Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Willow? Please? Why did my mentioning the lawyer bother you? The truth is, we’ve talked about that night a fair amount over the last month and it never seemed to trouble you before.”

“How do you know that? Why would you think that? Of course it troubled me! You don’t know what I saw, you don’t know what I’m feeling!” the child said, speaking through her hands. Sara considered prying her fingers from her face but figured this, too, would only antagonize her daughter further. She decided there was a fair amount of disingenuousness going on here: Yes, Willow had been the first to reach Uncle Spencer, but until this moment Willow had never once behaved in a manner that might suggest the vision had been traumatizing. They’d talked about that night at length when they were in New Hampshire, and-usually when John wasn’t in the room-they’d talked about Uncle Spencer’s likely disability when they were home in Vermont. They’d talked about what Charlotte may or may not have been experiencing in terms of guilt, and what John clearly was enduring in terms of self-loathing. At least between mother and daughter the accident certainly had not been a forbidden subject.

No, Sara decided now, this wasn’t about the shooting. This was about… the lawyer. And when she analyzed what had just occurred between the two of them in the car, she was pretty sure that it was precisely when she had said to Willow that she would be expected to tell the lawyer the truth-as if she were a witness in a courtroom-that the child had suddenly gone nuclear. And that might mean there was more to the accident than she knew.

Than anyone but Willow and Charlotte knew.

“You’re right, sweetheart,” she said, stalling for time while she tried to think. “I don’t know what you’re feeling.”

The hands came down from the mouth, but her daughter wrapped them around her chest and stared angrily out the window. In the field they could see Holsteins clustered in groups of four and five, some of the animals grazing lazily near a trough.

She decided that she should probably get Willow to ballet and not force the issue right now. But with a pronounced ripple across her stomach and a slight fuzziness in her eyes-a sensation reminiscent of the very first wave of seasickness-she understood that she had just learned something important: She might not know as much about what had occurred that night in Sugar Hill as she thought she did.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. Then she smiled at her daughter and put the car back into drive. She told herself that while Willow was dancing she would try to figure out exactly what to do next.

ANDRE NADEAU, avid sportsman (Translation? Deer hunter) and single father of two, Andre Nadeau with a misdemeanor assault on his record (a fine, probation, but no time to be served), called John late that afternoon in his office. Awash in guilt John took the call, because he hadn’t spoken to Andre since before he had left for New Hampshire on the second to last day of July-where he had then remained far longer than planned. Consequently, it was no thanks to John that Andre received a mere fine and probation, despite smashing a glass beer mug on the head of one Cameron Gerrity to the tune of thirty-four stitches. Andre could thank Whitney Bowerman, one of John’s PDs who had pinch-hit for him while he had driven back and forth between his mother-in-law’s and the hospital in Hanover those first weeks in August.

Andre understood that John hadn’t represented him because an “accident” had befallen his lawyer’s brother-in-law, but he did not know the details. Consequently, he was calling now to ask simply-simply because he was decent, simply because he was a dad, simply because he still presumed that he was going to mentor John Seton in the woods that November-why he hadn’t bothered to bring his rifle to that gunsmith in Essex Junction.

“You really should take care of that bullet in the chamber,” he said to John. “Something could happen.”

He wondered what he should say to Andre, how much to tell him. He did not miss the irony that one of his clients was now offering him the sort of obvious counsel-you can’t drive when your license has been revoked, even if it is your own car; you can’t forge someone else’s name on someone else’s check, even if the guy has passed away-that formed such a high percentage of the wisdom he himself volunteered daily. He was also touched that one of those women and men at whom Paige Sutherland sneered, her nose crinkled in distaste, was calling for no other reason than because he cared.

KEENAN BARRETT walked up Fifth Avenue to Grand Central at the end of the day, and the train that was waiting to take him home. With each block the crowds grew thicker, and the city-despite the fact Labor Day was behind him-felt increasingly equatorial. He was perspiring, a rarity for him this far north in September, and he decided he had to slow down. His train didn’t leave for twenty-three minutes.

He was sorry to hear that Spencer had burned himself while trying to fry a soy cheese sandwich, but he also knew the additional injury-minor as it most likely was-could only help at the press conference. If the wound was still visible in two weeks, a reporter invariably would ask whether the marks on his hand had something to do with the shooting, and then Spencer could answer yes, indirectly, and talk about what the disability meant in terms of nerve damage: the reality that once the sling was gone the limb would dangle like a plumb line, knocking over teacups as he wandered through restaurants, getting caught in elevator doors, and banging with such frequency into door frames and desktops that his knuckles forever would be black and blue.

Alas, the new wound probably wouldn’t look like much the week after next. It might not even be noticeable. And they certainly couldn’t move the press conference forward, even if they had the results from the ballistics lab, not with this Saturday the eleventh of September. He knew from experience that in the week before and the week after 9/11, with the exception of breaking news, it was difficult (and, he felt, inappropriate) to get the media to pay attention to anything that didn’t commemorate the people who had died in the attacks in New York and Washington or the people who rose to the daunting task of carting away the literal mountain of rubble where the World Trade Towers once had stood. It was an annual media frenzy that Keenan found at once moving and numbing: profiles of the medical examiners and laboratory technicians who helped identify the tens of thousands of body parts, of the bond traders who were in the towers and survived, of the Baptist volunteers from Vermont who replaced the windows that were blown to pieces in the nearby apartment buildings. There would be an endless parade of images on television-the altered skyline, the twin towers, the Pentagon, the living, the dead, the missing who never were found-a ritual that was now as much a part of the memorial mores as fireworks on the Fourth of July or fighting for drumsticks on Thanksgiving.

It was, of course, a supreme testimony to the resiliency of that great oxymoron called American culture that the anniversary of the tragedy was still observed each year with an avalanche of new books, special-edition magazines, newspaper extras, and exclusive television programming that was never in reality all that unique. Even FERAL always found a way to get into the act. This year Dominique would be photographed in Long Island on Friday with the Suffolk County SPCA at a ceremony honoring rescue dogs, some of which had wandered deep into the World Trade Center wreckage that awful September in search of survivors and then for victims throughout that nightmarish fall. She would be giving the animals a lifetime supply of vegetarian dog biscuits and poly-filled dog beds, each item embroidered with the name of one of the dogs who’d sustained an injury that had forced him to retire-usually respiratory disease or blindness from the powder and dust.