Mercy

by Sarah L. Thomson

  “Haley, you dropped this.”

  The voice was quiet. Haley turned to look at Alan O’Neil, holding out a page of her notes. She hadn’t even heard him come up behind her.

  “That was really interesting,” he said calmly, and eased past Haley in the narrow aisle between the desks. Pausing, he waited for Thomas to move. He looked as if the possibility of Thomas doing anything else had never crossed his mind.

  Thomas fell back a few paces and turned, heading for the door. Andy and Kevin followed.

  Haley felt ridiculously relieved, almost shaky. “Thanks.”

  “For what?” Alan looked back. “Picking up your notes?”

  “Yeah.” Haley tried to remember if she’d ever talked to Alan O’Neil before, beyond “Excuse me,” and “What chapter are we supposed to read?” Didn’t he play basketball? Or hockey? Or something? She couldn’t imagine why he’d come to her rescue, but she thought she was even more grateful to him for pretending there’d been nothing to rescue her from than for making Thomas Jaffe back off. “Yeah, for picking up my notes. Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  She expected Alan to drift off once they reached the hallway and she caught up with Mel, but somehow the three of them stayed together into the cafeteria and through the line past pizza, chicken sandwiches, and the salad bar. Haley, her slice of pepperoni cooling on her plate, flicked quick glances at Alan’s face after they’d all found seats at one of the little round tables. He’d photograph well, that fair skin against the black of his eyes and eyebrows and shaggy, loose hair. All that contrast. Alan and Mel were talking about Lucy Williams’s great-great-grandmother, who’d survived the Titanic. Haley’s fingers itched for her camera.

  “Haley, what do you think? The Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake?”

  “What?”

  Mel rolled her eyes. “What disaster would you rather have an ancestor live through?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know. As long as they live, who cares?”

  “The practical approach,” Alan said thoughtfully. He disdainfully removed the lettuce from his sandwich. “Efficient, but a little lacking in nuance.”

  “So if you’re not paying the least bit of attention to what we’re saying,” Mel inquired, poking around for the bits of ham in her salad, “what are you spending your lunchtime thinking about?”

  “Mercy, I guess.” Which was better than saying out loud that she’d been thinking about the dark lines of Alan’s eyebrows and the way his jaw moved when he chewed.

  Mel sighed. “Haley, your project’s done. You definitely got an A. Relax, can’t you?”

  Haley looked down, surprised to find half of her pizza gone. She didn’t remember taking a bite. “I know. It’s just . . . it’s just . . . I don’t get it, really.”

  “Get what?” Mel asked patiently.

  “How people could do that. I mean, they knew her. Exeter was a really small town back then.” Haley hadn’t actually been thinking about this, but now that she’d started talking, it was as if it had been in her mind all along. “We’re talking about people who knew her when she was a little girl, people she went to school with. Her family. How could they have thought she was evil?” Actually evil, like some monster out of a horror movie. Fresh, warm blood in her dead, cold heart.

  Haley blinked hard to get that image out of her brain and went on talking. “How could her father have thought so?”

  “Well, he didn’t think so,” Mel pointed out. “You said. Other people talked him into it.”

  “But he let them. He agreed. How could anybody do that?”

  Blood so wet and fresh that it glistened. Like those red stains on Mercy’s glove.

  “That’s easy. Fear.”

  Haley looked over at Alan. He shrugged and took a huge bite of his sandwich.

  “You said it all yourself, Haley.” He swallowed. “Tuberculosis had a fifty percent death rate. There were, what, six people in Mercy’s family? And four of them died?” He really had been paying attention to her report. Haley was surprised. She’d assumed that most people, except for Mr. Samuelson (who got paid to listen) had been dozing or daydreaming or thinking about their own reports. “People were scared,” Alan went on. “You can’t blame them, really. When people get scared, they just get stupid. And they look around for somebody to blame.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Haley snapped. She looked down at her plate, smeared with greasy red tomato sauce, and her stomach heaved. She had to swallow hard. “I don’t care how scared they were. Her father could have stuck to reason, at least. If he’d loved her at all, he would have.”

