The Shape of Mercy

by Susan Meissner

  “Do you want me to take you to him?” I asked.

  Abigail didn’t answer right away. The words caught in her throat. She laid a hand across the journal. “You’ve already done that for me.”

  “He’s dying, Abigail. Do you want to see him?”

  “I see him as I saw him then. And that’s how he sees me. Who wants to mess with that?” She inclined her head, and I smiled.

  I wanted to ask her so many questions, but I didn’t know if any of them were appropriate. Abigail must have seen my unspoken thoughts.

  “I didn’t know I loved him until it was too late. When I finally realized it, I’d already sent him away and he was already in that awful camp.”

  “You didn’t try to find him or write to him?”

  Abigail looked away, her eyes glistening with moisture. “I was afraid to love him. He was Japanese. I was afraid of what people would say about us. And I was embarrassed that he was in that camp. And that I had let him kiss me.”

  She paused and I waited.

  “The night before he was taken away, we met in the garden. He and his father lived in the gardener’s cottage out past the pool. We often met in the garden at night. We would talk and laugh, and I could tell Tom anything. He wasn’t like any of the men my father found suitable for me. He was genuine. I knew I could trust him. He was my best friend.”

  Abigail looked at her lap. “But that night he told me he loved me. I was so angry with him. It changed everything. It changed me. I sent him away.”

  She raised her head and exhaled heavily. “I was a fool, Lauren. Worse than a fool. A fool doesn’t know what he’s doing is foolish. I knew and did it anyway.”

  “But he forgave you,” I whispered. “He went on with his life. He wants you to live, Abigail.”

  She said nothing.

  “Abigail?”

  When she finally spoke, her voice was different than it had been a moment earlier. Softer, less sure, like that of a young girl.

  “My resolve is crumbling,” she said. “I’ve always been able to pretend I’m indestructible, that I’m strong enough to bear the consequences of my blunders, the weight of my misfortunes. But it’s all crashing in around me and I’m starting to wobble.”

  She turned to face me and her voice became her own again. “I never factored in how bringing you into my life to give you the diary would shatter the glass. I should’ve guessed.”

  A queer shiver ran through me. “What glass? What do you mean ‘give me the diary’?”

  “The glass around the diary. I was protected from the diary’s indictment against me as long as it was hidden away. But the glass is shattered now because I’ve given the diary to you. That was my sole objective. I never considered having it published. I never cared about it being rewritten in today’s language for a host of strangers to read. I wanted you to transcribe it for you. I chose you to transcribe it so you would fall in love with it. I wanted it to become important to you so I could pass it on to you.”

  “Why me?”

  “I couldn’t leave it with just anyone, Lauren. Surely you can see that.”

  “But why me?”

  A tepid smile spread across her lips. Someone standing ten feet away would not have seen it.

  “You are the girl in between. You are young like Mercy, a writer like Mercy, and the sole daughter like Mercy. And you’ve lived a life of privilege like me. You’ve seen its every side, just like I have, and you are the heir to an accomplished man’s legacy, as I was. You, like me, will always have choices to make because of it. Who better to give the diary to than you, Lauren?”

  I couldn’t wrap my brain around the notion that the diary was mine, nor that Abigail had hired me for reasons that went far beyond her job posting. But her wanting me to possess the diary didn’t explain why she had taken off with it.

  “Then why are you here? Why not just give me the diary?”

  She sighed. Abigail from eight weeks ago might have said, “What I do and why I do it is not your concern.” This Abigail turned to me but did not raise her eyes to meet mine.

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Because I want to have the diary published?”

  “Because the glass is broken,” she said, shrugging. “And I don’t know how to live without it.”

  Forty-Two

  The breeze off the ocean below lifted a lock of Abigail’s hair and twirled it about her ancient face. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “I never told you how my family got the diary,” she said, swiveling her head to face the breeze, forcing the wild strand of hair back where it belonged.

  I waited.

  “John Peter Collier did indeed get the diary from the girl Benevolence several weeks after Mercy died. I don’t know how she got it to him, but she did. John Peter kept it for many years. At some point, he must have felt Mercy’s family should have it. He went to Wells and gave the diary to Samuel, Mercy’s cousin, who never went back to Salem after Mercy died and her land was seized. He stayed in Maine with his new bride. Samuel apparently never told anyone he had Mercy’s diary.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Abigail absently smoothed an eyebrow. “The family believed in Mercy’s innocence, but she had committed suicide, and that was against Puritan law. I don’t think Samuel was proud of what his cousin had done.”

  “But surely Samuel read the diary after John Peter gave it to him. He knew why Mercy did what she did.”

  Abigail shook her head. “Apparently it wasn’t reason enough for Samuel. It is amazing to me he didn’t destroy the diary.”

  She took a sip of her tea, set her cup down, and continued. “Samuel’s daughter Elizabeth found the diary after her father died. She wrote to John Peter Collier in Salem after she read it, she was so taken by what the cousin she wasn’t supposed to talk about had written. But John Peter had died several years earlier, having never married. Elizabeth’s letter was delivered to one of his sisters, Anna. Anna and Elizabeth decided to meet, and when they did, Anna gave Elizabeth something she had found among John Peter’s things after her brother died. A letter.”

