Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “Is there anything we can do to help, Dad?” Annamaria asked.

  “Well, there is something.”

  “Anything, Dad.”

  “You can help your mom.”

  “Sure. How?” Annamaria was quick to answer, eager to have the conversation shift from fear to action. But she couldn’t imagine what kind of help Mom could need. No one doubted for a minute her capability to handle things; in fact, she would end up taking over like she always did. Maybe the folks needed help drawing up their wills, something she’d been trying to get them to do for ages.

  “You can support what your mom’s doing with Raelynn Blackwell.”

  Annamaria bit her tongue. How dare Dad use his cancer to manipulate her like this? She looked at her mom, and when she saw the anticipation on her face, it was too much. “How the hell,” she said, shooting daggers at her mom, “when Dad needs you, can you even consider wasting your time on Raelynn Blackwell? Is this why you’ve been calling me Annie all night, to get me on your side? Is that why you made lasagna?”

  “Enough,” Marty said. “Support your mom and you help me. That’s the way it is.”

  Annamaria squeezed her eyes tight to keep the tears at bay. Here was Dad acting like cancer was nothing to worry about and her easygoing brother a ticking time bomb, ready to explode any minute. And, as if that weren’t enough, in the midst of it all, Mom seemed even more determined than ever to jump off a cliff into who knows what, to go on yet another wild goose chase. But the worst part was that Mom and Dad had conspired to use his life-threatening illness to hold her captive to a murderer. This wasn’t like them. This wasn’t like them at all. They must be desperate. This had to be their way of coping.

  “I’ll try,” she mumbled. “I’ll try.” What else could she say?

  EIGHTEEN

  A quick glance at the odometer and the MapQuest directions indicated that Bernadette had twenty more miles to go on I-35 before turning onto Highway 195 North. After that it was only thirty-four miles to Killeen. She should be there by one thirty and back home before dark—if all went well, that is. Butterflies started flapping in her stomach as she anticipated finding Maxine Blackwell. She speculated about what she might encounter once she got there: run-down conditions, for sure, most likely a trailer. But what if Rae’s mother refused to talk to her? What if she was drunk, incoherent? Best to be prepared for anything. Above all, she needed to be or at least appear to be composed, to remember to breathe before reacting; then she’d be okay, no matter what happened.

  She still wasn’t sure, even after staring up at the ceiling and thinking about it most of last night, what would be the best way to introduce herself to Rae’s mother. Hello, I’m Bernadette Baker; your daughter killed my daughter. That would be the most direct approach but also a surefire way to get the door slammed in her face. Hello, I’m Bernadette Baker, and I’d like to talk to you about your daughter Raelynn. Maybe. Hello, I’m Bernadette Baker. Do you have a few minutes? No, too vague. It hadn’t occurred to her before now that someone else might answer the door. She decided the first thing she should do was ask for Mrs. Blackwell. Or should it be Ms.? Or maybe she should call her by her first name. She tried it out. Hello, are you Maxine Blackwell? I’m Bernadette Baker. May I come in and talk to you?

  A few more tries and she settled on Hello, are you Maxine Blackwell? I’m Bernadette Baker and I’m here about your daughter, Raelynn. May I come in, please? That was probably the best she could do. She rehearsed it out loud, making sure to speak in a calm, matter-of-fact voice so as not to cause alarm or raise suspicion. She expected getting Rae’s mother to talk to her to be the most difficult part, but she shouldn’t have to worry too much after that. She had her arguments ready: seeing Rae would give Maxine a chance to come to terms with her relationship with her daughter—it was Rae’s last wish to see her—it was the right thing to do—Gatesville was less than an hour’s drive from Killeen—she could take Maxine there if she wanted, help get a visit approved with the prison authorities, make all the arrangements.

  She drove past a billboard announcing last year’s Belton Fourth of July Rodeo with a cowboy on a bucking Longhorn bursting through a blur of red, white, and blue U.S. and Texas flags. That meant she was getting close now. Sure enough, a few miles later she saw a small sign that said Killeen, Texas, Population 116,934.

