Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

And so while he wasn’t about to see more of a spiritual second chance here than was probably warranted, neither would he forget that he still had a future. It might not be the future he once had imagined. But when the sun rose in the morning over the mountains just east of his mother-in-law’s house in Sugar Hill, he would still be around. Tomorrow-and the day after tomorrow and the day after that-he would try to be less careless with his time.

IN THE HOUSE IN SUGAR HILL, Sara stood above the crib in which Patrick was sleeping and watched the small blanket rise almost imperceptibly off his chest with each inhalation. She wondered if he was going to have her husband’s elegant, patrician slide of a nose. People said they saw as much of her in the baby as they did John, but she knew they were just being polite. Right now the child looked like nothing more than a John Seton clone. She closed the window completely and for a moment gazed out into the garden. The rain had resumed a few minutes ago, soon after her husband had left for a walk. She didn’t think John had brought an umbrella with him. She thought she saw something move in the dark and the mist, guessed it was probably the deer, and decided to go outside to turn on the floodlights by the garage. Scare the creatures away: frighten the hell out of the animals that, inadvertently, had brought so much pain on her family.

At the top of the stairs she could hear the murmurs of Willow’s and Charlotte’s small voices, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She’d kissed them good night and turned out their lights perhaps fifteen minutes ago. She hoped they were talking about something silly-not the accident or poor Spencer’s injuries. As she passed the kitchen, she saw Nan glancing at the catalogs and the bills and the solicitations (did no one write letters anymore?) that somehow had managed to amass in the few days her mother-in-law had been shuttling her brood back and forth between the hospital in Hanover and the Contour Club.

The house was linked to the garage by a path made of slate, and the slabs tonight were cold and slippery and wet. Sara’s feet were bare, and despite the rain she walked slowly. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t want to fall: Suddenly she wanted to catch the deer in the floodlights and watch them freeze before fleeing. The light switch was just inside the side door to the garage-what Willow had referred to as the people door when she’d been younger, her means of differentiating it from the massive overhead doors for the vehicles, which even now she had to struggle to lift.

Sara found the switch with her fingers, and turned toward the garden before flipping the lights on. She wanted to be sure she had the patch of badly mauled vegetables fixed in her gaze.

In the instant of illumination she spied not deer, however, nor a dog or raccoons or even a black bear. She saw instead John, his hair plastered so flat on his head by the rain that it looked as if he had just emerged from the pool at the club. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and before she saw he was still clad in his khaki shorts she thought he was naked. He had a pair of metal tomato cages in one hand and the cherry tomato plants that moments earlier had been growing inside them-easily three feet high now-in the other, their stalks and roots dangling in the air like the spindly legs of unimaginably giant insects. On the ground beside him she observed that he had upended the other tomato cages as well, and ripped those plants from the ground, too. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as if he had yanked up the corn plants the family had meticulously replanted on Friday and Saturday, and savaged the peas, the string beans, the beets, the pumpkins, and the squash. It appeared as if he had ripped up everything the deer hadn’t already nibbled to death in the garden.

She couldn’t tell if he could see her-if he could determine exactly who it was who had just turned on the lights-both because she was in the dark and because at some point he had taken off his eyeglasses (perhaps, she worried, when he had ripped off his shirt). He looked unsteady on his feet, but he squinted and stared in her general direction.

“Mother? Sara? Who’s there?” he cried, and it was indeed a sob that he was offering up through the wind and the rain and the night.

She tried to answer but her voice caught in her throat. She tried one more time but was struck dumb by the sight of her husband and the half-mad waste he had inflicted on the vegetables and-now she glimpsed the edge of the cutting garden, partly illuminated by the floodlights-the flowers the family had planted Memorial Day Weekend. She was incapable of offering anything but a desperately sad little whimper.

“Sara?”

She wiped the rain from her eyes and nodded though he couldn’t see her, and then she ran to him across the driveway and soggy carpet of lawn.

On a Tuesday in early September, a full five weeks and three days since he’d taken a.30-caliber bullet in his shoulder, Spencer began the time-consuming ordeal of getting ready for work. Catherine and Charlotte both wanted to help him, as they had in different ways throughout the entire month of August and those still-balmy days of September. They had each felt a particular desire to assist him this morning since today he would be returning to the FERAL offices for the first time since before their disastrous family vacation in New Hampshire. But Spencer made it clear that this Tuesday he wanted to be completely on his own. He wanted to be a free agent: Capable. Confident. Independent. He understood that this image lacked a certain fidelity to his actual circumstances, since Charlotte had been tying his sneakers for him for most of the last month and slathering his plaque-fighting gel on his toothbrush. Likewise, it had been Catherine who had been pulling up his socks and his pants (it was almost impossible, he had discovered, to get a pair of slacks on without his right hand, because the fabric along the waistband kept bunching up just below his right hip), and opening the small prescription bottles with the Allegra he depended upon this time of the year for his allergy and the Percocet he needed these days like air. But it was an image toward which, he told himself, he could aspire.

Spencer knew his independence would not be a pretty sight and would take mind-numbing amounts of time, and so he’d told Dominique on the phone the previous Friday not to expect him until midmorning. And because he wanted no witnesses to the embarrassing struggles that loomed before him, he was still in bed when his wife and his daughter ventured into the bedroom one last time to kiss him good-bye before leaving for their separate classrooms at the Brearley School across town. They asked-for, he guessed, the hundredth time that morning-what they could do for him.

“I’m really okay,” he said, feigning a self-assurance he didn’t feel. He was, after all, about to try to conquer Everest. “Go, go, go-I’ll be fine!”

He wasn’t at all sure this was the truth. Still, he reminded himself that today might not be quite like his other days of pathetic incompetence, his right arm and hand completely useless, his left hand mesmerizing him with its weakness and palsylike lack of dexterity. This morning he was going to christen the tools that his physical therapist, a square-shouldered young man with hands that were at once muscular and soft named Nick Trigiani, had brought him over the weekend. Between grueling reps to build up the muscles on his left arm and hand and to prevent the ones on his right from atrophying completely, the two of them had pored over the catalogs Nick had brought with him from his office at Roosevelt Hospital, each one filled with myriad wonders to help the sick and the lame survive in the modern world. Spencer managed to run up a thousand-plus-dollar tab with items that cost between five and fifty dollars apiece, uncaring whether his insurance would cover the cost of a single one. These were things he had to have, and now they were here, unpacked and ready to use.