Mercy (42 page)

/'m not making any promises," Graham said, picking at his BLT. "I'm just tel ling you what's at stake."

Jamie stared dejectedly at a turkey sandwich. The mayonnaise was seeping t hrough the white bread, which hadn't been cut thick enough to begin with. He pushed the center with his finger and watched the dressing ooze up. "Ne ver thought I'd hear you say that." He glanced up. "What's it been? Three, four months? 'You're gonna walk, Jamie,' " he mimicked in falsetto. Graham shook his head. "Who knows?" he said. "You may walk."

"And I may get twenty to life."

Graham went to protest, but shut his mouth and took a bite of sandwich. Jam ie wasn't a fool, and he'd seen the jury selection process that day. He had watched Graham bow his head when it was all over, as if the weight on his shoulders had suddenly become too much to bear. He had noticed the way Judg e Roarke's eyes trapped him, like a scientist inspecting a rare insect, whe n he thought that Jamie wasn't looking.

Jamie pushed his sandwich away and took a drink of water. He thought abou t the snow, which lay knee-deep over Maggie's raw grave. He would miss th e outdoors, he thought. He would miss seeing the sky.

Other than that, he didn't much see how the punishment

would differ: a life sentence that made the limits of yout wotld a prison, o r the prison your world became when your sentence was simply to live. On Saturday, Allie drove Jamie all the way to Pittsfield to buy a suit for t he trial. He had several at home, but he refused to wear them. "She picked t hem out," he told Allie, who understood exactly what he was saying. The men's shop was called Lou's, and Lou himself came forward to offer his a ssistance. "You're a big one," he said, glancing up at Jamie. "What, forty-f our, forty-six long?"

Allie stepped up to the man. "We're looking for something sedate. Something tasteful but not flashy."

"Tasteful," Lou said, trying the word on his lips as if he had never quite hear d it put that way before. "Tasteful."

Allie pushed past the proprietor to a rack marked 44 Long. "You like blue, J

amie, or gray?"

Jamie followed her. "I don't know. Blue, I guess." He ran a hand down the r ack of jackets, making the hangers clack and sing. "Does Cam buy his suits here?"

Allie laughed. "Cam buys his suits through a public safety catalog. He own s one sports jacket. His mother bought it for him when he was twenty-two." She deftly pulled a couple of suits from the rack. "You've got the height to c arry double-breasted," she mused, "but I don't want the jury to think you're s lick."

"I'm going to wear the same suit through the whole trial?" He stuck his fing er through a buttonhole.

"Graham says that you don't have to wear a suit every day. Just during the opening and closing arguments, when you're making the biggest impression on the jurors. He suggests V-necked sweaters and ties with Wall Street dot s."

"Wall Street dots?"

Allie nodded. "You know, yellow or red with those little divots in neat litt le rows. Like you have no imagination at all." She glanced up. "Come over he re."

She held a suit up to Jamie's chest, as high as she could reach. "I think I li ke this one best. Go try on the pants." When Jamie

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stood there, just staring, she laughed at him. "Go on," she said, pushing him off. "I'm not going with you."

Jamie looked around for the fitting rooms and finally realized they were hidd en away behind the row of mirrors to the left. He stepped inside one and hung the three suits Allie had chosen on the tiny hook in the wall. Then he strip ped out of his clothes and pulled on the first pair of trousers. Allie had forgotten to give him a shirt. He stood there for a moment, staring at his bare chest. The hair ran down in an arrow to disappear beneath the ba ggy waist of the pleated trousers. He looked like a kid dressing up in his fa ther's clothes.

He remembered once when Maggie had dragged him bathing suit shopping. She s aid it was the worst thing a woman could possibly do to herself, and she'd really appreciate having someone there who loved her no matter how flawed h er shape was. The dressing room had been big, so he came inside while his w ife tried on one maillot after another. He thought they all looked good and he told her so, but she wasn't considering the bathing suits at all. She'd poke at her stomach and suck in her breath and slap at her thighs with eac h suit she tried on, until Jamie realized that in spite of each shiny scrap of red and aqua and purple, she was only seeing herself. Maggie had not much liked mirrors after the mastectomy. She'd shower in the morning and wrap a towel around herself in the steamy stall so that she wo uldn't have to see. As far as he could remember, after the operation she ha d always gotten dressed in her walk-in closet.

