Just Mercy: A Novel

by Dorothy Van Soest

  “No, she couldn’t have.” It was Dad’s voice, much louder than usual.

  “I shudder to think about what she was spared.” This was Mom.

  Annamaria thought she was going to explode. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands shook. She slapped at her cheeks until they burned red. “No way, no way, no way. Veronica was nothing like her. Nothing at all.” The words kept spitting out of her mouth until the pressure of her mom’s hands on each side of her face made them stop.

  “It’s okay, Annie, it’s okay.”

  Her dad’s hands were on her arms now, guiding her to the front of the couch, urging her to sit down. Then Patty nestled in close, her arm around her, squeezing her shoulder.

  “Why did you have to tell us?” Annamaria heard the distant wail of her voice sounding as if it was coming from someone other than herself, someone little and far away.

  “We don’t keep secrets in our family,” her mom said.

  “No, we don’t.” It was Dad.

  “Gran? If Aunt Veronica and Rae were sisters… then… wouldn’t…”

  “Half,” Bernadette said. “They’re half sisters.”

  “So, like, that means my mom and Uncle Fin are Raelynn Blackwell’s adoptive half-sister and half-brother or something?”

  “Yes.” It was Fin. Too loud.

  Annamaria’s eyes stung. Her stomach contracted. She bent forward with her face between her knees, her hands over her ears.

  “So what are you going to do now, Gran?”

  “I’m going to see Rae again.”

  “And do what?” Annamaria asked in a weak voice.

  “Whatever I can. She’s Veronica’s sister.”

  Annamaria’s stomach churned, and its contents started to heave up into her throat. Her eyes watered. “I need some air” was all she could manage to say. With one hand clutching her stomach and the other covering her mouth, she lurched out the front door and stumbled away from the house.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  A stream of light, on its way toward dusk but not quite dusk, moved across Annamaria’s desk as she stood with her back against the sink, following the rays with her eyes. Nothing was real. Everything was upside down. She had no memory of how she had gotten to her office. All she knew what that she couldn’t stay at her folks’ house another minute, couldn’t listen to them talk about it as if it mattered. As if it changed anything. Veronica was still dead, wasn’t she, and all that talk about good babies and bad babies, about who’s related to whom, didn’t change a damn thing.

  She wiped her face with a paper towel. Then she reached into the mini-refrigerator next to the sink and pulled out a bottle of white wine. With the bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, she walked over to her desk and filled the glass to the rim. After a couple of sips, she was calm enough to reach for the phone. Her mom answered right away.

  “Are you all right, Annie?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, an automatic response. “Is Patty…?”

  “She’s fine, honey. We’re making chocolate chip cookies. Let her stay the night. I’ll bring her home first thing in the morning. Where are you? We’re worried about you.”

  “I’m at my office.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then her mom said, “It might help to talk about it.”

  “Just tell Patty I love her. I’ll be all right.” She hung up the phone, fast, before her mom could ask any more questions.

  She would be all right. All she needed was a glass of wine to cool her down and a legal brief to distract her. She reached into her desk drawer and grabbed a random folder, but the words inside bounced around on the page like Mexican jumping beans. She pinched her eyes, but still the words were nothing but a gray blur. She gave up and sat back, the only sound in the gloomy silence the squeaking of her chair whenever she moved to refill her wine glass. The next thing she knew, her office was dark and the bottle was empty.

  Outside the window, lights shimmered here and there from houses tucked into the hillside as families prepared and ate dinners, watched television together, talked. She wondered what her family was doing now, whether Fin was still at her folks’ house. Maybe they were talking about Dad’s cancer; was she missing the most recent update? Maybe they were talking about how Mom was going to break the news to Raelynn Blackwell. Or maybe, just maybe, they were talking about her. She shouldn’t have run out of the house like that. But then, no one had asked her to stay, had they?

