Just Mercy: A Novel (12 page)

Bernadette watched Maxine Blackwell drop her head down onto the table.
What am I doing,
she asked herself. Here she was acting as if they were two normal mothers talking about their kids over coffee. She should have had the sense to keep her mouth shut. Wasn’t Rae’s mother having enough trouble holding herself together as it was? It was one thing to lose a child, as they both had, but a different thing altogether to know you were responsible.
She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to carry such a heavy burden of guilt and think there was no way to make it right. But it wasn’t too late. Rae and her mother could still come to terms with the past. They could at least try. But how was she to convince Maxine of that? Maybe a more indirect approach would work.

“Tell me about your other children,” she said.

Maxine Blackwell shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“Do you want to know?”

“How can you even ask me that? I was promised they would be taken care of when I gave them up. Don’t you think I want to know they was?”

“You gave them up to protect them.”

Maxine Blackwell shrugged. Then, after a few minutes of silence, her eyes opened wider and her eyebrows arched up as if something had just occurred to her. “Does my Raelee want to see them?”

“No. She doesn’t want to hurt them. She thinks they would have visited her by now if they wanted to see her.”

“Do you think it would help her if she knowed they were okay?”

“I think it might help both of you to know that. If you write down their birthdates, I can try to find out.”

Bernadette thought about what a strange twist of fate it was that had brought the two of them together, two mothers bonded by a desire to protect their children. Yet both of them had failed, hadn’t they? Her Veronica was dead, and Maxine’s Raelee would soon be dead, too. But there was one big difference: while she had Marty, Fin, Patty, and even Annamaria to help her cope with Veronica’s death, Maxine Blackwell had no one to help her. No one at all.

“My mother overdosed,” Bernadette said, “pain pills. Her father, my grandfather, died an alcoholic.”

“My mama never could stop drinking,” Maxine said. “I never knew my papa.”

“I never drank,” Bernadette said. “I was afraid if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop.”

“I done stopped just a short time ago.”

“Rae would be glad to hear that. I know someone who could get the warden’s approval for you to visit. I could drive you there. It’s not far.”

Maxine shook her head.

“Give her a chance to forgive you.”

“No forgiveness for me.” Maxine slapped the table with her fragile hands, then doubled over in pain.

“It’s not for you. It’s for her. Think of her.”

Maxine looked her in the eye without blinking and with great effort lifted her body back to an upright position. “Don’t you know that’s what I’m doing?”

Bernadette lifted her hands in the air, then dropped them onto her lap. So that was it. Maxine Blackwell thought she was protecting her daughter by not going to see her. There would be no convincing her otherwise.

“What should I tell Rae?” she asked with a sigh.

“Tell her I’m dead.”

“I won’t lie to her.”

“My liver’s shot.” Maxine shook her head. She looked exhausted.

“My husband has cancer.” Bernadette saw Maxine Blackwell start to reach across the table, seem to think better of it, and withdraw her hand. Why hadn’t she just said she was sorry? After all, Marty was not dying, but the woman sitting across from her right now clearly was. But who was she to feel sorry for her? It was obvious that the world had been a cruel, hard place for Maxine Blackwell, so who was she to think it was sad that the poor woman might soon get to leave it?

At a loss for what to say or whether to say anything at all, Bernadette looked at Rae’s mother and saw that with her eyes closed, her face seemed to disappear into her grief. There would be no atonement for her. There was nothing more to be said. They would both have to come to terms with having failed, her for not convincing Maxine to go see her daughter and Maxine for failing as a mother. But, she wondered, would Rae be able to come to terms with the truth about her mother?

NINETEEN

When she got back from Killeen, Marty was so intrigued by Bernie’s detailed account of her trip—what Maxine Blackwell and her house looked like, how their conversation went—that he only once felt compelled to interrupt her. It was when she said, “She’s dying. Cirrhosis of the liver is my guess.”

“My cancer is different,” he said.

“Oh, I know. Believe me, Marty, I know.”

He went back to listening, particularly captivated not only by Bernie’s compassion for Raelynn Blackwell’s mother, which he expected, but also by the way she didn’t seem distressed about failing to convince the woman to visit her daughter before it was too late. There was something different about Bernie; he sensed it. But he couldn’t put his finger on what it was except that it seemed to have something to do with her being so accepting of Maxine Blackwell’s refusal.

“We think alike,” she said, “like mothers, you know what I mean?”

His eyebrows shot up toward his receding hairline, and he scratched the side of his head. No, he didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t know what she meant at all. From everything he knew, Maxine Blackwell had been a very inadequate mother, to say the least. How could Bernie, the best mother in the whole world as far as he was concerned, compare herself to an abusive and neglectful mother like her?

“Her kids’ birthdates are engraved in her brain,” she continued, “like mine are. She may not have been able to act like a mother, but she thinks like one. She cares about her children. It’s sad.”