  “He was worried about his son, though,” Mel pointed out, looking at Haley a little oddly. “What was his name—Edwin? Hey, is Eddie named after him?”

  “Eddie’s Edward. He’s named after Elaine’s dad.” Haley peeled clingy plastic wrap away from a brownie, hoping a bite of that would get the sour taste out of her mouth. “All that proves is that Mercy’s dad loved Edwin more than her. Typical. For that time. Loving the son more.”

  “The son was still alive,” Alan said quietly. “I mean, Mercy was already—Haley? You okay?”

  Haley dropped the brownie on the table.

  “If you really love somebody, you don’t stop just because they’re dead,” she said coldly. She got to her feet, snatched up her tray, and went to dump the rest of her lunch in the trash.

  Suddenly she hated school. Hated the bright, loud cafeteria, hated the talking and laughing and shouting that battered at her ears. Hated the smells of steamed food and salt and grease. Hated the hallways with their shiny linoleum, full of jerks like Thomas Jaffe, full of people like Mel and now, maybe, Alan who were supposed to be her friends but who just didn’t get it. They didn’t even get that there was something they couldn’t understand.

  So she did something she had never done in all of her years at school. She walked out.

  It was ridiculous, how easy it was. She just went to her locker, stuffed her laptop and a few books into her backpack, grabbed her jacket, and left by the front door. Nobody stopped her. Nobody asked where she was going. Maybe they thought she was sick, or assumed she had a doctor’s appointment. Maybe they just didn’t care.

  Haley set off quickly down the street. She wanted to see the one person she could count on to understand death and dying.

  Jake, stretched out with a book in his armchair, glanced at the clock when Haley opened his door. But that was all. He must have known she was cutting class, but he didn’t say a word about the time.

  “You brought your laptop?” he asked, eyeing her backpack. “You got some new photos to show me?”

  The tightness inside Haley’s chest eased a little. And she felt herself relaxing more when she took a second look at her cousin. Jake looked better. His voice was firmer. His eyes were alert.

  Haley grinned to herself as she flipped open her computer and turned it on. Maia meant well, but she wasn’t a doctor. She didn’t know everything. Setting the laptop on the table by Jake’s chair, she nudged aside the black ashtray. It had a half-smoked cigarette in it. Liam must have been by to visit, even though it wasn’t Saturday. Haley turned off the tall floor lamp so nothing would reflect off the screen.

  “See, those are the ones for my history project. The gravestone and the cemetery . . .” She tilted the laptop so that Jake could see and tapped the touchpad to move through the images.

  “That’s good. The one with the tree leaning toward the grave. And the black-and-white. Strong. Go back, I want to see that one of the stone wall again.”

  Most people—even Mel, even her dad and Elaine—flipped through photos like the goal was to get to the end as quickly as possible. Jake really looked.

  A stray thought flickered into her mind. Alan O’Neil, now. Would he really look?

  The thought of Alan brought her mind back to the lunch she’d walked out on, and the tomato sauce on her plate. Sticky and red, like half-dried blood.

  And that m
ade her think of the stains on Mercy’s glove.

  She glanced quickly up at Jake’s face as he stared at the screen. Would he laugh if she told him how creeped out she’d been?

  No, of course not. Jake had never laughed at her.

  “Listen,” she said.

  “What?” Jake dug into his shirt pocket for a book of matches, picked up the half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray, lit it, and put it to his lips. The tip glowed as he breathed in, a spot of vivid orange.

  Haley stared at him in shock. “What are you doing?”

  Jake blew white smoke gently at the computer screen. It swirled and drifted like eddies in a quiet stream. “Nice. I like how the line of the stone wall moves to that upper corner. What were you going to say?”

  “You’re smoking!”

  “Well—yeah.” Jake looked down at the cigarette between his fingers. “I used to, a little, in college. It was hanging out with all those theater majors. Half of them smoke, I don’t know why. You’d think they’d want to take care of their voices. I guess it’s a weight thing—”

  “You can’t smoke!” Haley was outraged.

