Blue Mercy: A Novel. (6 page)

I had forgotten she knew that. I had half-forgotten I knew it myself. "Yes, it is."

"Oh my God, Mom, you are unbelievable!" She jerked the car to a stop, making the car behind us hoot.
 

"Star!"

"Don't you think, Mom," she was speaking slowly, like I was a child. Or an idiot. "Don't you think I might be a tad interested in seeing the house where my father grew up?"

"Gosh, honey, I don't think I even know where your dad's home place is. Once before I tried to find it, from his description, but I couldn't be sure..."

"But not to even say."

"I'm sorry." Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry... "All right then," I said. "Let's try. Let's see if we can find it."

I directed her to turn at the bridge, near the old mill, and we drove up to the house that I believed might have belonged to Brendan's family. We parked a little beyond, walked back to look at it. A bungalow, low and squat, without a single attractive feature except the shrubberies.

"The garden's pretty, isn't it?" I said. "Even at this time of year. Somebody in there has green fingers."

"I think we should go in," Star said.

"Absolutely not."

"Oh, come on, Mom. Why not?"

"I'm not even sure that it's the right house. If it is, they could well be dead by now. And even if not, what on earth do you think we can go in there and say? 'Oh hi! I was married to your son, the one who left when he was eighteen and never contacted you again. This is your granddaughter. Nice to meet you.'"

"But, Mom, they don't know whether he is alive or dead. Whatever happened, that's just not right."

"I know, honey. But going in there and putting the heart crossways in a mother or father who must be in their seventies by now is not going to give your dad's sad story a happy ending."

"But..."

"It's too late, Star."

"No. Don't say that. I hate those words."

"If you want to do this, you'll have to do it another day. On your own."

"Or on my own, now."

"Okay. Give me the keys and I'll wait for you in the car."

She rummaged in her bag, handed them across. I turned and began to walk back down the hill. I hadn't got far when she called me. "Stop. Wait."

I turned.

"Maybe you're right," she puffed, as she caught up.

"You could write to them first. That might be an approach."

"I probably won't even do that. As usual I'm a funk."

"You just want to know more about him." I took her arm. She let me and I gave it a squeeze. "It's natural."

But that only set her off again. "Why didn't you tell me more when I was growing up, Mom? Why did you keep it all from me?"

"Star, I've admitted that was a mistake. I did what I thought was best."

"It wasn't."

"I know. You've said. And I'm sorry."

Over and over: the same thing. Was she never going to let it go? These reproaches were the flip side to the excessive love she used to lavish on me when she was little: "I love you, Mommy," holding my head in place with her two little hands, so I couldn't look away from her.

Twice in my life I had wronged her, she believed. The first time with her father and in her mind, our recent travails were connected with that. A connection she would never explain and I could never fathom.

I realized I was going to have to say something, take hold of the subject we were both avoiding. "This isn't just about Brendan, is it?"

"Mom, don't. I'm warning you, just don't."

"I gave him up for you, Star. He's gone." There it was, out in the open.

She snatched back her arm, looked around herself, as if for a door she could escape through and slam behind her.
 

"Why does that mean nothing, Star? I don't know what else to do."

"Okay, Mom, that's it. This sham of a day is now officially over."

"I know it's hard for you to talk about it, honey. But we have to. Please."

"Dr Aintree told me this would happen." I was hardly listening. She knew I liked Amanda Aintree, her therapist, a good doctor. And a good woman. I felt she was just using her against me and all my mental attention was on trying to find persuasive words that might work, might melt the hardness between us so we could communicate. Until I heard her say, "She warned me. Told me you were likely to
 
annihilate me again."

"Annihilate you?"

"We are driving home now, Mom, and then I am going to pack and leave as planned."

"Annihilate you, Star? You have got to be joking.
Annihilate
?"

On the drive back to Doolough from Glendalough, Star turned on the radio so we wouldn't have to talk. Back at the house, I said to her, "Will you help me clear away your Granddad's things before you go?" If I could get her to hold off until darkness, she might stay another night.

She didn't want to but she could hardly say no, so we set to it, working through the house with boxes and black plastic sacks, separately and in silence, like burglars.

It's surprising the amount of detritus that even the least accumulative life can gather, but my father was a hoarder. He hadn't smoked for years before he died, but he'd kept all his old pipes in a shoe box. Of footwear, old and new, I counted seventy-eight pairs: wellington boots, walking boots, best shoes and second-best and long, long past their best. Wardrobes and cupboards stuffed with clothes and knick-knacks.
 
Ornaments and pictures, brass plates and candlesticks, holy water fonts and ancient bedside lamps.

As the shelves and drawers emptied and the bags and boxes filled, I saw how objects separated from their owners become pure junk.
 
The blue woollen hat he wore when fishing was repellent: greasy at the edges but mostly because it was now redundant.
 

It took us over two hours, to clear out everywhere except my bedroom and the parlor. "They've already been sorted," I lied. I knew she wouldn't want to be in those two rooms that Zach and I had made our own.

She took a carriage clock as a momento, along with the photograph of my parents on the cliff. I brought out the last of the bags and, when I came back into the kitchen, I was shocked to find her beside the stove, crying. "Darling?" I crossed the room, put my arms around her shoulders, and she let me, just about, her spine stiff as a tree trunk. And not for long. She shrugged herself away, dabbed each eye dry with the back of her wrist. "Oh, Mom..."

"It's okay, Star. I understand. You have to go."
 

I knew what I had to do now was keep talking, fill the space between us with meaningless sound, hums and burbles and fuzzy static that would get us through. "Thanks for helping with the clearing. I needed to get as much of Granddad out of here as I could."

I imagined myself stripping further back, taking up the carpets and polishing up the wooden floors. I fed myself that vision in my head and I liked it. Painting every wall white. Turning this place into a new blank canvas. That was what I would do, when she was gone.