He rubbed his chin, trying to figure out why it made such a difference to Bernie whether Maxine Blackwell cared about her children when her behavior had been so hurtful and destructive to them. He was pretty sure she wasn’t implying that caring was enough. Maybe, as usual, she was just looking for the good in people. He loved that about her.

“Well, you tried,” he said with a smile.

“But there’s still Rae’s siblings. I have to find out what happened to them.”

So that was it. That’s what was going on. Bernie had a new mission.

“I’m calling Annamaria,” she said, reaching for the phone. “She can help me.”

He put his hand on her arm. “How about a walk first? Town Lake?”

“Good idea,” she said.

He laughed out loud then, not only because he was surprised at himself for making the suggestion, but also because he was even more surprised and delighted when she agreed so readily. He had missed their regular early-evening walks but had given up asking her to go with him a long time ago.

As they strolled the gravel-covered Lady Bird Trail together, the views of the lake and the Austin skyline seemed much more stunning than usual, and he knew it was because he was with Bernie. They stopped for a few minutes at Deep Eddy, silently appreciating the huge treasure of a pool right in the middle of the city. He squeezed her hand, then put his arm around her shoulder and pressed his cheek against the top of her head as together they remembered how their kids used to love swimming in that pool. She leaned into him, and they walked on in silence.

But once they were home and Bernie headed for the phone, Marty started to feel anxious. “You sure you’re ready for her reaction?” he asked.

She placed her forefinger on his lips to shush him. “Annie, this is Mom,” she said into Annamaria’s answering machine. “Call me, okay? It’s important.”

“You know how stubborn she is,” Marty said after Bernie put the receiver down. He stuck his hands under his armpits and poked his chin out. “Remember how she’d curl up her tiny fists, like this, whenever she pouted? No one could ever talk her out of trying to get what she wanted until she was ready to let it go herself. Not even you. I’ve never known another two-year-old who could hang onto her anger as long as she could.”

“Stubborn, yes,” Bernie said, “but not hateful. Not our Annie.”

He nodded as if he agreed—unable to admit, even to Bernie, his fear that, if Annamaria stayed stuck in her rage, it could, in the end, make her hateful.

“She won’t help,” he said.

“Then I’ll figure out a way to find out what happened to Rae’s siblings without her.”

“Amazing,” he said.

“What?”

“You.”

“Why? Because I’m stubborn? Like Annamaria?”

“Because you’re persistent.” Marty dug around in his brain for a possible answer in case Bernie asked him—he hoped she wouldn’t—how he defined persistence, how it was different from stubbornness. The closest he could come to understanding it himself was that being stubborn seemed more about being right while being persistent seemed more about caring enough or maybe being desperate enough to hang in there no matter what. He saw Annamaria as stubborn, but not Bernie. Bernie was persistent.

She smiled at him then, a crooked, almost teasing smile that aroused in him a longing, a desire to wrap his arms around her and feel the softness of her breasts. Maybe later, when they were in bed, she wouldn’t pull away when he pressed his chest against her back. Maybe she would let him draw her warmth into him, and they would fall asleep in each other’s arms the way they used to.

TWENTY

Annamaria liked going to the office on Saturdays, when, uninterrupted by colleagues or clients, she was able to fully employ her considerable powers of concentration and get tons of work done. But today was different. The stack of files on her massive mahogany desk seemed insurmountable as her mind kept jumping from one thought to another. Not only that, everything from the late-afternoon view of the Hill Country outside her twenty-third-floor picture window to the sunny yellow walls and the red, blue, and purple area rug in her expansive corner office seemed downright gloomy. Even the coffee she’d just brewed tasted bitter on her tongue.

She fidgeted with the edges of the folder on top of the stack, then opened it. It was a corporate fraud case involving a well-known Austin investment banker-turned-politician. It wouldn’t be long before the media were all over this one. Well, if anyone was up for the challenge, she was. At least, that’s what she’d thought when she accepted the case. But now, as she read more of the details, hints of her client’s duplicity—even outright dishonesty—began to emerge. The legal jargon blurred on the page, and she squinted to catch the words.

I can’t do this.
She could hear herself moaning in her head. What she needed was a good, stiff drink. She walked over to her office bar and fixed herself a gin and tonic, heavy on the gin. Back at her desk, she took a big gulp and tried once again to read the case file. But the words swam across the page like a school of fish adept at avoiding detection. She slammed the folder shut, slid it into the top desk drawer, and locked the drawer.

She swiveled her chair around so that she was facing the computer table behind her. If anyone in the family was going to do this, it would have to be her. She was the only one with her feet grounded in facts, not in fantasy like Mom or deep philosophical concepts like Dad or raw emotions like Fin. If anyone was going to find out what the hell was really going on, it would be her. Her fingers trembled as she typed the dreaded words—prostate cancer—in the Google search engine on her computer. She clicked on the Mayo Clinic website, took a deep breath, and read about Stage IV of the disease.

