The Crooked Heart of Mercy

by Billie Livingston

“Is your grandmother in spirit?” the medium asks.

  Behind me, a voice answers, “Yes.”

  “I think that’s who I have with me. ‘I’m not alone,’ she says. ‘I’m being well looked after. I just wanted to come back and tell you that I’ll always be there for you.’ She says she worked really hard to make herself heard by you. She says, ‘Would you tell your mother about my visit today? Because I come to her and your mom feels sad and I want her to feel love.’”

  Somewhere near there are quiet sniffs.

  “Another presence is with me,” the medium says. “May I come to you? Yes, in the red sweater. I’m feeling energy around the heart. This person had some issue with heart or respiratory. It’s a breathing thing, asthma or bronchitis. Does this make sense to you? Yes? This is a lady coming through. She’s short, five foot three or so. Slender. Does this make sense to you? No? Maybe? Oops, she’s laughing! Really? She’s telling me she was a little rounder in life. Does this make sense to you? She says she carried so many things, issues, and worries and that you’re a little mirror of her, that you take on too many worries. ‘Let it go,’ she says, ‘don’t wait like I did.’ You need balance. Is your mother in spirit? Yes? This is your mother I have with me.”

  The voices are getting quiet and quieter. Soon I can’t hear anything but a soft pulse in my ears. In our ears. We are dreaming together, we are dozing, drifting, Frankie and me. He needs me. What would it take to be here with Frankie forever?

  A thump in my ribs—my body is quaking. I gasp back into the room. Lucy has me by the thigh, jostling me.

  “She has a message for you!” Lucy says.

  He’s gone. No. Please no. My Frankie is gone. Chased off by this crazy old bitch. I want to slap her. I want to snap her in half.

  “Can I come to you?” Kalinda stares at me, her purple pashmina draping off extended arms.

  “I—yes.” A rush of heat comes up my arms and legs. I can’t do this. “I mean, no. No, I can’t.” My heart is slamming. I’m on my feet, sidestepping out of the pew.

  “Please don’t be frightened,” Kalinda says. “Some people—”

  “Excuse me. I need some air.”

  “It’s okay,” Lucy says. “You’re just—”

  Before she can finish I am heading down the aisle, out of the church and into the rain.

  FIVE

  Ben

  The old man screamed. Blood spattered on the sheets. Ben and Cola stood in the hospital corridor just outside his room. Two male nurses, one on either side of his bed, tried to feed a tube up his nose and down his throat. He’d yanked it and now they had to get it back in. Had to keep his stomach drained.

  “Relax, Mr. Brody. You’re just making it harder on yourself.”

  “Fuck you, you little prick.”

  Hard to make out with no teeth in his head, but Ben heard him loud and clear.

  The old man had pulled the IV from his arm twice. If he got his hands on the one in his neck, the walls would be washed in red. His wrists and ankles were in restraints now. A chest vest kept him trussed to the bed.

  The nurses went for round two. “Come on, Mr. Brody, swallow, swallow!”

  “No. No!” The old man let go a shriek as if there were hooks tearing out his entrails. Maybe he thought there were.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cola said. He made a move and Ben grabbed his arm, held him steady. Cola pushed him off. “Come on, man, why do they have to hurt him like that? It’s fucked-up.”

  “It’s for his own good,” Ben said, because you can’t say, Karma’s a bitch. He nodded down the hall. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  THE TWO OF them sit on a green vinyl couch in front of the coffee machine. Each holds a paper cup; neither says a word. There’s a hand sanitizer on the opposite wall. A sign says, CLEAN YOUR HANDS. IT’S YOUR DUTY. On the other side of the dispenser is an Alzheimer’s poster: “Caring for a loved one with dementia impacts every aspect of your life.”

  Five days after surgery and the old man still can’t understand what he’s doing here. Can’t retain it. The nurses have asked if he’s got a history of dementia. Between the tranquilizers and the cough syrup, who knows?

  “How come you never told me he was throwing up?”

