Her mind drifted to the subject of gifts, the subject she’d suggested to Clint for February’s issue. Appropriate for Valentine’s Day, but her mind wasn’t considering sentimental photographs of lacy hearts and chocolate candy or photos of couples walking on the beach. For some reason, her mind floated back to the first days after Tommy was killed, when for the first time since they’d known each other, she and Cy seemed unable to talk. Both of them were adrift in their own personal grief, reliving their moments with Tommy, wondering if there would ever be an end to the long bridge they were being forced to cross.
A sudden memory caused her to sit forward and move the wooden bowl filled with magazines from her coffee table trunk. Down at the bottom of tissue-wrapped family heirlooms of pickle dishes, embroidered pillowcases, her father’s folded coffin flag, her great-grandmother’s silver-plated cake server, next to her mother’s letters was a large envelope of photos that had rested there for fourteen years. She pulled out the manila envelope and hesitated. She’d had the photos developed, then slipped them unseen into this envelope, taping it shut with brown packing tape.
Why now? Why would it occur to her now to search for the photos she’d taken while she walked up and down Morro Bay mourning her lost son? She really should have just thrown them out. Like the fish that Cy told her he caught when he took the Love Mercy out and floated in the open ocean. He’d fight to bring the fish in, he told her. The harder the fight, the better he felt. Once he won, he’d toss it back in without a glance. Over and over, he fought to capture a fish, then throw it back. At some point, he told Love, he just started feeling better. After that, he never fished again. Didn’t have the heart for it.
While he fished, Love walked. She’d walked and taken roll after roll of black-and-white photos. Not color, because at the time, color seemed an emotional extravagance she couldn’t bear. Mile after mile she’d walked on the beach or on the three-mile white sand spit that enclosed Morro Bay, taking photos of birds. Later, the metaphor seemed painfully clear to her, but at the time she just felt drawn to photograph birds. She concentrated on f-stops and lighting, framing and detail. The mechanics of photography took over, relieving her from thinking too deeply about the life that stretched out in front of her and Cy like a long, dark, treeless highway.
She carefully tore away the tape, curling at the edges after all these years, and opened the envelope, expecting somehow the brackish, salty scent of the ocean to rise up to greet her. Instead, there was only the smell of old paper. The photos fattened the bottom of the envelope, and she pulled the first one out. She stared at the picture of the one-legged seagull perched confidently on a rock. A memory hit her like an electric shock. She dumped the photos out on the floor, sifting through them until she found what she was seeking. Two other photos. Two other seagulls. Each of them one-legged. She remembered that day like it was last week. What were the chances of her photographing three different seagulls in one day, each with only one leg?
The second gull she’d caught in flight at just the right angle so that its footless stump was outlined against a bright afternoon sky. The other stood next to a discarded McDonald’s bag, precariously balanced on one leg, its head half hidden, searching for leftovers. She laid all three photos on the closed trunk lid, staring at them. Two of the seagulls—the one flying and the McDonald’s bird—were busy doing what seagulls do: looking for food. The third one, the one posed on the rock, stared directly into the camera’s lens, looking—if a seagull could—defiant and strong and, it seemed to her, confident.
She remembered something else. The gulls had caused her to recall a Bible verse that she’d memorized as a child. It was a practice that Mama encouraged, telling her and DJ they’d be grateful someday that she made them do so, that memorizing God’s words was like saving quarters for a rainy day.
Love closed her eyes and whispered out loud, “Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness; that the bones which Thou hast broken may rejoice.”
Psalm 51. Was it verse eight? Nine? She didn’t remember exactly. But she did remember that at the time, the verse that the injured gulls flushed from her memory had made her angry. Had God been trying to communicate with her? If so, it was a message she had refused to accept. She didn’t want to have broken bones, and she certainly didn’t want to rejoice. The whole idea of being happy about affliction seemed sick and horrible and wrong. She just wanted her son back.
Love stared at the photos, wondering what she was supposed to learn from them after all these years. Maybe she’d ask Clint to do something a little different and print three photos. Three one-legged gulls. Gulls that were going on with their gull business despite their broken bones. Because that’s what you do. You go on. You put one foot in front of the other. You trust that there’s a reason, even if you don’t get it. You trust there is someone in control. You go on because the only other choice is to give up, to believe that there was no reason at all that bad things happened. That seemed the most hopeless thing of all to believe. Maybe that was the gift right there.
That would be her caption, her mini essay: “Let the bones which Thou hast broken rejoice.” Let people stew on that one. If they asked her what she meant, she could honestly say, I’m not really sure. Could you tell me?
By the time Rett came back from walking Ace, Love had scooped up all the photos and put them back in the envelope. Except the three of the one-legged gulls. She left those on the top of the trunk to take to Clint.
“What’re those?” Rett asked. She picked up the one of the flying gull. “Wow, cool.”
“Just some photos I took a long time ago,” Love said.
The next morning at seven a.m., Love was up before Rett. She heard Ace pawing behind Rett’s closed door. He was used to taking his morning constitutional right on time. Love opened her bedroom door, and he bolted out, scampering toward the back door.
