A Matter of Mercy Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 3

  “Don’t panic,” Elsie said, touching Caroline’s arm. “I think it’s a pleural effusion. It’s a common complication in advanced ovarian cancer.” Caroline nodded as if she understood. She found it nearly unbearable to watch or listen to her mother trying to draw in a breath. What must it be like to endure? “If we hospitalize her overnight—Dr. Simcoe has already approved it—an x-ray will tell for sure. It’ll just show up as a big area of fluid in her lung. Your mother will be much more comfortable if it’s drained, and she’ll only be in the hospital overnight.”

  Caroline waited until Eleanor was settled and asleep after the procedure, mid-afternoon. “You don’t need to stay,” she’d said, and Caroline wondered if her mother knew how much she didn’t want to, in that terrible way mothers have of seeing through their children as if they were translucent. Nothing was in her control here, anyway. Not that at home the real outcome was in her control, either. But at home she could go into Executive Mode. She could do what she thought needed to be done. She could switch on the light that pushed back the edges of darkness, and she could keep it on, keeping her thoughts at bay. She could scramble eggs in the kitchen, rearrange furniture in the living room, give pills, and plump pillows wherever there were pillows. She could wait. And wait and wait and wait. She could wait for doctors to return calls, and pills to take effect, for test results, and for late respite care workers. Sometimes it was terrifying and hopeless, ducks she tried to keep in a row all waddling off in opposite directions to die while she wept. But mostly, she coped by staying in charge, by making lists and schedules, by doing. The hospital made Caroline quite crazy.

  “You don’t need to stay. You know she’ll likely sleep pretty much from now on,” the charge nurse said, echoing Eleanor. “You could get a break. Caregiving is exhausting. And with this storm coming, you shouldn’t wait until you’ll be driving in it.” So Caroline swallowed her guilt and slipped out of the hospital furtively, as if her purse was full of stolen goods.

  An hour later, she was curled up on the couch with a novel and a cup of tea trying not to worry about whether thunder would waken her mother. The afternoon light was fading fast. Eleanor was used to Cape storms, but she might be disoriented, Caroline thought. Maybe I should have stayed. She put down her book. It was almost too dark to read, and she needed to turn on a few lights. The radio said the storm was going to be a big one. What if Eleanor wakes and doesn’t know where she is? Caroline stood to look out the living room window. That’s when she saw him: Rid out on the tidal flats. Later, when she tried to retrace the course of events, it seemed her whole life once again had turned on chance.

  * * * *

  Forecasters said the eastern edge of the hurricane that had grazed the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Connecticut had bounced off and spun oceanward. They thought it might miss the Cape entirely. They were wrong. An ominous sky and high hot winds had buffeted Rid all afternoon. He could have gotten an earlier start pinning the nets over the quahogs he’d planted in early spring if he’d realized how much storm was going to make its way back to the outer Cape. His Chinese hats—the cement dome-shaped forms the aquaculturists molded to catch wild oyster seed in the bay, much cheaper than buying seed oysters—were in the water and loaded with spat. Not only that, he had nursery bags with beautiful matchhead quahogs, a small fortune’s worth in a year when the hatchery in Dennis didn’t have a lot of seed to sell and were rationing them in fairness. He’d gotten these beauties by luck, from a hatchery up in Maine. He had to get extra U-hooks down to hold the nets in his raceways, plus pull the nursery bags of seed clams out of the water. He had to pull the hats out, too.

  Some of the others left everything in, even in a nor’easter, but Rid knew what Hurricane Bob had done to his father: demolished trays, nets, rerod, everything, leaving parts of the grant literally bare, even old cultch snatched and deposited somewhere else. Other parts of his grant had been a mess of tangled torn nets, U-hooks lifted out by an easy lick of storm tongue and hopelessly chewed up along with broken trays and racks and hats, some his and some of Mario’s, Tomas’, Barb’s, Austin’s—even some of Tweed’s and Clint’s, whose grants were at the Blackfish Creek end of the harbor. Rake had lost more than a year’s harvest and even now, Rid was still paying on the loan his father had had to take to resupply with equipm
ent and seed. Rake had picked in the wild to make enough to feed the family all the while he was working his grant back into shape. And money had nothing to do with the time it took to build new hats and trays, cut new nets. The whole winter after that hurricane had gone into the effort. Some of the other farmers had losses almost as crippling, but were temperamentally still more inclined to take their storm chances than he was. A few had been stung to cautiousness as great as Rid’s. It depended on where the tide was when the worst of any storm hit, of course. A moon tide rising was the worst time for bad weather, but moon tides are the best for working because the stronger gravitational pull makes the water recede farther. Yet even a storm that clouts during the front of a moon tide can be capricious enough to leave one grant almost untouched while those adjacent might be fouled or wiped out.

  Twice Rid moved his truck further inland after the turn, when the water started advancing on him and crept halfway up his rear tires while his back was turned. It was coming in fast and this whole blow would be compounded by it being a moon tide anyway, the biggest of the month and getting toward the biggest of the year, which would come in October. Only Clint’s and Barb’s trucks were parked on the shoals now. The rest had left already, maybe nobody pulling out or anchoring as much as he was trying to. It bothered Rid, mostly because if their stuff got loose and washed onto his grant it could do a lot of damage. Technically, it would be the other guy’s responsibility to replace what he lost, and they’d all say as much themselves, but he’d have to be able to show whose stuff had damaged his. And they couldn’t give him back the two years it took to grow quahogs, and three-year oyster aches of nursing his seed toward picking and sale. They couldn’t replace his legal-size oysters and clams if their own were as lost as his. No way. They wouldn’t have the stock and they wouldn’t have the money. Insurance was a joke; so expensive you’d be broke before your first harvest, so none of them had it. No, starting over was a matter of taking thirty thousand dollars, throwing it in the bay, breaking your back and gambling that you can beat predators, weather and disease for three years before the first harvest while you live on more borrowed money. Who among them could do that anymore? Not Rid. Not anyone he knew.