Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

And so she simply sniffed deeply for control and then said into the little hands enmeshed with hers, “I love you, Willow Seton. I love you so, so much.”

THE WEATHER TURNED COLD overnight in northern New Hampshire, the temperature a mere thirty-five degrees when Nan Seton came downstairs in the morning, and she knew it was time to return to New York. She called up the local handyman whom she paid some seasons to drive her between Sugar Hill and Manhattan and scheduled her return for that Thursday. She would close up the house for the winter tomorrow, depending upon the same gentleman who would be driving her south to replace the screens with the storm windows and to carry the porch furniture into the garage.

She had already pulled up what was left of the garden-mostly vines and weeds that had grown back since her son had had that paroxysm in the rain in early August and uprooted whole rows of decimated tomato and bean plants, as well as the maturing potatoes and carrots and beets the deer hadn’t yet nuzzled up from the earth-but she went out there now and stood with her hands on her hips. She guessed people who took their vegetable gardens seriously would spread compost into the dirt and clay, but her family hadn’t bothered with a compost pile this summer. There had been some discussion that they would have one next year, but it had been work enough simply to get the vegetable and cutting gardens into the ground and those rows of berries planted.

She wandered to the edge of the lupine and thought of her family in New York City. She believed she was standing just about where Spencer had been when Charlotte had shot him, and she wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her chest. According to Catherine, he was doing about as well as could be expected, though Nan had been careful not to press for details: The last thing she wanted to know were the grisly particulars of either his injury or his treatment.

She gazed at the clay soil and wondered if ever again it would grow more than lupine and weeds. She rather doubted they would have a vegetable garden here next summer. She presumed that Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte would return for their summer vacation, if only because this house was a part of Catherine’s cultural legacy, her childhood. And-at least until he was shot-certainly Spencer had loved the place, too. But she guessed there would be no energetic descent on this house over Memorial Day Weekend, with the McCulloughs and the Setons arriving en masse with their trowels and their spades and their big green boxes of Miracle-Gro.

The foreboding she had experienced the other day on her hike in the woods had since grown more pronounced. She was becoming more certain all the time that the next time everyone in that younger generation would be together here in the country would be at her funeral: a little ceremony amid the astilbe, the daisies, and the phlox, the mourners expressly forbidden from sharing their memories or singing any hymns. She understood that Spencer was still refusing to speak with John, and she wished she had the matriarchal clout of either her late mother or late mother-in-law. Forty years ago, young adults still listened to their mothers and mothers-in-law. Lord knows, she sure did. Neither of those strong-willed women from a more simple era would have tolerated this sort of nonsense: A raised eyebrow or spoken dagger from either of them, and Spencer and John would have been back at the Thanksgiving table together, their egos curbed and their tails between their legs. They might not have liked each other, but they would have tolerated each other. They would have been civil.

And that was what counted. Civility.

She sighed and stared at the mountains, their peaks hidden today by a heavy layer of leaden white clouds. She imagined it might be sleeting right now atop Lafayette, and perhaps the first snow was falling on Washington. She tried not to be morbid and was only rarely, but she couldn’t push from her mind the vision of snow falling on a tombstone in the Sugar Hill cemetery. There was her name carved into the marble beside Richard’s. She reminded herself that she still felt no pain, was enduring just a constant shortness of breath. Was weary. Constantly weary. Her heart? Perhaps. She guessed she would schedule an appointment with her doctor when she was back in Manhattan, but she had the fatalistic confidence that she was at the beginning of the end.

Suddenly, at the edge of the woods at the base of the hill, the far perimeter of the sweeping tangles of old lupine, she sensed something move. At first she wasn’t sure what she had seen because she’d barely glimpsed it from the corner of her eye. She lowered her gaze from the clouds shielding Lafayette and remained perfectly still. She squinted, wishing she had her eyeglasses looped around her neck as she usually did, and grew annoyed with herself for leaving them by the sink after washing her face before coming outside. Nevertheless, she could see that the animals were deer, even if she couldn’t make out the details of their markings. There were three of them, none with antlers impressive enough that she could distinguish the branches this far away. One of the creatures, it was clear, was watching her, standing guard while the other two ate.

“Go away!” she screamed unexpectedly, surprising herself. When she was alone she barely made a sound. She never spoke aloud-she certainly wasn’t the sort who would talk to herself-but here she was… screaming.

“Go away! Shoo!” She stamped her foot, though she knew it caused no tremor they could feel at this distance.

Still, her voice was enough: Almost as one the animals bolted into the wall of pines, their white tails as prominent for one brief second as the flags on the greens at the Contour Club golf course. Then they were gone.

She turned toward the house and started in, steaming. Hadn’t they done enough? Really, hadn’t they brought enough ruin on her family? She was fearful that she would never again see her two granddaughters together in the pool at the Contour Club or in the gloriously crisp waters of Echo Lake. She was afraid that she would never again witness John mixing gin and tonics at the end of the day for Sara and Catherine and Spencer or see the four grown-ups battling together on the tennis court. And while her son and her granddaughter certainly had their parts to play in this travesty-and, perhaps, even Spencer himself, with his dogged opinions about everything-the deer were far from blameless. They had the whole world in which they might browse, the miles and miles of forest that sloped slowly up into the White Mountains. Why in the name of heaven did they have to have her family’s Swiss chard and kohlrabi, too?

Oh, how she missed the summer, and those long and wondrous days in July when she had no greater challenges before her than getting Charlotte into a decent swimsuit or figuring out what she could serve her difficult eaters for dinner.

“I want to do something special for Charlotte,” Spencer said. “We completely ignored her birthday two and a half weeks ago.” He was sitting in one of the ladder-back chairs in the kitchen that surrounded a round cherry table about the size of a manhole cover. Catherine was cubing a great block of tofu and putting the squares into a bowl with scallions, zucchini, and okra. Their daughter was rehearsing at Brearley.

“We did not completely ignore it,” Catherine said, hoping she didn’t sound too defensive. They had only been back in the city a couple of days when Charlotte’s birthday rolled around, and with Spencer’s painful convalescence, the familial strife, and the chaos that greets any family when they return after an unexpectedly long time away-the towering mountains of mail, the canceled appointments that have to be rescheduled-the day itself had been downplayed. Besides, there was that small issue that the girl had nearly killed her father. Granted, it had been an accident. But it still seemed inappropriate to Catherine to make a major production of her birthday this year.