  Abigail paused and I filled the space. “Mercy wrote a letter to John Peter the night she died, not Prudence Dawes.”

  Abigail lifted her head and gazed out over the vast blue water. “She wrote a letter to each of them. Her letter to Prudence was very short. She simply told her she forgave her. Anna knew of the letter to Prudence. John Peter had shown it to her and asked her to deliver it, as he could not. Elizabeth never saw that letter, of course. But family legend has it that there was one. Mercy’s letter to John Peter was the longer of the two, and she ran out of ink writing it. It was not even signed.”

  “Do you have it?” I whispered. I wanted so badly for Abigail to say she did.

  But she shook her head.

  “No. I don’t know what happened to it. No one in the family does. It was apparently tucked into the diary for many decades, but something happened to it in the early 1800s. No one could account for it after that. But what was written in that letter has been passed down through the generations. My mother told me what the letter said, but of course I cannot prove it, nor can I prove there even was a letter.”

  “Tell me.” I leaned in.

  “Mercy told John Peter she loved him and she wanted him to be happy, to live a full life and to spend it at peace. She wanted him to remember her as they last touched, fingertips to fingertips. She didn’t want him to be burdened with the image of her execution, nor did she want his life to be endangered should he attend the hanging and shout an opposition. She told him she was to be hanged; it was the providence of God and the will of man, and he could not stop it. No one could. So she would hasten the inevitable and allow him only sweet memories of her. She asked him to pray for her immortal soul, as she hoped God would look favorably on this last act of mercy and gladly receive her spirit a few hours early.”

  Abigail touched the corners of her eyes. Her fingertips came away wet, and she rubbed th
em gently into her palms, absorbing the tears into the skin of her hands.

  We were silent for several moments, lost in the extravagance of Mercy’s love for the man she would have married had she lived.

  “Do you not want the diary published, Abigail?” I asked when I was able.

  “I know I told you in the beginning that I wanted her to be remembered, but now I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I just wish I had the letter.” Abigail’s eyes closed slowly, as if she were in pain. “I don’t want anyone to think Mercy was a coward because she killed herself. Mercy was no coward.”

  I reached for Abigail and clasped my hand over hers. “No one will think that. Even without the letter, no one will. We can re-create the letter, you and me. We can put it at the end as an epilogue.”

  “But we’ve no proof there was a letter. Will anyone believe it?” Abigail opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “Everyone will believe it. They’ll want to believe this is what Mercy would have done.”

  Abigail stared at me for several long minutes.

  “I am so tired of pretending,” she said.

  “Then stop.”

  Abigail folded a palm under her jaw and rested her elbow on the table. “What am I going to do, Lauren?”

  “Come home. Publish the diary. Entertain people in your sitting room. Adopt the stray cat. Find more shelves for your books. Get your drivers license. Set up Internet service. Have a garden party.”

  The corners of her mouth rose. “And what about Graham? He’s mine, you know. In a strange way, he’s mine. What am I going to do with him?”

  I shrugged. “All I know about him is he gambles. He has a problem with money.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I know and that’s not enough. I know Esperanza thinks he’s after your estate. But I’ve never met him. What if he’s coming because he’s concerned for you? What if he’s coming because he’s desperate and needs help?”

  “I’ve tried helping him.”

  “You pay his debts. That just allows him to keep gambling.”

  Abigail’s brow crumpled and she lowered her hands to her lap. “What else can I do? I don’t know what else to do.”

  “I don’t either. But you can live and find out.”

  Abigail’s gaze drifted to the house. “You really think we should publish the diary?”

  I liked that she said “we.”

  “I do,” I replied.

  “She was an amazing person. I’ve never met anyone who loved like Mercy did, without any thought for herself. That is love of another kind.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Is that why you stopped reading the diary, Abigail?” I asked.

  She answered me slowly. “It killed me to read it, so I stopped. A long time ago. But then when I wanted to die, I wanted it to kill me. I’ve read it dozens of times the last few days. I’ve barely eaten or slept. I wanted it to kill me. Then you came, and for a moment I thought you were her, coming to take it from me.”

  Abigail inhaled deeply.

  “I’ve made such a mess of my life, Lauren. I pushed Tom away. I couldn’t save Dorothea from her depression, and I didn’t fight her parents to raise her child. I tried to make amends with myself by marrying Edward and adopting Graham. I thought I could make up for my bad choices by being a good wife, but Edward didn’t love me and Graham knew I didn’t really want to be his mother. I could have made the effort, but I didn’t. It’s no wonder he grew up the way he did.”

  Abigail looked down at her hands. “After Edward and Graham left me, my father developed dementia and by the time he died five years later, he had no idea who I was. He didn’t like the person he had to live with—me. Every day I had to tell him my name, and every day he told me he didn’t like me.”

  “Abigail,” I began, but she stopped me.