Rett lifted her head slightly off the pillow. “Ace?”
“Go back to sleep,” Love whispered. “I’ll let him out.”
“Okay,” she said, her head dropping back down on the pillow with a thump. “Thanks.”
About an hour later, Rett wandered into the kitchen, her hair pulled back in one long braid. She was dressed in jeans, sneakers and the Morro Bay sweatshirt Love had bought her.
“Yum,” she said, sitting down, picking up one of the cinnamon rolls Love baked earlier. “I have a question.”
“What?” Love asked, pouring her a cup of coffee.
“I’m supposed to meet Dale at the Buttercream at one to give him back the banjo. But I want to play it a little before I do. And, uh, just kinda be alone, you know? Maybe somewhere outside where, like, no one would be around. In nature or something?”
“Morro Rock,” Love said. “It’s a weekday and not tourist season. It would probably be you and a bunch of birds. Maybe an old guy or two taking photos, though they usually do that at sunup or sunset. There are always a few folks watching the peregrine falcons. You should be able to find a quiet spot.”
“Can I walk there?”
“You could, but it’d be, as we say in Kentucky, a fur piece.”
Her lips turned down slightly, a stubborn expression that Love was starting to recognize. “I can make it.”
Love pulled a set of keys from the hook next to Ace’s leash and tossed them on the table. “You can drive my Honda.” She looked Rett in the eyes. “Providing you have a valid driver’s license.”
“I do,” she said, standing up. “I can show—”
Love waved at her. “I believe you. Just turn left out of the driveway, then left again at the next street. That’ll take you to the Embarcadero. Turn right on Embarcadero and follow it north. You’ll see the road that leads out to the rock. It’s a couple of miles.”
“Wow, thanks. I’ll be real careful. I promise.”
Love smiled at her. “I know you will.” Then she made a mental note to herself. Call insura
nce agent and have Rett put on my policy.
When Rett was halfway through the door, she turned around and asked, “You and Grandpa. How’d y’all meet?”
Her question caught Love by surprise. “He was visiting in Redwater with one of his friends from Fort Knox, Jim Shore, a boy who went to my church. They were on leave before going to Vietnam. We saw each other in the Redwater Drugstore. He was drinking a Coke float. I was buying some nail polish.”
“So his friend, the guy from your church, he introduced you?”
Love smiled. “No, actually, he wasn’t there. Cy just started talking to me. Said he liked the color of red polish I was buying, that it was the color of Pacific sunsets where he grew up.”
“Grandma! He so totally picked you up.”
Love faked a grimace, then laughed. “Yes, I guess you could say he did. He asked for my phone number, and he called the next day. He wanted to go out that night, but I was already busy with the Vacation Bible School fund-raiser pie social. He came with Jim, whose father was our head deacon. Your crazy grandpa paid seventy-five dollars for my rhubarb pie.”
“Wow, he must have really liked you. That’s a lot of money for a pie.”
“Especially in 1967. After church, he and I and Jim went to a road-house to hear a bluegrass band play. But we told your great-grandma we went to a movie.”
Rett leaned against the doorjamb and giggled. “You were a bad girl!”
Love winked at her. “Only semi-bad. I didn’t touch a drop of liquor, and he had me home by ten p.m. Then he left, came back here to visit August and Polly, then he was off to Vietnam. I wrote him a letter every day for the whole year he was gone.”
“No e-mail? Harsh.”
Love started stacking the breakfast dishes. “Yes, hard as it is to imagine, we actually had to wait a little longer than thirty seconds for a reply.”
Rett shook her head, the concept beyond her comprehension. “Then what?”
Love turned around and started rinsing plates. “When he returned, we got married. It was small, mostly my family. His parents couldn’t leave the ranch to come out, so when we got to Morro Bay, we got married again by a minister here under the lightning tree. We used to celebrate two anniversaries every year.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
Love opened the dishwasher door and started filling it with dishes. The dishwasher had seen more action in the last week than it had in a year. “I loved living here on the Central Coast. I mean, who wouldn’t? It’s beautiful. And Polly and August were wonderful to me from the start. Then your daddy was born, and everything was perfect.” She didn’t mention how glad—no, relieved—she was to leave Kentucky. Yes, she’d missed her mother like a physical pain, but she was glad to be thousands of miles from the earth that swallowed her beloved twin brother and rotted her daddy’s pink lungs.
“Did you ever go back?”
“Once a year until Mama died when Tommy was five years old. Then, not as much. I have relatives there—Mama’s two sisters and a passel of cousins—but by the time Tommy was born, my home was here.”
She was silent for a moment. “When my dad died, how did you . . .”
Love turned around to face Rett, waiting for her to finish her question. Rett stared at the tile floor, her expression so stricken that Love wished she had a magic wand to wave over her head and conjure away all the hurt.
Love took a deep breath, not wanting to talk about this, but knowing she had to for Rett’s sake. “When Tommy was killed, I thought I didn’t want to live myself. I felt like . . .” Love paused a minute, thinking how she could word it. “I felt raw. Like a wound that couldn’t scab over. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even pray.” Love closed her eyes, thinking, Kind of like now.
