Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  We were lucky. Dr Aintree was an exceptional psychiatrist: kind, firm, knowledgeable, supportive, wise. We needed her to be every bit of that as each tiny change led Star into shrieking and sobbing fits of anger and me into a fear that I was beginning to see tipped towards paranoia.

  It was exhausting. It left both of us wrung-out and wretched. Star was having her toddler tantrums now, the good doctor explained, and I was feeling classic separation anxiety.

  Stay with it.

  So we did. Not knowing what else to do, I followed instructions, gripping tight while the roller-coaster of emotions that didn't want us to be free, bucked and dipped. And we were doing okay. To this day, I believe we would have been fine if only we had been left alone together.

  Ding-dong. I was preparing dinner behind that kitchen counter when our doorbell rang. One of the things I didn't like about myself at that time was that I always experienced the doorbell ringing as an intrusion. Maybe it's because a double-jobbing single mother is always busy and always has a plan for the coming minutes or hours. That evening, it was the usual routine: dinner, Star's homework, TV, bedtime, Lauren's arrival, go to work. Zach was gone, back to college, sending almost daily letters. He would be home for Thanksgiving. I had a calendar, like a schoolgirl or a prisoner, marking off the days.

  In the meantime, I was busier than ever. If he was going to be taking a college education, it seemed like maybe I should too. I had started to read again, to entertain notions of what I might do. I had written to UCSP for their prospectus, and then to the English Literature Department and to College Administration about second chance degrees.

  I had started to swim in a sea of words. When I wasn't working or looking after the house or Star, I was reading. A great wave was breaking across North America and it was heady: the civil rights movement had been quickly followed by women's liberation, its bastard child. Unplanned and unwanted by its parent, it was sweeping into kitchens and schools and community halls, finding me and women like me, and giving us what we had never had: the understanding that what felt like private, individual problems were, in fact, socially constructed and widely experienced and so malleable. We could change them. We could change ourselves.

  It was handing me a whole new way of looking at my life, spinning connections I was only beginning to grasp.

  That's why I resented the doorbell. I had been hoping to grab a half-hour reading time between getting Star to sleep, and having to go to work. If Star hadn't been watching, I wouldn't have answered the bell. I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn't.

  Later, I used to play the same game with Zach, imagining what would have happened if he hadn't turned up at Honolulu our first night. What if I had been on my break? What if I hadn't run out after him or if he'd got fed up waiting and left? We might have missed each other forever. Imagine. I would shiver at the imagining, though we were snug under his duvet, enveloped in body heat. It all seemed so random, so accidental.

  "I don't believe in accidents," he said.

  "Well they happen, whether Zach Coleman believes in them or not."

  "Nope, no accidents." He shook his head. "No coincidence or happenstance, no such thing. No freaks or misfits, either. Just things that we don't understand."

  "Oh, Zach." He was so sweetly intense.

  That was the day I gave him the Yeats, for our two month anniversary.

  He was delighted. "The Collected Poems," he read, taking off the wrapper.

  "That Irish poet I told you about."

  "I know. I haven't forgotten." He kissed me. "Thank you."

  "You don't have to be nice about it. You think you're not interested but you will be, trust me."

  "Read me something. Read me your favorite."

  "I don't have a favorite. It's more like I have different poems for different days. I know exactly what I'm going to read to you, but first you have to get into the right place to receive it."

  "Huh?"

  "Think of it as watching somebody dance, okay?"

  "Dance?"

  "Poetry is language dancing. That's the way you have to take it in. Like you were watching a dance."

  "Okay, I'll try."

  "I'm going to start with the early stuff. His early poems are childlike in their belief in another world, less intellectual and formal than his later stuff, but for me they're magic. The lines and phrases make me feel like I've fallen into a dream... Anyway... Here goes."

