Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“I don’t think they’re secret meat eaters,” he said softly. “I guess it’s possible, but the idea of someone hiding meat-”

“I hide meat!”

“What?”

Her eyes were starting to tingle and so she dropped the place mats and the silver on the counter and dabbed at them with her middle fingers. Then she repeated herself: “I hide meat. I have a couple of Slim Jims in my purse right now and a couple more in a shoe box in my closet-the box with my dress heels. Why do you think I scarf down Altoids the way you scarf down Percocet? So you can’t smell the meat on my breath!”

“I didn’t know,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry and he didn’t sound hurt. He didn’t even sound betrayed. He seemed merely surprised, and this was too much for her since she’d expected something like rage.

“No, of course you didn’t know, because it was just easier to eat my cheeseburgers where no one could see me, or my bologna, or my Slim Jims. It was just easier! But you know what? I’m tired of sneaking around, I’m tired of trying to accommodate you and your vegan pals. I’m tired of this whole vegan nonsense, and that includes eating tofu and zucchini, or sneaking Slim Jims like I’m some closet binge drinker. I’m tired of watching you humiliate my brother and embarrass our daughter by making a public exhibition of your lawsuit! I’m tired of… I’m just tired of everything!”

She stared at him, at the small, scruffy tufts of beard, and at the defenseless alarm on his face. At his wounded arm in its sling. At his limp, forever useless fingers. For a long moment neither of them said a word, and the only sound was the traffic outside the window.

“How long have you felt this way?” he asked finally.

“For years,” she said.

“Always, huh?”

She nodded. “You know what I wish?”

“No.”

“I wish years ago someone had told you to see a shrink so you could just get over your lobster fixation. Just talked out your… your guilt or your whatever, so you could have gotten on with your life instead of becoming this fanatic.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then: “In the hospital-in New Hampshire-I had a similar thought.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. When I was having those dreams about lobsters. Those nightmares. And I wondered if I was starting to lose it.”

“What did you decide?”

“Well, I will see someone. A therapist. Paige needs me to see someone for the lawsuit. But my sense is that it wouldn’t have changed anything if I went to one ten or fifteen years ago. If it hadn’t been the lobsters, you know, it probably would have been something else. I still would have given up meat.”

“But maybe you wouldn’t have been so extreme.”

He surprised her. “Maybe,” he agreed.

She heard their front door opening, the hinges groaning with the precise whine she knew well from their years in the apartment, and then the jingle of keys on a FERAL fob-that hand grenade-shaped logo with all the animals on it-and she realized that Charlotte was home. She wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed by her daughter’s return: Had she been a few minutes later, who knew where her series of confessions might have progressed. She doubted she would have revealed that as recently as hours before the accident she believed their marriage was in such desperately sad shape that she was wondering seriously if it was winding down. But she hadn’t planned to tell him about the Slim Jims, either, so who could say what she might really have said? Perhaps, she thought, she might have dropped a bombshell that big.

“We should probably just ask Charlotte what she’d like to do for her birthday,” she said simply. “If anything. For all we know, she’ll tell us it’s more than two weeks past and she feels no need to celebrate it now. Okay?”

“Okay,” Spencer agreed, his voice barely above a whisper.

She called out into the living room that she and Spencer were in the kitchen, and in a moment their daughter pushed her way through the swinging door, bringing with her a shimmering array of stories about rehearsal and the voice coach and the handsome older boy from Buckley who was going to play Archibald Craven.

The obsessions will get you every time when they’re not human-and sometimes, Sara thought, when they are.

She flipped off the small tape recorder with the remarks she had made to herself that morning immediately after Eleanor Holmes had left her office. Eleanor was a thirty-two-year-old woman with an eating disorder who was only now beginning to struggle with the fact that when she was eight she’d spent a full day alone at a New York State Thruway rest area because neither of her divorced parents was willing to cave in to the other and go pick her up. Her father had left her there a day early and just presumed that her mother would drop everything and come get her: Mom hadn’t. Mom had refused to be bullied by her ex-husband and wouldn’t change her plans. It was a game of chicken, and one result was that little Eleanor had lived on whopping plates of nachos in cheese sauce that day, because she was afraid she would be abducted if she left the rest area’s snack shop and cafeteria. The woman believed now-and Sara thought there was some truth to this-that this was why she had become a compulsive eater and tried to use food to reduce anxiety and stress.

Sara closed her eyes. Upstairs she presumed that Willow was sleeping as deeply as Patrick, while John was…

John was probably staring at the pages in his book in bed. She’d noticed lately that it took him long minutes to turn the pages in whatever novel or history he was reading. When she’d first noticed the trend in their bed two or three weeks ago, she had presumed he had fallen asleep and that was why he had been on, say, page 216 for fifteen minutes. But then she’d realized that his eyes were open, staring aimlessly at the wallpaper or the window-a blank screen, inevitably, because the shades would be drawn-or simply the foot of their bed.

She hadn’t spoken to Spencer since they’d left New Hampshire five weeks ago, and she knew John hadn’t, either. This was yet another source of torment for her poor husband. It was a wonder he hadn’t become a compulsive eater himself. (Instead, alas, he’d simply lost almost all of his appetite.) She tried to imagine how the brothers-in-laws’ feud-though it was actually a pretty one-sided squabble since John wanted desperately to be on speaking terms with Spencer-would play itself out. She had to believe that the next time they saw each other would not be in five or ten or fifteen years. This lawsuit would have to bring them together at some point, wouldn’t it? And what about Christmas in three months or the Seton New England Boot Camp next summer? The McCulloughs actually didn’t visit them all that often in Vermont, largely because when they came north everyone gathered at Nan’s place in New Hampshire, but Sara and Willow and John had a long history of seeing the McCulloughs in Manhattan. Willow loved New York City, and the three of them went there at least twice a year and stayed at Nan’s. They’d see lots of Catherine and Charlotte and-when he was in town-Spencer.

Still, Sara guessed that it was possible with a man as stubborn as Spencer that he’d find a way never to speak to her husband again. It was, of course, ridiculous. Childish and ridiculous. And it was only making things worse.

She was about to head upstairs herself and get ready for bed, when she heard a knock so soft on the living room door that she knew instantly it was Willow. The girl was awake, after all.

“Come in,” she said, just loud enough to be heard through the door.

Willow’s bangs were falling across her eyes, and she was squinting against the light in the living room. Though it was only the middle of September, it had been chilly the last couple of days and the girl had started to wear her winter nightgown, a red and white Lanz which last year had dragged on the floor but now, Sara noticed, didn’t even reach her daughter’s small ankles.