  “Terrible things happened to Mercy, too, but somehow she didn’t end up like me. I found that so remarkable. That’s one of the many reasons I hired you to transcribe the diary, because I thought Mercy had so much to teach us. But then I was afraid you, too, would see her suicide as weakness. That she did what she did for herself. She was young and naive, and reason tells me she ought not to have taken her own life, but Lauren, the strength it must have taken for her to make that kind of sacrifice! I want people to understand! I don’t want Mercy to be remembered as the young woman who committed suicide in the Salem jail. She was a brave girl who willingly traded her life to save another. She was everything I was not. Everything.”

  I laid my hand over hers. “Not everything. If you didn’t care deeply, none of this would matter to you.”

  Her hands trembled under mine.

  “Tom had a message for you, Abigail. Something besides the poem.”

  She looked up, trepidation and expectancy splashed across her face.

  “He remembered you liked primroses,” I continued. “He told me to remind you the primroses always come back. Even after a hard winter, they find a way to survive. They come back every spring.”

  Abigail swallowed and her gaze dropped to the red journal on the table as if it, rather than I, had spoken those words to her.

  “Let’s go home,” I whispered.

  Abigail was silent for several moments. Then she looked out over the ocean. “I’d like to keep this place.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was happy here.”

  “I know.”

  She turned to me. “Do you really think I should adopt the cat?”

  I smiled at her. “Definitely.”

  I stood and helped her to her feet. She picked up the book of poems and tucked it under her arm. “So Graham is in Santa Barbara?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps I can borrow your phone on the drive down. I need to talk to him.”

  “Sure.”

  We took two steps, and she stopped.

  “Thank you. For this.” She patted the book.

  I smiled and said nothing.

  As we walked back to the house—and to what awaited us both in Santa Barbara—I wondered if I would still dream of Mercy now that the transcription was finished. Would she still invade my sleep if we published the diary and Mercy no longer belonged to just me and Abigail?

  Even then, as we made our way to the back porch, I knew there was no “if.” The diary would be published, and Mercy would be embraced for what she had been all along. She was an echo from the past, a link to our origins, and an observer of those things about us that never seem to change.

  I used to think mercy meant showing kindness to someone who didn’t deserve it, as if only the recipient defined the act. The girl in between has learned that mercy is defined by its giver. Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

  Mercy showed us our true selves—the beautiful and the awful, the deep and the shallow, the marvelous and the mortal.

  She revealed it all and begged us to take heed.

  I thought of Raul as this revelation took hold of me. As Abigail reached for the door, I must have smiled.

  Abigail hesitated. Her hand froze over the doorknob and she cocked her head.

  “Somethings happened to you. You’re different somehow,” she said. She tightened her other hand on my arm.

  Then her brows suddenly knitted together in a weave of surprise and elation.

  “You’ve met someone,” she breathed.

  Yes.

  Behind us, the sea crashed onto waiting rocks below, as it had done for ten thousand years.

  READERS GUIDE

  The Shape of Mercy is about three distinct women from vastly different generations: Mercy, Abigail, and Lauren. What do you feel they have in common? What separates them?

  The diary’s pages reveal a time and place of tragic historical significance. What emotions did the diary evoke in you? If you were faced with Mercy’s choices, which would you hav
e chosen? Discuss why.

  Mercy writes about a bird seeking shelter in her barn during the first few weeks of January 1692. What do you think the bird represents for Mercy? Lauren? Abigail?

  Lauren describes Abigail’s library as suffocating, overly decorated, and bursting with books—a room in sharp contrast to the rest of the house. Why do you think this room was like that? Does Lauren’s opinion of the library remain consistent throughout the story?

  When Lauren first meets Raul, she assumes he is a member of the catering staff. Later she assumes he is a rich, upwardly mobile, premed student who cavalierly rolls up the sleeves of two-hundred-dollar Armani shirts. Discuss how you believe we fall into the trap of such assumptions. Think of a personal experience when, based on first impressions, you assumed someone to be different than they actually were.

  Esperanza is convinced Graham wants to have Abigail declared unfit to manage her affairs. Why does she think that? Do you agree?

  Were you satisfied with Tom Kimuras response to Laurens visit and revelations about Abigail? How might Abigail’s life have been different if she had married Tom Kimura? What might have happened to the diary then?

  When Raul takes Lauren up in the plane, she makes the comment, “I’m so small!” He tells her, “It’s not always about you.” What do you think he means in that moment?

  What do you think Lauren does after she graduates from college? What kind of career do you imagine her in?

  John Peter tells Mercy shortly before her arrest that it “is easier to believe ill of someone than good.” Discuss whether you think he is right, and why.

  What do you think of Mercy’s final act of compassion? Did she do the right thing?

  The Shape of Mercy is a story about choices, stigma, and preconceived notions. In light of these themes, what did you discover about yourself?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to …

  My writing colleagues, Susie Larson and Sharon Hinck, for coming alongside to applaud me as Mercy’s story and persona took on flesh, and Brandilyn Collins and James Scott Bell, for advice, direction, and perspective.