The Crooked Heart of Mercy

by Billie Livingston

  TWO

  Ben

  Dr. Lambert is back again. “I had hoped to see you in the common room today,” he says. “It was a good group session.”

  He leans forward a little. Here it comes; he is about to say something meaningful.

  “The dark place a person finds himself,” he says, “that sadness can be tremendous, but there were people in that room today who were also in a lot of pain. I know that you might not feel like being around others at this point, but participation in a group can provide a kind of permission to express your sadness and work through it—which not only helps you, it helps others.”

  Heaven help the others. God help us. The Lord helps them that help themselves. Some men are beyond help. I got a brother-in-law in the God business . . . riding both sides of the fence. Where does that leave us? Where does that leave you, Doctor?

  Lambert sits back in his chair. He waits. Lambert and the white room breathe in sync. Finally he says, “It sounds as though you and your wife separated shortly after your birthday.”

  That’s right. She’d rather be with no man, than a man like Ben.

  “Why don’t we try and talk about that night. Dancing in moonlight . . . your description yesterday, it sounded as though you were very much in love with Maggie.”

  Ben and Maggie in love. Very much in love.

  Ben and Maggie, Maggie and Ben, dancing away, their last night as a couple: just the two of them floating in the kitchen. Maggie had been working her ass off all day, hauling old ladies to geriatric clinics and denturists, making their beds, vacuuming their floors, filling their goddamn hummingbird feeders . . . one long day of gimme-gimme-gimme. Ben had been home with Frankie and he spent most of it pulling him off the ceiling. Two-year-olds: That’s just how it is sometimes.

  Tucking that kid into bed and then slipping into that soothing quiet together was such a sweet relief.

  “Soothing quiet.” Lambert looks down at his notes. “Was it common for the two of you to use sedatives as a recreational drug?”

  Common for what? One of the old ladies gave the pills to Maggie as a tip. Mrs. Riley. She used to complain that her doctor didn’t listen, he prescribed: sleeping pills, anti-anxiety meds, painkillers. That’s what they do with old people: pill them up to shut them up. Mrs. Riley had the prescriptions filled, but she never took the pills—maybe a Percocet now and then, for her back. Her medicine cabinet was crammed with bottles, going back ten years. She didn’t have much money, so once a month or so, she’d give Maggie something as an extra thank-you. Maggie gave them to Ben and Ben sold them to limo clients. The night before his birthday he unloaded most of the Xanax on some tweaked-out stockbroker. A hundred bucks for the pills and a hundred in tips. Ben stopped at the twenty-four-hour supermarket on the way home and bought groceries and a cheap bottle of wine for his birthday. He paid the electric and phone bills in the morning. That’s the kind of recreation they usually got from Xanax.

  That day was a real ballbuster for both of them. By dinnertime they were both fed-up and bitched out. The Xanax was Ben’s idea. It was his birthday. He had two left in the bottle and he wanted to chill with his wife. So that’s what they did. They had a glass of wine and slipped into that heart-shaped bubble and danced. They stared into one another’s eyes for the first time in weeks.

  Everything was going to be okay. They were going to make out just fine. As soon as that thought entered his mind, Ben should have bolted the doors and barred the windows.

  Maggie and Ben, just the two of them floating in the kitchen.

  And then suddenly the baby: Little Frankie climbing up the couch.

  Standing on the windowsill, hands against the moon. As if he would be taken up. It was a vision. Small hands on the window, pushing until it opened into the night, into the universe. Ashes ashes, we all fall down.

  Happy birthday, Ben. If he had any balls he’d have followed Frankie out the window. But no, not him. The baby broke and so did Ben and Maggie.

  No more Frankie. No more Maggie.

  Dr. Lambert shakes his head now. “I’m sorry. It must have been extremely painful to lose your child that way.”

  Got a little chart for pain there, Doctor? On a scale of one to blinding, where does wrecked fall?

  Fistfuls of love one minute and the next it had all disintegrated—poured through Ben’s fingers like sand.

