The Shape of Mercy (22 page)

I am glad Papa is breathing the air of Heaven with lungs that are not diseased. But I miss him. He has been gone from me five days.

I laid out table settings for two tonight
.

I laughed at first
.

Then I wept.

I
pushed my chair away from the diary, blinking back tears that I didn’t want to fall on pages already smudged from long-ago grief.

Abigail had returned to the library at some point while I worked, and she moved toward me. In her hands she held a tissue. “Here,” she said.

I took it and dabbed at my eyes. “Guess where I’m at in the diary today?” I said. My voice cracked.

“I know where you are.” Abigail took a chair across from me at the writing table instead of her usual one behind me.

“And I even knew it was coming.” I laughed, but fresh tears tumbled down my cheeks. I mopped at them, surprised and angry that they refused to stop.

Abigail said nothing. Her face revealed nothing. It was as if she felt nothing.

“So how did you know I’d need this?” I waved the wet tissue.

“Because I needed one the first time I read it.” Her voice was flat.

I looked up at her. “When was the first time you read it?”

“The day my mother gave it to me. I was thirteen.”

“Thirteen?”

“You think that’s too young.”

“Well, sort of. She just handed it to you one day?”

Abigail’s features softened. “I had to wash the chocolate off my hands first.”

I dabbed at the last stray tear and smiled. “I’m serious.”

Abigail inhaled, as if to grab a remnant of oxygen from that long-ago day when she first saw Mercy’s diary.

“It was my birthday. My mother invited me to her bedroom. She had a little safe in her closet. She told me was going to give me something special for my birthday. I thought it was going to be one of her diamond necklaces, or maybe the ruby ring I liked, or the sapphire earrings her parents had given her. But it was the diary she handed me.”

Abigail stopped and I waited.

“I was disappointed,” she continued. “Not terribly so, because I loved books and was taken with the idea that the diary had been written by an ancestor of mine during colonial times. But still, I wasn’t overjoyed.”

“You wanted the ruby ring instead?”

“No, not exactly. I was just frustrated at the reason my mother gave it to me then. She told me she was supposed to wait until I was nineteen, like she had been when her mother gave it to her.”

“Mercy’s age?”

“Mercy died a month before her nineteenth birthday.”

“So why didn’t she wait?”

Abigail blinked slowly and then locked her eyes on mine. “Because she was dying.”

My voice hung useless in my throat.

“So I was mad,” she continued. “Ticked, I think your generation would say. I ended up with all those jewels anyway. She didn’t bother to give them to me ahead of time, like she did the diary. The diary was the only thing of hers she actually handed to me before she died, so I saw it as proof that life isn’t fair. And then, of course, I read it that day and was sure of it.”

“You read it in one day?”

“I wasn’t as patient as you. If I got to a part I couldn’t decipher, I skipped it and went on to the next part I could read. I stayed up most of the night.”

I imagined Abigail as an adolescent, reading the saddest parts of the diary alone in her darkened bedroom. What had run through her young mind as she read of ghostly apparitions, screaming girls, and swinging bodies?

“Did you know before you began reading what happened to Mercy?” I asked. “Did your mother tell you?”

Abigail looked at her withered hands folded in her lap. “She told me …” Abigail’s voice fell away and she chewed on her lower lip, obviously deep in thought. I didn’t think she was trying to remember what her mother said. She was trying to decide how to tell me.

Or how much.

“What did she say, Abigail?”

Abigail raised her eyes to look at me. “She … she said the diary would make me sad, but that I was to remember that underneath all the sadness, the diary told a love story. That was the part I was to remember, and that’s what I was to tell my daughter, if I had a daughter, when I gave
her
the diary.”

I blinked. “A love story.”

“Yes.”

A love story? I saw no hope for Mercy and John Peter’s love for each other. None. I had two months of Mercy’s entries left to transcribe, and I knew in that time she’d be accused, tried, and hanged.

She’d be dead.

That didn’t seem like a love story to be remembered.

“Is that what you think it is? A love story?”

Abigail looked past me, into the room across the hall, whose doors stood open that day.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I think, when you are done, you will too.”

I let my eyes wander down to Mercy’s aging words. There weren’t that many pages left to transcribe. August and September, just two months. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to finish it.

I wanted to stay up all night and finish it, as Abigail had done.

I was about to ask if I could rearrange my work hours so I could spend the weekend at her house and finish the transcription, when her voice broke the silence.

“Lauren, I need to go away for a couple days. I need to take care of a few things.”

“Oh.” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. I didn’t try.

“This doesn’t need to interfere with your work on the diary. You can either not come the next few days, or if you wish, I will give you a key and you can work your normal hours. Esperanza will only be here a few hours a day. I’m giving her most of the week off, so she won’t be cooking meals. She deserves some time to herself.”

“Oh. That’s okay,” I said, my mind already whirring with how easily I could finish the diary if I could stay as long as I wanted.

“I hope this doesn’t cause problems for you.”

“No. Not at all. I’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

She studied me for a moment. I was too eager for her to go and it showed. I attempted to back-pedal a bit. “I’ll do what I can while you’re away and just save any questions I have until you return.”

Another long moment passed between us where she simply studied me.

“Lauren, I want you to know that I trust you. And I’m glad I can trust you. I know you won’t let the laptop or the diary leave this house while I’m away if I ask that they not. And I am indeed asking you. Being able to trust you means more to me than I can say.”

