Mercy
Authors: Jodi Picoult
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romance - General
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Copyright © 1996 by Jodi Picoult
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an Kaszuba, Christopher Gentile, Aaron Belz, Laura Gross, Laura Yorke, Jane Picoult, Jon Picoult, and Paul Constantino, chief of police in Sterling, M
assachusetts. Hats off to Andrea Greene Goldman, legal guru, who didn't min d consultations at midnight and who graciously waived her hourly fee. And s pecial thanks to my husband, Tim van Leer, who gave me fly-fishing lessons on our perfectly dry back lawn, and all the time I needed to write. I'm indebted--again--to Ina Gravitz and Dr. James Umlas. Thanks also to Fr an Kaszuba, Christopher Gentile, Aaron Belz, Laura Gross, Laura Yorke, Jan e Picoult, Jon Picoult, and Paul Constantino, chief of police in Sterling, Massachusetts. Hats off to Andrea Greene Goldman, legal guru, who didn't mind consultations at midnight and who graciously waived her hourly fee. A nd special thanks to my husband, Tim van Leer, who gave me fly-fishing les sons on our perfectly dry back lawn, and all the time I needed to write.
about how much you both mean to me.
For Hal and Bess Friend, my grandparents, with love. I could write volum es about how much you both mean to me.
What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.
What good is it otherwise?
--William Carlos Williams,
"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
"I T/yhen she had packed all the artifacts that made up their per-Vr sonal h istory into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties wh ich sat in the base of one box like a writhing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled wi th yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow. True, it looked more like a scene from a Martha Stewart magazine than a home, but that was to be expected. She packed away the matching mugs hand-lettered with their names, and the v ideo camera they'd bought for their last anniversary, and a framed sampler some relative had stitched to commemorate their wedding. She painstakingly dismantled the frame of the big brass bed, lugging the pieces into the livi ng room until all that remained was a thick and silent mattress. She thanked God, and in advance, the groundhog, for the unseasonably warm day. When it hit 50 degrees in the shallows of January, people came out of their houses, and the more people to venture outside, the more people the re would be for the sale. She dragged the boxes outside and turned them ov er and arranged the
items on top of them. She ran a line between the two elm trees in the front y ard and neatly hung his clothes up, even his spare and dress uniforms. She em ptied his bedroom drawers and organized the things she found in smaller carto ns: socks, ten pairs, for fifty cents; sweatshirts, two for a dollar. She set the bed up behind her folding chair, where she wouldn't have to see it. She went back into the house for a final quick check, since curious neighbo rs were already milling on the front lawn. The walls were bare of his ances tral paraphernalia. The living room seemed empty, now that his old leather wing chair was sitting in front of the azaleas. Overall, the house looked m uch like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him. There was only one thing left in the house that reminded her of him. It was th e panel of stained-glass, the daffodils on a blue border, that he'd given her just a few months before. She stopped in the bedroom doorway, staring as the s un filtered through it and burned the colors and pattern onto the mattress. Wh en he gave it to her that day, she'd held it up to the light, turning it back and forth, until his hands had come over hers, stilling. "Be careful," he had said. "It's fragile. See the soft lead? It bends. It can break." She wondered why she had not perceived that conversation then the same way she did now: as a shrill and distant warning. Instead she had only smiled a t him, smiled and said that she knew this; that of course, she understood. Glancing around her, she took a quick calculation of what had sold, what sti ll remained. The strongbox in her lap held over seven hundred dollars at las t count; she could easily believe that half of the people in the town had st opped by at some point to browse, if not to buy. The fishing tackle and his grandfather's bamboo fly rod had been among the first things to go. All of h is suits were gone. The head teacher at the nursery school had bought every last uniform, saying the four-year-olds loved to play policeman, and wouldn'
t this be a wonderful addition to the dress-up corner?
The only things left were his boxer shorts--she supposed they would have to be sent to Goodwill--and a stack of travel magazines that she'd found quit e by accident behind his band saw. Inspired, she stood up and took the stac k, then walked to the edge of
the driveway. She handed the one on top--blue ocean, white beach, "200 Top C
aribbean Hotels"--to a man with a little girl in tow. "Thank you for stoppin g by," she said, offering the magazine like a theater Playbill, or a parting gift.
At ten past five, she sat down on her folding chair. She remembered reading once about tribal Indian societies centuries earlier, in which women had the power to divorce a husband simply by stacking his shoes outside a tipi. She pressed her knees together and tried not to think about the sun that was bl inding her eyes and giving her a headache.
Her husband drove up at 5:26. "Hi," he said. "I made good time." She did not say anything.
He glanced at the overturned boxes, the pile of underwear to the left of her f eet, the bare strung clothesline, the box on her lap. "Getting rid of some stu ff? It was a good day for a garage sale."