  I began with The Song of The Happy Shepherd, the poem that I've turned to again and again over the years to keep me writing. "The wandering earth herself may be/ Only a sudden flaming word,/ In clanging space a moment heard,/ Troubling the endless reverie..." I looked up at him as I finished the last line -- "Dream, dream, for this is also sooth" -- and smiled to see how his eyes were shining.

  He got it.

  I knew he would.

  I moved on to The Cloths of Heaven and When You Are Old, and told him all about the poet's hopeless, unrequited love for Maud Gonne and his multiple proposals and rejections.

  "That's enough for today," I said as I finished The Two Trees. "It's like a drug, you can overdo it and then you kill the pleasure."

  Nineteen years old Zach Coleman might be, but I was living the whole love thing with him, smiling and glowing through my days. At the time, I thought it was because of what I was receiving, the attentions of this kind and handsome (young) man. Now I know it was the giving that had me feeling so good. When you're in love, you're so willing to amuse, to gratify, to charm, to pleasure... Later in a relationship, you get grudging again, but at the beginning, you give of you.

  For every long-standing couple, there is a quadrant of emotional landmarks: first kiss; first sex; first "I love you", and the biggie: moving in together. We were stuck on Phase Two. The three words were not coming out of me. He wanted to say it, but was being held back by the reluctance he sensed in me, knowing, with that knowing way of his, that it had to be me first.

  The same knowing had him pushing to meet Star.

  "I don't her to introduce boyfriends," I told him. "It would be too confusing for her."

  A flinch. He was so much younger, without a history, and hated to think of me with Brendan or anyone else.

  "Zach," I said, more gently. "In a few weeks, you're going back to college. You'll meet some preppy girl and that will be the end of it."

  "Don't say things like that." He sat up, the sheet falling from his chest.

  "Hey, take it easy."

  "You don't really believe that?"

  "I... I don't know... It's what happens."

  "What do you think I'm doing here, Mercy?" His fingers tightened, making a mark. "You know I've cancelled my summer trip to Europe to be with you."

  "Zach, stop. Let go of me."

  "Don't you know I'd give up college tomorrow for you, get a job, move in with you and Star?"

  "I'm not asking you... I'd hate you to do that. It would be all wrong."

  "I wish you would ask. I want to give you something, I want to give you everything. But you won't even give me a meeting with your daughter."

  "I will, but not just yet."

  "I'll know you're serious about me when you let me meet her."

  "I'm sorry, Zach, not yet. If you had a kid of your own, you'd..."

  "You're just scared, Mercy, but that's okay. You might know more about poetry but I know more about us. I'll just wait until you know it too."

  "Know what, you crazy man?"

  "That we were made for each other. That I'm not just a little boy for you to play with --"

  "Is that what you think I think?"

  "-- And that we are never letting each other go."

  Next time, I promised. Next vacation, I would introduce them. In the meantime, while he was away, I would prepare the ground.

  Except I didn't. Every time I went to broach the subject with Star, I was at a loss at how to start. Now I was coming round to thinking that maybe the best thing was for us to wait till he came back
at midterm break and have her meet him.

  Ding-dong, went the door again. I waved goodbye to my reading half-hour and called across to Star, doing homework at the table. "Will you get that, honey?"

  Oh, what if I hadn't? Would he would just have come back another day? Or would everything be different now?

  I turned back to the cooker, heard Star's chair scrape back, her footsteps, the creak of the front door. And then his voice. "Does Mercy Creahy live here?"

  I turned too fast, dropping the pot I was holding. Bolognaise sauce spilled all over the floor. Creahy. Nobody out here called me that. Before I came West, I had returned to using Mulcahy. And that voice. Its low timbre sent blood rushing into my skull.

  The sticky, tomato mess was oozing all over my shoes and it might as well have been glue, because I found I couldn't budge.

  "Mom...?" My name fluttered in Star's mouth. She knew something was wrong. I couldn't look at her. The door creaked and he crossed the threshold. He was coming in. Coming into our house.

