The Shape of Mercy (31 page)

Two tears slipped from my eyes and slid down my cheeks. I had been moved by Mercy. I was baffled by her and awed by her. She had changed nothing and changed everything.

And Abigail had told the truth all along.

She told me Mercy died a needless death. That she had been unjustly tried, convicted, and sentenced. That the verdict had been execution by hanging.

And that Mercy died by hanging on September 22, 1692.

All true.

“Look, I’ve got class,” Professor Turrell said when I said nothing. “If you want, call me when you get your thumb drive back. My editor said he’d come talk to Abigail in person if the diary is genuine.”

“I already told you it’s genuine.”

“He needs to see it. He wants to see it.”

“If I hear from her, I’ll call you.”

“Sounds good.”

“Tell your Boston friend thanks.”

“Will do.”

We said good-bye. I shut my phone and turned my body so that the back of my head rested against the window. I wanted to reach across the ages. I wanted to fold time in two, slide myself into that jail cell, and bring Mercy back with me, alive. I wanted to know what it was like to see the world the way Mercy saw it. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, I looked over at my family at the far end of the corridor. They were all absorbed in their own thoughts.

Except Raul. His book lay open on his lap, but he was staring at me.

I met his gaze for only a moment. Then I turned toward the elevators, the cafeteria, and momentary anonymity.

Raul followed me to the elevator doors. When I lifted my finger from the down button, he was at my side.

“You okay?” His polite tone was laced with concern.

“Yeah.” Our eyes met for a second, and I looked away.

“I’m sure your dad’s going to pull through this just fine. He’s relatively young, in great physical shape, and this is a really good hospital.”

I felt my face warm. I didn’t know how to tell him I wasn’t thinking about my dad at all. It was demoralizing enough just realizing it.

His hand reached out and I felt his fingers gently land on my shoulder. “You don’t believe me?” He bent his head to catch my gaze.

“No. I mean, yes, I do believe you. I just.”

Raul waited. His thumb caressed the skin below the bones of my shoulder. I shivered.

“I just …”

I couldn’t tell him my anxious thoughts were tumbling around in the seventeenth century instead of in the present, where my dad lay in an operating room, his chest splayed open.

Raul moved his hand away quickly, like he had read my thoughts and was ashamed of me. I looked up, startled to see that the elevator doors were open and had probably been open for several seconds. Raul held them for me. I forgot where I’d been headed.

I stared at the doors.

“Still want to go down?” he asked.

From somewhere deep inside me, my frustration burst through.

“I don’t know what I want.”

The minute I said it, I wished I hadn’t. Those words had nothing to do with whether I still wanted to go to the cafeteria or not, and we both knew it.

For a second we were both silent.

“I really think everything’s going to work out just fine. Most of the time it does.” Raul’s voice was gentle. He could have asked about the phone call, why it had moved me tears, why I was so torn between two warring concerns. But he didn’t. It was one of the kindest things anyone had ever done for me.

He pulled his hand away and the doors swished closed, the car empty. “Want to pace?” He smiled.

I smiled back.

We walked the floor eight times.

Raul told me about growing up in Guadalajara. There was a lot to tell. I only had to listen.

Six and half hours after surgery began, we were told Dad was in recovery, heavily sedated and intubated, but doing well. We had been told at the five-hour mark that it was taking longer than expected and that we needed to just sit tight. My mother and Denise practically jogged the cardiac unit that last hour.

The surgeon suggested we wait to see him until the following day since he was sedated. My mom was allowed in for a few minutes, and I was told I could visit first thing in the morning.

Cole and Raul weren’t allowed to see Dad because they weren’t immediate family, and since they had to get back to Palo Alto, they got ready to leave.

“Want to take us back to the airport, Lars? I’ve borrowed a car from a friend of mine here, and he needs it to get to work. We’ll need a ride from his place.”

Cole didn’t wait for me to answer. He just hugged his mom and mine and started for the elevators.

“Do you mind?” Raul asked.

“No,” I said. I had nothing better to do. My aunt and uncle agreed to wait for my mom and take her home so I could use my parents’ car.

Cole chattered the whole way to the municipal airport, expelling the nervous energy he had stored up in case something bad happened during the surgery. When we got to the airfield, Raul went inside the main building to okay his flight plan. I stood outside with Cole and waited. Behind the fence lay a sea of white and cream planes with splashes of color on their wings and sides.

“Which one is Raul’s?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“Which plane is Raul’s?”

“Oh.” Cole pointed to a plane across the Tarmac with a bold blue stripe on the cockpit door. “That one. But it’s not his.”

“His is broken?”

“What?”

“Why aren’t you in his plane?”

Cole made a face at me. “Raul doesn’t have a plane. Did he tell you that plane was his?”

My face grew hot.