At this stage the cancer would have spread not only to tissues next to the prostate, but to lymph nodes or other more distant sites in the body such as the bones as well.

Metastatic prostate cancer, it was called. A tear splashed onto the keyboard, and she swiped it away with her fingers. Why hadn’t her folks used that term? Were they sugarcoating the truth, or were they in denial? Or could it be that they didn’t know how serious Dad’s condition was?

The average survival for men at Stage IV is usually one to five years.

Her throat tightened and she turned her chair back to the desk, gulped down the rest of her gin and tonic. Dad couldn’t be that sick. He looked good. A little tired is all. Maybe she should call him, ask more questions. But just then, her phone rang. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath to pull herself together before answering.

“Pizza and a movie, okay, Mom?”

The eagerness in Patty’s voice reverberated through her ear and tumbled straight down to the core of her. “I’ll pick up the pizza on my way home,” she said. “You find a movie on cable.”

***

It was rare to spend a Saturday evening at home, just the two of them. More unusual still was Patty’s chattiness about who was dating whom, who had broken up with whom, and the new boy in school. The innocence of a child in the body of a woman, Annamaria thought with a shudder.

“Mom? Are you even listening?”

“You think the new boy is cute.”

“And?”

“He asked you out.”

“I said, like, I
want
him to ask me out. Oh, never mind.”

“Sorry. I guess I’m worried about your grandpa.”

Patty’s half-eaten piece of pepperoni pizza dropped onto her plate. She wiped the grease from the corners of her mouth with a napkin, her eyes filling with tears.

“I know you’re worried about him, too,” Annamaria said. “So is Gran, no matter how much she tried to cover it up last night.”

Just then, her cell phone rang. “That’s her now,” she said as she turned on the speakerphone.

“Hey Gran,” Patty called out, “we’re having girls’ night in.”

“Mom?” Annamaria said, “are you calling about Dad? Is he okay?”

“Oh, Annie, I knew you’d worry yourself to death all day.”

“How could I not?”

“Your dad’s going to beat this thing. And it’s not just me who thinks so. The doctor does, too.”

“I don’t think you know enough about the kind of cancer he has to be so sure, Mom.”

“Trust me. My instincts tell me everything’s going to be all right.”

Of course
, Annamaria thought. Mom’s instincts always ruled, didn’t they? Never mind the facts.

“Listen, Annie, I called you about something else. I need your help finding someone who was adopted.”

Annamaria stiffened. What now?

“There are ways to find people who were adopted after they’ve grown up, right?”

“Who do you want to find, Mom?”

“If you knew someone’s birthday and you thought he was adopted when he was little and now he’s an adult, how would you go about finding him?”

“It depends on who’s doing the looking.”

“What do you mean?”

“The person looking has to have good cause.”

“What counts as good cause?” her mom asked.

“Does this have anything to do with Veronica?”

“No. I mean, not directly.”

“What are you up to, Mom?” Annamaria slouched back onto the couch, shaking her head.

Silence.

“Talk to me or I’m going to hang up, I swear.” She sat up straight, moved to the edge of her seat.

“Don’t worry, Gran, she won’t hang up,” Patty called out. “I won’t let her.”

“I have to find out what happened to Rae’s siblings.”

“You what?” Annamaria and Patty stared at each other, their mouths open.

“I found Rae’s mother yesterday. She’s dying.”

Annamaria was too flabbergasted to do anything but listen as her mom came clean about going to Killeen—
all alone, for God’s sake
—about feeling sorry for Maxine Blackwell—
no surprise there
—and about wanting to help find out, of all things, what happened to her other children.

“Why, Mom? For God’s sake, why?”

“I want to find out if they were adopted so I can tell Rae before she dies. Her mother, too. Will you help me, Annie?”

Annamaria gritted her teeth. Her head throbbed. How many times did she have to say that she detested being called Annie? Come to think of it, her mom always called Fin and Veronica “sweetie”—so why not call her that?

“Promise you’ll at least sleep on it, Annie.”

“I’ll call you in the morning.”

“’Night, Gran,” Patty called out. “Don’t worry, she’ll help you.”

With a sigh, Annamaria snapped her phone shut.

“You will, won’t you?” Patty threw her body back into the beanbag chair in front of the television.

“Such nonsense. Gran should be taking care of Grandpa now.”

“Why do you have to be so stubborn?” Patty’s lips tightened into a thin line of disapproval.

“Because enough is enough.”

“So, like, you always know better than Gran.”

“She doesn’t know when to quit. Pretty soon she’ll be adopting that whole damn family. Who knows what the hell she’ll do next.”

“You think you know, but you don’t.” Patty glared at her, a dare.

“It’s movie time,” Annamaria said with a sigh.

“If Gran says it’s the right thing to do, then it is.”

“Okay, okay. I said I’d sleep on it, didn’t I?”

“You’ll feel better if you help, Mom. I know you will.”