  "Mercy," he said, putting himself in front of me. He looked bad, I saw that in an instant, though he'd done his best to dress himself up. Gone too far, in fact, with a suit and tie, but the suit was shiny and the shirt was faded and the shoes were bunched and knobbled. And no clothes could disguise the mottled skin and the red-rimmed eyes.

  "Oh, God," I said. And then noted, in that detached way that you do even while you're in shock, how people in moments of extremity always call to either God or their mother.

  We were frightening Star. "What is it, Mommy? What?"

  "It's all right, baby."

  "Mommy, tell me."

  "It's..."

  What could I say to her? She was beside me now, looking up at me, the false sophistication she'd adopted since turning twelve knocked off. Tugging my sleeve, eyes full of accusatory questions.

  "Mom! Tell me!"

  How was I going to find the words to explain what I could see she already knew?

  It was her father, of course. Who else but Brendan, returned from the dead to haunt us?

  You may call what I said a lie and I know you wouldn't be wrong but his dying came to me as a half-imagined dream, on the miserable Brooklyn morning after the night I discovered what he'd been doing to us. As an explanation, it felt truer than that sordid discovery and our departure, later that day with a friend.

  "Was there somebody else?" That was the question people were sure to ask if I told them we were separated. A question that undid me. Made a fool of me.

  The Brendan I thought I knew would not have been able to so tenderly share that Cape Cod weekend with me and Star in, to feed her with me and put her to bed, then bring me downstairs for dinner, her baby monitor on the table between us along with the candles and flowers and pre-dinner drinks and clink a glass of wine against mine, the way he did -- "Look in my eyes, Merce," -- and to drink and eat all the while exchanging heavy, meaningful looks that got us both worked up long before we got back upstairs and to make the kind of frenzied, wild, all-over love we made, with Star sleeping sound and oblivious in her cot beside us, knowing he had a girlfriend on the side.

  He killed us.

  So I killed him in my imagination.

  Separation didn't describe what was done to us, didn't even come close. My husband was dead. Defect of the heart, previously undetected. That was the truth of it to me.

  So why, remembering all this, did I take him back? That is the question that flays me now.

  It wasn't like he'd improved with age. Whatever had happened to Brendan since I last saw him -- most of his communications on the matter were long, circuitous rambles that told little but revealed much. He had become a man incapable of settling on anything for more than a minute. Watching TV meant flicking up and down through the channels; smoking meant lighting one cigarette from the last; telling a story meant losing his place and stumbling onto something else.

  He spent the night he came back telling us a long, allegedly funny tale about what some guy had done to him in a motel, littered with cussing and swearing, each one followed by an "excuse me". No matter how round Star's eyes grew or how often I said, "Brendan, will you please mind your language", he just excused himself and did it again, as if the apology cancelled out the use of words like "fuck" and "prick" and "motherfucker" in front of a twelve-year-old.

  I sat, offended by his careless talk and by the sprawl of him taking up way too much room. And fearful. When he tore a piece of laminate from a napkin carton and starting to pick his teeth with the edge of it, I thought: for this, for this, I have to give up my Zach. It seemed inevitable to me then. Now he was here, now Star knew about him, I was going to have to take him back.

  Poor Zach. When I told him he cried.

  Yes, tears, real ones, forehead pressed against the steering wheel of his car. He raged against me, calling me a liar, a cheat, and a whore and other horrible, hurtful things that were true. He tortured us both with his imaginings of me sleeping with this other man, this husband, and my insistence that I would not be sleeping with Brendan was spurned. What did such assurances mean from a liar?

  Trying to hold some dignity for us both, I kept bringing it back to one quiet line: "He is Star's father, Zach."

  It was no good. Zach had made an idol of me and wasn't able for the real Mercy's life, all shimmers and shades and blurry edges. His hurt was sharp and certain and pitiless and he said the most outrageous things. He'll learn, I told myself, pulling defenses up around me as I looked out the car window. Just live a while longer, my dear boy, and you'll come to see life's not so black-and-while.

