A Matter of Mercy (2 page)
Authors: Lynne Hugo
The air outside the house was cooler and fresher. She stepped off the porch and started downhill, through a pine and oak scrim to the hundred-step path surrounded by beach plums and rose hips that opened out to clear sand. Many of the houses nearby had been turned into summer rentals, though a few of the old families who hadn’t been driven out by ever-increasing taxes still hung on. Up on the bluffs to the east, a spate of new custom homes, with enormous expanses of plate glass, skylights and multi-tiered decks, had been built by washashores, non-natives ostentatious enough to leave them empty in winter while they sojourned in Mexico or the Mediterranean or wherever people like that went to stay warm. To her right, the sunset—peach with magenta streaks—melted over the roofs of houses on the western edge of the horseshoe-shaped inlet. When she reached the sand above the wrack line, she sank down cross-legged to absorb the luminous kaleidoscope over what remained changeless of her mother’s holy place.
This was the town’s back yard, the bay side, with its natural harbor and gentle variations, domestic and domesticated. This was where people woke, did business, played, ate dinner and lay themselves down at night. Seven miles cross Cape, on the other side of Route 6, was National Seashore, where giant parabolas of brocaded dunes and the raw wild Atlantic offered a natural and spiritual ecosystem far more expansive. Over there, the beach was primeval, the stoneless sand ranged from raw to ultra-fine sugar. Here, one was best advised to walk wearing shoes. All Wellfleet’s bay beaches were littered with dusky water-worn stones of pure white, gray, mauve and purple nestled alongside razor-sharp bivalve shells that could ribbon bare feet and leave them bloody. And around Indian Neck, the oyster cultch was murderous. But the contrasts were Wellfleet’s ying and yang, just as the summer crowds and the winter isolation balanced each other. Caroline knew natives who hated the summer people, truly hated them for the congestion they brought, packed with their arrogance, even though much of the Cape depended on tourist dollars to keep afloat.
She glanced away from the sunset to take in the whole sweep of beach and bay at twilight and realized that a man approaching from the other side of the inlet was already close enough to speak. Caroline guessed who he was from her mother’s brick shithouse summary more than from an image she could call up herself. Jeans, a green T-shirt, tattooed forearms, hair and complexion like sand and dusk, weather-scrubbed as the bluffs behind him.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” he said, looking down at her, not slowing.
“Hey yourself, Rid. How’re you?” Caroline composed herself mentally, grateful she’d seen him coming and was spared the startle.
“Uh, hi, uh—I’m sorry.” He was off guard, and Caroline realized he had no idea who she was, had only been making a passing greeting to a stranger. She wished she hadn’t used his name because now he stopped, a question on
his face.
“It’s me, Rid, Caroline, from up yonder.” She gestured toward her mother’s house behind and slightly above them. It still wasn’t registering. “CiCi Marcum.” She added the nickname of her school years.
“CiCi. My God, I’d never have recognized you.” Embarrassed. “Geez. What’d you do? I mean, God. Geez. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it rude like that sounded.” He squatted down next to her on the sand. Sticking his thumb and forefinger into his mouth, he produced a shrill whistle. A Labrador retriever appeared within seconds and Caroline paused to watch it lope across the beach. Rid grabbed its collar. “Lizzie, you stick here with me, girl,” he said, “Down,” and Lizzie slurped his chin with her tongue, sat, and then lay down, reluctant, one brown foreleg then the other.
“That’s okay. Yeah, I probably do look pretty different.” Caroline knew he was envisioning a heavier girl with a high forehead and long dark brown hair. She’d never put the weight she’d lost in jail back on, and her hair was cropped now, highlighted blonde, a scattering of bangs altering the shape of her face. She’d been two or three classes ahead of him. And fair’s fair: her memory of him didn’t include this burliness and weathered tan, the smile lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes revealing their secret white centers when his face was at rest. His hairline had started to recede on either side of his forehead, making his round face faintly heart-shaped. She remembered his hair as some undistinguished shade of brown, but now it was sun-burnished, gold.
“I’d say. Um, you here visiting or—?”
“My mother’s sick,” she said, cutting him off.
“Geez. Is it serious? I mean, I didn’t know. I just come in over there, on the access road, you know, and do my work.” As he spoke he pointed to the opposite side of the horseshoe, to the dirt road that led out of Indian Neck toward Route 6 where a truck, painted black by the advance of night, was parked. Usually, there were at least eight or ten at low tide; now only his and one other, a sure sign the tide was a good halfway up. “I don’t pay much attention to who’s—anyway, I’m sorry she’s sick. What’s the matter?”