  “Why not?” Without moving his head, Jake lifted his eyes to her face.

  “Because. Because it will—”

  Jake waited, quietly, for her to finish. She couldn’t.

  “It’s gross. It’s disgusting,” she said at last, fighting the urge to snatch the cigarette out of Jake’s hand and grind it to ash beneath her shoe. “It’s—and what about secondhand smoke?” she demanded triumphantly. “You think I want to breathe that every time I come over?”

  “Okay,” Jake said mildly. He put the cigarette out in the ashtray. “I won’t smoke when you’re here. You could open the window, if it bothers you.”

  If it bothered her! Haley felt as if an electric shock had hit her right on top of her head. Its energy sizzled along her nerves. She wanted to jump up, yell, run, hit something as hard as she could. How could Jake just sit there calmly, like it was no big deal?

  “Come on, Haley. It’s not like it’s going to kill me.”

  After the heat of the electric shock, icy cold. “Don’t do that,” Haley said.

  “Do what?”

  “Make jokes.” Her voice still rasped, as if the smoke from the cigarette had already corroded her vocal cords. “Like you don’t care.”

  “I’m the one who’s dying, Haley.” He could have said it impatiently. But there was sympathy in his face, gentleness in his voice. Too much. Haley felt her throat closing up with that old, sharp pain that meant tears would be on the way soon if she didn’t change the subject quickly. “I pretty much have to care. I’m just . . .” He put a hand out and flicked his fingers into the air, as if brushing something insubstantial away. “Not going to cry about it every minute. What do you expect me to do?”

  “Try.”

  She whispered it. Jake frowned and leaned forward a little, as if he hadn’t quite heard her.

  Haley leaned forward too, her hands on her knees. Her heart began to beat a little quicker. “You could, you could talk to the doctors some more. You could—” Jake was shaking his head. Haley’s fingers were pinching her knees tightly. She’d have bruises in the morning. Right now she hardly noticed. “There might be something you could do!” Jake looked as if he felt sorry for her, and the idea put an edge in her voice, made it louder. He shouldn’t feel sorry for her, he should listen to her; she was right. “If you went back to the hospital, tried some new stuff, if you just tried—”

  “I did try. I tried for a long time. Now I’m done.”

  Haley froze. She couldn’t move. Except for her heart, which still beat out a frantically quick tattoo against her ribs.

  “I’m sorry. Really. To put you through all this. But—you remember my mom, Haley? You remember how she died?”

  Aunt Nell’s face on the hospital pillow. Her lips and eyelids an ashy blue. Her skin as pale as her wispy, white-blonde hair.

  “For a year, all we talked about was her health. Or lack thereof. The last year of my mom’s life, all we talked about was tests and medicine and how many milligrams of this and how many milligrams of that. For a year. The last thing I said to her was, ‘The next transfusion’s at eight-thirty tomorrow.’ That’s the last thing I said to my mother. I just don’t want to do that again.”

  He picked up the unlit cigarette and tapped it restlessly on the edge of the ashtray.

  “You can get as mad as you want,” he told Haley. “But remember, when you’re done being angry, I’ll still be dying.”

  Haley didn’t talk much for the rest of the day. Somehow she felt as if she needed to keep everything quiet. As if there was an unexploded bomb inside her and any loud sound, any sudden movement, would set off the explosion.

  The bomb had started ticking with Jake’s words. I’ll still be dying.

  She stayed silent all through dinner. Nobody could carry on a conversation at the table anyway. Not with Eddie trying as hard as he could to wear most of his food as body art.

  She headed up to her room after the meal was over, her feet in thick socks noiseless on the stairs. She was so quiet that Elaine and her father, still in the dining room, didn’t hear her.

  But she could hear them.

  “ . . . really don’t know what do with her.” Elaine was speaking. “Half the time she doesn’t say a word, or she’s so mad at Eddie . . . treats me like the evil stepmother . . .”

  And then her dad’s voice, heavy and resigned. “I’ll talk to her.”

