A Matter of Mercy Read online

  “Where are you going?” she demanded.

  He knew his face was wet and hoped she couldn’t tell. It made him feel like he was back in high school, that much a loser. “Back to my house. The roads are terrible. I’ll get your car for you first thing in the morning. It’s the safest thing to do.”

  “I want my car tonight.” She put time between each word, conveying that this was not negotiable. “Either you take me to get the gas or I will walk.”

  Rid didn’t answer. He pulled onto the highway and rather than take the next exit off Route 6, he continued east down to the Chevron station, where he borrowed Sam Preston’s five gallon can, arranging his face before he went in. “I’ll drop it off tomorrow or the next day,” Rid told Sam, with whom he’d regularly cut General Math in tenth grade.

  “You’re supposed to leave me a deposit. Can’t you read the sign?” Sam mock complained from behind the counter. Florescent light made the scars from his acne look like craters. Tormented with zits through adolescence, Sam had been caught shoplifting Clearasil at fourteen. The store manager had taken one look at him, paid for the Clearasil himself, and let Sam go. At least that was the story Rid set loose around school, and it was pretty close to the truth.

  “Aren’t you worried what I might deposit on the can, though?” Rid leered. “If you ain’t, you should be.”

  “Kiss my ass, you pervert, and get the hell outta here. Bring my goddamn can back tomorrow,” Sam laughed.

  “Or the next day,” Rid called over his shoulder, pushing open the glass door and hunching into the snowstorm. He headed to the gas pump where his truck was parked, Caroline huddled inside. Her face was a pale unmoving moon in the starless sky of the windshield.

  Before he was back in the truck, though, Rid’s grin died. He got in and headed back west on Route 6, neither of them saying a word. As the wipers thwacked back and forth, the blower of the defroster kept up its white noise and so their silence did not sound as utterly strained and unnatural as it really was. He pulled over, climbed out, and put the gas in Caroline’s Honda, then replaced the empty can in his truck bed.

  When he climbed back into the driver’s seat, Caroline was just putting on her gloves and fastening her hood, keys ready in her lap.

  “Look,” he said. “It’s terrible out. We’re not that far from my house. Please.”

  “Please what?”

  At first he thought she wanted him to beg and he bit back a snide refusal. In the silence in which he let her words replay, though, he heard the tone, which was questioning.

  “Please come back to my house. I’m sorry I left you alone. I’d messed things up, I hadn’t talked to Mario, and that’s where I went, to get it done. I’m sorry. I did things all wrong. It’s not Mario that’s been after you. I found out that much if it’s any help.” If he’d added anything more, if he’d tried to explain the complex layer of the history of men, competitors and friends—now business partners—a fire and a rising tide that sank a truck on a beach at night, his second thoughts about Mario undermining his own denial, it would have undone what he wanted. And all that was like grabbing air, too smoke-like for language. Especially now.

  She was quiet a minute, looking down at her gloves. When she looked back up at him, he couldn’t read her face. “I don’t want to leave my car here.”

  It was a sideways opening. At least he took it as one. “How about this: I’ll drive your car back to my house—you follow me in the truck.” Seeing that she was about to object, he raised the ante hastily. “The truck has four wheel drive. If anything’s going to happen, you know, any problem, like going off the road or something, don’t you think it’s better if it happens to the one of us that isn’t pregnant?”

  She looked down again. She shook her head once, and one hand balled into a fist that nested inside the other. She must have hesitated a full minute, maybe more. It killed him not to say anything, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out.

  “All right,” Caroline said finally, and there really wasn’t a clue either in her voice or on her face as to why she’d agreed.

  He didn’t care why, only that she had.

  Then, without warning, her wet glove slid between his jacket and the back of his neck, cold where he’d thrown back his hood. A suggestion of pressure pulled him to her as she moved to him, and her lips—dry, chapped—the edgy skin on them brushing his as she kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. Just that, looking him in the eye a moment, and then ducking her head as if ashamed.

  Like most everything she did, it caught him completely unprepared. He tried to find his voice and barely managed to stammer, “Are you sure … I mean … are you … are you okay from walking out in it? I was frantic when your car was gone, I … hey....” Rid tried to get her to look at him.

  She wouldn’t look at him, though. But when he reached his arm over, she let him pull her toward him, and pressed her face against his chest. “I thought you weren’t coming back,” he scarcely heard it, her voice muffled and murky like something underwater. Then she was crying. I’m sorry, CiC, I’m so sorry echoed through him and he rested his cheek on top of her head where his regret felt like melting snow.

  Chapter 24

  She would almost describe it as hovering, Rid was so careful with her. “I’m not a carton of eggs,” Caroline said the evening after the snowstorm, then laughed at her analogy. “Well, one egg, maybe.” Rid had jumped up to get a blanket when she’d rubbed her arms and said, “It’s getting chilly in here.” They were watching TV after dinner, Lizzie between them on the couch. Rid had made the dinner, although Caroline had protested that she felt like cooking.

  “What’s going on?” she finally said. “I’m fine. I can take care of myself, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Rid said, but it was utterly noncommittal, and he didn’t look at her.