"It's too cold to go down to the gate," I said, knowing that if I did, I'd break . "I'll wave you away from upstairs."

I left her then, so she could get on with it, and went up to the spare bedroom. This was my favorite room in the house, a corner room with a window on three sides. I went to the one that overlooked the drive. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the day was already faded and a soft rain was falling. I could barely make her out below, head bent to the rain, one hand holding her coat together, backpack in her heartbreaking, chubby grip. She threw it onto the back seat and waved up to me once, unseeing. Then she folded herself in behind the steering wheel.

The car lights came on, front and back, and the red vehicle slipped down the laneway. Moran's dog, who hung around every part of the neighborhood, appeared out of somewhere to go running after the back wheels –
Bark! Bark! Bark!
– until the car sped up and he relinquished it.

I watched on. It turned the corner, out onto the road and I followed its lights as they blurred and faded into the endless Irish rain.

Beginnings are for beginners. When you get to my age, you know there's no one moment when it "all" began. Why not start the story when Zach came to Ireland to rescue me from my father, and I allowed it, though I knew Star was still sensitive about him? Or on the day I returned to Doolough, after all my years in Santa Paola, to nurse that ungrateful man?

Why not the day I met Zach?
 

No. As I harken back now over the long and sorry tale, the moment that seems most significant is the one that saw me sitting on the floor with my father's war-time journal, feeling like that act would save me, would knit past and present together into an answer.

Misguided? Oh yes. Now, so many years on, I can see that I was not quite sane in those days after my father died. For twenty years, I'd carried him around in my head. In coming back to Ireland to nurse him, the picture I held -- a broad, red-faced bully -- had been reduced, as age and illness made him little more than skin shrouding bone. Then he died, and I had to accept that both versions of him -- the young and the old, the frightening and the fearful -- were gone.

The strong arms that used to reach so readily for the strap: gone. The sour smell of his sickroom breath: gone. The size fourteen feet that had to have shoes and boots specially made: gone. The shriveled genitals and wispy, grey fuzz that surrounded them: gone.

All gone, gone, gone. I knew it but something about it was unknowable.

So when the Inspector told me he was arresting me, a part of me was unable to take it seriously.

What I said, according to
The Wicklow Gazette
, which took a personal interest in my arrest and subsequent trial, was: "You must be joking." But, already, another, deeper part of me was whispering something I didn't understand, something that didn't really want to be heard.

Establishing values other than,
better
than, my father's; pulling together the pieces he'd ripped apart, making myself whole again: these were the aims that had guided my life since I ran away from Doolough. I had traveled far in my effort to escape him -- more than 6,000 miles -- but, even at that distance, he held me. My body might be in Santa Paola, California, but my thoughts stayed in Doolough, County Wicklow; regurgitating what had been, what should have been, what might have been.

Each
I-wish
twist and
if-only
turn of my mind only tightened the tie I longed to loose.

Then, when his health failed and I was needed, I came back to Doolough to tend him. To try to find the closure my Californian friends recommended. He was no easy patient, but I prevailed and thought often of the time to come, when I would be alive and he would be dead.

It didn't seem too much to ask, to be given some years after he was gone. I had thought it would be enough. That it would be over then, that I should have peace at last.

Wrong, Mercy. Wrong, yet again.

Early on Christmas Eve morning, hours before Zach left or Star arrived, my father asked me to kill him.
   

I'd spent some of that night in a chair at the end of his bed. At one point, he woke and started to panic, then remembering, reached up to push the button that released liquid morphine into his veins. Through half-closed lashes, I saw him lie back, and his breathing was hoarse and loud, a sound like the sea pressing through a blow-hole.

"Better," he said, as the pain relief kicked in. "That's better."

His hand went up to press the machine again, but I knew nothing would issue from it again so soon. Maybe he believed it had, because he dropped off immediately into a more settled sleep and didn't wake again until breakfast time, when I brought him the bowl of mashed banana and yogurt that was all he could manage first thing. His eyes clicked open and he said, in a clear voice, "I need a pill."

"What about the pump?"

"No, a pill."

I took the container, a new one, nearly full, from its place on the window, shook one pill into his hand. He took the glass of water and gulped to swallow, his whole throat working over it. He coughed, then drank again.

"I need more."

Thinking he meant water, I reached for the jug.

"More pills, I mean."

I looked at the phial in my hand. "You can't, you know that."

He turned his eyes on me. "I've had enough now of living like this." His eyes held onto mine, as only ever once before.

"Please."

 
I shook my head, just as I had back then. "Let the one you've just had take effect," I said. "You'll feel better then."

"There's no better for me." He put his fingers on my wrist, his grip surprisingly tight. "Please. Have mercy."

But the pill was already beginning its work, or maybe it was the effort of making the request, of taking my arm, of saying such words. His eyelids began to droop.

"You're a clever girl, always were," he whispered. "You know what to do."

His eyes closed on the first compliment he ever gave me.

the temporary release of an accused person awaiting trial, sometimes on condition that a sum of money be lodged to guarantee their appearance in court

•
money paid by or for such a person as security.

bail out: eject, parachute to safety; desert, get out, escape.

bail someone/something out: rescue, save, relieve; finance, help (out), assist, aid; informal: save someone's bacon/neck/skin.

*

The world was back to work. I had a lawyer, a no-nonsense woman called Mags Halloran, hired the Irish way, through someone Pauline knew who knew someone. Mags was the only girl in a farming family of seven whose widowed mother had struggled and saved and steered them all into college. Each year in August, three of them took a week off their high-powered jobs in Dublin or London or New York to go home to Tipperary to help save the hay. This was the robust approach Mags took into the milieu of Dublin law, where she was known as "a character".