“Man, are you gullible, Lars. Good one, Raul.” He laughed.

“Raul doesn’t have a plane?”

Cole laughed harder. “I’m so sure! No, he doesn’t have a plane. He has a pilot’s license, though. At least he told me he does.”

“Whose plane is that then?”

“A friend of my dad’s at the West Valley Flying Club. He lets us borrow it for hardly anything, ’cause he hasn’t been able to fly it in a while. He only charges us for the fuel. He likes Raul. Everybody likes Raul. And Raul takes good care of the plane.”

“So Raul rented that plane.”

“No, not rented. Borrowed.”

The warmth continued to spread across my face and neck. I felt like I was melting.

Cole cocked his head at me. “Besides, Raul can’t
rent
a plane. Do you know how much it would cost to rent a plane, Lars?”

I couldn’t say anything.

“Okay, well, you and I don’t have to worry about money but some people do. Raul can’t afford to rent a plane whenever I want to come home. You think everybody’s made of money?”

No, no, no.

“I just thought … I mean, he’s at Stanford.

“On a scholarship and student loans.”

“He wore such nice shirts when you guys came home.”

“What? Oh. Those were
my
shirts, Lauren. He borrowed them because he wanted to look nice while he was here. Man, are you red. People will think you spent the day at the beach instead of the hospital. I do believe you’re embarrassed.”

I wanted to rub the red and the heat away. I didn’t want Raul to see me shamed out of my wits. I had done it again, done exactly what I loathed. Assumed I knew everything and was wrong all the way around.

“I can’t believe I did that,” I muttered.

“Me neither. You were always the nice one.”

I looked at Cole. “Don’t tell him, please?”

“Tell him what?” Cole’s eyes danced with glee.

“Please, Cole, don’t tell him!”

“Don’t tell him you don’t like him now that you know he’s not rich?”

“That’s not true, Cole. Don’t you dare tell him that! I swear to God that’s not true!”

“Yeah, right.”

“Cole, please.”

“I’ll think about it.”

I leaned against my car, wanting to dissolve into the warm metal. I wanted to leave. I didn’t want to wait for Raul. And yet I did.

“Why did you guys even come?” I moaned.

Cole blinked. “Well, I came for my parents and for your dad.”

“And you just used Raul as your personal taxi driver?”

He laughed, but it was a sour laugh. I didn’t like it. “You really are dense, Lars. Wake up. Raul didn’t come to be my chauffeur.”

I met his eyes and waited for him to tell me.

“Raul said you e-mailed him and told him your dad was going to have surgery and that you were afraid.” Cole folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against my mother’s car. “He came for you.”

I
slept in the guest room by the little library. I don’t know why. When my mom went up to bed a little after nine, I went into my bedroom, grabbed my overnight bag, and headed up to the third floor. I poked around in the library for a while, sat at my old writing desk awhile longer, and then climbed into a bed I had never slept in and begged sleep to take me to a place where I didn’t have to think about who I really was.

For so long I had imagined I was different, that money wasn’t important to me, that I was a new kind of Durough. I didn’t evaluate people or tasks or ideas by their monetary worth. I was above all that.

I wasn’t the person my dad was.

I was someone else.

I was someone worse.

I did evaluate people and ideas by their monetary worth, but I pretended I didn’t. And that was worse.

I had judged Abigail that way. And Clarissa. And the gardener’s son.

And Raul.

Sleep didn’t come for a long time.

I woke early, before the sun. My dreams were unremembered, but they left me unsettled and on edge. I didn’t want to remember them.

I made my own breakfast, drank several cups of coffee, and waited
for the day to break. As soon as the sky turned from pink to amber, I left a note for my mother apologizing for going to the hospital without her but I couldn’t wait to see Dad. I knew she would at least be happy to hear that. I promised to come back and get her if she didn’t want to drive down herself.

I wondered if I would collect frowns from the nursing staff for showing up so early, but no one seemed to mind that I had come before visitors typically showed up. Perhaps they thought I had camped out the night before in the waiting room like others had done.

My father had a restful night, the nurses said, which meant he did not burst his stitches or spike a fever or slip into cardiac arrest. He was barely awake when I stepped into his room. The breathing tube had been removed, and when he saw me, a quiver of a smile broke across his face.

“Lauren,” he whispered.

“Shhh. I know it probably hurts to talk, Dad.”

“It’s not so bad,” he croaked.

I took the seat next to his bed and ran my hand across his. He grabbed for my fingers.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

He cracked another smile. “I’ve felt better.”

“You’ve looked better,” I whispered back and the smile increased before it fell away. He didn’t have the strength to keep it.

“I was afraid,” he whispered.

“What’s that?”

“I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“I think maybe I was gone for a few minutes,” he continued.

My heart stuttered. “What?”