  “I told you. I did! Not right away because he said not to.” Cola’s eyes are watery. They slide up and down the hall. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, man. He said, ‘Don’t tell Ben cuz he’ll just come stompin’ in here and tell me what to do.’”

  Another anguished howl echoes down the hall. Cola’s hands are shaking, his pupils so big and black there’s no iris. Ben would take it for sympathy if it weren’t for those eyes. Cola’s eyes look the way they did the time the old man kicked down the door. They look like they did when their mother finally walked out for good.

  Miriam would only be about sixty-five now. Ben figures she must be dead. How else could she disappear so completely? Cola claims he saw her on the street once, standing on the corner across from the school yard. She was watching him, he said. A big moving truck came round the corner and blocked his view. He jumped down from the monkey bars and ran to the fence. By the time the truck cleared, she was gone.

  Cola still scans the faces of women in the street. When he meets a new girl, he asks her how old her mother is, what her mother’s first name is. He asks if her mother can sing. That’s the only thing he seems to remember: Miriam had a very pretty singing voice.

  When the old man was out, Miriam liked to put the radio on in the kitchen and sing along. She liked the oldies—the Beatles and Bobbie Gentry. There’s one afternoon Cola still keeps in his pocket: Gold light dropped in through the window over the kitchen sink. It packed along its very own song and Miriam knew all the words. We’ll sing in the sunshine, she crooned, a smile in her voice. Cola giggled each time she got to the bit about laughing every day. He reached for her hands and she waltzed him in circles.

  We’ll sing in the sunshine. That’s Cola’s Miriam.

  Of course, Ben had her for longer. Before Cola came on the scene Ben would go to work with her. Two or three years old, trailing behind, hand on the tail of her coat as she dragged the yellow janitor’s pail around the deserted football stadium. He would stand against the wall, eye level with the sinks, and watch her scrub toilet after toilet, urinal after urinal, before she started mopping the floors.

  After Cola was born, there was no money for a sitter, so Ben stayed home to look after him while Miriam and the old man went to work. The old man cleaned the floors in public schools. Before that he had a factory job, making tar and concrete—until he crushed his thumb filling drums with hot tar from the spigot. He took what he could get: resentful kinds of work, the kind where you didn’t need an education.

  Ben would also be in charge at night when his parents went to Shelly’s pub across the road. No matter how broke, there was always money for drinking.

  “Okay, little man,” his mother would say. “We’ll sit where we can see your bedroom window. If it’s an emergency, turn the light on. No screwing around.”

  Ben was five. He liked giving Cola his bottle, liked the way his round brown eyes stared up. Like worship. Like he would love him forever.

  The diapers were tough, though—getting those sticky tapes right. One time Ben fucked up the last Pampers in the house. Miriam was at work. The old man was home that day, in front of the TV with a beer, and he didn’t want to hear about it.

  In the bedroom, Ben looped his father’s belt around the diaper but it wouldn’t stay. Cola crapped himself again. It was getting on the bed. Holding the diaper together, Ben hauled the baby to the bathroom. He put him in the tub. The diaper fell off. Cold tub against his butt, Cola started to cry. The old man made Ben close the bathroom door so he wouldn’t have to listen to the racket.

  When Miriam came home, she found Cola in the tub covered in shit and wailing blue murder. “You leave a baby like this?” She swatted Ben’s head. She snatched the TV remote out of the old man’s
hand. “You couldn’t put a clean diaper on him?”

  “I don’t clean other people’s shit. That’s your line.”

  She aimed the remote and turned off the tube.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” His dad looked at her as if she were something stuck to his shoe.

  “I’m the one you’ll never see again if I walk out that door.”

  Miriam wasn’t going anywhere, the old man said, because no one would have a bitch like her who stank of shit.

  It was the same roaring match. The old man would send Ben outside—“Go play!” When Cola was big enough, they both left.

  Miriam never had a black eye. Not that Ben could remember. There was a split lip once. She said she’d opened the kitchen cupboard and a can fell out.

