Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

Finally a door opened and a woman Charlotte guessed was her mother’s age emerged, though Charlotte had once heard someone observe that heavy people were occasionally older than they looked. And this Dr. Warwick was heavy indeed, a series of round snowballs: midsized ones comprising her bottom and her breasts, a large one to serve as her torso and abdomen, and a smallish (at least in comparison to the rest of her body) one for her head. She was wearing black velvet pants and an ivory silk top that was a tad too clingy for someone so big. Still, this Dr. Warwick had the eyes and smile of a pixie and the most lovely blond spit curls clinging to the sides of her scalp. Charlotte liked her on sight.

She and her mother stood simultaneously to greet the therapist, and after they had made their introductions all around-including the receptionist named Anya who, it turned out, was a psych major at Columbia when she wasn’t here three mornings a week-Dr. Warwick ushered her into another room. The doctor had her fingers pressed gently on her shoulder, and Charlotte decided that she liked the feel of this, too.

KEENAN BARRETT studied Paige Sutherland. He wished he had something that resembled her charisma. He wished he exuded the sort of telegenic charm that mattered so much more these days than an ability to frame an argument soundly. Alas, he was anything but magnetic. He was mannered… deliberate… old school. All qualities, alas, that didn’t play well on CNN.

The problem at the moment was that he feared Paige was about to make the kind of mistake that young charismatic lawyers often made: She’d convinced herself that she was so smooth and attractive that she could bluster and bluff her way through anything. He hoped he could disabuse her of this notion and persuade her to rethink her plans.

“I just don’t see why it will be relevant,” Paige was saying in response to his concern. His office didn’t have the sort of small round conference table that Dominique’s had, though this was because he liked the way his massive mission desk made everyone with whom he met look small and inconsequential. Right now Paige and Spencer were sitting across from him in two straight-back mission chairs.

“It will be relevant because they are going to want to know why John couldn’t extract the bullet,” he told her, referring to the writers and reporters who they hoped would be at the press conference next week.

“And I’ll tell them we delivered the gun to the lab,” she answered.

He glanced at Spencer, who was looking down at the fingers on his right hand. His arm was still in that sling, and since his return Keenan hadn’t seen him make any effort to take a single note with his left. Hadn’t even seen him pick up a pen. Keenan wasn’t completely sure he was listening now, or-if he was-whether he was following the nuances of their conversation. It was as if he’d been shot in the head, not the shoulder. He was so placid. So yielding. So serene. Keenan wondered if this was the result of his painkillers or whether the ache in his shoulder and back simply precluded him from concentrating on anything outside his body. Either way, this was a different Spencer from the one who had left for New Hampshire at the end of July, and Keenan wasn’t sure what he thought of him. The fellow was certainly more likable. But he wasn’t especially helpful. While the old Spencer would have had strong opinions on what they should and should not say at the press conference, this new one hadn’t offered more than a sentence or two in the last fifteen minutes.

Keenan decided that he didn’t even like his associate’s new beard. He understood why Spencer was growing it, but the sad fact was that it made him look a little dim: He resembled the cavemen Keenan saw going to Ranger ice-hockey games at nearby Madison Square Garden, the beefy, lumpish, ancient-looking hominoids who painted their chests red and blue and then took off their shirts for the cameras. This troubled Keenan for a great many reasons, though the foremost right now was the reality that in four days Spencer was going to be the focal point of a press conference.

“If that’s all you tell them,” he said, directing his response at both the other lawyer and Spencer so he could see if there was anyone home behind those whiskers, “then once the gun’s fundamental soundness is revealed-as it will be as soon as Adirondack inspects it-we will lose a sizable measure of our credibility and our message will be undermined. People will not be listening to what we have to say about hunting if they believe the legs have been cut away from beneath Spencer’s lawsuit. If the lawsuit appears groundless, we have no forum.”

“I’m not going to say the rifle didn’t function the way it was meant to. We’re contending, pure and simple, that Adirondack has been manufacturing a dangerous product because a bullet remains in the chamber once you unload the magazine. If the extractor had been defective, that would have been a nice bonus-nothing more, nothing less.”

“That isn’t my point.”

“What is your point, Keenan?”

“I believe it is in your client’s interest to acknowledge upfront-next Tuesday-that Mr. Seton’s weapon worked perfectly. We need to be the first to say it performed exactly as it was designed to, so reporters do not misconstrue what we are claiming and get it into their deadline-obsessed heads that we’re implying the rifle was in any way defective. We simply cannot allow Adirondack to trump us in the media in a week or a month or whenever with the announcement that the gun was inspected and no mechanical defects were discovered.”

“The gun worked?” It was Spencer, looking up finally from his useless right fingers.

“Spencer,” Paige said, smiling gently at her client, “haven’t you heard a word we’ve been saying? Haven’t you been listening?”

“I guess the reality only hit me just now.”

“Yes,” Keenan said, “the gun worked.” He couldn’t imagine how the hell they were going to put this guy on the dais in a couple of days.

“But we’re not going to say that it didn’t work,” Paige added. “Our point all along-”

“If the gun worked, then why couldn’t my brother-in-law get the bullet out?”

“That’s exactly the question we need to answer,” Keenan said.

“He’d been getting the bullets out for two weeks. Probably more when you factor in the time he spent in his hunter safety courses,” Spencer continued.

“We can ask the lab to look into that,” Paige said. “But I’m sure it was just your brother-in-law’s unfamiliarity with the gun.”

“My brother-in-law’s a pretty sharp guy. The hunting is appalling, of course. But he’s not stupid.”

“No, of course he’s not,” Paige said, though Keenan could tell that she didn’t believe that for a minute. “But it may just be that he didn’t know how to unload the weapon-which, given its apparent complexity and the fact you have to do two things to unload it, seems plausible enough to me.”

“People who are a lot less capable than John do it successfully every day.”

Keenan immediately sat forward. “That, Spencer, is a sentence you need to divest yourself of instantly. Do you understand? Expurgate that very thought from your mind this very second. Please.”

“Oh, Keenan, I won’t say that on Tuesday. I’m just telling you here in the privacy of this office that I agree with you: It’s something we need to understand.” Then he placed his left hand on the front of the wide desk and pushed himself to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Paige asked. She sounded alarmed.

“To get a dog. I was going to wait till Monday, but if I bring her home today my family will get to spend the weekend bonding with her.”