Mercy (11 page)

Martha ran her courtroom very casually, at least at the beginning stages. S

he lifted her eyes, signaling to Cam that she was ready to begin. "Your Hon or," he said, having done this a thousand times, "in light of the evidence uncovered by the voluntary statement given by James MacDonald and taken fro m the scene of the crime, we've booked him on charges of Murder One. Becaus e he was the perpetrator of such a violent crime, we recommend that bail be set at fifty thousand dollars."

When he said the sum, Jamie's eyes sought his out. Cam was not certain if he read disillusionment there, or respect.

"Your Honor," Graham began, clearing his throat, "my client is an upstandin g citizen of his community. He's never received a traffic ticket, he's a me mber of the Small Business Association, he's served on the Cummington selec tmen's board for three consecutive terms. Since he does not in any way pose a threat to the Wheelock community, we feel that he should be released wit hout bail, provided he stays in the area pending trial." Martha rubbed her temples and scanned the papers before her once more. She had, of course, heard of this case yesterday when it happened; had in fac t been waiting for it to appear in her courtroom today. She knew what Cam was up to; she also knew what he was up against. She doubted he really wan ted James MacDonald locked away at the county jail, in spite of his outrag eous request.

"Conditions for bail are as follows: Mr. MacDonald will remain within Wheelo ck proper pending trial; and he is obligated to check in with Chief MacDonal d at the police station every day, excluding Sundays, before noon." She peer ed over her half-glasses at the small group in front of her. "Bail," she sai d, "is set at five dollars."

Cam stayed in the courtroom after Jamie and his lawyer had left. He sat down at the prosecutor's table and stretched his legs in front of him, peering at the seal of an eagle over the judge's podium and squinting to read its motto. The last thing he wanted was to be Jamie MacDonald's keeper. Damn Martha Sully.

With a sigh, Cam got to his feet and headed out of the court. He had a hundre d things to do at the station, administrative duties that hadn't been finishe d in the bustle of the past two days. He had to talk to Allie too. He hadn't seen her yet this afternoon. He had driven Mia to the flower shop, but Allie had only left a note saying she'd be back soon.

At the foot of the stairs he saw Jamie, standing before the bail bondsman's office, talking to someone. He considered just walking out the door, but rea lized it went against his better judgment. Taking a deep breath, he walked f orward.

"Fifty thousand dollars?" Jamie said.

Cam opened his mouth, ready to reply, when he realized who Jamie had been speaking to. Allie was just shoving her wallet back into her purse, having obviously sprung Jamie free on his ridiculously low bail. "Really, Cam," she admonished, smiling up at him.

Her heart-shaped face was pink from the cold and her tongue came out to wet h er lips. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, catching here and there in the collar of her coat.

Within an hour, everyone in Wheelock would know that Cam had asked for fif ty thousand dollars bail, that it had been set at five dollars, and that A llie had been the one to pay it. He found himself wondering how high she w ould have gone. A hundred? Five hundred? Five thousand?

She slipped her hand through the crook of his arm, and at her touch, he felt his fury begin to recede. "Jamie's going to stay with Angus," she said, as if she were announcing the seating at a dinner party. She smiled a goodbye a nd steered Cam out the door.

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They had taken separate cars, so they stopped at the center of the parking l ot, hands bunched into their pockets against the unseasonable cold, like two fighters squaring off. "Allie," he said, "I have to know what you were doin g here today."

Allie stared at him as if he could create a whole different world for her, as if he already had. He thought of Mia, and suddenly he could not breathe.

"Why, Cam," Allie answered, her voice clear and true and comfortable, "I c ame because of you."

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FIVE

"ITTV'hen Mia was in seventh-grade Latin class, she learned that Vr her nam e derived from the classical word for "mine." The teacher made a joke about it, saying it was surely the most selfish name in the class. But Mia had o nly smiled weakly, wondering what her parents had had in mind. Whose was sh e, exactly? Her father's? Her mother's? In spite of their devotion to each other, they hadn't named their daughter "Ours," leaving her to believe she had to choose a side.

