of a pair of black flies. It was, as far as Sara knew, the first time her niece had run playfully-a spontaneous smile on her face-in almost three days.

Catherine never viewed herself as the sort of girl-now woman-who thought she could smother her troubles beneath frozen moguls of ice cream or half-thawed clubs of freezer-case cookie dough. There was the secret meat thing, of course, but she presumed this had more to do with the body’s natural desire for animal protein than an attempt to overpower her anxieties with junk food.

Nevertheless, Wednesday afternoon as she sat around the table in the bar at the Hanover Inn with these two lawyers from New York, she realized she wanted nothing more right now than a cheeseburger. No, make it a hamburger. Screw the cheese. Make it meat and nothing but meat. Like the burger she’d had at the fast-food restaurant on Sunday afternoon, but bigger. Thicker. Juicier. She guessed this was because she was scared. She had no idea anymore what sort of future awaited her or just how debilitating Spencer’s injury would be. Every time she tried to get even the smallest glimmer of hope from the surgeons or these lawyers, however, they were cruelly adamant in their prognoses. Her husband was going to be severely disabled, and he was going to find his “floppy arm” so annoying and unattractive (they kept talking about the way the muscles would shrink from disuse) that he might choose to have it amputated in two or three years. Apparently, most people with this sort of injury chose exactly that path.