Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

He wasn’t proud of what FERAL was doing, but he also believed that the organization was exploiting 9/11 for a good cause and that the dogs wouldn’t mind the treats and the beds. Besides, profits and nonprofits alike would be taking advantage of the moment. He hoped the anniversary would never become an excuse for retail sales bonanzas the way Washington’s Birthday and Memorial Day had, but you never knew: Perhaps in fifty years 9/11 would be commemorated always on the second Monday in September, so there would be back-to-back three-day weekends at the end of the summer. The very notion made him shudder, but he knew in this world it could happen.

He was jostled by a young man in a blazer with a mandarin collar talking with great animation into his cell phone, and the bump brought Keenan’s mind back to the press conference. Spencer, he concluded, should not be the one to discuss the ramifications of the nerve damage. A surgeon should. Spencer would sound like a medieval monk if he himself cataloged the likely future mortifications to his flesh. But a physician wouldn’t be on the dais, both because Paige didn’t want to risk revealing too much of her hand and because Paige had a very healthy ego-healthy even by the Rushmore-sized standards of most big-time litigators. Consequently, in addition to announcing the lawsuit, Paige should explain to the press the petty indignities that awaited Spencer McCullough-petty, of course, only in comparison to the complete loss of function. There was really nothing petty about accidentally slamming a car door on your hand and not having a clue that you’ve just shattered half the phalanx bones in your fingers.

Still, Keenan guessed that Spencer was the sort who might never allow the arm to be amputated. The man was both too vain to walk through life without it (and given the complete destruction of the bones and muscle in his shoulder, he understood there was no point in a prosthetic replacement) and too in love with his daughter to subject her to a visual reminder for as long as he lived of what she had done. If he were in the same situation, Keenan presumed he would keep the arm, too.

So, the press conference would feature Spencer, Paige, and Dominique. Keenan decided he could live without a surgeon, if Paige felt comfortable explaining the medical carnage (and he sensed that Paige would savor every gruesome detail). That team was sufficiently capable of embarrassing the hell out of Adirondack and getting Spencer on-air with the morning news anchors if the right people were in the audience. Dominique, too.

A key, obviously, would be to make sure that those right people were there. And that was something that Spencer himself often handled. Certainly his assistants were quite capable, especially Randy Mitchell. Randy, too, knew the key producers and some of the more powerful editors. But it was Spencer who had the special rapport with them and knew which freelance writers had the clout to convince the New Yorker to let them write about the horrors of the beef industry or were capable of selling the Atlantic on the idea of an exploration about what really went on in the university labs that experimented on animals. These people were particularly important because broadcast followed print. That was the rule. And sometimes it took a few timely magazine and newspaper features to get the network news and their prime-time newsmagazines to produce those glorious exposés with their computer-generated graphics.

Already Keenan could see in his mind the computer-generated blues, blacks, and golds of an animated cutaway diagram of the Adirondack thirty-ought-six, a moving, fluidlike image that showed the placement of the bolt, the extractor, and the ejector. He heard the reporter’s even tones in a voice-over, as an image of a hook failed again and again to fasten itself into the groove in the back of the bullet in the chamber, until… until finally the computer zeroed in on the round. Maybe the designer would cause the bullet to flash red now, like the defective part in a passenger jet that caused the plane to crash.

He sighed, contributing his small moan to the sultry crush on the street. Depending upon what the ballistics lab told them, the angle would be either that John Seton’s individual gun had a faulty component or the contention that even used properly his Adirondack brand of rifle needlessly left a bullet in the chamber after the magazine was emptied. Either way, Keenan believed, they would make the firearms manufacturer look bad. Very bad. And they would portray hunting as the barbaric, irresponsible hobby that it was.

As he made his way through the throngs pressing their way into the station, he wondered if Spencer was capable of calling select members of the media himself, or-even if he was-whether he should. It might be unseemly. Spencer, after all, was the focus of this tragedy. He guessed they would have to depend upon Randy Mitchell or Joan Robbins or Turner Smolens-Spencer’s staff. He tried to imagine their phone presence, to recall what he could from their conversations with him and the numerous times he had overheard them on the telephone as he strolled past their cubicles.

Then it hit him, and he actually stood still for a moment on the platform beside the very rear of his train while the thought registered: All Randy or Joan or Turner had to say to these people was that Spencer McCullough had been shot by a hunting rifle, and they would be at the press conference in a heartbeat. It wasn’t that they cared so deeply for Spencer; it wasn’t, in truth, that they cared for him at all. Rather, it was that same ghoulish irony that had led him to fear back on the first day of August that FERAL would wind up the butt of jokes by Jay Leno and David Letterman. How could they possibly miss getting the story on this one?

The answer? They couldn’t. They wouldn’t.

The difference now-unlike his worries in early August-was that FERAL was going to control how the information was presented.

When he started moving forward once more, it was with a gait that was brisk and confident and-for a man of his age and reserve on a sweltering train platform in the bowels of Grand Central Station-downright effervescent.

On Thursday afternoon Charlotte came home from school before her mother, radiant with the news that she had gotten one of the leads in the autumn musical. She was the only eighth-grader with a part-the only student, in fact, with a role who wasn’t at least in the ninth grade. She understood that she was going to play a ten-year-old girl surrounded by grown-ups, and so it helped that she was younger (and shorter) than the rest of the cast. Still, this was a real coup, and when she saw the cast list outside the drama teacher’s classroom at the end of the school day she’d raced down the Brearley corridors to her own mother’s room, demonstrating exactly the sort of unfettered enthusiasm that usually she disdained.

Now when she opened the front door to her family’s apartment across town, she was no less cheerful. She saw her father was dozing in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt in a chair by the window, and initially she was disappointed that she couldn’t tell him the news that very moment. She was still annoyed with him over what she considered the Maurice and the Magic Banana slight, but he had seemed so pathetic since Tuesday that she never had confronted him with either the book itself or the magazine photo she had discovered of her father and the gifted gorilla. Now she thought she would burst if she didn’t tell someone her news and so she was delighted when he opened his eyes and stared at her. His hair hung lank down his temples and he looked rather tubby. Uncharacteristically slovenly. Until Tuesday, when he had failed to make it to work, he had tried to keep up a semblance of hygiene and fashion normalcy. No more. Over the last couple of days, he had lived in sweatpants, tennis shorts, and bulky T-shirts a size too large. He hadn’t even tried to shave, and his face was covered with the gray and black stubble she associated with the homeless along Riverside Drive. She noticed that his small weights were out by the couch, and though she hoped it was because the physical therapist had been at the apartment earlier that afternoon, she was pretty sure the weights had been there for days.