  The night of Ben’s tenth birthday, she made good on her threat to walk out. Miriam dragged the two boys and a suitcase about ten blocks east to the cheapest flophouse she knew. Cola tripped over every curb and cried the whole way. “Just say you’re sorry and he won’t be mad anymore,” he pleaded.

  The place was called the Parisienne. The lobby smelled like mold and beer. The geezer behind the desk made lizard eyes at Miriam as she rooted in her purse for the first night’s rent. Ben stared at the lump in the pouch of his cheek. The man’s mouth opened, and his tongue moved the lump down front. He pulled a crusty red hankie from his sleeve and wiped spittle from the corners of his lips.

  Miriam handed him a ten and five ones. “Do you need any help around here?” she asked. “Cleaning? I do a good job.”

  He picked up the black plastic ashtray beside the cash register and spat a wad of wet chaw into it. “So do I.”

  That night, Miriam, Ben, and Cola lay in the dark on a double bed. “When are we going home?” Cola asked. No answer. He asked Miriam if she’d sing a song. There was a long pause. Then her voice came low and sweet. “We’ll sing in the sunshine,” she sang. When she came to the second verse, the bit about kissing you morning and night, someone hammered the wall. “Shut up!”

  None of them spoke again.

  Hours later, Ben lay awake, listening to traffic and staring at slits of street light on the walls. When footsteps echoed in the hall, he watched the chain on the door, tensing, waiting.

  The next morning, Miriam went down to the lobby. She came back with a small carton of chocolate milk, poured it into two glasses from the bathroom, and handed one to each boy. “He says he’s sorry,” she said.

  “I told you,” Cola said.

  They weren’t home a week before the fights started up again. Soon Miriam and the boys were back at the Parisienne.

  Two nights into their second stay, the desk clerk knocked at the door. She had a phone call, he said.

  Miriam opened the door. “I’m not here.”

  The old clerk looked from her to the boys. He moved the chaw from one side of his mouth to the other. “You owe for tonight,” he told her and scuffed back down the hall.

  As soon as she closed the door, Cola started in. “Why can’t you just say you’re sorry?”

  She stared at him. Her mouth opened. Her face looked like a memory—Ben recalled someone kicking over her yellow janitor pail, telling her to clean it up. He wondered who that was.

  Cola’s face turned red, tears rolling. “I hate it here. It stinks like barf. And there’s mean, drunk people.”

  “There’s mean, drunk people at home,” Miriam said.

  The three of them lay in the double bed that night. Cola slept. Miriam fidgeted. She rolled onto her side and faced Ben. They looked at one another until she finally spoke. “Do you think I should go back to him?”

  She looked as if she truly believed he’d have the answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She stared into his eyes. “What if nobody else wants me?”

  THE NEXT EVENING Miriam, Ben, and Cola had dinner in the room. No hot plate in there. They sat on the bed with a block of Velveeta and a loaf of Wonder. Miriam cut an apple into slices with a paring knife. “Sing the song about sunshine again,” Cola said. Miriam smiled. Footsteps echoed in the hall. The familiar drag of the foot: heavy and angry. She shot a look at Ben.

  The door thundered. All three of them stiffened.

  “Miriam, open up.” The old man banged his fist on the door again.

  Off the bed, Miriam clutched the paring knife, her tongue flicking at her bottom lip as if she were working out a problem.

  “Daddy?” Cola called. He ran to the door as the old man shouted, “Miriam, you open this goddamn door!”

  Miriam yanked Cola back by his sweatshirt.

  The old man’s boot hit the wood and the door shook in its frame. In the short quiet that followed, Ben thought he heard the sound of safety chains grazing locks on nearby doors. He wondered where the clerk was, if the police would come. He climbed off the bed and stood near the window.

  “Miriam, I know you’re in there.”

  “Daddy!” Cola struggled to get away from his mother.

  A boot hit the door again. Just as Miriam turned away, it flew open, caught her in the shoulder, and knocked her and Cola to the floor. The knife dropped out of her hand and slid.

  The old man stumbled in, panting. He picked up Cola. “Hey, boy.” He held him and ordered Miriam over his son’s shoulder. “Get your things.” He set him down and scooted him toward the suitcase.