  “I don’t mean to keep pushing about this, but did you call the police today? I didn’t hear it if you did, and I was wondering if, I mean when, we’re going to talk to them. Sooner or later, I need to be going home, of course. Noelle will be back tomorrow. She said she’d go to get some maternity clothes with me. And I need to get to the doctor.”

  “I thought I’d do that. The doctor, that part, I mean. That I’d take you. Doesn’t the father usually go?”

  What popped loud as a fat kernel of corn in Caroline’s mind then was her father’s old expression: you could have knocked me over with a feather.

  “I guess that’s right,” she said.

  “All right then,” Rid said, as if something were settled. As if she’d made an appointment and asked him not only to drive her, but to come in and be there when the doctor examined her, talk to the doctor, hear what she said, as if they were going to raise this baby together. Or as if it was already decided that he was going to be there for her, for the baby, from now on, till death do us part, or something like that. And she had no idea what to say. Or even what she wanted, and the indefinability of her desire frightened her.

  “I don’t even have an appointment,” she said, thinking to put him off. Rid had gotten up to stir the fire, and Caroline thought she could put closure on the subject for the time being. “I’ll have to call. Noelle is, well, really Elsie gave me the name of someone she recommended and then Noelle suggested someone else, so anyway, I’ll…”

  “Look,” Rid interrupted, putting the poker down and turning to face her, “this is important. I know you’ve been taking care of yourself with the vitamins and all, but still, you need to get going with a doctor. If you can’t get an appointment right away, I’ll get Tomas to have Marie call her OB.”

  “No, that’s all right. I promise I’ll get an appointment. I know I shouldn’t have waited so long. First Mom died and then I got so freaked out by what was happening at the house, and I didn’t think about anything else. Elsie told me what I needed to do in the first trimester, and I’ve been doing it, and yes, she did say I needed to see a doctor too, but it got away from me.”

 
; The overly-rich stock it boiled down to was that Rid never answered her about their talking to the police—or about her going back home—but had gotten her to agree to letting him go to the doctor with her. So she was de facto at his house at least another day, and calling the doctor’s office from there in the morning.

  Then, when she did call right at nine the next morning, even the nurse midwife who worked with the doctor couldn’t see her until Tuesday morning, which was six days away. “I should have realized,” she said to Rid. “They’re covering a big area out here.”

  His brow furrowed. “You want to go down to Hyannis?”

  Caroline was studying his face, distracted by his broad forehead and how the parallel worry lines looked like those little lap marks a tide sometimes leaves. His hands were wrapped around a coffee mug, and she noticed again how work-roughened they were, even now, in the dead of winter, from seasons of planting, lifting, raking, culling, handling nets, cages, rerod, U hooks, cement, clams, oysters, in and out of every tide of the bay. The next time she went to the store, she’d buy him some of that hand cream her mother used to use, the Norwegian kind that was so good for healing. Eleanor’s hands used to get like his when she sat at her potter’s wheel, hands slick, moving almost imperceptibly as she shaped the clay, or especially when she did more intricate work and ended up with tiny knife nicks.

  “Huh? Do you?”

  “Do I what?” she said, jerked out of her reverie.

  “Wanna go to Hyannis?” A hint of impatience—or maybe worry—in his voice now.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “Should we go to Hyannis to see a doctor sooner than next Tuesday?” Now he spoke slowly, as if she belonged in Special Ed classes.

  “No. I’m not having any problems. I’m just extra tired, and that’s normal. I’m taking double vitamins. I mean I’m not spotting or anything. Elsie said really the first trimester is pretty routine—mainly prenatal vitamins and blood pressure checks and watching for problems. I did check my blood pressure at the grocery store, you know that free thing they have, and it was normal. Six more days isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “But you said you’re in the second trimester.”

  “I’m barely in the second trimester. Really, I’m okay. Rid, it’s six days.” If he hadn’t been upset, she would have been. In order to avoid looking at him, she got up from the table, clearing dishes as she did, and took them to the sink. As she made her way, a bird thudded against the window. “I wish you could put something outside, at the window, to warn the birds. That’s happening a lot.”

  “Always does in the winter. Must be the way the light hits it.”

  “Okay then, could you do something to make it stop?”

  “You’re trying to make this about me, about the birds, about anything, instead of you.”

  “No, I didn’t mean to. If there’s any sign of a problem, we’ll go right to Hyannis without waiting, okay?” She carefully kept any hint of sarcasm out of her voice, ran water into the sink then, and let the plash and clink of dishwashing make natural, conversation-ending noise.

  “How about you just stay here?” The words came five minutes later, through a natural lull, as she finished putting dishes away, and was pouring another cup of coffee. She’d just offered Rid one, he’d said yes, thanks, and she brought the pot over to the kitchen table where he had an account book and piles of receipts spread out like the contents of an upturned wastebasket.

  “Stay here? You mean today?”

  “I mean, for the time being. I don’t know. Just stay. I mean, it’s safer here. We’ll go give a statement to the police, but you stay here while this thing is going on until they catch someone.”

