Mercy (5 page)

He knew, by the smile that curved Maggie's lips beneath the high-tech helmet

, that she was delighted with the visual images of the tennis center in Flus hing Meadow--the lined courts, the perspiring crowds, the smoggy blue of the sky. He watched on the flat screen as Maggie flickered her eyes, making a t ennis racket appear at the edge of her virtual vision and swing in a forehan d. "He wants other friends to be able to connect into the virtual space. And he wants a neural network thrown in, a 'smart enemy,' in case no one else i s around to play against him."

"Why are you stuck?"

Jamie shrugged. "Because I can't make him feel the sweat on the grip of his racket. Because I won't be able to make his legs tired from running."

"That's hardly your fault," Maggie said. "Couldn't you over-compensate som ewhere else? You know, like a scent--sun tan lotion waving in from the sta nds, or that rubbery smell you get when you open a can of tennis balls?"

"He can already smell," Jamie said. "He wants to walk." Maggie sank down on his lap. She pulled off the HMD and

Jodi Picoult

touched her hand to the screen, shaking her head. "It always amazes me how much better it looks with the helmet on."

"That's the idea." Jamie smiled.

"Imagine," Maggie said. "To be so active, and to have that taken away from you. If I ever get into an accident and become a quadriplegic, you have m y permission to shoot me."

Reflexively, Jamie's arms tightened around her. "You shouldn't even joke abo ut that," he said. "And you don't really mean it." Maggie raised her eyebrows. "You'd want to live as a vegetable?"

"You're not a vegetable. You still have your mind."

"And you're stuck in it," Maggie added. "No thank you."

"You have all five of your senses," Jamie argued. "You can still see, you can feel with the skin on your face, you can smell, you can taste, and you can h ear."

"Taste is a stupid sense," Maggie muttered absently. "No one would miss it.

"

"You would if you didn't have it," Jamie said.

"I'd rather be blind, deaf, and dumb than quadriplegic." Even with the whir of the computers in the back of the lab, the room was too silent for Jamie's liking. He kept thinking that if they continued to talk like this, they'd be tempting fate. "I hope you never have to make that choi ce," Jamie murmured.

Maggie took her hand and pressed it to his cheek. "You could stand not feeli ng me touch you here," she said, moving her fingers to his forehead and over his lips. "And here, or here." Then she slid her hand down his chest, betwe en his thighs, to cup him. "But to forget what this feels like?" He felt himself growing into her palm. He could not believe that the sensa tions Maggie could create by touching him were something he would ever hav e trouble remembering. Maybe that was the clue for his program, too--evoke a memory of what used to be, so that the mind made up the parameters the body physically couldn't. He would use the sounds and smells of a game of tennis, and mount a small fan in the HMD to give the sensation of wind cau sed by movement. If there were enough bombarding stimuli to elicit a recol lection of running, of serving a tennis ball, why couldn't your head make you think it was really happening again?

Maggie squeezed him gently.

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Jamie swallowed. The problem was, the same mind that could suspend its di sbelief had the capacity to be rational. A man who had walked for forty-t wo years before surviving an accident wouldn't be fooled by bells and whi stles. A man who had touched his wife and moved within her body and felt her sweat drying on his own skin would not remain satisfied with a resurr ected memory. When you came down to it, no matter how good Jamie was at w hat he did, a virtual world could never be the real thing. Jamie cupped his hands over Maggie's breasts and grazed his teeth along her neck. "You have a point," he said.

/f you aren't spooked about that kind of thing," Zandy Monroe said, "I can g o find Hugo."

Allie shrugged. Sitting in the driver's seat of the pickup truck beside the body of Maggie MacDonald, she wasn't frightened, and surely Cam would have wanted his sergeant to dispose of the body with the local undertaker, even if he hadn't explicitly said so. "We're not going anywhere," she said, smi ling at Zandy.

She had sent Mia back to the flower shop and told her to make as many funera l decorations as she could until Allie herself returned. Roses, she had said

. Use as many as we've got. She also told her to find bluebells, which stood for constancy, and gillyflowers, for the bonds of affection. Now, she glanc ed at Maggie's smooth, pale skin. Rue, she thought, for sorrow. I should hav e told her about rue.