  Imagine the silence, the casket of a room once the police had left it, once the ambulance had taken Frankie’s . . . and the neighbors had gone back inside, locking their locks behind them, locking out misery like a contagion.

  Maggie and Ben: Now you see them; now you don’t. The two of them lost in the smallest room in the world.

  Maggie wouldn’t go to work and she wouldn’t pick up the phone. The old ladies kept calling. Ben would listen to their stuttering messages. There was no one to take them to their appointments or sweep their floors. “Maggie,” they’d say, “I was late for my appointment . . . you were supposed to be here today at . . . I would appreciate it if . . . if you could at least . . .”

  Message after message. Maggie never listened. She didn’t speak.

  At first Ben could feel her hovering, searching: for the baby—for Ben—but he couldn’t—he couldn’t face his own face, let alone hers.

  Most days, Maggie would fill up the bathtub and lie in the water for hours at a time. Sometimes she would dress and drift out the door without a word. She would slip back into the apartment so quietly, Ben wouldn’t know she was home until he heard the bathroom door close and the pipes groan as she filled the tub again.

  And while Maggie filled the tub with water, Ben would fill a limo with gas and drive it around the city until dawn, long after his last ride of the night. He took every work call that came. One morning he got home, walked into the bathroom, and the mirror was gone. She’d taken it off the wall.

  A couple of days later the mirror in the bedroom was gone too. And then the last one in the hall disappeared. Fine by him. Who wants to look in a glass and see his rotting soul reflected back?

  Then he came home one morning and Maggie was gone. In a way, it was a perverse comfort to have the exterior match the interior. Empty/Empty.

  She left a phone number. But he didn’t phone it and it didn’t phone him.

  The old ladies kept phoning, though, looking for her. “Maggie, I have a doctor’s appointment . . . Maggie, there’s no tuna fish in the house . . . My library books are overdue . . . Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.”

  He listened to their messages when he should have been sleeping. He’d come home and listen. He’d sit there, watching the sun come up, listening to those goddamn messages, over and over, in case they changed, or he caught something he’d missed. With each listen, he despised them more—them and their dried-out spider plants, their dusty knickknacks and expired coupons.

  The one who called the most was the pill lady. Mrs. Riley and her Xanax, her Ambien, her Percocet—the bottles began to float in front of Ben’s eyes like ghouls. Mrs. Riley’s ugly minions.

  After replaying one of her messages, Ben went into Maggie’s address book and hunted for the pill lady. He watched his finger scrape down the page and land on the name. He picked up the phone and tapped out the number.

  Her line rang and Ben stared into space, wondering. There was no purpose for this call. What could he possibly say to the woman? He should put down the phone, but it was as if he were paralyzed, as if his body belonged to someone else.

  Then she picked up. “Hello?”

  There was a long pause. She said hello again. And again. She asked if anyone was there.

  Ben said, “Have I reached Mrs. Cecily G. Riley?” His voice was hollow and craggy, like a demon in the radio. “I’m calling about Maggie, your cleaning woman. Maggie won’t be coming to work. I thought you might like to know why: Maggie’s baby, Frankie, found a bottle of Xanax with the name Cecily G. Riley on it. He swallowed the pills and now he’s dead.”

  At the other end of the
line was a short, sharp little cry. And then Ben hung up.

  He sat very still and waited and listened. He put his hand on his throat, feeling for a pulse. A part of him wondered if he was dead and if he was, then why the hell couldn’t he lie down and be done with it.

  TWO

  Maggie

  I fling through the lobby doors and hurl my purse at the pavement. Fuck! WhatIsWrongWithMe? WhatIsWrongWithMe? WhatIsWrongWithMe, God Fucking Dammit, What Is Wrong With Me? I can’t be in the world anymore. I don’t know how to be normal.

  Construction continues to brawl and hammer across the road. I snatch my purse up off the ground, backhand the tears and snot off my face, and stare back at Lucy McVeigh’s high-rise. So much for reentering the workforce. So much for becoming a stable human being again.

  Across the road a dump truck is backing its way off the site. Backing and beeping. Shut up! All the traffic stops in both directions. The world stops for progress. Not for me, not for Frankie, just this goddamn building site.