  Maybe, if you were as good as Zach, it was. After he was gone, the absence of him hurt. I missed his goodness and his youth, his caramel smell and the bright metal taste of him in his secret places but mostly I missed the adoration I'd got used to, that had been turning me into something I wasn't before. I could have cried and wailed and ranted too, it would have been nice to have had that luxury, but I had to be shatterproof glass. Splintered all over, but still holding together.

  Star would have a father again. Brendan and I would synch our schedules to ensure one of us was always there for her. We would become a proper family.

  Except Brendan wouldn't co-operate. He had lived the easy life for so long that he had become incapable of doing anything for anybody else.

  "Honey, no TV for us tonight," he said to me the night after his return.

  "Huh?"

  I'd come downstairs, groggy, having dozed off beside Star while trying to get her to sleep.

  "We are going to that swish new bar down on the waterfront."

  "It's my night off, we've no sitter."

  "She's asleep now. She won't miss us for a few hours."

  Was he serious? It seemed so. "You go," I said.

  "I think I will."

  It was 4.30 a.m. when he came home, stumbling and cursing.

  I should have sent him packing then but I didn't want to allow that I'd made a mistake. I'd let Zach go to take Brendan back. I wasn't going to let him make nothing of that. We were going to make it work.

  On we staggered, with me forever forgiving the unforgivable and him forever promising promises we both knew he didn't even mean to keep.

  Guilt made him lash out at me. "It's so bad for Star, the way you indulge her."

  "Sure. Far better to indulge myself, I suppose."

  "Lying beside her every night to get her to sleep. At her age. Never leaving her out of your sight for one minute that you're not at work. The poor child can't breathe."

  "Oooh, I'm so bad. I should be the person who can't last two evenings without getting drunk or stoned."

  "A man has to do something. There's no room for anyone else in your little hothouse for two."

  "Of course, I drive you to it. You never touched a toke or a bourbon till you fetched up here."

  "God help you when she grows up," he said, his Irish accent strong in his anger. "God help her even more."

  On we went. S
trike. Strike back, each of us scoring our points,both knowing we were losing the match.

  It ended the night I came back from work at the restaurant and found a drunken mob there, three men and two girls, with Star upstairs. The thought of her rising from her sleep and seeing their carry on... I gave them all their marching orders, including him and he went, "happily", he said.

  I didn't tell Star that part, of course. I just said he'd had to go away and would be back soon. And then, weeks later, when she missed him less, that I didn't think he was going to be coming back.

  Just thirteen weeks he'd stayed for. Just long enough for her to get used to the idea of a father and be distraught at losing him all over again. Just long enough for him to have wrecked our lives twice over.

  What a mistake. I see it so clearly now. What I should have done was bid Brendan good-day when he turned up unannounced, stayed with Zach and introduced him slowly to Star. Let him grow over time into being her father. Zach would have risen to the role and all that happened later would never have happened. With Zach, I could have gone to Europe, traveled the world together, done whatever we decided to do...

  Now, I can see my taking Brendan back and letting Zach go for what it actually was: self-abuse. I made myself sorrier than any woman should ever be, not just for Star -- which was what I told myself at the time -- but because a part of me felt more comfortable with my flawed and floundering husband, or with being alone, than being with my sweet and upright Zach.

  Brendan, or loneliness, was as much as I deserved.

  Part Three: STARCROSSED

  |STÄR KRÔS|[ADJECTIVE POETIC/LITERARY]

  (of a person or a plan, especially of lovers): thwarted by bad luck.

  *

  We may call it a lie. May we, indeed? Of course Mercy Mulcahy never did anything so ordinary as lie. She was imagining. Looking through that hazy, mazy mirror of hers. The one she lives right up against, close enough to kiss. It reflects her bigger than the rest, down behind, and turns us back to front while it's at it.