  A wave of loneliness hit her then with such force that it drove her back to the refrigerator for another bottle of wine. She switched on the floor lamp and flopped onto the couch.

  “What the hell are you smiling about?” she said as she lifted the glass to her lips.

  She shook her head. So now she was hallucinating? “Fin is not here,” she said out loud. She was alone, in her office, with no one to talk to but herself. No one to see how upset she was at Mom for caring more about Veronica’s murderer than about anyone else—no one to see how worried she was that Fin might cross over the line into insanity—no one to see what was happening to her—no one to hear her confess that, even though she said she didn’t believe it, she knew Mom had told the truth.

  “Why the hell don’t you call Mom and tell her that?” she said out loud. But she made no move to do it. No, if she told her mom that she believed what she had said about Veronica and Raelynn Blackwell being sisters, her mom would want to know how she felt about it. And there was no way Annamaria could tell her it was triggering something inside that was so deep she couldn’t reach it, so menacing that she was afraid to even try. No way she could talk about how it took her breath away to feel Patty’s vulnerable body pressed against hers today when they were on the couch, to hear her daughter’s sweet voice—her poor baby trying to reassure her that everything was going to be all right. No way she could admit how terrified she was. No, there was no way she could tell Mom any of that, no way she could understand. How could she, when she couldn’t even understand that all Annamaria had ever wanted was justice for Veronica?

  She poured herself another glass of wine and looked at a framed eight-by-ten family picture on the coffee table. The photo had been taken the last time they were all together for Christmas. Mom sat in the middle, with Dad to her right with one arm around her shoulder and the other around Veronica. Fin was next to Veronica, his arm around her, too, intersecting with Dad’s. And there she was, on the other side of Mom, her arms wound around then-six-year-old Patty, who was sitting between her legs.

  “I want us back,” she whispered as she picked the picture up and looked into their laughing faces. “I just want us back.”

  She pressed her family to her breast with one hand, picked up the wine glass with the other, and stumbled over to her desk. She propped the picture up next to her computer and sat down. What she was about to do didn’t make any sense. But it was the only thing she could think of doing, the one thing she knew how to do best. She turned on the computer and started to type.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Fin hadn’t spoken since Bernadette picked him up this morning, so all she could do was guess what he was thinking from the jumbo mustard-yellow letters on the cardinal-red tee shirt he was wearing—Love on the front and is everything on the back. It worried her, though not for the first time, that one of these days Fin’s loving spirit was going to crush him. It’s not that she thought he was too compassionate. Heavens no, she loved that about him. It’s just that he had never learned to contain his caring. She tipped her head in the direction of a sign that said it was ten miles to Gatesville.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  He sighed, and out of the corner of her eye she saw his head go up a little, then drop back down. She hoped the conditions in the women’s prison wouldn’t be too much for him, that he wouldn’t get overwhelmed when he found himself face to face with Rae for the first time. She’d tried to talk him out of coming with her. When that had failed, she’d gone ahead and asked Regis to get him on the a
pproved visitors list and then done her best to tell Fin what to expect. But there was no way anyone could ever be prepared for Gatesville. She sure hadn’t been.

  “You can change your mind,” she said.

  He shook his head, kept staring straight ahead.

  “It’s okay. If you decide you don’t want to do this.”

  “I have to,” he said.

  Bernadette couldn’t help but smile. Even now, four days later, it warmed her heart to think about how well Fin had taken the news. She felt strangely grounded by Patty’s curiosity, as if it normalized things somewhat, and she would be forever grateful for Marty’s unconditional support. It was Annamaria who worried her.

  “You’re not going to tell her, are you?” Fin asked.

  She squirmed at the intensity in his voice.

  “You are, aren’t you?” From the way his lips curled downward and his brow furrowed into a tangled mass on his forehead, it was clear to her that Fin was making an accusation, not asking a question.

  “I want to do the right thing,” she said. “I keep thinking she’s entitled to know.” She ran her hand through her short hair, and its coarse gray strands prickled her fingertips.

