Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

HOURS LATER, as Spencer was lying alone in bed, he kept thinking back on something the EMT had asked about Charlotte, and the way she had phrased the question: Is she badly shaken by what she did? It was dark now and it was raining outside, and he thought of his daughter and his niece in the room with the twin beds they shared here in the country and he wondered what they were talking about tonight. He imagined their light was still on, and in his mind he saw them in their summer nightgowns and he heard the rain drumming against the slate roof. He pictured them alone, just the two of them. In all likelihood, their grandmother was already safely ensconced in her turret for the night, John and Sara were focused on baby Patrick, and he guessed that Catherine either was soaking in the tub or curled up in bed with a book.

He worried that over the past couple of days he hadn’t told Charlotte-really made the point crystal clear-that she hadn’t done anything wrong. How could she have known there was a bullet in the gun? She was twelve, and while he had been absolutely sincere when he told the EMT that Charlotte wanted nothing more in the world than to be sixteen or seventeen, the reality was that in so many ways she was still a child. She had no idea the rifle was loaded, she had no idea her father was out walking at the edge of the garden. On some level, he decided, he was probably suing the gun company precisely because he wanted to make clear to the world that this travesty was not his daughter’s fault.

He made a mental note that in the morning when Charlotte came for a visit, the very first thing he was going to do was explain this to her. Maybe he’d ask everyone else to leave so he could have a moment alone with her. Then he would make absolutely certain that she knew she was blameless.

Well, not completely blameless. Twelve might still make her a child, but even twelve-year-olds should know not to play with guns. But then, she’d never seen a rifle before! None of their friends in Manhattan had guns lying around the house-at least that they knew of.

He imagined Charlotte and Willow were sitting together on the twin bed against the wall right now, the one that was Willow’s, and he saw the girls playing gin rummy with one of his mother-in-law’s shoe box full of bridge decks, the rain cooling the night so the windows were open only an inch. As they played they were talking about…

He realized he couldn’t begin to conceive what they were talking about, and this lapse troubled him. He told himself it was the painkillers he was taking, but he knew this was different. Deeper. He couldn’t concoct a conversation for them in his mind because he didn’t know how badly his daughter was hurting. That EMT might have been onto something.

He felt a small freshet of fear ripple through him: He was scared. There was nothing he loved more in the world than his wife and his daughter, and alone in this bed he had to admit he was probably losing his wife. Had been for months. These days, they could fight over what to pack, where to eat, which vegetables they’d plant in the garden. Whether they should even have a garden.

Well, in this case Catherine had been right. No good had come from the garden, that was for sure. Next year they’d let the lupine return to the patch of earth they had tried to make their own. Allow all traces of the vegetables to disappear. It was ridiculous to believe they-he, this was all his idea-could maintain a garden when he and Catherine lived in Manhattan and John and Sara lived two hours to the west in Vermont.

He hoped he wouldn’t lose his daughter now, too, especially since the accident really wasn’t her fault. He thought of the little girl who once raced for hours at a time amidst the stuffed animals on the first floor of the old FAO Schwarz, that preschooler entranced by the cotton- and poly-stuffed snakes and chimpanzees and giraffes. He couldn’t lose the girl who, when she was seven, was capable of belting out “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” in a children’s cabaret as if she were Ann-Margret, or the child who on occasion could be so wondrously giving that at nine she’d taken a booth at the church rummage sale and sold all her old puzzles and Barbies and books and raised $273 for FERAL’s special fund for abused circus animals. Yes, right now she was going through a rough period. Right now she was subjecting everyone around her to her preadolescent angst… but this was the same child who would run into his and Catherine’s room when she was in the second grade for one last good-night kiss or who would lean against him for hours as they sat on the beach in Florida and watched seagulls and talked.

Spencer decided he hadn’t been very nice to that EMT. He wasn’t proud of his behavior, and he wondered why he had been so testy and sanctimonious with her. All she did was save his life. Was it because of his injury? The fact that he would, in all likelihood, be disabled? Or was it more basic than that: Was he cranky simply because last night he had slept poorly again-woken twice by the lobsters in his dreams-and now he was tired?

He had asked for and been given a different kind of sleeping pill tonight, but he was still wary about what sorts of dreams might await him when he dozed off. Last night there had been a couple of doozies, including one in which his hands were bound with belt-wide rubber bands, and he was trapped on his side in a crate in a walk-in refrigerator. He woke up in a sweat as he was being grabbed by a giant human hand to be either cleavered or dropped into a pot of boiling water. It was only a dream, but it had still been a pretty hideous experience.

No doubt tonight he’d start dreaming of deer. Inadvertently Catherine had put the idea into his head when she’d been commiserating with him this afternoon, trying to cheer him up. Trying to elicit a smile from him, she’d suggested that tonight he’d probably start dreaming of Bambi: The fawn would emerge from the garden, beet greens and kohlrabi on the young buck’s breath.

Well, deer were beautiful animals: graceful, athletic, and lithe. They were completely unlike lobsters, which Spencer believed were among the most vile-looking creatures on the planet. What in the name of God had the first person to eat one been thinking? He decided he was mistaken when he had told Melissa Fearon that he liked lobsters. He didn’t. He tried to appreciate all animals, and most of the time he did. But not lobsters. He couldn’t appreciate a lobster.

He stared into the blackness out the window, watching the designs the raindrops made on the glass. He would have to get the address of that EMT from someone at the hospital so he could write her a note. He wanted to apologize for being short with her, as well as, yes, to thank her for saving his life. He would be unable to write the note himself, of course. At least in the foreseeable future. He guessed eventually he would learn to write legibly with his left hand, but that day was almost unimaginable to him at the moment. He could barely lift his left arm right now because of the way any upper-body movement at all sent tectonic shudders of pain across his right side. But he would thank her. Somehow. And he would do more than write a note, because sixty or eighty dictated words were insufficient when someone has brought you back from the dead.

He told himself he shouldn’t lose sight of that. It was certainly a temptation to read more into this second chance than was most certainly there-to see it as an opportunity to make resolutions and vows, promises that he knew in his heart he would never keep for more than a week or a month-but the undeniable reality was that he very nearly had died. Bought the farm. Augured in. If the bullet had been a few inches higher, he would have been all but decapitated. A few inches in another direction, and his heart would have become a ragout. Either way, he would have been dead before his body landed back in the snow peas. As troubling as his future looked to him tonight-the considerable handicap that loomed before him, his daughter’s almost crippling remorse, the damage he had inflicted on his marriage before this accident had even occurred-the truth was that he was alive. Just about four days ago there was no reason to believe that he would be.