Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

He was pulled from his unpleasant little musings when he heard the metallic thud of their copper-core soup pot being dropped onto the burner on the stove. At the moment, Catherine and Charlotte were preparing dinner and setting the table while he sipped a gin and tonic. So far the gin wasn’t doing a whole lot to help buttress the work of the Advil and the Percocet. He still hurt like hell. At least the combination of alcohol and drugs hadn’t sent him spiraling down into a coma, though he did wonder whether a painless coma might actually represent a small improvement over his current circumstances.

The glass was cold from the ice, and he held it gently against the back of his right hand. His arm was still swathed in the sling and cradled tightly against his chest. He didn’t feel a thing, even when he pressed the glass very hard against his knuckles. He didn’t expect he would feel anything, but still the absolute nothingness fascinated him, especially since at the other end of his arm, the sensation-none of it good-was pretty near ceaseless.

He knew he looked a bit scruffy-no, that wasn’t right; he looked exceedingly scruffy-and he considered trying to shave before dinner. It had been days. He gazed at the russet brick wall of the apartment building across the street and the cement skirts of the windows, his mind on the logistics of shaving with his left hand with that electric razor he loathed, and quickly gave up on the idea. He’d never get an electric razor through the scrub pine growing now on his cheeks and chin.

A moment later he heard the phone ringing in the kitchen, and then Charlotte was scooting through the living room with the cordless phone pressed against her ear. She waved at him, and he thought she had mouthed the name “Willow” as she continued past, apparently taking the phone with her to her bedroom at the very end of their apartment’s thin corridor.

WILLOW WAS HAPPY to hear that her cousin had gotten the part she wanted in the play, but it wasn’t why she had phoned her. As soon as she could she brought up the depositions that loomed before them.

“And that’s why you’re calling?” Charlotte was asking her now, and Willow could hear the disbelief in her cousin’s voice. “They’re still months away!”

“Charlotte, I don’t want to lie.”

“Look, if you’re so worried about getting caught, do what I did: I simply told them I wouldn’t take a lie detector test. I said it was my constitutional right. And Paige-she’s my dad’s lawyer-she said I wouldn’t have to.”

Willow was sitting outside on the front steps of their home in Vermont, savoring the early autumn chill in the air. It wasn’t quite seven, but already the sun was behind the mountains to the west, offering only a strip of red against an otherwise colorless dusk sky. She’d brought the phone out here so her parents wouldn’t overhear her conversation.

“I’m not worried about getting caught. I’m worried about having to lie in the first place. We’re going to have to take oaths, you know.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we should tell them everything.”

“No way. Why would you want to get Gwen in trouble?”

“Charlotte-”

“Look, they probably won’t even ask us the sorts of questions where we’d have to lie. What are they going to do, say, ‘Willow, were you smoking marijuana the night your cousin found a loaded rifle in the trunk of your dad’s car?’ I don’t think so. They have no idea we did that.”

“But we did. And that’s important. We were both stoned. You wouldn’t have shot your dad if you weren’t stoned.”

“Don’t put it that way. It makes me sound dreadful. And I feel lousy enough as it is. Besides…”

“Yes?”

“Besides, none of this would have happened if your dad hadn’t left a loaded gun sitting around in the first place.”

“I realize that. He feels terrible, too, you know.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Look, Charlotte, I didn’t call to fight. I called because I’m scared. I’m scared I’m either going to have to lie under oath or I’m going to have to tell the truth-and I don’t know which would be worse.”

“I do. Trust me: Lie.”

“But I don’t want to, this is too important. My dad’s a lawyer and I know about oaths. I know how these things work. And…”

“Yes?”

“And it would be wrong. That’s all. It would be wrong.”

“Telling the truth would only make things worse. I know that doesn’t seem possible, but-believe it or not-it is. Things actually could get worse. A lot worse.”

Willow sensed someone was standing behind her in the mudroom just inside the screen door, and when she turned around her mother held up two fingers to signal that dinner was about two minutes away. Her mother was smiling, and Willow thought she had mouthed the sentence, “Say hi to Charlotte for us.”

“Look, I don’t believe this accident would have happened if you hadn’t been a little bit tipsy and a little bit stoned,” she said to her cousin when her mother once more was out of earshot. “And maybe more than a little bit.”

Charlotte sighed, a gust of wind she heard in her ear. “I don’t know about that.”

“What?”

“I said, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“This week I start seeing a psychiatrist-a friend of your mom’s, I guess. And I’m really glad, because sometimes I wonder if I have even the slightest idea of just how screwed up I am. Sometimes I think I’m keeping it together really well, and then when I’m alone I’ll just lose it completely. And while most of the time I’m only mad at myself, there are other times when I’ll find myself mad at my dad, and then I’ll wonder…”

“You’ll wonder what?”

“I’ll wonder if I would have taken the gun even if I hadn’t been stoned.”

“You think so?”

“Sometimes, yeah. Maybe I wouldn’t have fired it. Then again, maybe I would have. Sometimes I even wonder if I really thought I was firing at a…”

Her cousin’s voice trailed off, and she was about to ask Charlotte to continue when the older girl abruptly resumed speaking, her voice once more rich with its characteristic flippancy.

“Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the shrink. Excuse me, the therapist. It’ll be good for me! It’ll be good for my dad’s lawsuit, it’ll be good for the work he does for FERAL. So, I’m serious about this, my country cousin: You don’t need to get Gwen involved, you don’t need to bring up the teenagers. You don’t need to say anything-not a word-about the marijuana or the beer. Your dad’s gun would still have been in the trunk of your car even if we hadn’t smoked a little dope and had a couple of beers, and I still would have taken it. Okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said, aware they had hit some sort of impasse. “I should go in for dinner.”

“You do that. We’re about to have dinner here, too.”

Before hanging up Charlotte announced that she would be busy memorizing lines and songs and doing the mountains of homework demanded of someone in the eighth grade, but they could still talk next week if the prospect of the deposition continued to frighten her.

At dinner that night Willow’s parents wanted to know all about Charlotte and The Secret Garden-and, simply, how the child was bearing up-and she was sorry that despite the length of their phone call, there was very little she could report.

CHARLOTTE HAD TROUBLE falling asleep that Saturday night, because she was aware that she had made an important connection: Initially she hadn’t wanted Willow to tell anyone about the marijuana and the beer for the simple reasons that she was afraid she would get in even more trouble and because she didn’t want to imperil what she considered her friendship with the older teenager. Now, however, she understood that secrecy mattered for another reason: She feared if it came out that she had been a little bit high, a little bit drunk, it would jeopardize both her father’s lawsuit against the gun company and the way FERAL was using the accident to tell people that hunting was disgusting and guns were unsafe. And after what had happened (oh, hell, after what she had done) she owed it to her father not to imperil either the lawsuit or his organization’s antihunting media campaign.