  She propped the directions on the dashboard, noting that she was on course when she passed the Hallmark Lanes Bowling Alley set back from a large parking lot filled with cars and trucks. When she passed a strip mall with a McDonald’s and a Red Robin restaurant, she decided that after she’d seen Maxine Blackwell she would reward herself with a burger and fries. For now, a few bites of her energy bar would have to do. At an intersection at the edge of town, where the directions said to turn onto a backcountry dirt road, there were items for sale on the porch of a sagging house—an old refrigerator, an easy chair with fluffy white stuffing peeking through holes in the seat, a metal cabinet, a Formica table and chairs, an assortment of small household items. She slowed down, mostly out of curiosity, saw nothing worth stopping for on the way back.

  As she drove on through rolling hills dotted with Texas Ash, red oaks, and scrub brush, a cloud of dust from a Fort Hood helicopter suddenly disturbed the quiet setting, scattering a herd of cows just before a camouflage-covered Humvee whipped by in the opposite direction. She looked at the odometer and saw that she’d gone two and three-tenths miles since the turn, which meant she should have arrived at her destination, so she pulled over. But there was no mailbox or address sign, only a narrow path made by truck-tire tracks off to the right that she decided to follow. But the front tire of her old station wagon dove into a hole right away, and the car lurched to a stop. She rocked it back and forth—a trick she’d learned from driving in Minnesota blizzards years ago—and after several tries was able to free the wheel. Not about to take any more chances, she backed up and parked her car on the side of the road. She would have to walk in.

  It didn’t take her long to realize she shouldn’t have worn sandals, as scrub brush started poking through the spaces between her toes. But irritating as that was, it was nothing compared to the tiny fire ants biting her ankles. She slapped at them while at the same time dodging their anthills as best she could. She heard something scurrying through the woods, at which point she considered turning back; who knew what hidden dangers lurked behind the trees in rural Texas. Then she told herself she was being silly, that it was just a raccoon or some other innocuous creature going about its business and she should go about hers as well.

  She took a deep breath and resumed walking until she came to a clearing. A footpath through knee-high weeds led to a ramshackle house with an unpainted exterior and a cracked roller-coaster foundation that had to be a feast for termites. Pieces of tattered cardboard fluttered over shattered windows, shingles were missing from large sections of the roof, and the screens on the sagging front porch were pretty much ripped to shreds.

  She stumbled up the crumbling steps toward the lopsided screen door that was stuck partway open, leaving a space just wide enough for her to squeeze through. Rusty nails stuck up through the floorboards; with each cautious step she took, she was afraid that she’d either step on one of them or that the sagging porch would collapse under her weight and take her with it. With a sigh of relief, she reached the front door and knocked on it. No answer.

  “Hello, is anybody home?”

  She knocked again, louder. Still no answer.

  “Hello? Hello?” She pressed her ear against the door. Nothing. She reached for the doorknob but then pulled her hand back. Wasn’t she trespassing? What if the person with the truck came back and found her here? But wasn’t the house too dilapidated for human habitation? Wasn’t it most likely abandoned? Maybe teenagers used it as a hangout. But that wouldn’t explain the clean rag rug in front of the door, the way the porch floor looked recently swept. She decided to take a quick peek inside. If it looked like people li
ved there, she would either wait for them to come home or she’d come back later, maybe leave a note. She tried to turn the doorknob and it spun around in her hand. She pushed on it, and the door creaked open a crack.

  “Who is it?” The voice on the other side of the door was low and hoarse, almost inaudible.

  “Hello?”

  Before Bernadette could say anything else, the door swung open. The first thing she saw was a rifle pointed right at her face. Then she saw the wisp of a woman holding the rifle, her trembling finger perilously close to the trigger. Finally, she saw that the rifle was scratched and rusted, which gave her hope that it might not work. But she wasn’t about to take any chances. She raised her palms in a gesture of surrender and, being careful not to lose her balance, lifted one foot up and placed it down behind her, then the other. As she backed away she reminded herself to breathe, to stay calm.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said in the most natural tone of voice she could summon. “I didn’t think anyone was here.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “My name is Bernadette. I have a message from Raelynn Blackwell for her mother.”