She had played hooky for the rest of the day, coming home to sit in the ro se garden her mother had abandoned several years earlier when she found th at pruning took her away from Ed Townsend too many hours of the weekend. M

ia had remade it into her own image, twisting the thorny bushes around wir e frames and clipping them so that they resembled dragons and centaurs and big-bellied ships, trained to stay exactly as they'd been told. Her paren ts thought she was very clever, quite a little horticulturalist. They had set a hammock in the garden, big enough for two, so that they could watch her work.

But they weren't in the garden when Mia arrived, and she didn't go to her ga rdening shed immediately. Instead she sat on the cool, damp grass, picking a part a leaf with her nails. She thought about her name. She reached the conc lusion that even at birth, her

Jodi Picoult

parents had wanted her to be separate and apart from the magical unit they fashioned when they were together. Self-sufficient, she was. Independent. Mia. Mine. And she knew then, perhaps had always known, that she could on ly belong to herself.

Cam sat in the middle of a dark pew, staring at the body of Christ. It was a waxy sculpture that hung over the altar at the town's church. When Cam wa s a young boy at Sunday mass, he'd held himself awake by keeping his eyes w ide and unblinking until the sheen of tears made the painted blood at Jesus

' hands and feet look real.

MacDonalds had always been Catholics. It was why some of the clan chiefs h ad decided to support the restoration of Prince Charles--and the Stuarts-to the British throne. By now, most of Scotland was Presbyterian, but the MacDonalds of Carrymuir, when they came to Massachusetts in the late 1740s

, had brought with them their original religion.

Cam was not a terribly religious man, but he knew that when he was overwh elmed, he had somewhere to turn. He had several reasons to be in church a t this time: He wanted to light a candle for Maggie MacDonald; he had to pray for Jamie MacDonald's soul. He wanted to talk to someone about his o wn indiscretion, too--and although the confessor he had in mind was Mia T

ownsend herself, he knew this was not possible.

Unfortunately, as he sat there waiting for Father Gillivray to begin hearing confessions, he could only picture his wedding day five years before. Allie had been a beautiful bride, small and elegant in white satin that curv ed at her breasts and her hips. Cam had watched her walking down the aisle, and all he had been able to think was, She's so light. It seemed that with e very step she hovered inches above the ground, and when her father placed he r hand on top of Cam's, he had clutched at it with his fingers, determined t o keep her from floating away.

Allie had been beautiful, but Cam had stolen the show. After all, it was not e very day that a clan chief took a wife. He had worn his father's full-dress re galia: the black velvet coat with silver but-77

tons, the heavy kilt in the strong MacDonald tartan, the white linen shirt with a festival of lace at the throat and the wrists.

When they went back to their honeymoon suite at the Whee-lock Inn, AUie ha d laughed, saying he had more clasps and buttons to undo than she did. . .

.

Cam sank to his knees, as if in prayer, hoping the hard bench below him wou ld center his thoughts.

Even in this church, where he could feel God sitting next to him, Cam could not get the image of Mia Townsend out of his mind; the slight tilt of her ey es, the spiral of her ear. She had been rooting for Jamie MacDonald, just li ke Allie, but somehow he did not hold it against her.

Cam bent his neck so that his forehead touched the pew in front of him. He did not even know what exactly he was going to confess to. Was it adulter y if you kissed a woman who was not your wife? Was it adultery if you thou ght about her so often you could hear her voice when you closed your eyes?

It didn't seem right that he'd only sinned in a matter of the flesh. For som e reason, kissing Mia seemed less of a betrayal to Allie than having Mia run ning through his thoughts like stunning mountain scenery seen from a train: you did not keep looking after a while, yet you couldn't help but notice it was there just outside the window.

