Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

“That night at dinner”-in, alas, an unfamiliar dining room in an unfamiliar house-“I realized that something had changed. The lamb-an animal nothing at all like a lobster, I know-made me gag. There I was with my parents and my sister and a serving plate layered with skewers of shish kabob, and I thought I was going to be ill. Really and truly ill. And I knew-I knew!-at precisely that instant that never again was I going to yearn for meat or poultry or fish and that I would always find the slick, rubbery touch of bologna revolting. I might never have nightmares about lobsters, but nor would I ever again dream of meat.”

With his thumb he flipped the small button on the remote in his right hand that dimmed the room’s overhead lights and then the second one that controlled his PowerPoint presentation slides, and instantly the FERAL logo-an image of lions and tigers and bears and cows and chickens and dogs and goldfish and cats and (at Spencer’s insistence) lobsters planted on a grid on a lentil-shaped oval that FERAL’s critics insisted was a subliminal hand grenade-filled the screen.

THAT NIGHT IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, the last night when the house would still have in it only the dog, the cousins, and the girls’ grandmother, the deer discovered the massive vegetable garden in the sprawling meadow beside Nan Seton’s long and meandering gravel driveway. There were three animals, a pair of does and a yearling, and they smelled the radishes-which they wouldn’t eat, but which they understood often seemed to coexist with so many of the plants that they would: the leafy oakleaf and Bibb lettuce that was just starting to go to seed, the lush, sprawling spinach rosettes, and the snow peas and the string beans and the purple vein-laden greens that towered above the golf ball-sized beets.

The animals had their summer fur, a rosy, almost reddish tan. They wandered silently through the broad, sweeping fields of lupine on which they would never dine, moving so quietly that the dog in the nearby house neither stirred nor lifted his aged snout. The next morning there would be tracks-twin mollusk shells pressed into the earth-at the edge of the garden and in some of the rows, but the girls and their grandmother would not notice them when they wandered out to weed and water the plants. This was the first time in a generation and a half that there had been a vegetable garden beside this house, and while Willow’s parents might have detected the deer prints and recognized them-John Seton, after all, had lived in Vermont most of his adult life, and his wife, Sara, had been there since birth-Willow herself did not. Nor did her cousin from Manhattan’s Upper West Side or their grandmother, who lived across that city’s vast ecosystem of a park from young Charlotte. After all, Nan only spent the summer and early autumn at this ancestral homestead surrounded by fields of lupine and-far enough down the hill that it didn’t obstruct the house’s views of the White Mountains to the east and the south-a small forest of sugar maples and pine.

Nor did anyone notice the way the whitetails had browsed the lower branches and twigs of the apple trees that separated the vegetable garden from the driveway or the scat that one of the creatures had left near the mounds from which had sprung the first tubular sprouts and broad leaves of the zucchini and squash.

They noticed instead the more obvious signs that the deer had visited: The leaves on many of the plants the girls’ parents had placed into the ground with such care as seedlings or seeds over Memorial Day Weekend were gnawed or nibbled or gone, and a part of one of the rows of corn-finally knee high-had been knocked over. Stepped on. Crushed.

When the girls and their grandmother discovered the damage in the morning, it crossed all of their minds that when the middle generation arrived that afternoon-their idiosyncrasies and their hopes as clear on their faces as their receding hairlines and their adult-tired eyes-there would be discussion and there would be debate. There might even be action. Certainly Spencer, the catalyst behind the vegetable plot, would want to do something. But they all knew on some level that despite the exertions and proclamations of that energetic middle generation, there really was nothing they could do to prevent the deer from feasting on what was left of the garden.

The morning after the deer found a veritable supermarket waiting for them on Nan Seton’s property, Willow was standing in a beam of phosphorescent sunlight in her grandmother’s kitchen, adjusting the candy lilies and the yellow loosestrife she had picked in one vase and the snowcap daisies in a second, thinner one. She was using the counter between the antique dishwasher and the sink, working carefully because she wanted the arrangements to be perfect. When she was done, she threw the stems she had trimmed into the garbage and filled both vases with water. Then, taking baby steps so she didn’t slop water onto the floor in the hallway, the stairs, or along the second floor corridor, she carried the flowers upstairs to the room in which her parents and Patrick would be staying when they arrived later that day-the room in which her parents always slept when they came here, since it had been her father’s bedroom in this house when he was a boy.

Initially she placed both arrangements on the embroidered scarf on the dresser, but that looked too crowded and so she sidled around the crib that Grandmother had brought down from the attic and placed the daisies on the nightstand. Then she fluffed the pillows on her parents’ bed one more time, made sure the welcome card she had created from colored paper and her grandmother’s ancient Magic Markers was perfectly centered against the headboard, and adjusted the bedspread so that it was as flat as a tabletop. Her mom and dad would be arriving sometime that afternoon, and she wanted their room to be cozy and welcoming. She couldn’t wait to see them.

When she turned around, she saw that her cousin was standing in the doorway in her string bikini.

“You should get in your suit,” Charlotte said. “You know Grandmother will freak if you’re not ready when she wants to leave for the club.”

“She’s still watering the vegetable garden, isn’t she?”

“Actually, she’s just standing there with the hose, staring at stuff. It’s like she’s had a stroke or something.”

“Charlotte!”

The older girl rolled her eyes and started running her fingers over the red petals of one of the lilies in the arrangement on the dresser.

“Be gentle with them,” Willow said to her, and then added quickly, “Please. I want them to look nice when Mom and Dad get here.”

“The only reason we even have flowers this year is because my dad planted them.”

“We all planted them.”

“It was my dad’s idea.”

“So? You can pick some for your parents’ room, too.”

“Yeah, right.”

“It would make them happy.”

“It would take more than a couple of tired-looking lilies to do that.”

“Don’t say the lilies are tired. They’re not,” she answered. Willow knew enough not to either reassure her cousin that her aunt and uncle had seemed happy enough when they’d all been here over Memorial Day Weekend or to ask her what she had meant and thereby give her yet another chance to vent. She really didn’t want to hear Charlotte’s complaints right now about either her parents’ marriage or how her father’s job was constantly screwing up her life: how she was the only kid in all of New York City who had never been to the Bronx Zoo or seen the Big Apple Circus or (and this, Willow knew, was what really vexed her cousin these days) been allowed to own a leather skirt or a pair of leather dress shoes.

“No, you’re right,” Charlotte agreed, “they do look pretty. Your mom and dad will like them. And the card, too. You’re sweet to do all this.” Then she gave her that wide-eyed smile that Willow thought made her older cousin look like a beautiful young model in a face crème commercial and took her hand. “Now come on,” she continued, pulling her from her parents’ bedroom and down the hall to the one the two of them shared, “you need to get dressed for the club.”