  Cola looked at his mother. “It’s okay, Mommy.” He tried to help her up.

  The old man had her by the hair before she made it to her feet. “You get your things.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Miriam shrieked.

  Ben stayed back against the windowsill, unsure whether to charge like a bull or duck out the door and disappear for good.

  “Daddy, no, it’s okay.” Cola grabbed his father’s free hand, stroked it, and patted it.

  Miriam dove against the old man’s side and bit hard until he threw her across the floor.

  He snatched the knife off the floor.

  Cola hung off his arm. “Daddy! Please. We miss you. We’re sorry.”

  “See that,” the old man said. “My boys love me.”

  Miriam got back on her feet and bolted through the open door. Her screams echoed. Nobody answered.

  Ben moved toward his father. “Dad, we’re coming. Just leave her alone. Give me the knife, okay.”

  The old man went out into the hall. “Miriam. You get back here. Get these boys’ stuff together and get your ass home.”

  No sign of Miriam.

  “You’ll be sorry if I hafta find you.”

  At the end of the hall, two sets of slow footsteps came up the stairs, the sound of stiff, squeaking leather.

  The old man threw the knife into the room. His voice turned pussycat when he said, “Evening, Officers. Sorry about the commotion. My boys—”

  “Are you a resident here, sir?”

  “It’s a funny situation, I—”

  “Would we find your name on the register? No? Sir, I think we should take this outside.”

  Ben watched out the window as the two cops talked to his old man on the sidewalk. Cola had followed after his father and stood next to him, staring up, flop of hair falling in his eyes. Soon the cops were talking more to Cola than his father. Minutes later, he was in the driver’s seat of the squad car with an officer’s cap on his head.

  Heads turned as Miriam came out from hiding. Stepping onto the sidewalk she tucked in close to the nearest cop. The old man said something to her and held out his hands as though he were trying to reason. She went to the driver’s side of the car, got Cola out, and pulled him in against her side.

  Cola wriggled free. He ran to hug his dad goodbye and the old man walked off toward home.

  THE THREE OF them stayed in the same room that night with a dresser pushed in front of the broken door. The next morning, Miriam packed their bags.

  “Are we going to see Dad?” Cola asked.

  No answer. They went out the back door of the
hotel and walked the ten blocks home.

  Miriam steered them into the apartment building and sat them down on the beat-up leather couch in the lobby.

  Ben stared at the elevator. “They spelled it wrong,” he said.

  “ShitT HoLE” was sprayed in scrawling letters across both elevator doors, strings of orange paint drooling to the floor.

  “He’ll be home soon.” She looked at the front door. She looked at the ceiling as if he might be there now. “He’ll be glad to see you.”

  “He’ll be glad to see everybody.” Cola swung his legs out and thumped them back against the couch. The springs creaked.

  Ben stared up at his mother. She looked away. He watched her throat move as she swallowed. Her thin blond hair was short and spiky up front, the back pinned up in a little bun. She was ten years younger than the old man but she had the same bags under her eyes, the same deep creases around her nose and mouth. As if he’d infected her.

  Miriam went into her purse and handed Ben a five-dollar bill. “Get a hamburger for you and your brother.”

  “Are you going out again?” Cola asked.

  She opened her mouth as if she were going to say goodbye, and then turned and walked out.

  Ben watched the door close behind her. He listened to the steady thump-thump of Cola’s heels against the couch. “We’ll sing in the sunshine,” he sang, and the two of them listened to it echo up the walls.

  FIVE

  Maggie

  Huddled beneath the overhang of the United Church of Spiritualism, I stare into the rain as it drops through the streetlight. I check and recheck my watch. Figuring the service is just about over, I head back inside and wait at the back of the room.

  There are a lot of damp eyes and smiles among them. As the offering plate circulates, they start singing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” It’s the real thing, they sing. What the world wants today.

  A Coca fucking Cola commercial! That’s their idea of a hymn?

  After a few closing words from the medium, the congregation stands, joins hands, and rocks from side to side as they warble “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”