The whole time Cam had been holding Mia on a bed he shared with Allie, on a quilt Allie had sewn one summer in a craft class, in a room that Allie had wall-papered and furnished, he had not had a single thought of his wife. He saw Father Gillivray's round, black-clad body shuffle from the vestibule to the small confessionals at the back of the church. Giving him a minute to settle in, Cam stood and drew open the curtain of the little booth, then sa t down on the folding chair. "Bless me, Father," he began, "for I have sinne d. It has been four months since my last confession." He could see Father Gillivray's profile through the latticed opening of the c onfessional. Impulsively, Cam pressed his big hand up to the partition, as if by blocking it off he would guarantee a greater anonymity. "I've been thinki ng a lot about this one woman," he said. "I can't get her out of my head. I s ee myself . . .

Jodi Picoult

well, with her. She's not my wife. And I kissed her. I kissed a woman who w asn't my wife."

And I'd do it all over again, he thought.

"Think about what you're doing," Father Gillivray said. "Think long and har d."

He was given his penance and knelt in a different pew to say the round of the rosary. It was not the first time he'd been a hypocrite to the teachings of the Catholic church. He and Allie had been using birth control, after all, an d he didn't make it to Mass every week.

He looked up at the plaster face of the Holy Mother and pictured Mia, and knew that he was damned.

When he broke from the heavy double doors into the fading daylight, he was sweating. He hadn't finished his rosary. He certainly hadn't been capable o f thinking of his actions. Cam walked down the street toward the station to pick up his car, feeling the wind wrap about his neck. He did not realize until he was on his way home that he had never lit a candle for Maggie MacD

onald, never prayed for Jamie at all.

The ten men who had worked for Jamie at Techcellence were part computer ge eks, part philosophers, and part geniuses. Two--Flanders and Rod--had been with Jamie from the company's conception over a decade earlier. Like Jami e, they were obsessed with pushing the envelope in their virtual designs. And like Jamie, they spent a good deal of their free time in the lab, shoo ting the breeze with each other and brainstorming tomorrow's toys. It was the fall of 1992, and they had just won their first big Sega contrac t. While Jamie tinkered with one of the huge graphics machines, Rod had run out to get a case of Rolling Rock. The three of them were halfway through the package, toasting their own success and their unquestionable brilliance

. "Hey," Rod said, his eyes lighting up. "Give me an HMD." He reached for t he high-tech helmet, switched on a couple of computers, and downloaded a pr ogram they'd recently finished for an architectural firm in Nova Scotia--a virtual walk-through of a hospital that had not yet been built. "You ever g et into VR when you're shit-faced?"

Jamie looked up over his shoulder. "You fuck with that program, and I'll kil l you. That took me months to get right."

Flanders had picked up the program at a different monitor, sliding his hand into the glove and fitting the HMD over his skull. On the two-dimensional screen, Jamie watched images of the men appear as they stepped into the gla ss-domed hospital foyer.

Rod whistled, staring up at the impressive ceiling. "Nice," he said. "But how are they going to scrub the bird shit off the cupola?"

"It's virtual bird shit," Flanders said. "Jamie thinks of everything."

"You ready?" Rod asked, turning to the right so that the tracking device in his HMD picked up Flanders. Flanders nodded. "Let's rock," Rod said, and h e took off down the main hospital hall at a breakneck run. Flanders was close at his heels, his feet flying on the motion-platform tread mill that was attached to the computer system. Jamie took a sip of his beer, smiling at the antics of his colleagues in someone else's virtual world as th ey sent wheelchairs careening and leaped up to touch the fluorescent ceiling lights. Flanders crouched down on the platform, pushing against something inv isible that let him vault over a nurse's desk in the simulated hospital. "Hey

," he said, "let's be derelicts."

He tossed a virtual felt-tipped marker at Rod, who stretched out his gloved hand to catch it. "Too heavy," Rod commented. "Jamie, you're going to have t o finesse the tactile feedback."

Flanders began to scribble on the pristine white walls. "God, I was always t oo good. I should have been doing destructive things all along."

"Graffiti?" Rod said. "Graffiti's for kids." He walked into an adjoining surg ery suite and dumped a tray of instruments all over the floor.

"For Christ's sake," Jamie said. "Get out of there. Now." Reluctantly, Rod and Flanders tugged off their HMDs and gloves. "What's the big deal?" Rod sulked. "You can boot up the system again and it'll look ju st as sterile as it was before we went in."