Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Charlotte put the scone down and looked at her nails. This morning they were painted a robin’s egg blue that Paige thought looked quite nice with the navy skirt the child had to wear while in the middle school at Brearley.

“These conversations with lawyers,” the girl said. “I’ve wanted to ask you about that. Will they be in a courtroom?”

“Maybe down the road. Far down the road. But at this point I just meant in an office. Probably my office. It’s all part of the process: your way of helping people to learn how dangerous guns are and how evil deer hunting is.”

“The thing is,” the girl began, turning toward her with eyes that were wide and slightly bewildered. “I don’t think deer hunting is all that evil. Really. I think Uncle John is a pretty normal guy.”

Paige looked quickly at Catherine, but the girl’s mom, it was clear, may actually have agreed with the child. “I wasn’t aware you felt that way about hunting, Charlotte. Thank you. You’re entitled to your opinions. I’ll be sure not to ask you for your thoughts on that subject. And I think we can assume that Adirondack won’t either. Mostly the lawyers will want to know exactly what you recall about the night the accident occurred,” she said, resorting-as she did always-to the passive when discussing the shooting. She did not believe she had ever used the construction “when you shot your father” or “when your daughter shot you” or even the vaguely innocuous “when Charlotte inadvertently discharged the firearm” around any of the McCulloughs.

“They’ll just ask me what happened?”

“Uh-huh. They’ll want you to reconstruct what occurred that night. Exactly what you did at the country club, exactly what you did when you got home. There will be other questions, of course. Other things will surely come up. General things, like I said. But most of it will be about the night your father was injured.”

The girl’s gaze returned to its normal eighth-grade pout. She wiped at her lips with her fingers. “Will there be a lie detector?”

“A lie detector?”

“You know, one of those things that tells people if you’re lying. It monitors your heartbeat or your sweat or something.”

“I know what a lie detector is. I was only repeating the question because I was surprised you’d even worry about such a thing. There will most certainly not be a lie detector. I can promise you that.”

“Good.”

“You sound relieved,” Paige said, her antennae now up.

“No. But I still wouldn’t take one.”

“Any special reason why not?”

“I just wouldn’t,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s, like, my constitutional right or something.”

Slowly Catherine turned toward her daughter, and she was looking at her with apprehension: as if the child were a stranger on the street whose intentions were suspect. Paige knew that if this girl were her daughter, she would be reacting exactly the same way. It was the way the kid had snapped “Good” a moment ago and then announced that she wouldn’t take a lie detector test. Paige began to wonder if she really did know exactly what had gone on that night in New Hampshire. If, for that matter, any of the grown-ups did.

And maybe that was the problem: These parents-Spencer and Catherine, Sara and John-farmed their daughters out to Charlotte’s grandmother for a major chunk of the summer, and maybe that was indicative of their parenting attitudes in general. Paige had no delusions that she would be a better parent than any of these people, but then she also didn’t have any expectations that she would have to try… at least not in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, she liked to believe that educated people who chose to become parents would not become so absorbed in their own lives that they would grow oblivious to whatever it was their children were thinking. Or doing. Especially if they were going to leave loaded weapons in the trunks of their cars.

But, of course, they became less mindful over time. It was inevitable. Often people like the Setons and the McCulloughs were particularly impressive when it came to finding interests other than their own children: Their careers-clients and causes, patients and students. Their marriages. Gardens. Guns.

Nevertheless, Paige decided now there was definitely something curdling in the back of this kid’s head that her parents weren’t exploring with sufficient resolve, and something had occurred that last night in July that no one knew about except this girl. Perhaps this girl and her cousin.

“It is my constitutional right… right?” Charlotte was asking her.

“I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” she answered carefully, not wanting to lie but still hoping to plant a small seed of fear in the child’s mind. “Nevertheless, I don’t believe the men who framed the Constitution even envisioned such a device as a lie detector machine.”

“Well, I won’t take one.”

“Charlotte?” her mother said, a nervous tinniness to her voice. “Did something else happen that night you haven’t told us about? Is there something more we need to know?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Like what? You think I shot Dad on purpose? Is that what you’re thinking? Well, I didn’t, and I can’t believe you’d even accuse me of such a thing!”

“I didn’t accuse you of anything. That idea hadn’t even crossed my mind,” Catherine said, but Charlotte clearly wasn’t listening. The girl pulled her napkin from her lap and heaved it in a messy ball on the tablecloth.

“Isn’t it bad enough that I shot him by accident? Isn’t that horrible enough?” she said, barely choking out her second sentence before storming off in the direction of the ladies’ room.

After a long, awkward moment, Catherine said quietly, “I can’t believe she would fear for even a split second that I would think such a thing. I just can’t believe it.” Then she took a breath to compose herself and followed after her daughter.

Paige nodded in agreement as a courtesy, but the truth was that the notion had come to her before, and now, she knew, it was going to remain lodged in her mind whenever the subject of that night in New Hampshire came up. Thank God the kid never would have to take a lie detector test. Who the hell knew what the child really had done-and why? Certainly, Paige understood, she didn’t.

And, as a lawyer, she was glad.

The next day, Saturday, Spencer sat alone in a living room chair late in the afternoon and cataloged all the precise ways he and his wife would never make love again, all the small ways he needed both arms-and both hands-when they had sex. It was a sort of negative Kama Sutra, a litany of sexual impossibilities. Some of the losses were pretty basic: Unless he became real proficient at the one-handed push-up, he was never going to be atop Catherine in any manner that wasn’t pathetically smothering-and certainly not in the variant of the old-fashioned missionary position that Catherine preferred, her legs on his shoulders, her ankles behind his head. Other losses were more idiosyncratic to the two of them, the sorts of physical eccentricities any couple with a long history together discover about one another, many of which demanded that he have the use of two hands and plenty of functioning fingers.

And in addition to all the things he no longer could do, there was the reality that whenever he moved his body back and forth with anything that resembled an energetic motion, his arm was going to sway accordingly. Now that was sure to be an aphrodisiac for Catherine: her husband’s increasingly thin and stunted arm banging against her hip, her side, or the back of her leg as he moved inside her.

He and Catherine hadn’t made love since the accident. Of course, they hadn’t made love a whole lot in the months before the accident, either. They’d never talked about it, but something was happening-or, to be precise, not happening-even before his brother-in-law had left a loaded rifle in the trunk of his car. He had gotten a reminder of it the other night in their bed when he brought up the press conference.