Mercy of St Jude (18 page)
In the tranquility of the kitchen, Annie thinks about her parents, about the deep bond they share. She thinks about her mother and the babies she lost, about how she has kept her sorrow close so many years. Lucinda was never the type to revisit the hardships that life dealt her, nor was she a martyr determined to hoard her pain. Rather, she always said she saw no reason to dwell on hard times, that it made no sense to be making people sad for no good reason. Still, Annie knows her mother would have given anything to spare her daughters the grief that she has known.
For the first time, Annie feels a deep connection with Lucinda, even with Mercedes, a connection that surpasses blood ties yet exists solely because of them. She does not mind that it is probably loneliness that binds them. It makes her feel less alone.
“Annie, Annie!” Pat yells from the other room. “Get in here. Hurry!”
Annie rushes to the parlour, Joe and Callum right behind. The door is shut. When she tries to pull it open, she meets resistance. She pulls harder. It opens.
Annie stops. “For the love of God!”
The coffin is now in the middle of the room. Inside it, Mercedes is propped up with pillows. Her hand, which is tied to a rope attached to the doorknob, has risen with the opening of the door and is reaching out towards them.
Pat and Aiden stand by the coffin, swaying slightly, their faces proud, expectant.
“You're pissed to the gills, the pair of you.” She doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. “This is really gross. I hope you know that, you big idiots.”
Joe, not completely sober himself, peers nervously at Mercedes. Callum stands quietly by. He is not smiling.
Annie unties the rope from the doorknob then goes to the coffin and removes it from Mercedes' hand. The cold sallow skin sends shivers down her arms. She pushes the rope at Aiden. “Get rid of this right now.” She sniffs. The air reeks of incense and scotch. “What the hell did you do?”
Pat leans over the coffin. “Aid spilled it. I told him not to put it there.”
“St. Peter won't let her past the gate with that stench on her,” Aiden stammers. His speech is slow, some words delayed.
Pat drapes his arm over his brother's shoulder. “You trying to preserve her?”
Holding onto the coffin's railing for support they start to giggle, which soon erupts into hoots of laughter. Annie tries to quiet them but they're too drunk to care, or to notice the sound of footsteps running down the stairs. She grabs the rope from Aiden's hand and shoves it behind the couch.
Lucinda barges in, her flannel housecoat wafting around her. “Enough!” she yells, charging across the room.
Pat and Aiden immediately go silent.
Lucinda stops by the side of the coffin. Her mouth tightens when she sees the upended bottle lying next to Mercedes. She picks it up by the neck and holds it out towards Pat and Aiden as if she might hit them with it. They both take a step back.
“Have you no respect at all?” she says. “Do you even know the meaning of the word?”
The boys say nothing. They lean in closer to each other.
Lucinda nods. “Right. I didn't think so. Now look at this ungodly mess. Disgusting it is, absolutely disgusting.”
Pat tries to stammer out an apology but she thrusts her hand up. “I don't want your sorrys and your excuses. Just clean this up and quit acting like children for once in your frigging lives.” Hands on hips, she hones in on Pat. “I'm beginning to think she was right about you. All you had to do was sit up with her on her final night. But no, that was too much to ask. Well, the fun is over for you this night, do you hear me, Patrick Hann?” Not waiting for an answer she shifts her gaze to Aiden. “And you! It's high time you learned to take some responsibility, and not just about this. If you had one lick of decencyâ” She stops, bunching her lips together in frustration. “Ah, what's the use of talking to you? Just get your arse in gear and fix this, the both of you. I better not smell one whiff of that in the morning. Am I understood?”
“Yes, Aunt Luce,” they answer in unison.
“I'm going back to bed. And I don't want to hear another peep out of you two.”
The room is silent until they hear the hard clack of Lucinda's bedroom door.
“Which one of you wants to bathe her?” Annie asks with a perfectly straight face.
Pat pulls back. “Jesus, Annie, you're creeping the daylights out of me.”
“She's just kidding.” Aiden looks cautiously at Annie.
She gestures pointedly to the stained satin lining.
Pat's face is an odd shade of green. “I think I'm going to be sick.”
For his sake only, she decides to let them off the hook. “Ah, relax. It's not all that bad. From the looks of you two, you must have drank most of it first.”
Joe moves closer to inspect the damage. “What were you doing anyway?”
Aiden starts to titter. “We were giving her a little drinkie-pooh, but she wasn't too interested.”
“Not like she ever drank much,” Pat adds.
“Might have cheered her up a bit,” says Annie, although not with the same degree of bitterness she usually reserves for Mercedes.
The others nod. Except Callum, who turns to go back to the kitchen.
Annie sets Joe and the boys to work, then follows her grandfather out. He is slumped in a chair, his solemn face lost in thought, his gaze far away. She thinks again of Bay D'Esprits. It was the one place she felt she could never reach him. No matter how hard she looked upon that water, at the lonely cliffs on the other side and the hard jutting rocks rising from the Atlantic, she knew that she would never see what he did.
Annie hugs his rounded shoulders and brushes back his limp grey hair. “Sorry, Granddad. Sometimes I don't know when to shut up.”
“Oh love, I know she was a trial to put up with all these years. Mercedes long ago gave up trying to please anybody. She wasn't one for making friends.”
