This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (3 page)

“We’ve been home for a while,” I’d say.

“Okay,” she’d say. “Y’all want something to eat?”

I told myself this time wasn’t any different from any of those other times, and I tucked the sheet around her even though it was warm in her room, and I closed her door as quietly as I could and walked into the living room and found Ruby sitting on the floor in front of the television.

That night I heated up a can of SpaghettiOs in a saucepan on the stove. Me and Ruby ate in front of the television and watched
Entertainment Tonight
. I hated Mary Hart’s big cheesy smile, but I loved her hair: how huge it was and how it didn’t move when she turned her head. I wanted hair like that. I liked her name too. It reminded me of Boston Terrier—one of those names you wouldn’t think was real until you met somebody who answered to it.

While Ruby brushed her teeth and got ready for bed, I went back into Mom’s room to check on her. It was pitch black and hot as it could be, but I could see by the light coming in from the hallway. I walked around to the side of the bed where Mom had been lying that afternoon. She was still in the same spot, and I sat down beside her. I was afraid that she’d gotten too hot with the door being closed and the sheet being pulled up around her tight, but she wasn’t sweating and didn’t feel warm when I touched her. She breathed softly, so I knew she was just fine, and I knew she’d wake us up for school in the morning like nothing had happened. I leaned over and whispered in her ear.

“Good night, Mom,” I said. “Me and Ruby already ate something and did our homework, and I’m getting her ready for bed.” She didn’t say nothing or give any sign that she’d heard me, but I didn’t expect her to. I stood up and started to walk out into the hall, but then I heard her whisper my name. She’d raised her left arm up from the bed and was holding it out toward me like she wanted me to hold her hand. I walked back to the bed and held her hand in mine, and I just stood there holding it and waiting to see if she’d say something else, but she didn’t. “All right, Mom,” I said, letting her hand rest on the bed right beside her. “You get some sleep.”

I went to bed too, but all night long I kept waking up and wondering if I’d heard her moving around the house: the sound of her feet dragging across the floor, doors opening and closing, water running in the sink.

I woke up in the morning just as it was getting to be daylight outside. The house was silent, just like it was supposed to be at that time of the morning, but something about that quiet told me it was wrong. So I wasn’t too surprised at how I found her when I opened her bedroom door.

She was lying sideways on top of the bed like maybe she’d stood up sometime during the night and had fallen back across the bed and just stayed that way. I knew she was dead right when I opened the door. She was on her side with her knees bent up close to her and her hands under her chin. Her dark hair was covering her face, so I couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or not, but I didn’t move it out of her face to check because I knew I didn’t want to see. I didn’t even touch her, which seems strange to think about now because I’d give anything in this world to curl up in bed beside her, be able to smell her hair on the pillowcase, feel her scratch my back through my nightgown. But instead I just stood there looking down at her and went ahead and decided that I wasn’t going to cry, not then anyway. I knew it was more important to decide what me and Ruby were going to do next.

Ruby must’ve felt something in the house too because when I went back into our bedroom I found her sitting up in the bed like she’d been waiting on me.

“How’s Mom?” she asked. I just stood there looking at her, trying to figure out how I was going to explain what had happened. “Is she better?”

“No, Ruby,” I said, “she’s not.” I sat down on her bed and told her. I told her about how Mom was tired all the time and that was why she was always sleeping. And I told her that Mom’s body just couldn’t take that tiredness and that she’d finally had enough. Ruby just sat there and looked at me while I found my way through whatever it was I was saying. I can’t promise that I quite remember it myself, but I do remember telling her that now wasn’t no time to be sad. I remember telling her that there’d be plenty of time for that later, that right now we had to be tough and figure out what we were going to do next to make sure we stayed together now that we didn’t have a mama or a daddy like most kids our age.

I asked her if she wanted to go into Mom’s bedroom to see her one more time, and I could tell she thought about it awfully hard, but in the end she decided that she didn’t want to, and I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t go back into that room again either.

