Book of Mercy

M
OST WOMEN DON’T LEARN
they’re pregnant and then drive for fifteen hours trying to outrun the idea. Antigone Brown did. Today the open road called to her like a siren. It whispered: Today’s your birthday. You’re thirty years old. And you’re going to have a baby. What if she’s just like you?

Much to her husband’s despair, Antigone unwound on curving country roads, unraveling problems as yellow lines disappeared in the rearview mirror. Normally, the road healed. Her stress melted into the hot asphalt like ice cream. Her fears receded.

Not this time. This trip the pressure inside her had built with each passing mile. She drove through the warm night, hair flying, radio blaring, with the top down on the convertible, until she could drive no more. Finally, she whipped into a roadside park, with a spray of gravel, and braked in front of a pay telephone. She switched off the motor.

With an exasperated sweep of her hand, Antigone flung to the floor the bewildering assortment of documents from her doctor—prescriptions for vitamins, orders for lab work, handouts on prenatal care. They made her want to scream. So she did. Convertibles were perfect for a good scream. Her voice abruptly silenced the early morning twittering of the birds, but a few moments later, they were back at it again, conversing about the spring day, worms, whatever the talk was at their breakfast tables. As it grew lighter, she looked around and was struck by her aloneness. There was a single picnic table tucked back in a copse of maples. And that was it. Two-lane road, no traffic, no farms in sight. Just her and the birds.

Antigone staggered from the car, leaving the door ajar, ran to the edge of the road, and peered up at a road sign. As she slowly sounded out the words, she remembered: the smell of the girls’ school bathroom. She was huddled on the cold tile floor, hiding, rocking, reciting the alphabet song over and over again. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G . . .”

“I’m falling to pieces right here on the side of the road,” she grumbled. The mischievous letters on the sign continued to jump around, leapfrogging over each other. Maybe, she thought, crazy baby hormones had short-circuited her. All the little things she, a woman with dyslexia, did to cheat chaos, like singing the alphabet song, weren’t working. How would she survive without her normal tricks? She rubbed her eyes and whispered, “No alphabet songs for my baby. Please.”

She needed Sam.

Abruptly, she turned and headed for the telephone kiosk, old and abandoned. Without even looking at the buttons, Antigone punched in the numbers. No dial tone. She slammed the receiver down and redialed. Nothing again. She banged on the side of the phone box with the receiver.

“You need to put in some money.”

Antigone whirled and squinted into the dusky light. At last, she saw a figure lying on the lone picnic table.

“Of course.” Antigone dug in her pockets, but they were empty except for pellets of deer food and the small green stone she always kept in her left pocket. She glanced at the picnic table. “Do you have any money?”

“Do I look like an ATM?”

She searched her pockets again. This was the kind of thing that made Sam crazy: his wife on a lonely road, no cell phone, talking to strangers.

“Maybe there’s some change in your car,” the stranger yawned.

“Good thinking,” she said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Antigone ran to the car, flung her sunglasses on the dash, dropped to her knees, and pushed her fingers in the space between the Mustang’s seats. She knew the contents of her wallet: one twenty-dollar bill and a credit card. She never carried change. If you carried change, that meant, eventually, you’d have to count change, which was not an option. That left whatever the floor and seat cushions would give up. She found a barrette, some M&M candies, more pellets, and several quarters.

“Aha!” She held up the coins to the light with her dusty fingers and popped the stale, chipped M&Ms in her mouth.

Sam answered on the first ring. “Antigone?”

“Sam.”

Her husband’s voice instantly became alert. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“I don’t know. New York, I think.”

“New York,” confirmed the voice from the picnic table.

“Definitely New York,” said Antigone.

“Is there someone with you?” Sam asked.

“No.” Antigone shook her head, suddenly confused. “Yes. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re not making sense.” She heard Sam sigh. “Dammit. You know how I hate this.”

Antigone leaned against the kiosk, exhausted. “I know . . . but I
did
leave a message on the answering machine.” Before driving north out of Mercy, North Carolina, Antigone had called home from the doctor’s office—“It’s official. We’re having a baby. Gone for a drive. Don’t worry.” Antigone never left notes; she always called the answering machine, especially when she was avoiding Sam. The answering machine was the first thing he checked when he walked into the house.

“Yeah, nothing like getting one of the most important messages of your life from a damn machine,” Sam growled.

“Sorry. I tried
not
to run. I really did.”

“I called the doctor’s office, but they said you’d already left.”

“I just freaked. The doctor gave me homework—all these papers to fill out—and you know how I am with forms.”

“I know, you’d rather be put on the rack,” Sam said.

“I was driving around, and everywhere I looked there were babies.”

“If you’d driven straight home . . .”

She lowered her head and turned her back to the figure on the table. “And then I started worrying about who was going to help our baby with her homework.”

Sam’s voice softened. “Tigg, why do you put yourself through this?”

“I’m going to be a worthless mother, Sam. She’s going to hate me. She deserves a mother who can read.”

“You
can
read,” he insisted.

“But it’s so hard and it takes so long. I feel like an idiot,” Antigone said.

“She won’t hate you.”

“But the homework . . .”

“I’ll handle the homework; you’ll teach her to drive.”

Antigone smiled at that. She wished more than anything that she were cuddled next to Sam. Sometimes, at night, she watched Sam sleep, his hard chest rising and falling with each steady breath. Even in sleep, he exuded confidence. He made her feel safe. He never needed the alphabet song.

“I’m so tired, Sam. I can’t remember being this tired on other drives.”

“You’re killing me, Tigg. You know that, don’t you? Absolutely killing me.”

“Sorry.”

“I tried your cell.”

She kicked at a tuft of grass with the toe of her hiking boot. “I sort of misplaced it—again.”

“I know. I heard it ringing. In the yard. With the deer.”

Silence. She leaned closer to the phone, “Forget the phone. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Sam groaned. “William baked a birthday cake like you wouldn’t believe. Quadruple chocolate. Come home, Tigg. I’m going nuts around here without you.”

“I love it when you turn all sweet and mushy.”

“I am never mushy.”

“Sam . . .” Antigone paused, and she could almost feel Sam tense.

“What?”

Playing with the phone cord, she whispered into the receiver, “I wish you could come get me.”

It was the first time she’d ever asked.

Silence, then finally, “You know I’d never find you.”

What a fine pair they were, Antigone thought, the directionally challenged Sam got lost crossing the road and she couldn’t even navigate her way through a prenatal brochure. What chance did their child have of being remotely normal? “Who ever heard of a mechanic who gets lost the minute he leaves the driveway?”