Mercy (27 page)

"Well, yes. I told him to."

Cam leaned forward. "You told him to?"

"Of course," she said easily. "I wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I was twenty. I wasn't a kid."

Ellen shrugged. "You'll always be my kid." She opened the refrigerator an d picked out a Tupperware container full of something thick and brown. Du mping it onto a plate, she moved toward the microwave. "You sure you don'

t want some? Stroganoff. Made with tofu."

"How come you ran away?" Cam blurted out.

Ellen dropped the plate so it rang against the Formica. Little splats of gravy landed on her shirt. "Who told you that? "

"Bally," Cam pressed. "He said it was the first case Dad ever asked him to t ake."

Ellen stuffed the plate into the microwave and began to set the table. With slow, graceful movements she pulled two place mats from a rack on the counte r and centered them in front of the kitchen chairs. She added napkins, forks

, and knives. She had just picked two goblets off a shelf when she turned ar ound to face Cam. "Well," she said, "for starters, I'm really fifty-two, not fifty-three."

Cam's jaw dropped. "Do you think I give a damn if you lie about your age? I find out this morning that my parents didn't trust me, and if that isn't e nough, I've got all kinds of assumptions running through my head about you being forced to marry Dad--"

"Cam," Ellen said quietly, "think back. Do you really believe I didn't want t o marry your father?"

Cam tried to remember his parents interacting in any way

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whatsoever, and the first image that came to mind was once when, as a fiveyear-old, he had wakened from a nightmare and wandered into their bedroom i n the middle of the night. Even in the dark, he could see the lump in the b ed writhing and moaning. Frozen, he'd thought he heard his mother's cry, an d that was when he realized the horrible thing was eating his parents alive

.

He'd crept to the side of the bed, ready to scream down the house, and saw his father under the covers. It was some kind of game. He watched for a min ute, then tapped the nearest limb beneath the sheet. "Can I play?" he asked

, wondering why, as his parents began to laugh, he hadn't been invited to p articipate.

"Listen to me," Ellen said. "Why in the name of God would I go around telli ng people I was a year older than I really am?" She sat down in the chair t hat had been hers as long as Cam could remember. "And if you'd ever conside r giving me a grandchild, you'd figure out that a baby born two months earl y is never, ever ten pounds."

Cam's hands fell to his sides. "You ran away because you got pregnant?"

"I ran away because I got pregnant and because your father thought I was e ighteen. He was eleven years older; I didn't think he'd appreciate being s hackled to someone like me, however entertaining I had been at the time. A nd we're talking about 1959, where men who weren't as honorable as Ian sti ll did the honorable thing. So I figured I'd save him the trouble. Except he found me--thanks to Bally Beene. I turned seventeen on the day we got m arried. In Maryland, where we could fudge my age and didn't need my parent s' consent."

Cam stared at his mother in a whole different light. "Dad didn't care?"

"Oh, he cared a great deal. He cared about me and he cared about the fact th at, as tiny as you were at the time, you existed. He didn't speak to me for a week after the wedding because I'd been stupid enough not to confide in hi m."

The microwave beeped. Cam crossed toward it, removed the steaming plate, an d set it down in front of his mother. "You hot little number," he said, gri nning.

Ellen speared a piece of tofu and blew on it to cool it down. 189

"You going to tell me what you've got Bally wotking on?" she asked. Cam shook his head, still smiling. "You'll have to hightail it down to the sta tion and dowse the files to see if you can figure it out. Confidential police business."

"I married one chief and gave birth to another," Ellen said. "Don't give me t his garbage."

"It's just some stuff," Cam hedged.

"As long as it has nothing to do with Jamie. He's got trouble enough."

"Digging up dirt on a murderer isn't my job. I'll leave that to the DA."

"Mercy killer," Ellen said, "not a murderer."

"Seventeen, eighteen," Cam murmured, "a matter of semantics." Ellen glared at him.

"Sorry," Cam said.