Caroline hesitated, inclined by the habit of her history to put him off. For a minute, she let the background sound—incoming mid-tide plashes—emerge, but there was still a gap and he left it unfilled so she answered, more because he was a stranger than because she’d ever casually known him. “Cancer. Ovarian.”
“Geez, that’s bad. Is it...? I mean, she’s gettin’ treatment and all, right?”
“It was pretty far gone when she got diagnosed. It’s an easy one to miss, I guess. That’s the only easy thing about it.” Her voice a hybrid of irony and
anger.
“God. That’s hard, that’s bad.” He nodded, as if to say
I know.
It occurred to her, in that same intimate-stranger way, to say, “I’m really sorry about your Dad. Mom told me. Were you there? When he died, I mean. If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Dad pretty much just keeled over, but I did get to the hospital just before he died,” he said lightly, and Caroline wouldn’t have pressed for more, but Rid said, “I was already back here then. After. I guess you know I was in prison and all.”
Startled. “No, I didn’t.” She’d wanted to ask about what it was like, seeing his father die, whether he was glad he’d been there or wished he hadn’t. The notion of rudeness stopped her. Later she’d think it strange that she hadn’t wanted to ask him what his prison was like.
“Yeah, man, I was one messed up dude. Did all kinds of drugs, sold ’em, you name it. It all caught up with me, though. Four and a half years’ worth.”
“For drugs?”
“Well, throw in a little grand theft auto, but I count that as drugs since I was flying at the time and didn’t really need a car.” He chuckled and shook his head. “If you get my drift. I was out before Dad died, and that was cool, though. When I came back, see, I started working with Dad because I didn’t have a job or a place to go. They always did stick by me. Then he died, and now that’s mine.” Rid turned and pointed behind him, to an area in the bay across the inlet. “Five acres. Dad got my name on his grant when I turned eighteen, even though I didn’t want nothin’ to do with workin’ it back then. I guess he could see I wasn’t headed anywhere else, you know, that I might want to come back to it. I seed ’em, I tend ’em and I harvest ’em. Best oysters in the world. I’m buildin up the quahogs, too, now, getting into them more.”
“You really like it?”
“
Look
at it,” he said by way of answer, sweeping his arm expansively. Then, embarrassed again. “How’s bout you? You went to college, didn’t you? And didn’t you get married?”
Caroline hesitated, sensing Rid wasn’t disingenuous enough to be setting her up. “Yeah,” she said. “I went to college, and yeah, but I also got a divorce.”
“And now you’re a...” he said, inviting her to fill in the blank.
“Oh, God, now I’m nothing. I was a waitress in Chicago. Actually, I just spent three weeks giving notice, subletting my apartment, and all that stuff so I could come back here to be with Mom.”
“A waitress? You went to college to be a waitress?”
“Well, I waitressed in the
Plaza
,” she said, and heard her defensiveness, so added, “but no, I didn’t go to college for that. My degree was in Elementary Education.”
“So you’re a
teacher
.”
“Ah, no, not any more. Long story.”
This time he caught the put off. “There’s a sure sign of fall comin’ on,” he said gesturing with his chin. Overhead, a great blue heron’s wings beat against the sky. “That’s my guy. He and his buddies love the bait fish around the grants this time of year.” The sun slid below the horizon degree by degree, a great red neon ball being lowered from an invisible string held by God, fiery and benign. The bay answered with tongues and darts and minnows of color. “Well, nice talkin’ to you, CiCi. I’m sorry about your Mom. Listen, I’m around here every low tide just like Dad used to be—I mean, if you need a hand, you know, just watch for me and yell.”
“Thanks. I’m fine, though.” The auto-answer. “There’s a hospice nurse that comes,” Caroline got to her feet a second after Rid did, pretending not to see the hand he held out, keeping her head down until he’d tucked it in his pocket to save them both the moment. The last of the sun slipped toward tomorrow, but its remains bled onto the water. Rid bent to caress Lizzie’s ears. When he straightened, he stood shorter than Caroline’s five-eight by a sideways thumb.
