Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“What are you saying, the cartridge was faulty?”

“Just conjecture. Maybe the rim on that one round was a tiny fraction of an inch too shallow for the extractor-or too wide. All it would take is one minuscule imperfection that might not make a difference with a Menzer rifle or a Winchester or perhaps even a Remington-but it did on your Adirondack. That’s all.”

Abruptly he felt a little sick, a little faint. He bowed his head against the sensation, and the sounds of all the conversations around him faded into one indistinguishable drone. A single thought dominated his mind: What if the problem were indeed with the casing, and the casing was gone? He knew the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him on the… the eleventh of August. He knew the date because it was the day after Spencer had returned to his mother’s house, and the very day he and his family had returned to Vermont. If, in fact, that trooper had arrived with his rifle an hour later, they already would have been on the road home.

He knew there was no reason why anyone in New Hampshire would have removed the spent casing from the chamber, but he had no recollection of seeing it in the gun when it was returned. Absolutely no visual picture whatsoever. Granted, he had barely looked at the rifle. He’d actually been repulsed by it.

But he had checked the magazine and the chamber before handing it to the paralegal who had driven up from Paige’s firm in New York to retrieve it. The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally turn a loaded rifle over to someone who’d probably never handled a gun in his life.

And though he wasn’t absolutely sure, he simply could not recall seeing the spent casing in the chamber. He could, however, see in his head exactly what the chamber looked like… empty.

“John?”

He opened his eyes and gazed up at Mansfield. “Yes?”

“You okay?”

“I…”

“Yes?”

“I actually thought I was going to faint for a moment.”

“I’d say it was something you ate, but you’ve eaten so little I’d say it was the opposite: It’s because you haven’t eaten.”

He reached for the sandwich and took a small bite, then washed it down by finishing most of the water in his glass. “I don’t recall seeing the casing in the gun when I got it back from the state police in New Hampshire,” he said.

“You checked?”

“I wanted to be sure the gun was unloaded before I turned it over to Paige’s firm.”

Mansfield was staring at him. The justice looked as if he had instantly digested this information and drawn a conclusion. He didn’t look anxious-Mansfield never looked anxious-but he did seem concerned. John sensed that the older man had thus come to the same conclusion he had: If the problem had been with the cartridge’s casing and the casing was gone, then there would be no apparent reason for his inability to extricate the cartridge other than mind-numbing incompetence. Yes, FERAL would still proceed with the lawsuit against the gun company, insisting that Adirondack was producing an inherently defective product because a live round remained in the chamber when you unloaded the magazine… but he himself would be crucified. It was bad enough to be perceived as a person who failed to take a broken rifle to a gunsmith; it was even worse to be viewed as a person incapable of extracting a cartridge from a functioning one.

He told himself this didn’t increase the likelihood that his own brother-in-law would sue him to see how far his insurance policy would stretch, if only because his sister wouldn’t let Spencer try such a thing… but anyone else in Spencer’s situation would.

“Well,” Mansfield was saying now, “maybe your memory is a little fuzzy and the casing was in the chamber after all. And maybe it won’t matter in any event, because the extractor will turn out to be the culprit.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “I think I’ll call the state police anyway and see what the police report says. Who knows? Perhaps the casing is bagged up in some evidence drawer, and some minion can track it down.”

Mansfield smiled at him and nodded, but John recognized it as the sort of smile he gave Willow when he was trying to make her feel better but didn’t believe a word he was saying.

YOU DON’T KNOW what I saw, you don’t know what I’m feeling! Her daughter’s impassioned roar at her from the backseat of the car last week when she was driving the child to ballet. Sara didn’t believe a morning or an afternoon or a 2 a.m. feeding had gone by since then when she hadn’t thought of it. Yet, so far, she had made absolutely no headway learning what was behind it-what may have occurred that awful night in New Hampshire that her daughter was keeping to herself. The girl remained uncharacteristically histrionic when the subject came up, adamant that no one could understand what she saw or what she was feeling, yet absolutely unwavering in her insistence that she was hiding nothing.

Sara was resolved to change all that now. Monday was one of the two days a week when she only saw patients in the morning so she could be home when Willow climbed off the school bus. With Patrick upstairs napping, she was determined to accomplish more in their time together this afternoon than merely help her daughter with her homework and dive into a new box of cereal with her. Cereal had become the girl’s after-school snack of choice these days, since the school nurse had used the first day of health class to remind the sixth grade to read the nutrition labels on packaged foods. Once Willow understood that she was getting 710 calories and 40 percent of her fat for the day from the Cobble Hill jumbo iced honey bun, she avoided her once favorite snack like it was infused with the Ebola virus.

“Can I ask you a question?” she asked her daughter, her voice as casual and nontherapist-like as she could make it, as she poured the milk into their twin bowls. They were sitting at the kitchen counter.

“Uh-huh,” Willow said distractedly. She was reading the back of the cereal box. On the front there was a vibrantly colored cartoon creature-part lion, part human, part space alien-while the back featured the beast on its way through a labyrinth in search of all the food groups in the nutritional period. Sara tried not to analyze the Jungian sensibility behind the image.

“It will be about a subject I know you don’t like to talk about.”

“Math?”

“No.”

Willow looked up at her now, instantly understanding that-once again-her mother was going to try to discuss the accident. “I don’t want to talk about Charlotte and Uncle Spencer,” she said. “You know that.”

“I know, sweetheart. But I do.” She almost added, And my feelings count, too, but was able to stop her therapist-speak in its tracks. Instead she continued firmly, “And I’m your mother, and so we will.”

“You’re adding tension and stress to my life, you know.”

“I’m doing no such thing, and you know it.”

The girl dropped her spoon in her bowl and gazed out the window. The maples in their yard hadn’t yet started to turn, but Sara knew they would any day now. Certainly most other trees had.

“Something is bothering you, sweetheart,” she continued. “That’s painfully clear. And I mean that: painfully clear. Your father and I both know that you’re keeping something inside you, and-”

“You can’t know that. You can’t know what I saw, you can’t know-”

“What I’m feeling,” Sara said, finishing her daughter’s sentence for her. “That’s right, I can’t know what you’re feeling. We’ve been around that block, Willow. The truth is, you’re using that line the way your cousin would-as a very dramatic bit of subterfuge.”

“I don’t even know what that word means.”