“Are you hungry?” I asked. She shook her head. “We probably should eat something anyway.” I turned to walk toward the kitchen.

“Where you going?” Ruby asked.

“I’m going to the kitchen,” I said. “We need to eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Okay,” I said, “you don’t have to eat nothing if you don’t want to.” I walked into the hallway.

“Hold on,” Ruby said. I stopped walking and waited until she was right behind me, and then we went into the kitchen and opened the cabinets and looked for something to eat, but there wasn’t nothing there for breakfast. There wasn’t hardly no food at all. I looked around and realized that we didn’t have anything, and I saw what our house really looked like, and I knew how people would think of us when they came inside in a few hours to get Mom and take us away to wherever we’d be going. They’d see that we didn’t have any furniture except for a plastic deck chair and two folding chairs that you might take to the beach. And they’d see that me and Ruby didn’t have beds but just slept on mattresses on the floor that had mismatched sheets on them. They’d know that I’d called them from the corner store because we didn’t have a phone, and they’d see that even if we’d had food we didn’t have no clean plates to eat from. I stood there looking all around that kitchen with a knot in my throat and an empty stomach, and I swear I could hear flies buzzing in just about every windowpane in that house. I just wanted to leave it all behind.

“You think we need quarters to call 911?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I ain’t never called it before.”

We spent forever looking for those two quarters. I finally found one in the bottom of my book bag, and Ruby found one behind the dresser in our room. The sun had come up all the way by the time we’d gotten dressed and were walking down the street toward Garrison Boulevard. It would be hot later, but the morning felt nice, and down the hill on the right mist rose up from the creek that ran through the center of Lineberger Park. A few people slept on picnic tables under the shelters. They’d been out there all night because they didn’t have no place else to go.

There weren’t any cars in the parking lot at Fayles’, and I took Ruby by the hand and led her through the lot to the corner where a phone booth sat by the sidewalk. The quarters were ready in my hand, but when we got closer I saw that somebody’d come along and torn the phone loose from the cord and taken it with them. They’d yanked out the phone book too. I stood there looking at that cord where the phone should’ve been, and I held Ruby’s hand and asked myself what Boston Terrier would do.

Then I remembered that you could see a pay phone inside the pool room at Fayles’ whenever we walked past it with Mom on the way to the library. I led Ruby back across the lot to the store, but when I let go of her hand and tried to open the door I saw that it was locked. The sign said they didn’t open until 7:30
A.M.
Through the glass, I could see a man inside the store messing with a coffeemaker, and when he heard me tug on the door he turned around and looked at us over his shoulder. He pointed to his watch. “We ain’t open yet,” he said. I had to read his lips because I couldn’t hear him through the glass. Me and Ruby sat down on the curb in front of the store and waited.

“What are you going to say to 911?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll wait and see what they ask me.”

A few minutes later we heard the lock turn on the door, and we stood up and walked inside. Smelly coffee dripped into a pot, and the man had already cranked up the hot-dog-turning machine. Hot dogs aren’t good for breakfast, but seeing them laid out and roasting on those rollers reminded me that we hadn’t eaten nothing yet.

I took Ruby’s hand and walked through the store, past the counter, and into the pool room. The man who’d unlocked the door was standing behind the cash register, and he folded his arms and stared at us when we walked past him. I figured he was wondering what two little girls were doing alone at the store this early in the morning.

A cigarette smell came up from the carpet in the pool room when I stepped on it. A big window looked out onto the parking lot, and I could see the phone booth that was missing its phone out on the corner by Garrison. The road was starting to get busy with traffic. In the corner of the room was the pay phone hanging on the wall. A stool was sitting under it. A jukebox sat beside it. I pushed the stool up against the wall and picked up the phone. Ruby leaned against the jukebox and watched me. A plastic Coke bottle sat on top of the phone, and an old brown cigarette was floating down inside it.

I dialed 911 and waited. It rung once, and then the operator picked up. “911,” she said. “What’s your emergency?”