Annie sits next to him at the table. “I've been around her since the day I was born, but the woman I knew was nothing like the person you keep talking about.”
He gives her a mischievous smile, bringing a youthful happiness to his face. “Like I said since you were little, you always put me in mind of Mercie as a girl.”
“That's the second time today somebody said I was like her.”
“Your mother thought you were like her too, though I think it gave her more worry than pleasure,” he adds ruefully. “Guess who else saw it? Mercie. Every time you'd bring home top marks, she'd brag on about it, glowing with pride. Remember how you got straight A's your first semester of university?”
She nods, surprised that he does.
“When Mercie heard about that, she went on and on about how she knew you could do it, knew you could beat anybody in your class. Then she said outright that you reminded her of herself, but she was thankful you had better opportunities.”
“I don't get it. Why didn't she ever tell me those things? She acted like she couldn't stand me most of the time.”
“Couldn't stand you? Annie, she loved you. She only ever wanted for you to make something of yourself because she knew you could.”
“Well, she was no help. Wouldn't even lend me a few measly bucks for school.”
Callum looks smug. “She made sure you got the money, though.”
“She did not.”
“Whose idea was it for you to help me out at the computer, and who do you think insisted on giving me the money to pay you for it?”
Annie leans in, elbows on the table. “You're kidding?”
“She made sure you got what you needed, and it wasn't a loan.”
“If she really cared, what could be so wrong with telling a person?” She notices the tremble in her voice, but she doesn't mind it, not now, not here with her grandfather.
“Oh Annie, she forgot how, is all. She said it felt like every time she tried to help she made things worse. Merce was always so nervous for you, afraid something awful would happen and you'd end up like her.”
“You mean alone and angry?”
“She wasn't always that way. When she was young she was full of dreams. And she was brazen and saucy, much like yourself.” He smiles. “A right card, she was.”
“That's what's so amazing.” Annie's hits the table lightly with the side of her fist. “I hardly ever heard a funny word come out of her mouth. In all the years I knew her, she was always so serious, forever on the edge of bitterness.”
“It's the only way she knew how to be in the end, but that don't mean it's how she really was. A person can only suffer so much before they just let go and give in to it.”
Annie leans in close to her grandfather. “So tell me about it.”
“Merce was awful private. I don't know⦔
“Please, Granddad. I need to know.”
He hesitates. “You do, don't you? You more than anyone else, just like Mercie said.” He studies her face for a moment, then takes a full long breath. “Something happened a long time ago, something awful. And Merce did what she had to do, and she survived. And when that was done, when she tried to put it behind her and start a new life⦔ He stops and presses his fingers against his forehead. When he speaks again there are tears in his eyes. “She was after falling in love, you see, in Nova Scotia, where she was an English teacher. She met a young man there from St. John's, Louis Cunningham was his name. They decided to get married.” He stops again, and his knuckles rap the table in an angry rush. “But then Louis found something out, something he shouldn't have been told, a thing Merce could hardly believe herself.” He peers past her out the window. “Louis Cunningham was her last chance for a regular life and he took that away.” After a brief silence he looks back at Annie. “Mercedes suffered more than you can imagine, but she carried on the best she could. Life dealt her some of the cruellest cards and there wasn't one damn thing she could do about it.”
There is a raw honesty in his eyes, and his face is filled with torment. Annie longs to ask him to go on, to tell her more about this strange woman that only he knew so well. But it's as if he's no longer present in the room. His eyes seem distant, far away, and Annie can tell that he has drifted back to a time and place that he alone remembers. The only thing she can do to help him is to leave him be, for now at least, to let him rest there with the little sister he loved from the beginning of her life until the sad, lonely end.
Sadie is in a dream. It is not a good dream. She is wearing her favourite blouse, but the silky yellow material is ripped across the front, exposing part of her old, greying brassiere. Lucinda is there. She is holding Dermot's hand. But then Dermot becomes Angus and he is watching Lucinda and Dermot walk away.
The dream shifts so that it no longer feels like a dream. It is happening now. Mercedes Hann stands at her bedside. Sadie knows she is there, somehow she can see her, even though she can't open her eyes. She tries to make her eyelids go up, concentrates as hard as she can, but they're stuck shut.
Mercedes is saying something, talking to somebody. Sadie can't quite make out the words but she can hear the voices. Then a young man rises up to stand beside Mercedes. He puts his hand on her shoulder. There is a smile in his voice as he speaks to her. “Yes, she's dead all right. Dead, dead, dead.” He laughs.
Sadie needs to get her eyes open. Her brain pulls at the muscles in her face, hauling and tugging so hard that she loses sight of the two of them. Nothing. No one.
She stops straining. They are there again, but only the back of them walking away. Mercedes Hann and Gerard. On they go, farther and farther, but still she can see them. They keep moving beyond, but never so far as to disappear altogether.
With one final wrench, she opens her eyes. Wide. She stares at the side of the bed. No one. Her heart bounces against her flesh so hard she is afraid it will break through. She takes several long breaths. Keeping her sights on the air beside her, she waits patiently for her heart to settle back into its place inside her chest.
She doesn't blink for a long time.
Goddamn Old Hag. Goddamn Mercedes Hann.