She stood and began to bustle around the kitchen, rinsing her plate and her silverware and settling it into the dishwasher. Even the soft tap of her sne akers on the white floor was familiar, and Cam began to remember this room a s a place of light and music, waffles burning black at the edges on a rainy Saturday morning while he clapped his hands to his parents' impromptu dance around the kitchen table. Even when the radio was turned off, he used to wal k into the kitchen in his parents' house and hear its presence, its energy. Cam realized that he did not think of the kitchen of his own house this way, like it was a heart that pumped life out to the other rooms. When he and Al lie were together in their kitchen--chopping vegetables, or making coffee, o r even eating--he was mostly aware of the quiet.

"Allie back yet?"

Cam nodded.

His mother did not turn around, but that had never stopped her from being ab le to see him. "That must be nice for you."

"It was," Cam said. "It is." He started back to the table to pick up the untou ched setting that his mother must have laid out for him.

"Oh," Ellen said over the stream of water in the sink. "You can just leave tha t."

Jodi Picoult

"I told you I didn't want any. You didn't have to set a place." Ellen shut off the water and wiped her hands on the dish towel. "It isn't for you," she said, a blush stealing over the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, t aking away the lines and the history until Cam could clearly see what she had looked like as a girl of seventeen. "It's for your father." Cam started. "Dad?' He glanced at his mother's copper dowsing rods, carefu lly packed back in their padded wooden carrying case. An interest in New A ge phenomena was one thing; channeling was quite another. He opened his mo uth to tell her not to get her hopes up too high.

"It's not what you think," Ellen said. "I just thought that if he was planni ng on returning for any period of time, it would probably be to me, and it w ould probably be during a meal. My guess is Thursdays, when I make chicken p ot pie."

Cam fingered the fringed edge of the place mat, picturing his father's stron g body filling the space that surrounded his chair. He remembered how his fa ther would salt everything without even tasting it, until one day his mother cooked a chicken with an entire box of Morton's to teach him a lesson. He r emembered his mother serving vegetables onto his father's plate, a cloud of steam curling the edges of Ellen's hair while Ian held her close with a hand slipped around her thighs.

"Has he come yet?" Cam heard himself ask.

"Not that I've noticed," Ellen admitted. She moved beside Cam and placed her hand over his, on top of the place mat's fringe. In the reflection of the p late, Cam could see their faces, and the slight distortion made by hope. "Bu t that doesn't mean he's not on his way."

'raham opened the package with Jamie in his office. It had ar-~ rived beat en and battered. Jamie fiddled nervously with the arms of the chair while Graham attacked the yellowed tape and brown paper wrapping of the box. "Yo u don't think it's a bomb, do you?" Jamie asked.

"It's not making any noise," Graham said, although the very idea--a bomb, de livered to him on behalf of a client--was so incredibly dramatic he couldn't help but revel in the thought for a mo-191

ment. He grunted and ripped away the last of it to reveal an ordinary Bible, the kind found in hotel rooms. He handed it to Jamie.

As they passed it over the desk, a note fell from the frontispiece. Jamie unfo lded it and began to read it aloud.

Repent, it said. Our loving God will forgive you. Remember Isaiah, 1:18--"Co me now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as s carlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, the y shall be as wool." I know you will pray for forgiveness during your trial, may this Bible begin your salvation.

Jamie crumpled the note in his fist. "I haven't forgiven God for letting Mag gie get sick," he said. "So why the hell should He bother to forgive me?" During the interminable night after Maggie asked Jamie to kill her, he must have slept for at least five minutes. He did not remember falling asleep-he thought he watched every digital flip of the clock--but at one point Jam ie opened his eyes and ran his hand over Maggie's side of the bed and came up with nothing.

He'd shot upright, thinking, She's already gone. Then, as his reason return ed, he got to his feet and wandered out of the bedroom. He checked the bath room first, but it was empty; then he went downstairs to the kitchen, where Maggie sometimes went to brew herself some tea when the pain was getting w orse. It too was deserted. Jamie had stumbled through the dark house, hitti ng his shins and his elbows on unlikely pieces of furniture. He stuck his h ead outside and whispered her name. Then he started back to the bedroom. Jamie was coming upstairs when he noticed the line of light ribboning from his study. He turned the knob and silently swung open the door to find Ma ggie standing in front of his home computer terminal, dressed in her bathr obe, wearing the HMD and the glove that were attached to the system. He knew she would not be able to hear him with the HMD's audio feedback in her ears, so he did not bother to call her name. Instead he walked forward until he was standing just behind her, watching her interact with one of hi s old programs.