Suddenly, Jamie was sweating. He stripped out of the trousers and hurriedl y got dressed. When he opened the dressing room door, Allie was waiting fo r him. She held up two shirts.

He thrust the suits into her hands, a smooth spill of herringbone and subtle checks and dark wool. "Any one," he said, pushing past her toward the clear, cold outside. "I don't care."

/t wasn't nearly enough time. They would be driving the following afterno on to Shelburne Falls, picking up Mia's car, and Cam would go home to All ie while Mia would return to the Wheelock Inn. A day of skating, a mornin g when he could wake up with Mia

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beside him, and then Cam would have to go back to the way it always was, as if this weekend had not occurred at all.

While the water was running in the bathroom, Cam laid a fire in the bedroom grate. He turned off the lights so that the four-poster bed was bathed in a red, smoky glow, and pulled the towel away from his waist. Mia came out of the bathroom with a towel turbaned over her head, her skin s till dripping. "Feel better?" he asked.

She walked closer to the fire and huddled in front of it. "Warmer," she sa id. Cam put his hands behind her thighs and drew her near. He unwound her towel and rubbed his palms from her bottom to her calves. "Much warmer," s he said, smiling.

He knelt on the hearth, ignoring the cut of the stones into his knees as he k issed his way down the front of Mia's body, following a shifting line that th e fire made as it crackled. He felt the heat against his back, and the heat t hat was gathering between his legs as he closed his mouth over her breast. Mi a's breath came out in a rush, and it seemed to him a symphony. When she finally straddled him on the thick braided rug in front of the hear th, he stared at her. Her hair was outlined crimson. Her head was tossed bac k, so that he could not see her features, only shadows.

Cam forced himself to close his eyes. Mia had taught him how to listen. So o ver the pulse of the winter, he heard the cry of a saxophone making love to a flute in the musician's colony a mile away. He heard the soft snore of Mia

's sleeping cat. He heard the sound of snow striking snow as it fell outside the window. And afterward, when he fell asleep in Mia's arms, he dreamed th is was the last night of the world.

1\ /Tia did not wake until nearly noon, letting reality slowly wrap L VX its elf around her. She started considering an idea she wanted to bring up to Al lie. A personalized Flower-of-the-Month club, much like the Fruit-of-the-Mon th organizations that ran out of Florida, except instead of oranges and pers immons you'd receive calyx and corolla . . .

"I've been thinking," Cam said, a disembodied voice from the warmer side o f the bed. "Maybe we don't have to go back."

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Mia rolled toward him and smiled. "It's Sunday," she said. "This afternoon the coach becomes a pumpkin again."

He reached out for her. Cam felt full of Mia, ripe to bursting with her, an d he did not know how he could ever go back to living halfway. "I'm serious

. You'd come away with me, wouldn't you?"

Mia felt her breath return to her. This was familiar, this was their game. " To Turkey. To Greenland. You name it," she said.

Cam shook his head. "I mean I'm going to leave--" Mia reached out to cover his mouth, but he said the word anyway, and it tangled obscenely in her fin gers. "Allie."

Mia sat up, pulling the sheet with her so it left Cam bare and flaccid, expos ed. "Don't say that," she murmured.

He rolled toward her, placing a hand on her leg. "What else could you possi bly want?"

You, she thought, the way you are. The life you have. She thought of Cam trav eling with her in her rental car, Kafka sleeping in his lap during the long s tretches of driving. She tried to picture him working as a hired hand on big farms in the South, or dispatching delivery trucks in the cities, just to mak e ends meet. She tried to picture him without a name, without a position, wit hout a family. She tried to picture him and she saw herself. If Cam packed up his duffel bag and went home to Wheelock and filed for div orce, he would not be the man she had fallen in love with. If people passed him in the street without calling a greeting; if he slept beneath the star s with her and ate Chef Boy-ardee for three weeks because it was all he cou ld afford, he would not be the man she'd fallen in love with. And how long would it take before he turned against her for taking away the criteria by which he'd always defined himself?