  So now she was a problem to be talked to, was she? Well, he couldn’t talk to her if she wasn’t in the house. Haley backed up quietly. Kitchen, back door. Shoes, where were her shoes? Elaine’s pumps and her running shoes, Dad’s clay-splattered work boots, Eddie’s tiny sneakers. There were so many shoes here, nobody could ever find anything. All this clutter, all over the house; no wonder all her stuff got lost—shoes, gloves, everything. Everything she ever cared about vanished.

  At last Haley found her sneakers and was bent over, lacing them up, when her dad came into the hallway, bringing the earthy scent of clay with him, buried deep in the threads of his old corduroy shirt, once green, now gray. He’d washed up at the studio but he’d missed the smudge of clay that had dried in his left eyebrow.

  “Taking Sunny out?”

  Haley nodded. Her throat ached fiercely. She yanked a shoelace tight.

  “Well. She could use a break, I think. Maybe she’s not the only one?”

  Haley straightened up and gave him a blank stare, as if she couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.

  “Honey. I know Eddie can be a handful, but this is temporary, you know? He’s not going to be two forever. You just need to be patient.”

  “Sure.” Gloves in her pockets. Scarf. Sunny came over, her claws clicking on the tile of the kitchen floor. Why are you putting on your jacket? What’s going on? Does it involve me? She poked her nose under Haley’s hands.

  “You went to see Jake today? How’s he doing?”

  “Fine—”

  The word barely got out of her mouth before her throat clenched tight. The hot, prickly pressure of tears stung behind her eyes.

  An arm in soft, dusty corduroy came around Haley’s shoulders, hugging her close. But Haley couldn’t relax into the warmth. She couldn’t let herself slip. There was that bomb inside her, ticking away.

  “Honey.” Her father’s voice was low and rough. “I know it’s hard, but think about everything Jake’s gone through. Death’s really going to be a mercy for him, when it comes.”

  “It’s not!”

  Haley yelled it, flinging off her father’s arm. Now there was no danger of crying, even though her eyes still stung and her throat hurt so badly it felt like her words were shredding it on their way out.

  “So it’s okay?” she demanded, glaring at her father. “It’s just fine that, that—”

  “Haley.” Now her dad was frowning, and his voice was a warning. “I care about Ja
ke too. You’re not the only one who—”

  Haley snatched Sunny’s leash from the hook by the door and the dog began to fling herself from side to side in the narrow hallway, thumping into Haley’s father’s knees, nearly knocking him down.

  “I better take her out,” she muttered, and bent down to grab the scruff of Sunny’s neck, clip the leash on her collar as she stood still for a microsecond of quivering impatience, and let the dog drag her out the door.

  How could he say that? Haley didn’t bother to zip up her coat; her fury was warming enough. She yanked Sunny away from a fascinating stop sign. A mercy? That was just one of those stupid things people said when they didn’t want to admit that things were awful. It’s God’s will. A blessing in disguise. What crap.

  “Jake’s twenty-three,” Haley said angrily to Sunny, who looked up intelligently, as if in agreement, and then buried her nose in a drift of leaves. “He’s twenty-three.” Jake hadn’t even gotten to finish college. He’d never gone to New York to work in a theater. He’d never traveled to India, to Spain, to all those places he used to talk about. He’d never even seen the last set he’d designed on the stage. And now he wasn’t going to do anything but die.

  It wasn’t a mercy. It wasn’t a blessing in disguise. It wasn’t anything but horrible. And it wasn’t fair.

  Haley pulled Sunny close by her side and stepped out from the curb. Then she flinched back, grabbing at the dog’s leash with both hands. A car swerved; a horn blared. Dirty, gritty air buffeted Haley. Her heel hit the curb and she sat down hard.

  Her heart thumped. Dead. She could have been dead. Right there. And Sunny too.

  A new grave in the cemetery for her, this time. Neatly marked out with orange nylon rope. Just waiting for someone to come and dig, and then to lower her down.

  Haley pulled Sunny close, hugging her tight. The dog leaned into her, panting happily, warm and heavy and solid.

  She didn’t want to get up. Didn’t want to cross the street. Didn’t really want to move.

  She wanted to stay right here.