It made absolutely no sense, but then again, nothing had that night, startin g with Maggie's request to be killed. She was not a computer jock like he wa s--she wasn't even an aficionado. She

Jodi Picoult

went so far as to refuse to dust in Jamie's office because she was afraid of crossing wires or upsetting the delicate technological balance. In the year s they'd been married, Jamie could not ever remember seeing Maggie voluntari ly enter his study, much less boot up one of his virtual reality programs. He peered at the screen. What he was seeing was far different, of course, from what Maggie was seeing, since she had the HMD on. But even in two dim ensions Jamie was able to tell that Maggie had found the disk for the prog ram he'd written years ago, the architectural walk-through for which he'd digitized an image of her body. She was somewhere in the middle of an elem entary school, determinedly stalking the halls. "Come on," she said softly

, under her breath. "There has to be one around here somewhere." Jamie frowned and watched her stretch out her gloved hand to open the door of a faculty bathroom. He had designed it with female professionals in mind

, complete with a full-length mirror on the wall beside the paper towel dis penser. Maggie stepped in front of it, so that she had a clear picture of h er own face and form. Except that her body was the one which had been digit ized in 1993 before she'd gotten sick.

He heard her draw in her breath and, with her bare hand, untie the sash of her robe. Then, with her gloved hand, she began to stroke herself. Jamie knew what she was seeing, because the same mirror image he could make out on the small computer screen was what Maggie was visualizing through the H

MD. But Maggie, who was also wearing all the trappings of a VR system, wou ld not only look different to herself, but feel different as well. Jamie stepped closer, until he was within arm's reach. Maggie's hand, in th e specialized glove, hovered just centimeters from her own skin, yet he kne w she was feeling the heat and resilience of a real body. Her hand skimmed over her ribs, toward her collarbone, cupping the air above her mastectomy scar. On the screen, in the mirror, she was holding her healthy breast. Beneath the goggles of the HMD, Maggie was smiling.

Jamie felt the backs of his eyes burn. And he, who had dedicated a career to creating virtual environments that did not allow for intrusions, committed th e cardinal sin of invading the periph-193

ery. He slid his arms around Maggie's waist and retied the sash of her robe. He reached for the glove and tugged it off her hand and laced his fingers wit h Maggie's; squeezing until there was pain, until she had no choice but to re member that out here, still waiting, was the real world.

o

«*

Audra Campbell, Assistant District Attorney, pretended to converse with one of the Pittsfield Superior Court clerks while instead focusing her concent ration on the small but dedicated clot of media that was hovering outside t he building. A grand jury hearing was not usually cause for much press--nin ety-nine percent of the cases presented to an impaneled jury ended in indic tment--but this one had attracted the papers and the local TV stations. A l ittle ambition could go a long, long way, and Audra meant to ride Jamie Mac Donald's filthy coattails all the way to a promotion.

"It's like this," she said, turning to the clerk whose name she had already f iled away for a future favor. She balanced a pencil over the backs of her knu ckles, hooking her middle finger over it. The clerk had been trying the stupi d bar trick but could not seem to master it; Audra squeezed her fingers and t he pencil snapped in two.

"Don't think about it as the power of your strength," Audra said. "It's all in the strength of your power." She smiled brilliantly at the young man and turned away, nodding at the grand jury she had helped select some weeks ago as they filed through the door of the small conference room. There were twenty-three of them, all of whom had at least one distinguishing characteristic to fix them in Audra's mind: a handle-j Jodi Picoult bar mustache, a pregnant belly, shifty black badger eyes. The foreman sporte d a pug nose with uneven nostrils; she couldn't have forgotten that if she h ad tried. She grinned at him as he stepped through the doorway. The witnesses she had subpoenaed were sitting in a row outside the confere nce room. Hugo Huntley, the mortician, sat alone doing a crossword puzzle. The police chief and the underling who had investigated MacDonald's room at the Inn were bent together, heads nearly touching and dressed alike, fo rming in tandem a mirror image.