Chapter 2
“I hate the idea of you being alone after I’m gone,” Eleanor said. “I wish there’d been a baby or two. Before. You couldn’t have done anything about it, then. For heaven’s sake, what would you have done, stuffed ’em back inside?” Eleanor chuckled, the first time she’d laughed out loud in a couple of days. Caroline had always liked the throaty laugh that leaked out of her mother like a man’s chuckle, and even though what Eleanor said offended her, she didn’t shoot back. The oncologist had privately suggested to Caroline that she consider having her ovaries removed prophylactically, and soon, unless she wanted to have a baby first. Eleanor’s was an aggressive cancer and likely an inherited gene. He suggested they do a genetic test to make sure, as if Caroline could think about that now. When she couldn’t block his words from her mind, she imagined a time bomb with a silent, cold-burning fuse uncoiling and shortening inside her.
“Obviously it wasn’t meant to be, Mom. So you’ll just have to hang around and live after all.”
“Nonsense.” As if to prove her point, Eleanor’s breathing grew heavy for a moment as a tide of pain washed over her. “Not going to happen, honey. Don’t forget to order firewood. Call Pete DeRego for that. And return Noelle’s casserole dish. Sorry I let you down.”
“Now that’s nonsense.”
“Not too late. You still could have one.”
Caroline was parked next to the hospital bed in an uncomfortable chair not meant for long sitting. She made another note to herself to move the furniture around again and position the blue upholstered chair where this straight-backed one was. She’d brought in more flowers—marigolds and white geranium heads this time, dotted with deep fuchsia dahlias—and rehung some of her mother’s favorite seascape paintings where Eleanor could see them. Though she’d had to shove the coffee table way out of place, Caroline had arranged some of Eleanor’s salt pottery on the hutch, the big blue and brown bowl and matching pitcher her mother had fashioned like an antique washstand set, trying to keep the room satisfying to an artist’s eye.
It was a Sunday, the third in August, and Caroline had been home just long enough to know that Sunday was the hardest day to get through. No Elsie the hospice nurse, no Julia the respite care provider who came twice a week. It was all on her shoulders.
And it meant that if Eleanor got on a subject Caroline wanted to steer on by, say, for example, Caroline’s phantom, unborn children or her own ongoing dying, it was even more difficult to divert her. Unless pain accomplished the diversion for her, which was something Caroline could hardly wish for. She learned to sit in silence or let a feathery response drift from her mouth. Sometimes Eleanor accommodated by nodding off, this especially after her pain pills. They hadn’t increased the morphine to a drip yet, though Elsie, nursey-crisp in her efficiency but kind in her smile and street clothes, had told them both that it was available anytime. “When you’re ready,” she said to Eleanor. “If” Caroline had corrected Elsie, and Elsie didn’t answer, only stroked the web between Eleanor’s thumb and first finger with her own thumb, as if it were the outer petal of a rose.
Other times, though, there was no escape. Some days they might as well have been mother and ten-year-old on the beach again. With July sun scorching her back, CiCi used to bury her mother’s feet over and over again. No matter how deep the preparatory hole, no matter how much cement she created with sand and red plastic buckets of water to pile and pound over her mother’s wide size eight feet, Eleanor would finally just pull them out with no discernible effort. She’d wiggle her unpolished toes, and Caroline’s sculpted mound would crack as Eleanor’s rising feet erupted from the fortress.
So when she could speak—especially on Sundays—Eleanor was determined to have her say. Like last Sunday, when it was, “You know, you’ll look back and not believe you were so profligate with it. Your life, I mean. That once you were a little girl, and then you had a little girl and even then it was still all ahead of you. You never think about it because just a school year is the length of forever. You want it to pass. You confuse looking ahead with wanting something over. Two different things.”
Caroline hadn’t twitched. Hadn’t done anything, in fact, that could possibly be interpreted as encouragement to continue in this vein. She’d busied herself with an unnecessary check on the water in the pitcher on the bed table. “This is just room temperature,” she’d said. “How about I get some fresh ice?” But Eleanor had gone on, her hands too feeble that day to gesture as she normally would have. Caroline couldn’t believe the damn morphine wasn’t kicking in.
“Remember when you had that terrible sixth grfade teacher? What was her name?”
“I don’t know, Mom,” though of course, Caroline did.
“Yes, yes you do. What was it? Mrs. Socci? No, that was second…”
Eleanor could have gone on forever naming elementary teachers if she had to. Caroline capitulated in self-defense. “Mrs. Bladen?”