“So what . . . how . . . ?” Her voice was hesitant.
She opened her eyes. “It just . . . gets easier. There’s no real secret. You’ve heard that saying, time heals all wounds?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”
“It’s not exactly true. It doesn’t heal; it just softens. You know it happened, but the details get fuzzier as time goes on.”
Rett took Ace’s dog leash and started rolling it into a little circle. “Like, you forget the pain?”
Love shook her head. “You never forget that sort of pain. It just . . . at some point it’s not the first thing you think about when you wake up. It’s a horrible cliché, but life does go on.”
Rett pushed herself away from the doorjamb, hung the leash back up and picked up the banjo case. “Do you ever get pissed? I mean, you know, at God?”
Her question startled Love again with its bluntness. Her generation seemed to just cut to the chase, push aside all the flimflam and go for the throat.
“Yes,” she said, surprised at her honest answer. “Sometimes I do, I have. But I think he understands. I hope he does.”
Rett picked up her banjo case. “So, see you later.”
Shortly after Rett left, the phone rang.
“Meet me at Cy’s bench in an hour?” Mel asked.
“See you there.”
Love left immediately, wanting to sit for a while before Mel arrived. There were rarely any children at the playground that early in the day, probably because it was usually still misty and damp. Once the sun burned away the fog around noon, the bronze whale tail and seals, the wood and concrete ship and the rocking fish would be filled with laughing, screaming children. When the city informed Love where Cy’s memorial bench was to be placed, she was overwhelmed with the rightness of it. From his bench you could see the playground, the bay, the boats, Morro Rock and, in the distance, the open ocean. Everything he loved could be seen from this one perch. As she did each time she sat down, she put her fingers to her lips, then touched them to the brass plaque.
“In Memory of Cyrus August Johnson—1950-2007—Beloved Son, Husband, Father and Friend—Born and Raised on the Central Coast—From paradise to Paradise.”
“Hey, Cy,” she said. “Things sure are looking better. But then, that probably doesn’t surprise you at all.”
She sat there for a half hour before Mel arrived, enjoying the quiet. Love didn’t know what Mel needed to tell her about her past, but before she even started, she was going to make it clear that whatever it was, it would not affect one bit how Love felt about her. Though they’d only known each other a few years and though they didn’t bare their souls to each other in the way she and Magnolia did, Love trusted her instincts. She would have bet the ranch on Mel’s decency and goodness. She was, Love suspected, someone who cared deeply but who’d seen too much hurt to let anyone get close.
Though Love knew a part of her would always feel missing with Cy gone, she suspected the pain Mel was feeling was very different. Like a motherless gosling, Mel had imprinted on Cy. She was, Love imagined, feeling the pain of almost having something and having it snatched away. Love would always have the assurance that she was loved, and that would carry her through her life. But even through her tears at Cy’s funeral, she could see the absolute terror on Mel’s face.
“She’s carrying a world of hurt inside her,” Cy told Love when he first hired her, right after the chicken incident. “I don’t know what happened to her, but I feel like the Lord brought her to us, and I want to do whatever I can to make her feel safe.”
Mel and Cy became friends immediately—good friends. And Love had become friends with her too. She had never been jealous, secure in Cy’s love for her, in her place in his life. She knew his feelings for Mel were special. She’d needed him and, in a way, he had needed her. Not as a replacement for Tommy. More like the daughter he’d never had. Now that Love thought about it, what he and Mel gave to each other had been more like . . . a gift.
Love felt a hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, Mrs. Johnson,” Mel said, slipping around and sitting next to her on the bench. “Looks like it’s just you and me right now.”
Love looked into Mel’s tired young face. Pale
lavender shadows stained the skin under her dark brown eyes. Her cheeks were flushed crimson from the cold. For a moment, she could imagine the little girl Mel once was, all gangly arms and skinned-up legs, big-eyed and serious. Who had hugged her when she was afraid or lonely? If no one had, would there ever be enough hugs in her life to compensate for that? Love couldn’t help herself. She reached over and laid her palm against Mel’s cold cheek.
“Melina Jane LeBlanc,” she said, feeling Mel’s skin start to warm under her hand. “I’m so awfully glad to see you.”
Mel’s eyes grew moist, though Love would be willing to bet it had been some time since she actually allowed tears to roll down her cheeks, at least in front of anyone. Even at Cy’s funeral she’d been stoic as a monk.
“You might not think so after we talk,” she said.
Love reached down and took Mel’s cold hand in her own. “Sweetie, I truly, truly doubt that.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Rett
Rett drove as far as she could on the road that ended at Morro Rock. Her grandma Love was right: not many people were out here this early in the day. She parked the car facing the ocean and stepped outside. It was cold and wet from sea spray. The foghorn that blew all night was still going, its warning like a slow, mournful heartbeat. Behind her, Morro Rock rose to the sky, looking less spectacular close up than it did from her grandma’s back deck, not so shiny. Really, just a big old rock.
Love Mercy Page 29