Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Though John didn’t believe he had made a mistake leaving this splendor for the public defenders’ office, he couldn’t help but wish he could find within the organization’s state-funded budget the money to repaint the walls and perhaps buy a decent couch for the waiting room. It wasn’t simply that he believed his lawyers deserved freshly painted walls: Those forlorn denizens who depended upon the PDs deserved them, too. After all, was it too much to expect that your lawyers’ offices would be clean?

Chris Tuttle rose from behind a desk the size of a small putting green as soon as he saw John in the doorway of his office and came around it to greet him. Tuttle was a few years older than Mansfield-John guessed he was in his midfifties now-but his hair was a shade of black darker than creosote, and his eyes were a vivid chestnut brown. His face was deeply wrinkled, however, and John suspected that Tuttle was dying his hair.

Unlike some of the other senior lawyers in the firm, Tuttle didn’t keep a conference table of his own in his office, and so when they sat back down Tuttle was on one side of the massive desk and John was on the other. He was reminded of those images of estranged couples in their baronial dining rooms in movies from the 1930s and 1940s, the length of table between them a signal for the viewer that this marriage had absolutely no hope of being saved. He and Tuttle had already spoken twice on the phone about his deposition, and John had told him all that he could about the rifle-including his fear that when the New Hampshire State Police had returned the gun to him in August the casing had somehow been lost.

“So, how are the girls? Sara and young Willow?” Tuttle asked.

He answered briefly that the girls were as fine as could be expected, given the reality that his family was dealing with a waking nightmare of guilt and self-recrimination. John knew that Tuttle didn’t actually want the details of their personal lives right now; nor did he himself have any great desire to volunteer the information while on this other lawyer’s billable clock.

“So, the folks in New Hampshire tell me they’re still looking for your missing casing,” Tuttle said to him. “But I really have no more confidence than you that it will turn up. They don’t think there was a casing in the chamber when it was checked into the firearms locker.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit, of course there was. They just lost it is all.”

“I’m just telling you what they’re telling me. You still have the box the cartridge came in?”

“Yes, absolutely. Why?”

“A gun guy thought it might be worth seeing if other rounds from the box jam in the chamber. Maybe it wasn’t just that one.”

“Interesting.”

“A longshot. Obviously you loaded and unloaded the rifle a couple of times last November, and no other cartridges got stuck. Still, it’s something to consider when we get a chance to look at the gun. So, bring me that box of ammunition, okay? Now, let’s talk about the deposition,” Tuttle continued. On the lake outside the window John could see a ferry leaving the dock at the boathouse and starting its way west toward New York.

“Yes, let’s.”

“Obviously there is no justification for your…” Tuttle paused, searching for the right word. John considered assisting him with stupidity, irresponsibility, or carelessness, but he restrained himself. “Improvidence,” Tuttle said finally. “There is no rational reason for what you did.”

“Thank you.”

“So what I’ve told Paige I want us to focus on, first of all, is the mystery of the round in the chamber. How it simply wouldn’t pop out when you cycled the weapon, and then-and this will be very important-how you struggled and struggled to extract it.”

“I didn’t struggle. I didn’t want to shoot my hand off with a ramrod or risk blowing my head off by firing it. I didn’t know what would happen if I fired it, and I envisioned the damn thing exploding against my cheek.”

“I understand-and we’ll need to make that point. But you did try to pop out the cartridge; you did try to remove it. Multiple times. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“And it just wouldn’t come out.”

“Yes.”

“Good. It must be clear that you did what you could. Second, it must also be clear that events then conspired to prevent you from dealing with it further, i.e., bringing it to a gunsmith. All that busyness you told me about at work, the birth of young Patrick. I want the numbers, please, of exactly how many cases your office handled over the last twelve months, and the number for the previous year, too. You were down, what, two lawyers this year?”

“One. But we were also down an investigator.”

“Fine. I also want to know how many cases you managed personally, in addition to all your responsibilities running the public defenders’ office.”

“I can get you that.”

“And, lastly, I want a list of all the ways and all the hours you volunteer in the community and all the ways you help out your family-including that garden.”

“You mean the garden Spencer had us plant?”

“Yup. That one. You must have helped him weed it or something.”

“I spent all of Memorial Day Weekend over there putting the damn thing into the ground.”

“Excellent. That’s three days right there you were helping him when you could have been taking the gun to a gunsmith. That is, after all, half the problem here. You never brought the gun to a professional.”

“The other half, I presume, is leaving a live round in there in the first place?”

“Okay, the problem should be divided into thirds, not halves. Forgive me. You left a live round in the chamber. You failed to bring the weapon to a gunsmith. And then you left the rifle where a child could get it.”

“It was only where a child could get it because I was actually going to see a gunsmith roughly thirty-six hours after Spencer was shot. That was the whole reason the rifle was in the trunk of my car.”

“You sound angry. You needn’t be. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t be angry at your deposition.”

He heard a small laugh escape his lips, unexpected and trilling. I’m not angry, he wanted to say. I’m depressed. His depression might have made him sound cranky, but one was only a visible manifestation of the other. Some mornings it took every bit of will he could muster to simply climb out from under the sheets on his and Sara’s bed, to emerge from the warm cocoon he had created with a little cotton and a nighttime’s worth of body heat. He might not have made it out of bed today-the depression this morning was almost a quilt, shielding him from all the nastiness the world had to offer with the cozy affection of a down comforter-if he hadn’t heard Willow calming Patrick in the kitchen (so distant, so very distant) while Sara was trying to get one child ready for school and the other for the Mother’s Love Nurture World. He had to help. He had to. If he didn’t, he understood, he would have ratcheted up the self-loathing yet one more notch, and that might have sent him so deep into his nest of percale and gloom that he would never have emerged.

“I won’t be angry,” he said to reassure Tuttle, and he tried to sit up a little higher in his chair. He realized he’d been slouching, just the way his own clients did when they were meeting with him.

He hadn’t really thought about it until just that moment, but he guessed they were depressed, too.

PAIGE LEANED FORWARD in the ergonomic stool with a back that purported to be a chair. She used to have a chair that was a deep burgundy leather. Once she was the youngest lawyer in the firm who got to sit on the slick, supple skin of a dead animal. It was a big chair with plush cushions and wheels-an unmistakable sign of achievement and success. Then she started working with FERAL and she understood that the chair had to go. Now an associate who would soon be a partner (but wasn’t yet) had it, a woman from Harvard who spent lots of time suing automobile manufacturers over headrests, fuel tanks, and air bags. Nothing she did ever wound up in trial, and she made the firm mountains of money. She was likable. She was pretty. She was a rising star. Paige knew she would have detested her if she herself weren’t already a partner.