She did not turn to face him as he gave her a strange look and walked into t he house. She counted how many breaths it took before he thundered down the stairs and out the door, to stand in front of her. His face was red with ang er and he blocked out the low sun so that the edges of his hair and his shou lders seemed to be on fire.
"I'm sorry," she said coolly, coming to her feet. She gestured gracefully ar ound the lawn. "There's nothing left." Clutching the strongbox beneath her a rm, she walked down the driveway and into the street. She put one foot mecha nically in front of the other in the direction she knew would lead to the ce nter of town, and she did not allow herself to look back.
Who will not mercy unto others show, How can he mercy ever hope to have
?
--Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on the road.
--Alexander Smith, Men of Letters
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/n the moments befote, she laid a hand on his arm. "No matter what," she sai d, giving him a look, "you cannot stop."
He turned away. "I'm not sure I can even start." She brought his hand to her lips, kissed each finger. "If you don't do it," sh e said simply, "who will?"
For a long while they sat side by side, staring out a streaked window at a to wn neither of them knew very well. He watched her breathing pattern in the re flection of the glass, and tried to slow his own heart until they were equall y matched. The quiet dulled his senses, so that he became fixated on the cloc k beside the bed. He would not blink, he told himself, until the next minute bled into the last.
With a fury that surprised him, he turned his face into the bow of her neck, trying to commit to memory this softness and this smell. "I love you." She smiled, that crooked little curving of her mouth. "Now," she said, "don'
t you think I know that?"
In the end, she had struggled. He wore the scratches like a brand. But he had held the pillow to her face; calmed her by whispering in her ear. My love, h e had said, /'// be with you as soon as I can. At the words her arms had fall en away; then it was over. He had buried his face in her shirt, and started h imself the very slow process of dying.
For the hundredth time that day, Cameron MacDonald, Chief of Police in Whe elock, Massachusetts, closed his eyes and dreamed of the Bay of Biscay. If he got it just right--the thrum of silence in the station, the afternoon light dancing over the corner of his scarred desk--he could make himself b elieve. There was no Smith and Wesson jabbing into his side; there was no mountain pass outside the window; hell, maybe he wasn't even Cameron MacDo nald anymore. He opened his mind as wide as he could, and let himself tumb le into the beautiful blue of it.
He blinked his eyes, expecting the bobbing shoreline of Prest, or the sweet scent of the Loire Valley that you could carry in your pocket when you were within a reasonable distance, but he found himself staring at the pale, past y face of Hannah, the secretary at the police station. "Here's the file," sh e said. "He was indicted." She turned to leave, but stopped for a moment wit h her hand on the door. "You sure you're not coming down with something, Chi ef?"
Cam shook his head, as much to clear it as to convince Hannah. He smiled at her, because if he didn't, he knew she'd be on the phone with Allie and wi thin a half hour, his wife would have him drinking a tea made of nettle roo ts and feverfew.
He put the file down, glancing longingly at Gall's Buying Guide catalog fo r public safety equipment, inside which he'd stuffed a Travel magazine. Ha nnah was right--there was something wrong with him. It was the same thing that happened every year since he'd returned to Wheelock, as was expected, to become police chief after his father's death. He was suffering from wa nderlust, complicated by the tension of knowing that he was rooted to this town by something as simple as his name.
"I Tfyheelock looked like other small western Massachusetts towns: Vr the c enter consisted of a simple white church and a lending library, a joint bui lding for fire and police, the local coffee shop, and a dotting of old men who sat on stone benches and watched their lives slouch by. But what made W
heelock different from Hancock and Dalton and Williamstown was the fact tha t had it not been for a twist of fate, nearly every family in Wheelock woul d still be living in Scotland.
At first you wouldn't notice. But then you'd see that the town restaurant s erved its specials on "ashets," not plates; that its serviceable stocky whi te china was decorated with the fat square rose of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Y
ou'd attend a marriage at St. Margaret's, and realize that the ceremony sti ll ended with a blood vow. You'd drive through the winding side streets and see the name MAC-DONALD painted on an alarming number of mailboxes. And if you happened to travel to the Scottish Highlands, you'd notice tha t a small town called Carrymuir on the banks of Loch Leven was an uncanny twin to Wheelock, Massachusetts.
In the 1700s, the Clan MacDonald was the largest and most powerful clan in Scotland, spread from the western isles through the main Highlands. One par ticular sect of the clan lived in Carrymuir, a small town north of Glencoe which was nestled between two jagged crags of mountains. In spite of the ra mpant clan warfare in Scotland, Carrymuir had never been defeated, built as it was in a natural, easily defended fortress.