With Zandy gone, Allie leaned closer to the dead woman. She glanced out th e window up and down the street, then laid her palm against Maggie's cheek

. It was cold and firm to the touch. Allie drew back her fingers and tucke d her hand inside her pocket.

Hugo Huntley came back with Zandy a few minutes later. He was the local mo rtician, and like everyone else on Main Street, had been in the crowd when James MacDonald had driven up to the police station. "Allie," he said, by way of greeting. He peered at the body through thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look very tiny and sunken in his face.

"She's dead," Zandy said flatly.

"Well yes." Hugo nodded. "I can see that." 7j&n&] carried Maggie MacDonald across the street to Huntley's Funeral Pa rlor, downstairs to the embalming rooms. To Allies

Jodi Picoult

shock, Maggie's body had already begun to freeze into the rigid position of sitting upright, so that even slung over Zandys shoulder, her knees bent sti ff and jutted into his abdomen instead of hanging slack.

Zandy laid the body on its side and turned to Allie. "You can probably go n ow, Mrs. Mac," he said.

Allie shook her head. "I made that man a promise. If you stay, so do I." They both turned to look at Hugo, who had donned a white lab coat and roll ed Maggie MacDonald's body onto her back, so that her knees peaked in the air. For a horrible moment, Allie remembered how funerals were done centur ies ago, and she had a brief vision of the laying out on a scarred kitchen table, where strong arms broke bones knotted by rigor mortis until the bo dy lay flat enough for a coffin. She turned away, the sweet mix of disinfe ctant and embalming fluid making her feel sicker.

"I don't think you should really do anything yet," Zandy said to Hugo. "Leas t, not till Cam says so." Hugo doubled as the town's forensic expert, althou gh his police experience was limited to an autopsy some ten years back that had turned out to be much less of a mystery than originally thought: the dec eased, believed to be poisoned, had died of cirrhosis of the liver. Hugo peered closer at the body. "I won't do anything, but I'm going to get he r out of these things and take some Polaroids. No matter what, that's the fir st step."

Allie swiftly glanced at the door before crossing her arms over her chest an d steeling herself to bear witness. Zandy leaned against a tray of medical i nstruments, scratching at a brass button on his heavy coat and pretending no t to watch as Hugo wrestled with the stiff body to remove the clothing. In t he end, both Allie and Zandy simply turned away.

"Not a scratch," Hugo called cheerfully. "No bruises at the neck. Not even a hangnail." Allie could hear the whip of a sheet being snapped open and la id over the body. "My educated guess is death by asphyxiation. Smothering." Allie shook her head, trying to erase the image of James Mac-Donald lung ing for his wife before Zandy could touch her. "Why would you do that to someone you love?" she murmured.

Hugo touched her arm. "Maybe because they wanted you to." He gently led All ie to the embalming table, pointing to several tiny tattoos that looked lik e the marks of a pen on Maggie's face. "They're for radiation therapy," he said. "The eye's a secondary site for cancer." And then he pulled down a co rner of the sheet, to reveal an angry red zag of weals and scars where Magg ie MacDonald's breast had been.

"V/^ou ready?"

JL Jamie turned around at the sound of Cam's voice. He had already signed t he top half of the voluntary statement that acknowledged his right to wait until a lawyer had been provided, but that was not his intent. He knew he w as going to be punished; he just wanted to get it over with. Cam had taken the handcuffs off an hour ago when the secretary offered him a cup of coffe e. He had been waiting for Cam to set up the booking room with a tape recor der. Now he stood in front of the most beautiful array of fall flowers he h ad ever seen.

They were red and purple and musty yellow, and the different fronds all see med to swoop low, like the trajectory of a leaf from a tree. He kept starin g at the arrangement, thinking how rich and warm the colors seemed to be; a nd then, in the next blink, it seemed their own beauty was dragging them do wn.

Jamie turned to Cam. "I've never seen a police station with flowers in it." Cam looked at the arrangement. "It's my wife. She owns a shop here. She does one every week." He watched Jamie finger the fragile petals of a lily, rubb ing it gently so that Cam could smell the light rain scent all the way acros s the room.

"You love her?"

Cam took a step backward. "My wife? Of course."

"How much?"

Cam smiled a little. "Is there a limit?"

Jamie shrugged. "You tell me. What would you do for her? Would you lie fo r her? Steal? Would you kill for her?"