I waited a second before I said anything because I wanted to make sure I used the right words. “I think my mom might be dead,” I finally said.

“Okay,” the operator said. “Why do you think that?”

“Because she won’t wake up,” I said. “And yesterday she was in bed sick and she slept all day. She’s still there, and now she won’t move. I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“Okay,” the operator said again. “And where’s your mom right now?”

I gave her the address for our house, and then she asked me Mom’s name.

“Her name’s Corinne Quillby,” I said, “and she’s twenty-nine years old.”

“All right,” the operator said, “and what’s your name?”

“My name?” I looked at Ruby where she stood staring at me, her back still leaned up against the jukebox. I smiled at her. “My name’s Boston Terrier,” I said.

Ruby smiled back. “And I’m Purple Journey,” she whispered.

C H A P T E R   3

I
must’ve drifted off to sleep sitting up in my bed, because the next thing I heard was the sound of him tapping on the window outside. Ruby didn’t move, and I figured she was either asleep or pretending to be. I scooted down toward the end of the bed and reached out and unlocked the window and opened it. It was a new window and the frame was made out of plastic, so it slid up easy without making a sound. The window frames in the house we’d lived in with Mom were old and made out of wood. Sometimes we couldn’t get them open no matter how hard we tried. I scooted back toward my pillow and waited for him to climb in.

The windowsill was painted white, and even though it was dark in our room I could see Marcus’s fingers close around it to pull himself up, and I heard the sound his shoes made when they scraped against the side of the house as he climbed up into our room, first one leg and then the other.

“Be quiet,” I whispered.

“I’m trying to,” he whispered back.

Once he’d climbed in all the way he walked right to our closet and stepped inside and closed it behind him. I lay down and covered myself up with the sheet and pretended to be asleep. We always did that in case Miss Crawford or one of the other workers heard him coming in the window and opened our bedroom door to check on me and Ruby. I always imagined hearing somebody’s footsteps coming toward us, the bedroom door opening, and that crack of light coming in the room from the hallway and lying across my bed. “Easter?” one of them would whisper.

I’d stir in my pretend-sleep like they’d just woke me up, and I’d wait a second before saying anything. “What?” I’d say.

“You okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I’d say.

They’d peek in the door, see me and Ruby both in our beds, and decide things looked just fine. That’s what I hoped would happen anyway. I didn’t know what they’d do if they found Marcus Walker hiding in our closet.

I lay there with my eyes closed and waited a few minutes, and then I whispered his name. “I think you can come on out,” I said.

I heard the closet door open slowly, and I could just barely see him as he stepped out and walked toward the bed. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said back.

He might’ve snuck in three or four times before that, and we never did much except whisper to each other and tell stories about our lives and our families. We lay down side by side on the bed together one time, and the last time he’d snuck in we’d given each other a quick pop-kiss before he left. I didn’t know if he was my boyfriend or not, but I thought he might be.

Tonight we sat on my bed with our backs against the wall. Our feet hung off the side of the bed. It looked funny to see my pale white feet beside his black sneakers in the little bit of light coming in the window. He smelled good, and I knew he’d put on some of his dad’s cologne, but I didn’t know what the name of it was. We’d already run out of stuff to talk about, but only because he just wanted to know one thing: who the man was that I’d been talking to at the baseball field.

“His name’s Wade,” I finally said.

“Who is he?” Marcus asked. I took a deep breath to let him know I didn’t want to answer that question; I didn’t want to talk about Wade at all. “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I just thought it was weird.”

We were quiet for a second, and then Marcus’s hand slid across the bed. When I turned my hand over he put his fingers through mine. We just sat there holding hands, neither one of us saying a word.

“He’s my dad,” I finally said. I waited, already knowing what he was going to say.

“You told me you didn’t have a dad,” he said.

I looked over at him. “Maybe I said that just because I don’t want the one I got.”

“What does he do?”

“Who knows,” I said. “He used to be a pitcher a long time ago.”