Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“Why didn’t you tell me you felt so strongly about the press conference sooner?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t-”

“I did! I told you every way I could! But it wasn’t registering! That’s why it has come to this.”

“An ultimatum. And all because of a press conference.”

“The press conference is just the tip of the iceberg. My God, Spencer, didn’t you hear what I just said? I considered leaving you this summer.”

A couple of seagulls swooped down onto the stone terrace and started pecking at something between the stones. Beside her she heard him breathing, and she couldn’t imagine what he would say next. She was hoping, she realized, that he was going to announce that the press conference was now a dead issue. Over, done with. He would call Paige and Dominique that afternoon to put an end to the nonsense.

Finally he spoke: “I’ve tried the last few weeks to behave better. I know how difficult I can be. Has it made any difference? Any difference at all?”

“Yes, absolutely. I’ve noticed. And I’ve seen how attentive you’ve been with Charlotte.”

“But it’s been too little too late…”

“That’s how it feels,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“And you’re serious about this?”

“Yes.” She almost said more, but she felt a shudder in her throat and now, finally, her eyes were starting to mist. She could feel it, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to wipe them. She knew if she did, that would be it: She would be sobbing and that was the last thing she wanted. Not here, not today.

“Okay, then.”

She tried to read meaning in those three short syllables-resignation or anger or acquiescence-but they were indecipherable. Completely impenetrable. The birds flew up past the two of them, apparently unsatisfied with the pickings in the stones at the foot of the wall, and she watched them wheel up and out over the wide river. She wanted to ask Spencer what he was going to do, but she didn’t dare open her mouth.

CHARLOTTE SIPPED her bottle of orange juice and nibbled at a very doughy, very salty pretzel and watched the contingent from Vermont eat frozen yogurt. Nearby, another family was eating “Medieval Festival Fowl”-turkey legs the size of bowling pins. They were using their hands, and their fingers glistened with fat.

But her father didn’t seem upset. If anything, he seemed oblivious. She wondered if his shoulder was hurting more than usual.

Everyone was sitting on a massive beach blanket that her grandmother-who thought of everything-had brought with her. She and Willow hadn’t spoken any more about her cousin’s determination to tell everyone about the dope and the beer, but she, at least, hadn’t stopped thinking about it for one single minute. The whole thing was making her a little queasy.

She stood up now and looked at the stone edifice of the Cloisters itself, the museum perhaps a hundred yards away from their spot on the grass in the park. She imagined it was a real monastery for a moment and tried to envision the monks inside it doing whatever it was that monks did. She wasn’t exactly sure. But she guessed they prayed and baked bread and they chanted. It probably wasn’t a whole lot different from being a nun, except she presumed that nuns sang instead of chanted. For some reason, in her mind’s eye she could see nuns wandering among those gardens and terraces inside the Cloisters, but not small gatherings of monks. Maybe it was the name of the place itself. Cloisters. It sounded feminine to her. Girlish. She’d learned that morning that a cloister was just a covered walkway in a religious building, but she understood that it was also the root of the word cloistered. And that meant something else. Something more. Separation. Isolation. Purity, maybe.

The gardens and the terraces reminded her of the secret garden: that walled garden from the play, that secluded little world of magic and-what were the words in one of the songs in the musical?-spirit and charm. When Mary Lennox tries to get the little crippled boy to rise up out of his wheelchair in the second act of the show, she sings precisely that: Come spirit, come charm.

She saw Willow pushing up off the ground now and walking toward her. She acted as if she hadn’t noticed and wandered a dozen yards closer to the Cloisters itself. Her cousin followed, exactly as Charlotte suspected she would.

“Have you ever met a nun?” she asked Willow when the younger girl was beside her.

“No. I don’t think so. You?”

“No. How about a monk?”

“No. I know I’ve never met a monk.”

“Me neither,” she said. Then: “The gardens in there made me think of the secret garden. Maybe it was the little walkways and stonewalls. It’s like in the play.”

“And the novel.”

“Yes, in the novel. I don’t mean to relate everything back to the play.” She finished her pretzel and put the paper napkin in her pocket. Willow looked so little to her right now, but also so strong. So courageous. So much more like that fictional Mary Lennox than she was. “You’re really going to tell them, aren’t you?” she said.

“About what we did? Yes. I’m sorry, Charlotte. Really I am. But I can’t lie.”

She nodded. “During the deposition later this year?”

“Actually,” her cousin said carefully, “I thought I might do it before the deposition.”

“So it isn’t a complete surprise for everyone.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was beginning to suspect that,” she said. “If possible…”

“Yes?”

“If possible, would you wait until after the press conference? Let my father have that?” She could see that her cousin was pondering the idea, and so she added, “After all, the depositions won’t be for a little while. But the press conference is this Tuesday. You’ll have plenty of time to tell everyone what happened afterward.”

“I could do that.”

“Thank you.”

The girl licked at a drop of frozen yogurt on the back of her spoon. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Charlotte wondered.

“Are you going to tell your parents-or wait until they hear it from mine?”

“Oh, I’ll have to think about that,” she said, but her sense immediately was that it would be better for them to hear it from her than from Uncle John. Or from Uncle John’s lawyer. Or, perhaps, from Paige. “But I’ll probably tell them myself,” she added.

“Do you want to pick a day now?”

“No, I’d rather not,” she said in her most mannered, most adult voice. “Is that okay?”

“Sure. Charlotte?”

“Yes?”

“We’re still friends, right?”

“Yes, Cousin. We’re still friends.” She knew she should say something more reassuring to Willow, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She was not happy with this turn of events, and she felt as if she had been needlessly cornered by…

Not exactly by her cousin. But by the events themselves. What had happened. On the one hand, she understood that her cousin was correct and they shouldn’t lie; on the other hand, telling the truth seemed to be almost a betrayal of her father. First she shot him. Now it comes out that she’d been smoking dope and drinking beer, and-worse-she hadn’t told anybody. She had seen enough courtroom dramas on television to hear in her head some lawyer from the gun company telling a jury that while this was all real sad, the fact was that Charlotte McCullough was stoned when she ignored her cousin and shot her father. This was a real tragedy, but it sure as heck wasn’t the fault of the Adirondack Rifle Company.

She turned back to her family on the beach blanket and stared for a long moment at her father. He still looked a little dazed to her, as if he weren’t listening to a word of whatever Aunt Sara and Grandmother were saying. She saw he had an unopened can of Diet Pepsi by his left leg, and she noticed that he was the only one there who wasn’t drinking anything.