  The rifle crashed to the floor, and the woman’s body slumped over.

  Bernadette took a step toward her, still keeping her hands in the air as a precaution. “Are you Maxine Blackwell?”

  “I’m Raelynn’s mother.”

  Maxine Blackwell didn’t look anything like Bernadette had imagined she would. Her eighty-pound frame—if she even weighed that much—seemed to be drowning inside a crisp white blouse and white slacks; there was a sheer red scarf tied around her neck, and red loop earrings dangled from pierced ears. It was obvious right away that she was not well. Not well at all. First, there was her hair: colorless, almost transparent, with bald patches exposing blue veins on her scalp. Her face and eyes were yellow, her cheeks skeletal like those of someone exhumed from the grave.

  “May I come in?”

  Rae’s mother tipped her head to the side and Bernadette, taking the gesture as an invitation, stepped into the room. Given the decrepit exterior of the house, she wasn’t at all surprised by the bare, rotting wood walls; faded patches of wallpaper with pink roses; crumbled ceiling tiles dangling over a mattress on the floor in the corner. In the middle of the room, a lumpy overstuffed chair faced an ancient television set that was balanced on a much-too-small wooden crate. A brown refrigerator at the far end of the room was so lopsided, it seemed on the verge of toppling over. What did surprise Bernadette was how clean everything was, how orderly. Even the yellow and red polka-dotted bedspread, though faded and torn, was tucked with square corners over the sides of the mattress.

  Maxine Blackwell hobbled over to a slab of wood held up by two wooden crates and motioned for Bernadette to sit on a flimsy metal chair at the makeshift kitchen table. Then she lowered her own frail body onto a lopsided stool across from her. The kitchen counter was uncluttered, the sink and stove a gleaming white. Not a single dust particle floated in the ray of sunlight streaming through the cracked window.

  “You know my daughter?” Maxine Blackwell said. “You saw her?”

  “Yes. I saw her this week. Tuesday.”

  “My Raelee will be gone soon. It was on the news.” The woman’s voice shook, and she twisted her mouth the way people do to keep from crying when she called her daughter Raelee.

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you again? How do you know Raelee?”

  “My name is Bernadette Baker. Your daughter killed my daughter.”

  Silence. They stared at each other. Bernadette didn’t know what to say next. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that.

  Rae’s mother shook her head with a vehemence that didn’t seem possible from someone so frail. “My Raelee was a good girl,” she said with a weak yet unmistakable huff in her voice. Her thin chest rose up in a challenge.

  “Yes,” Bernadette said.

  “It weren’t her fault she had a bad mother.” Maxine Blackwell shrank forward with her chest curved inward.

  “Your daughter wants to see you.”

  “Is Raelee…? I mean, how is she?” Maxine’s hand flew up to her mouth just as a sob escaped from her lips, making her sound as if she was choking.

  “They say she does a lot to help others there.”

  “That would be like her. That would be just like my Raelee.” Maxine Blackwell twisted her scarf around her neck, tighter and tighter, until her face turned almost as red as her scarf and she started to cough. She fumbled in the pocket of her slacks for a handkerchief, and when the coughing fit ended, Bernadette saw that it was covered with bloody splotches. She looked away.

  “She wants to make peace with you.”

  Rae’s mother shook her head. Tears filled the cracks in her hollow cheeks.

  “It’s something good you can do for her before she dies.”

  “The only good I can do for my Raelee now is keep my bad self away. I ain’t never been nothing but a curse to her. I weren’t never a mother to her. Not to none of my kids.”

  “You sound like a mother when you call her my Raelee and insist that she was a good girl. That’s what mothers do. They defend their kids.”

  Maxine Blackwell looked at her sideways and shook her head.