“That’s the one.” Eleanor plucked at her covers, and Caroline adjusted the sheets for the twentieth time in an hour. But she’d relaxed a bit, thinking Eleanor had finished with her unconceived babies and death talk
du jour
. But no, instead she was refining her technique, Caroline had soon grasped, combining the topics.
“See? I wanted that year to pass for you—and for me, too. Terrible year. Wanted it over. I really didn’t do a very good job with it.”
“Sure you did, Mom. You tried to get me switched out of that class.”
“I mean my life. Why didn’t I catch on about things?”
“Oh Mom, don’t say that. Please.”
“No, I spent my life avoiding what I should have embraced. Why didn’t I catch on? I want you to. Learn from me.” An offshore breeze rattled the open horizontal blinds that Caroline had partly closed against the late August afternoon sun overheating the room. “I almost think a body can use it as a sign when they avoid something, I mean. Here I am, seeing it now. So much too late.”
Caroline had rubbed her forehead then, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was sweaty in her jeans. She wanted to shout,
I get it already. You’re not exactly subtle, Mom.
Then, at that moment, she couldn’t bear the airlessness of denim another moment. She’d stood abruptly, unzipped and stepped out of her jeans, intending to carry them back to her room and get a pair of shorts. Eleanor didn’t miss a beat.
“I’ve done that, too. Your father had an elegant penis. Not large. Leroy’s was much bigger, but your father’s was tapered. Elegant.”
Caroline had been too stunned to get a sound out for at least fifteen seconds. She’d stood by the bed in her underpants and T-shirt. Who the hell was Leroy? Eleanor’s eyes were starting to close.
Oh no you don’t. You don’t go to sleep on me now, I don’t care how much morphine is in you.
“What, Mom? Who’s Leroy? Mom? Mom?”
Eleanor’s eyes were at half-mast. Caroline had repeated the question as Eleanor’s eyes shut. The response she received was a drugged snore. Later on, she’d tried again, asking in a tone casual as light breeze lifting the edge of a curtain who Leroy was.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever known a Leroy, dear,” Eleanor said calmly as she eyed the supper tray Caroline had made of beef barley soup, neat triangles of buttered toast, and applesauce. “And I don’t believe I’m hungry at all. The smell is making me a bit sick. Would you mind taking it away? Maybe later.”
Caroline brought it up again the next day, but Eleanor didn’t know any Leroy, and Caroline couldn’t make herself say why she was asking.
That had been the one time she wanted her mother to talk.
What she wanted every other day was just to make it. To do her job and bear what was and what was to come. To be patient, something that didn’t come naturally. To be loving. To redeem the ways she’d disappointed her mother, the ways she’d disappointed herself.
What she didn’t want were surprises that undid her, the eruptions of history and memory that broke the surface of her composure the way her mother’s feet used to destroy the sand mounds she’d constructed over them when she was a child. Tuesday morning, for example. Caroline took Eleanor’s power-of-attorney to the Seamen’s Bank and retrieved the contents of her mother’s safe deposit box. This time there was no warning toe wiggle, just an explosion of memory. Tucked in with Eleanor’s and Bill’s birth certificates, their marriage certificate, Bill’s death certificate, the canceled mortgage, insurance policies, car title and some letters from long-dead parents, was a newspaper clipping. A hot flush of recognition: Eleanor’s handwriting was on the bottom margin, slightly blurry, the way the ink from a felt pen fans out on newsprint:
Cape Cod Times
, November 12, 1994.
Friday Auto Accident in Provincetown Proves Fatal
blared the headline. Beneath it, slightly smaller type declared,
Teacher Charged with DWI Following Death of Four Year Old.
All she had done to bury that night crumbled away like the mucky wet sand over her mother’s feet. Eleanor had saved the only edition of the paper that didn’t give more details than the child’s name and age, details like, for example, that he’d been born without arms. Or that stubby hands emerged from wrists attached to his shoulders, although the hands weren’t themselves complete. Other days, the paper had chronicled his numerous birth defects, complete with all the pictures necessary to break everyone’s heart, including what remained of her own. Eleanor hadn’t saved those, it seemed. It didn’t matter; Caroline saw them anyway. Six and a half years after the accident, after a single moment had ruined everything, her grief was fresh as pressed cider. She put her head down on the fake wood veneer table and cried.
