Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“At school. Audition information meeting for The Secret Garden.” Her eyes were beginning to cross as she tried to look into his face through the cobweb of his fingers.

“Have you ever noticed how limited the ring finger is in comparison to the index finger?” he asked. “I’m not even sure it’s as helpful as the pinky.”

She looked down again at his burn. Some of the blisters looked particularly nasty: They could become infected and Spencer might never know until it was too late-though too late for what she wasn’t sure. Still, she nodded and then carefully rose from the bed. She decided she would go to the kitchen and call Dr. Ives, Spencer’s regular physician, and ask him what he thought Spencer should do.

John and Sara and Willow had breakfast in silence-most of their meals were silent these days, unless Patrick was awake and felt the need to contribute. When they were finished, John stood, grabbed his attaché off the floor by the coatrack, and walked Willow to the end of their driveway. The bus stop was about fifty yards farther down the road. He kissed his daughter once on her forehead and then climbed into the Volvo (the one that would always hold for him his memories of an Adirondack rifle in the trunk), and turned the silver key in the ignition. He hadn’t spoken to Spencer since he and his family had left his mother’s house in Sugar Hill a month ago, and he guessed it might be years before they’d speak again. He glanced in the rearview mirror before starting to back the car from the driveway, and paused for a moment when he saw how bereaved and haggard the eyes were that gazed back at him from the glass.

HE WENT STRAIGHT to the courthouse this morning, because his caseload today showed a welfare fraud, a pair of unrelated larcenies (one petty, one grand), an unlawful mischief, and a sexual assault on a minor. It was almost lunchtime now as he sat in the basement of the building in an eight-by-eight-foot room made almost entirely of cement blocks painted light yellow, listening to a twenty-three-year-old named Brady Simmons tell him across a thin table, “It’s a long story, see” (arguably the most common construction any of his clients ever made with five words), before launching into his explanation as to why he had sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.

Abruptly his cell phone started to ring, and he saw by the number that it was his brother-in-law’s human attack dog of a lawyer. Paige Sutherland. She had been trying to reach him for days now to update him on her plans for the lawsuit and discuss how she’d want to prep him for the deposition later that autumn. He decided he might as well get it over with-agree, at least, to a date they could meet once the lawsuit was filed-and so he asked Simmons for a minute and rapped on the door for one of the guards to let him out.

“Hello, Paige,” he said, reaching into the front pocket of his blazer for his Palm as he spoke.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” she said, and though her voice was sweet he detected the slight edge of chastisement.

“Oh, you know the drill,” he murmured. “A lot of clients who are, well, not as reliable as we might like.”

“No, actually I don’t know. The sorts of people I represent are extremely reliable.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, don’t take offense.”

He ignored her and tried to find a time on his calendar when he could subject himself to the torture of a morning or afternoon discussing his role in this disaster with her.

“I’ve left a couple messages for you on your voice mail,” she went on when he was quiet. “So I guess you know why I’m calling.”

“Yes, let’s get this over with.”

“Get this over with? You make it sound like you’re the one being sued! You make it sound like we’re not on the same side. You’re helping your brother-in-law by doing this. You’re helping to make a gun company take responsibility for-”

“Paige, please. My brother-in-law doesn’t even speak to me anymore. We haven’t said a single word to each other in five weeks. You know that.”

“Time heals all wounds-”

“Except Spencer’s.”

“That was exactly what I was thinking right after I said it! Too funny. Do you have representation yet? Why don’t I schedule a meeting through them? Really, we have so much to go over.”

“I… haven’t finalized my choice for a lawyer yet.”

“John, really. What would you do if one of your own clients were behaving this way?”

“My clients always behave this way.”

“It will be painless. Trust me.”

“I promise you: Reliving that night will be anything but painless. Maybe if you weren’t planning on making such a big deal about this in the media, I would-”

“It’s what Spencer wants.”

“That press conference? It’s not what my sister wants. Or what I believe is in the best interests of my niece.”

“First of all, it’s Spencer’s life we’re dealing with. He is the one who has to live with this trag-”

“We all have to live with this tragedy!”

“Well, yes, but some of you have two functioning arms to help you cope. Spencer doesn’t. And as for young Charlotte, well, Spencer is her father. You’re merely her uncle. I believe you should defer to his wishes. Don’t you?”

“If Spencer and I could just talk about this.”

“Spencer and I don’t make a practice of discussing your relationship, but as you yourself just pointed out, it’s pretty clear that he’s not quite ready to resume communications with you.”

He considered briefly asking her to give Spencer a message, but his brother-in-law wasn’t listening to his pleas through Catherine-the man’s own wife-so there was no reason to believe that Spencer would listen to whatever Paige said on his behalf.

He sighed so loudly on the phone that Paige murmured, “Oh, John, it’s not that bad,” but he had the distinct sense that she was smiling.

“Where do you want to do this? In New York or Vermont?” he asked.

“I thought we could do it in your neck of the woods. I’m going to be in New Hampshire the last week in September with the surgeons and those EMTs, and I could scoot over to Burlington on that Wednesday-the twenty-ninth. What does your schedule look like that day?”

“I don’t have to look at it to tell you that I can’t do a Wednesday. Not ever. Wednesday is the weekly calendar call, and-”

“And you have dozens of your little DWIs and pickpockets to parade before the judge. I understand.”

“Please do not demean-”

“People who drive drunk and pick other people’s pockets? Honestly, John, they don’t need me to demean them. They do a pretty good job of demeaning themselves. How about that Tuesday instead-the twenty-eighth?”

“Fine.”

“Ah, progress! Bless you, John Seton. How is midmorning? I could fly up on the first flight out of-”

“I have to go,” he said, not because he felt an overarching desire to return to a conversation with a young man who actually believed that he’d behaved responsibly (or, at least, not unreasonably) when he’d had consensual sex with a fifteen-year-old girl, but simply because he couldn’t stand to speak for another moment with Paige Sutherland.

“Get a lawyer!” he heard her shout into the cell phone, and he had the sense that she was going to add something more, but he was already pressing the small button with his thumb that ended their conversation.

A PARTNER IN SARA’S PRACTICE had asked her once in August if her niece had begun to process why in reality she had shot her father.

“She shot him because she thought he was a deer,” Sara had answered simply, hoping that she hadn’t sounded defensive. The partner-a woman whose three teenage children behaved so outrageously that Sara had always considered this other woman’s parenting skills more than a little suspect-had merely nodded and smiled.