  “Believe me,” Bernadette said, “I know. If anyone ever dared to say anything bad about my kids, I would defend them to the death.” She stopped and scolded herself for such a poor choice of words. “I hear that protective tone in your voice. That’s what a mother sounds like.”

  “My Raelee was the real mother. She protected the others. It done broke that girl’s heart when they was all taken away. It’s my fault what happened.”

  “It sounds like it broke your heart, too.”

  The look of pain on Maxine Blackwell’s face at that moment plunged so deep into Bernadette’s heart it made her wonder if this was what a heart attack felt like.

  “I don’t deserve to live,” Maxine said. “Your daughter is dead because of me. And now my daughter is going to die because of me. I’m the one should be dead by now.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “It don’t matter that I am. That don’t make for no excuse.”

  Bernadette was momentarily stunned to hear her say almost the exact same words Rae had said. “No one should be defined just by the bad things they’ve done,” she said.

  “I done nothing but bad by my Raelee. I won’t do no more wrong.”

  “No one is all bad, and wrongs can be made right,” Bernadette said, even as Rae’s words rang in her head: Ma was right, I was born wrong. I was just born wrong.

  Maxine Blackwell squinted as if searching deep inside for something, anything, that might not be bad about herself. It took a long time before she spoke again.

  “The only mother thing I ever did was birth my kids,” she finally said. “My Raelee was born March 3, 1972; Timmy was June 16, 1977; Anthony was September 8, 1978; Jenny was January 20, 1980.”

  “See,” Bernadette said, “no one but a mother could rattle off her kids’ birthdates like that.”

  “…and the baby was born in 1985.”

  Bernadette looked down at the table, thinking what a coincidence it was that Veronica would be the same age as Rae’s baby brother. In an ordinary situation, she would say that out loud, the way people do when they meet for the first time and discover they have something in common. But she didn’t. Not this time. Somehow it wasn’t right.

  “My Raelee never gave me no trouble.”

  “Veronica was a good girl, too. I always thought it was because she was my youngest, but then, Rae was your oldest, wasn’t she? My oldest, she’s a girl too; we don’t get along very well. My husband says it’s because we’re too much alike, but I don’t think we’re alike at all. My son Fin is most like me. I’m closest to him.”

  Bernadette watched Maxine Blackwell drop her head down onto the table. What am I doing, she asked herself. Here she was acting as if they were two normal
mothers talking about their kids over coffee. She should have had the sense to keep her mouth shut. Wasn’t Rae’s mother having enough trouble holding herself together as it was? It was one thing to lose a child, as they both had, but a different thing altogether to know you were responsible. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to carry such a heavy burden of guilt and think there was no way to make it right. But it wasn’t too late. Rae and her mother could still come to terms with the past. They could at least try. But how was she to convince Maxine of that? Maybe a more indirect approach would work.

  “Tell me about your other children,” she said.

  Maxine Blackwell shook her head. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “How can you even ask me that? I was promised they would be taken care of when I gave them up. Don’t you think I want to know they was?”

  “You gave them up to protect them.”

  Maxine Blackwell shrugged. Then, after a few minutes of silence, her eyes opened wider and her eyebrows arched up as if something had just occurred to her. “Does my Raelee want to see them?”

  “No. She doesn’t want to hurt them. She thinks they would have visited her by now if they wanted to see her.”

  “Do you think it would help her if she knowed they were okay?”

  “I think it might help both of you to know that. If you write down their birthdates, I can try to find out.”

  Bernadette thought about what a strange twist of fate it was that had brought the two of them together, two mothers bonded by a desire to protect their children. Yet both of them had failed, hadn’t they? Her Veronica was dead, and Maxine’s Raelee would soon be dead, too. But there was one big difference: while she had Marty, Fin, Patty, and even Annamaria to help her cope with Veronica’s death, Maxine Blackwell had no one to help her. No one at all.

  “My mother overdosed,” Bernadette said, “pain pills. Her father, my grandfather, died an alcoholic.”

  “My mama never could stop drinking,” Maxine said. “I never knew my papa.”