What she had always wished, she realized, was simply to turn back the cloc k. To meet Cam before Allie had come into his life and to take the place s he occupied so smoothly beside him. And in one of those blind, white momen ts of insight, Mia realized that what she had wanted all along was not nec essarily what Cam could offer, but what Allie MacDonald had. Cam turned Mia toward him and wiped a tear from her cheek with his finger.

"You don't want to leave either."

Mia smiled halfheartedly. "That must be it."

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But she knew it was more. If she really loved Cam, and she did, she would s pare him the pain of feeling like there was no place you could call home. She stared out the window at the spotless run of snow. Cam was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on his boxers. She watched his triceps flex a nd relax. She thought of how, in a moment or two, he'd ask her what she wa nted to do today instead of skiing, and how she would want to say, Stay he re. Make love. Remember you.

He came to her side of the bed and pulled her into his arms, mistaking her s ilence. Mia allowed herself the luxury of leaning against someone she would have trusted with her life. She kissed the base of his throat, letting her t ongue dart out and make a small, wet mark that was already vanishing when sh e left it. Then she straightened imperceptibly, just enough for the muscles and the marrow in her bones to realize she had taken the first step toward s eparation.

At 8:05 on Monday morning, Mia Townsend took the clothes she'd neatly arra nged in the dresser of the Wheelock Inn and rolled them into sausages, whi ch she'd always found to be the best method for traveling. She stuffed her belongings into her knapsack and scooped up her cat with her free hand. Setting Kafka on her stomach, she lay down on a bed that still smelled of her and Cam from the afternoon before. She had arrived in Wheelock before him, and he'd come to the Inn instead of going home. Cam had undressed her so tenderly she thought he must have guessed her decision. But then she r ealized that it was simply his way of marking something that, in his mind, was not an end but a beginning.

Her body could not let go quite so easily, and had sung to him a lullaby or chestrated by her skin moving against his, until he fell into a deep sleep at her side. Then Mia had closed her eyes and concentrated on the sounds th at pushed through the walls and the windows, family sounds and leisure soun ds, the hum of a weekend as it shuddered to a close.

She turned her face into the pillow that had been Cam's. She didn't think sh e'd ever quite forget the scent of him, but when he'd gone to the bathroom s he had stolen one of the sweatshirts he'd

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brought to New Hampshire, just in case. That was what she was taking this time, her keepsake of Wheelock.

Kafka mewed and scratched at her ribs. She absently stroked his neck, and she tried to imagine every line of Cameron MacDon-ald's face. Mia took a last look through the drawers and the bathroom to check that she was not leaving a piece of herself behind. With a gentle hand, she ran her fingers down the twisted trunk of her ancient bonsai, the one that had acc ompanied her everywhere. This she placed on the middle of the bed, where Ca m would be certain to find it.

She locked the door to the room that had been hers for a little while. She w alked downstairs and settled her bill and returned her key. Then she stepped outside.

It was unseasonably warm for January. Fifty degrees, at least, and it was e arly in the morning. The snow had melted down to the bare ground in some sp ots, leaving the grass weak and yellow, looking violated. Mia took a deep breath and kept her chin held high on the way to her car, c arefully avoiding a glimpse into puddles that would only show her herself. At 8:05 on Monday morning, Allie was rounding up the dirty laundry for dry cleaning. She took it in to Mr. Soong's place every other week, or else Cam would run out of uniforms. He had left early this morning--another meeting out of town, this one for some kind of task force. And since he'd returned after ten the previous night, he hadn't had a chance to unpack. Allie could remember him saying that the gun safety seminar in New Braintre e had been casual, but she wasn't sure if he'd packed anything other than a uniform which might merit dry cleaning. He had several cotton sweaters tha t couldn't be laundered in any other way.

She bent down to rummage through the duffel bag that was lying on its side, pulling out a pair of jeans and a wet musty set of polypropylene long unde rwear. She was absently thinking that the yellow sweatshirt he'd left town in was missing, when the pictures tumbled into her lap.

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They were very bad Polaroids, that was the first thing she noticed. The imag es were filmy and the colors a bit too awkward, so it was almost possible to believe that she was not seeing clearly as she recognized Cam and Mia stand ing together in front of a pond full of skaters.