"No," Cam said shortly. He turned Jamie away from the flowers abruptly, so t hat the lily fell to the floor and was crushed beneath the heel of his own b oot. "Let's go."

Jodi Picoult

// started almost two years ago, when we were ice-skating. Maggie was good a t it; she'd do little axels and toe loops and impress the hell out of the ki ds who came to play pickup hockey on the pond. I was goalie, and feeling eve ry bit of my thirty-four years as I blocked the shots of these high school g uys. When the action was down at the opposite goal, I'd turn to my right to catch what Maggie was doing.

It was only chance that I happened to see her fall down. Something stupid, s he said when I raced across the ice to her side. A twig sticking out of the surface that caught on the pick of her skate. But she couldn't stand up; tho ught maybe she'd heard something pop when she fell. I pulled her up the hill on a Flexible Flyer we borrowed from a little girl, and even though she was crying with the pain, she managed to make a joke about us trying out for th e Iditarod next year.

They showed me her X rays, not just the clean break of her ankle, but the lit tle holes in the white spaces, like bone that had been eaten out. Lesions, th ey said. Bone cancer was a secondary site.

When they found the original tumor, they removed her breast and the lymph nodes. They did CT scans, bone scans, sent for estrogen receptors. It stayed dormant for a while, and then it came back in her brain. She would hold my hand and try to describe the flashing red lights, the soft edges of h er fading vision as this tumor ate away at her optic nerve. The doctor said that it was a guessing game. It was only a matter of time but there was no way to determine where the cancer would show up next. Ano ther lobe of the brain, possibly, which would mean seizures. Maybe it woul d depress respirations. Maybe she would go to sleep one night and never wa ke up.

A few months before our eleventh wedding anniversary, we went to Canada. T

he Winter Carnival, in Quebec. We danced and sang in the streets and in th e thinnest hours before morning we sat on benches in front of the ice scul ptures with only each other to keep ourselves warm. Maggie unzipped my coa t and unbuttoned my shirt and placed her cold hands on the flat of my ches t. "Jamie," she said, "this thing is taking me from the inside out. My bon es, my breast, my brain. I think I'm going to look down one day and realiz e that nothing is left."

I hadn't wanted to talk about it; I tried to look away. But directly in front of us was the ice sculpture of a woman, all curves and lines and grace, her ar ms stretching over her head toward the limbs of a tree she would never be able to reach. I stared at the sculpture's dead eyes, at the lifelike form that wa s a lie--it was only a shell; you could see right through to the other side. Maggie tightened her fingers, pulling at the hair on my chest until I stared at her, called back by the pain. "Jamie," she said, "I know you love me. Th e question is, how much?"

~JT) y the time Jamie MacDonald finished telling Cameron how he XJhad kil led Maggie, he was kneeling on the floor, his hands clasped together, tea rs running down his face.

"Hey," Cam said, his own voice thick and unfamiliar. "Hey, Jamie, it's all right." He reached down awkwardly to touch Jamie's shoulder, and instead Ja mie reached up and grasped his hand. Instinctively, Cam put his other hand down, too, cupping Jamie's clasped hands in a silent show of support. It was also a gesture of obeisance, Cam realized with a start, the one a Sco ts clansman had used two hundred years back to accept the protection of his chief.

According to the sworn voluntary statement of James MacDonald, his wife had been suffering from the advanced stages of cancer, and had asked him to ki ll her. Which did not account for the raw scratches on his face, or the fac t that he'd traveled to a town he'd never set foot in to commit the murder. Maggie had not videotaped her wishes, or even written them down and had th em notarized to prove she was of sound mind--Jamie said she hadn't wanted i t to be a production, but a simple gift.

What it boiled down to, really, was Jamie's word. Cam's only witness was dead. He was supposed to believe the confession of James MacDonald sole ly because he was a MacDonald, a member of his clan.

Except for the time he had come back to Wheelock against his own wishes to s ucceed his father as police chief, Cam hadn't given much thought to being ch ief of the Clan MacDonald of Carrymuir. It was an honor, a mark of respect. It meant that when he married Allie, he did so in full Highland dress regali a, kilt instead of tuxedo, snowy lace jabot instead of bow tie. It was an an achronism, a cute link to history, and it might have made him a little more protective of his town's inhabitants than other police chiefs, but it did no t override his other responsibilities.