  “Don’t tell her, Mom.”

  One minute she agreed with him, but then the next minute she thought it was only right to tell the truth. She worried, though, that there might not be enough time left for Rae to come to terms with the fact that she’d killed her own sister. So maybe it was better if she never knew. Bernadette was glad she no longer believed in an afterlife; at least she didn’t have to worry that Rae would find out that way. Still, afterlife or not, her motivation for telling the truth shouldn’t be based on fear of being found out. It should be about doing the right thing. She hated not being sure, no matter how many times Regis told her that ambivalence was a natural part of the human condition.

  “What does Dad think?” Fin asked.

  “He says I’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

  “What would he do?”

  “You know your dad. He works things out in his head. He doesn’t need to do things hands on like I do.”

  “How about Regis? I suppose being a preacher and all, he would say ‘Thou shalt not lie’ or something.”

  Bernadette ignored the snort at the end of his sentence. “Regis never tells me what to do,” she said. “Except when I told him about Veronica and Rae being sisters, he right away said I was not to go to Gatesville without him and that he would rearrange his schedule and meet us there.”

  They drove for a while without talking, but the silence made Bernadette more nervous. “Rae cried when I told her I’d try to find her mother,” she said.

  “That’s the point, Mom. You promised to look for her mother. You don’t have to tell her anything else.”

  “We don’t keep secrets in our family, Fin. You know that.”

  She saw the pink splotches spring up on his neck and didn’t know if that meant he was hurt or angry. She used to be able to tell, but it was harder these days. She hadn’t meant to scold him, didn’t mean it to sound so harsh. But she did believe family secrets were harmful—at least as a general principle. Still, was it always wrong not to tell the truth? She patted Fin’s hand, a half-hearted attempt at best to reassure him, not enough to drive the apprehension from his eyes. She wished she could tell him there was nothing to worry about, that his dad was right that she would know what to do. But that would be lying. The truth was, she wasn’t at all sure that she would know what to do when the time came. In fact, right now, she wasn’t sure about anything.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Not only was the wire mesh at the bottom of the Plexiglas divider abhorrent, the whole place was so revolting it made Fin want to puke. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he had no idea what was going on with his mom, except that something changed as soon as they walked into the Mountain View unit. Her anxiety disappeared, and suddenly she was all composed. Could it be that Dad was right, that when the time had come, she knew what to do? But just what was she going to do? A tremor rippled up his arm, and his mom pushed her head against his neck as if trying to stop it from reaching his head and messing with his brain—a well-meaning gesture that wasn’t helpful.

  “Thirsty?”

  Fin found it disconcerting, the way Regis didn’t seem to mind being in this repugnant place at all, the way he was able to pour ice water from the pitcher into the three tall plastic glasses without spilling a single drop. It was almost as if he already knew what was going to happen. Fin lifted a glass to his lips, but his hand was shaking so hard that he spilled most of the water onto the table. He jumped back, his metal chair making a scraping sound on the concrete floor that hurt his teeth. He soaked up the spill with the bottom of his tee shirt, squeezed the water out, and let it drip onto the floor. Then he clasped his hands on the table, clenched his teeth, and tried not to look at his mom. It was his job to make sure she didn’t tell Raelynn Blackwell that she had killed her own sister, and no matter how many worried looks his mom sent his way, nothing was going to deter him. Not spilled water. Not his mom’s inexplicable composure. Not the ghastliness of inhumanity all around him. Nothing.

  Several minutes passed before a wiry young guard with a kind face appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas window, cupping the elbow of a slight woman dressed in white prison garb. He pulled the chair out for the woman, removed her handcuffs, and patted her shoulder before retreating to his post by the door. Fin didn’t realize at first that he was looking at Raelynn Blackwell. He didn’t expect her to be so small.

  “This is my son, Fin,” he heard his mom say, “Veronica’s brother.”