It was my turn to be silent. It had never occurred to me to remove the diary from the house. I would never have taken a chance with such a priceless relic. But taking the laptop out? I might have thought of
that. It annoyed me that Abigail had thought of it first and was forbidding it.

“I know you’re anxious to finish the diary,” she continued. “I don’t blame you. But you’ll have questions when you’re finished, and I ask that you wait until I return to find out the answers. I assure you everything will be perfectly clear in the end. I would like you to trust me on this as I trust you.”

We sat and stared at each other as she waited for me to seal our covenant of trust.

“Why will I have questions?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

She ignored my question. “When you finish the diary, wait for me. Anything unclear to you I will make clear. I promise.”

“How long will you be gone?” I asked.

“Three days. Maybe four. I plan to return on Monday. Tuesday at the latest.”

“All right.”

“All right to everything?” she said.

“Yes.” I sighed. “I’ll wait for you.”

She rose from her chair, placed her hand in her pocket, and withdrew a key. She placed it on the writing table next to the diary.

“You may stay in the guest room at the top of the stairs if you wish.”

I closed my hand over the key. “Thank you.”

Abigail started to walk away. I wondered if she was heading to Maine. To Graham. To bail him out of some kind of trouble, perhaps?

I called her name and she turned.

“Is everything all right? Do you need help with anything?”

The corners of Abigail’s mouth rose slightly. “No. Everything’s not all right. But it’s my problem to deal with. Thanks for asking, though. I’ll see you when I return.”

“Good-bye, Abigail.”

As soon as Abigail was gone, I stood, covered the open diary with
a plastic sheet, and gathered my things, including Abigail’s key. I tossed the wet tissue into the trash and ran my hand lightly and lovingly across the diary as I stepped away from the table.

I was both anxious for and dreading the time I would spend with Mercy while she still lived. I couldn’t wait for class to get out on Friday so I could rush over to Abigail’s and work as much as I wanted.

No one showed me to the door.

I walked out into the autumn twilight and switched on my cell phone. I’d turned it off while I worked. Two voice mails waited for me.

The first was from my dad.

The second, from Clarissa’s economics professor.

T
he professor’s message was short and to the point. He’d learned from my roommate that I was working on the transcript of a diary written during the Salem witch trials. Clarissa had told him the diary’s author was one of the women accused of witchcraft. He would very much like to talk to me about my work.

That’s what he called it—my work.

Professor Turrell gave me his home phone number and e-mail address in addition to his number and e-mail on campus.

He sounded interested. He also sounded unconvinced the work I was doing was authentic. There was something in his tone that made me nervous. I didn’t want to talk to him. Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

I drove to the dorm and made a mental list of all the reasons I could postpone calling him back.

I hadn’t read the whole diary yet, so my “work” was incomplete at the moment.

I should ask Abigail’s permission before speaking about the diary to a man writing a book. Even if he was a college professor.

I had no insights on how the Salem witch trials affected the colonists’ economy.

I owed this man nothing.

My cell phone trilled as I composed the list. I reached for it with one hand while driving with the other. It was my mother.

“Didn’t you get Dad’s message?” she asked when I answered. No
hello.
No
how are you.
She sounded agitated.

“Sorry, Mom. I was working. I just got off.”

“Well, he’s been waiting all afternoon for you to call him back.” She sounded on the verge of tears.

From somewhere behind her, I heard my dad say, “Julia, just give me the phone. It’s not that big a deal.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. It is a big deal.” My mother began to cry. I negotiated a turn with one hand while trying to cradle the phone in the crook of my neck.

“Mom, what’s going on?” I grabbed at the wheel as I swung wide, nearly hitting the curb.

“I knew something like this would happen. I knew it.” Mom wasn’t into theatrics, but something had her shaking with dread. And she wasn’t talking to me anymore.

“Mom, please!” On impulse, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and took the first available spot.

“Just let me have the phone, Jules.” My dad’s voice was near hers. I heard the phone exchanged from hand to another.

“Lauren.”

“Dad! What’s going on? What happened?”

“Nothing’s happened. I just have to have surgery.”

“Tell me,” I said, hardly aware of having said those words, that way.

“I’ve got three blocked arteries. The doctors want to do a bypass. They told me it can’t wait.”

A wave of alarm sliced through me. For a brief moment, I saw Mercy weeping over the body of her dead father. I tossed the unwanted image from my mind.

“Dad,” I finally managed to say, “when did all this happen?”

“Over the last fifty-two years.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. This has been waiting to happen for fifty-two years. It
doesn’t matter that I’m at the gym four days a week. It’s just the way I’m wired, apparently.”

I was still trying to process the idea that my father was ill. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the thought. I had never known my dad to be sick. He got the occasional cold or sore throat, but he never spent a day at home in bed. It’d been years since he’d seen a doctor.

“When did you find out?”

“Today. I’d been feeling kind of crappy. Your mom made me make an appointment. I put it off as long as I could, so she’s mad at me, of course.”

“When are you having surgery?”

“Tuesday.”

In five days.

“Do you want me to come?” I asked.

“On Tuesday? Your mother would probably appreciate it.”

“I mean now.”

“You don’t have to come now. I’m going to have a very boring weekend sitting at home and trying not to take care of things at the office. Don’t come for me, not this weekend. I wouldn’t mind seeing you on Tuesday, though. I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

There was an inflection in his voice I hadn’t heard before. He sounded afraid.