  I trudge toward the bus stop. The truck slowly moves forward, turning its nose north, and then roars up the hill, churning dust as it goes. A bus follows close on its heels, groaning to the inside lane. A bus? My bus. Shit. My bus.

  Hugging my purse, I race for the bus stop, scrambling in hopes the driver might see me or hear me and take pity. “Wait. Hang on!” I trip and lose my shoe. And, of course, there is no pity.

  “Oh, come on!” I pick my shoe up off the sidewalk and chuck it toward the exhaust that plumes from the back end of my ride home as it shrinks in the distance.

  I limp the few feet to my shoe, and step into it.

  A couple of teenage boys head in my direction, all torn jeans and lanky limbs, one tall with cautious, watchful eyes, the other small and grinning, snickering at me and my shoe.

  I slump on the bench at the bus shelter.

  As they pass, the small one loses interest in me. He casts his dreamy eyes at the bulldozers across the road, and then down at a bit of sunlit cellophane on the sidewalk. He picks it up: a discarded cigarette package. The taller boy bats it out of his hand.

  “What the fuck, man!” the little one says. “There was still some smokes in it.”

  The tall one mumbles something and shoves him along. They remind me of Ben and Cola—Benjamin and Nicolas, but no one ever called them that. My Ben often called his little brother “Donkey Boy,” after the Pinocchio story about boys who went to the Land of Toys—Pleasure Island—lured by the promise of fun, of never having to learn or work. As each one succumbed to his wayward desires he was transformed into a jackass. That little idiot is actually talented, Ben used to say. He talked about a chair that Cola made in high school: solid maple, polished, stained, perfect. It was art, Ben said. Cola gave it to his father for his birthday. It was barely a month before dear old Dad came home savage drunk and threw the chair in the street. A semitruck took care of the rest. Cola quit school and found work as a carpenter. Showed up drunk and got fired. Slept in and got fired. “Borrowed” a drill and got fired.

  The Ben-size boy catches me watching, looks away, and gives the Cola boy another shove.

  I look away too, down at my feet, and beyond them to the crack in the sidewalk: fall through the cracks, crack under pressure, hard nut to crack. I can hear Ben tying idioms into knots . . . the way his brain used to bob and weave. Now he’s trying to weave his brain back together. I grab a last look at those Ben-and-Cola boys before they round the corner.

  Who am I? Who am I without Ben? Who am I without Frankie? This is not how it was supposed to go. This is not who I thought I’d be at thirty-two years old. Something like a widow, but worse. What do you call the mother of a dead child? Besides negligent. Delinquent. Derelict.

  I want to look after you. Ben said that. That was the plan. I want to look after you. In the middle of a night just after we moved in together, I woke in the dark: 3:34 A.M. Half an hour since the last time I’d woken up. I could feel the cool emptiness on Ben’s side of the bed. Still at work. Closing my eyes again, I wished him close, imagined his limbs folding around me, the sensation of his breath on the back of my neck.

  Then I heard breath. Actual breath. My eyes snapped open.

  Ben stood at the foot of the bed. I gasped, startled.

  “It’s me—it’s just me,” he said.

  “Jesus! What are you doing?” My heart hammered.

  “Watching you sleep. You looked so sweet, lying there.” He climbed up the length of the mattress, nestled in behind me, and put his arm around my waist. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I wasn’t scared.”

  He brought his lips to my ear and murmured, “If I snored like you, I wouldn’t be scared either.”

  “Shut up, I don’t snore.”

  “You kidding? From out in the hall it sounded like a motorcycle gang in here. No burglar would chance it.”

  I laughed and elbowed him. “I do not snore.” Taking a breath, I rolled onto my back and looked at him. “How was your night?”

  “A stretch limo full of drunk dentists—couldn’t have been better if they’d thrown in a free root canal. What about your day, Madam Moderator?”

  At the time, I worked for a consumer research company. My job was to help facilitate focus groups. “We got another pep talk from the new analytics expert today. She’s got a voice like a constipated goose: ‘Desire is shaped by fear. The consumer desires a product when he fears what life might be like without it. It’s your job to discover what that fear might be.’”