  Raelynn Blackwell lifted her hands up in a prayer-like gesture. Her fingertips brushed her lips like a kiss, and then she smiled at him, a shy kind of smile that reminded Fin so much of Veronica that he felt dizzy and had to grip the edge of the table. The big round clock on the wall ticked, each tick more deafening than the last, Raelynn Blackwell’s smile fading a little bit more with each tick until her smile was gone. She chewed on her upper lip and looked down. It wasn’t long before jagged slashes of tears were fracturing her cheeks.

  “I will go to my grave sorry for what I did,” she said.

  Fin wanted to tell her he’d forgiven her a long time ago and so had Veronica, but the tears in his throat kept swallowing the words. He stood up, leaned across the table, and pressed his palms against the Plexiglas. Touch my hands, he pleaded with his eyes. But Raelynn Blackwell stared down at the table and turned away from him in shame. The ticking clock drowned out the silence.

  “Go ahead,” Bernadette said to Raelynn. “It’s okay.”

  Raelynn Blackwell looked at Fin then, and when he saw the panic in her eyes, he tipped his head toward his hands, then nodded to reinforce the invitation. She began to lift her hands from her lap, and he moved his hands farther down the window so they were closer to hers. With excruciating tentativeness, her hands moved toward the window until her trembling fingers grazed the Plexiglas. He tapped the window and nodded. She paused and looked at him, her tear-filled eyes a question. He smiled and nodded again. Their hands sought each other, fingers meeting first. He pressed his palms against the glass. She pressed back. Through a blur of tears, he saw a slight smile begin to form on her lips.

  “I love you, Veronica.” He mouthed the words as he slid his hands, little by little, down the window. But when his fingers touched the wire mesh at the bottom, they flew off as if they’d touched a burning stove, and he fell into his mom’s arms.

  “Don’t tell her,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t do that to my sister.”

  ***

  It took Bernadette’s breath away to so clearly see it now: Veronica’s life connected in the flesh with the life of the woman who murdered her. But even though her composure was shaken, her conviction was not. She knew what to do. She ran her fingers through Fin’s hair and pressed her palm against his cheek, knowing that he had been as stunned as she by the resem
blance between Veronica and Rae.

  “Please don’t,” he pleaded with her one last time.

  “Trust me,” she said.

  Fin slumped back in his chair, but he wouldn’t stop squeezing her hand as Rae watched from the other side of the barrier with a confused look.

  “I saw your mother,” Bernadette said.

  “You did?” Rae’s eyebrows shot up. “Disappearing was what Ma done best.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and her eyes were big with hope.

  “I couldn’t convince her.”

  “I knew she weren’t coming.” Rae’s face fell and she slumped back in her chair, her face a mask suddenly devoid of any detectable emotion.

  “She thinks it would make things harder for you,” Bernadette said. “She doesn’t want to hurt you any more than she already has. She says it’s all her fault, what happened to you.”

  Rae stared at the floor.

  “She called you ‘my Raelee.’ She said ‘my Raelee is a good girl.’”

  Bernadette cursed the wire mesh that kept her from wiping away the tear that she saw fall onto Rae’s folded hands.

  “Your ma stopped drinking.”

  “Really?” Rae’s head came back up, but her eyebrows were squished together.

  “She’s very sick. I think it might be cirrhosis of the liver.”

  Rae sighed and then smiled, a sad smile. “I guess me and Ma will work things out in heaven, then.”

  Bernadette shrugged.

  “I’ll pray for her,” Rae said. “Jesus is merciful.”

  How comforting it must be, Bernadette thought, to have that kind of faith, the faith of a child. But Rae’s praying wouldn’t make any difference if her mother was already dead, which she might be. And if Jesus really was merciful, Veronica would be alive and none of this would be happening.

  “There’s something else,” Bernadette said.

  “Mom, don’t.” Fin gripped the edge of the table, his body back on hyper alert.