  Ben smirked. “Gandhi said that, didn’t he?”

  I ran a finger across his breast pocket. “Would you hate me if I quit?”

  “Hate you?” He shook his head. “You said you wanted to quit the first time I met you, so . . .”

  “But it’s good money.”

  “But you’re not happy.”

  My mouth opened and then closed. “The thing is—” I fidgeted with the button on his shirt collar. “I’m—I missed my period. I bought one of those tests today and it was . . . I’m—”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  I nodded.

  He laid a hand against my cheek and blinked into my eyes. “Do you want this?”

  Seconds passed. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  Ben watched me and swallowed. “I want this,” he said. “Maggie, I—I’ve been waiting my whole life for you—for us. I want to look after you.” He took a breath and rested his forehead against mine. “I love you. So much. Marry me. Just say yes, and I will cherish you, love you, and hold you until the day I die.”

  The sound of his voice: low and quiet and sure. He brought his face back from mine and there was just enough light to see the shine of his wet eyes. My throat seized. I felt like an orphaned kid all over again except this time the world was about to begin, not end.

  “Yes.” I could feel a sob building in my chest and I said yes again while I could still get the word out.

  The rumble from across the road shakes me back into the bus shelter. Then I realize that my cell phone is vibrating. I find it at the bottom of my purse. “Holy Trinity” is on the call display. Francis. My brother is probably the only one I can bear this morning. So I put a finger in one ear and the phone up to the other.

  “Hello, Maggie, it’s Father Michael, the ah, the rector over at Holy Trinity. I’m calling about Luke.” Luke is the religious name my brother took when he was ordained.

  “What happened?”

  There is a long pause and my stomach lurches.

  “He’s fine,” the rector finally says. “I mean he’s not hurt or anything, but we’ve had another situation. He was arrested night before last. Another DUI.”

  “Sonuvabitch!”

  Father Michael gives a nervous laugh. “Ah, well, yes, he’s not handling it very well. He’s locked himself, ah, he won’t come out of his room. He—”

  “I thought you said he was in jail.”

  “He was. For a few
hours. We brought him back here. And, as I say, he’s not doing very well. We wondered if it might be better if he stayed with family for a few days until this blows over.”

  “Until what blows over?”

  “Ah, well, maybe it’s better if I let your brother explain. Maggie, I’m sorry, but you’re the only family he has. We understand you’ve been—it’s been terrible for you lately, and we think that for this very reason, it’d be a good idea for Luke to be with you.”

  Father Michael tells me to take a cab. He’ll pay, he says.

  FINE, YOU PAY. You pay and you deal with him. You people wanted him, body and soul, so you deal with him, body and soul.

  That’s what I should have said. But instead, I sit here in the back of a taxi that is hauling my butt down to Holy Trinity because my idiot brother is stuck in his holy-man room with his head up his ass. Barely heard a word from him since the funeral. I have been—my child is—his nephew, his namesake—and Francis is busy getting his wild on. There is real shit going on in this world with real consequences, but no, it’s all about Francis and his little pity party. I’d like to kick his self-absorbed ass up one side of that rectory and down the other.

  As we near Holy Trinity, it’s as if the circus has come to town. News vans are parked out front, there are people milling on the sidewalk, creeping up the church lawn, sitting on the steps. A couple of men in suits are holding microphones and pacing, looking up at the church doors in case something should haul off and happen. Fox News, local news, Good Morning America, even.

  The cabdriver slows and then I see chubby little Father Michael on the corner, standing there in his clerics, shaking his head, no, at a couple of scrappy-looking reporters who push recorders in his face. His palms are cupped together in front of his belly as if he’s Mother Superior instead of the squirmy little worm that he is.

  Seeing the cab, he scurries into the street and pushes his puffy red face in the driver’s-side window. While he pays, I get out and gawp at the sight of all the trucks with satellite dishes sitting in front of the church.

  The taxi clears off and Father Michael takes my arm as if I’m a geriatric.