  * * * *

  “So I guess we’ll see. I know he really cares about the baby.” Caroline said two days later to Noelle on their way to Eastham for some maternity clothes. A pale winter sun silvered the deserted landscape as they drove down Route 6 with Noelle at the wheel as Caroline summarized the whole story, downplaying it to teenage vandalism. Still Noelle fretted, impatiently fingering peppery waves that had fallen too far over her forehead back into place.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell us sooner. Whatever the police are doing, Walter will want to station armed guards around the house, you know.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m staying with Rid. So Walt doesn’t have to call up the militia.”

  “Would you be more comfortable staying with us? Because you know, we’re the baby’s grandparents, and Eleanor would want that.”

  “I know I can do that. Maybe this gives Rid and me a chance to work things out about the baby.” Caroline felt as if she were calming her mother. It wasn’t a bad feeling. Noelle was wearing a black coat with a scarlet scarf and Caroline was fairly sure her mother had given Noelle the scarf.

  “Do you think there might be something between you?” Noelle asked, an ah ha blooming in her voice.

  “He’s—very attentive right now. But maybe that’s just about the baby. If so, that’s a good thing for the baby anyway, right?”

  “Right.” And Noelle reached over to squeeze her shoulder through Eleanor’s jacket. “But I’d like there to be something in it for you, too. Do you think we should look for another coat for you?”

  “I suppose. But I like wearing Mom’s. Does it look really dumb? Anyway, the police were no help. Even with Rid there. There’s no evidence, which is a problem, and no suspect. But nothing’s happened since I’ve been at Rid’s.”

  Noelle tented her brows.

  Caroline had to study her face to extract what she was thinking. A whole unspoken conversation went on until Caroline made it explicit. “Oh no, Noelle, no way. I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay,” Noelle said. “As long as you’re sure. It’s a powerful lot of coincidence, though, that it all stopped when you moved in with him.” She inhaled and exhaled audibly, slowly, like a yoga exercise, her chest rising and falling as she did. “So, let’s figure out what we’re after, shall we?”

  Caroline tried to pay attention as Noelle created a list poem of what would carry her through her pregnancy. She laid her head back against the head rest and let the sun warm her face. The tire hum blended with Noelle’s voice, and fear melted with the salt slush on the road.

  * * * *

  “Tomas is picking me up. We’re gonna run to the hatchery down in Dennis. They’ve got a line on this QXP virus that’s been found in Barnstable and we both want to talk to John ourselves, just make sure we get the lowdown. It kills clams, and we’ve got to make sure it doesn’t get to Wellfleet harbor. Has to do with who we buy seed from, see.”

  Caroline pulled her hands out of the sink water and dried them. She had been distracted all through breakfast rehearsing what to say. Rid had been reading the paper.

  “Listen, I can see that you’re working on your receipts and your account book. Is that for taxes?” she said.

  “Yeah. And the state shellfishing regs.” A bit wary, Rid stopped rummaging through pages to look at her.

  “I’m good at paperwork. If you show me where you are, I can do that for you. You want me staying here, which is okay if you’ll let me pitch in and work with you. Otherwise I need to go home.”

  “I got it handled.”

  She shrugged and turned back to the dishes. “Okay, I’ll just pack up then.”

  “Whoa. What’s this?”

  “You want me to stay here. I’ll do that if I can work. Those are my terms. Take it or leave it.”

  * * * *

  He did need his expenses tallied in order to take his books to the accountant. “If you’ll give me a copy of last year’s taxes, I can do this year’s,” Caroline insisted. “I’m good at this stuff. I just need to see which forms you need.”

  “Well, for now, just add up the expenses month by month,” Rid hedged. The dining nook table was covered with receipts in variou
s piles. “I did get behind.”

  “Just a bit,” Caroline observed sarcastically, sticking her pencil behind her ear so she could use her right hand to pick up her mug of tea. “When did you quit writing things down? Last February?”

  “Probably about April. When the weather broke, likely. But I’m real good about saving the receipts. Look, CiCi, it’s a simple cash in, cash out system. You got enough light? If so, I’m gonna get to work downstairs. When the oysters come out of the pit, I gotta have all the cages ready, y’know. Some of the stock that was in mesh bags is big enough to go into cages, so I gotta build some more, too. And before spring, I need to—ah jeez, too much.”

  They settled into a routine within a week. He wouldn’t let her work on any cages by herself, even though she called him a diehard egomaniac control freak, and he said, I’m not in this to raise crabs, thank you very much. They were laughing at the time, though on Caroline’s side only because he did let her help with tasks like readying pieces for him to cut or fastening wire ties. There was a charge in the air. Occasionally they would touch by accident, smile. Once when she was at the kitchen table, having started on the book work, Rid leaned down and kissed her on the lips. Before either of them could think about it or react, he disappeared downstairs.

  They’d gone to her first doctor’s appointment. Dr. Silva had examined Caroline and afterward Rid had been called to join them in her office. “Your age alone makes this a high-risk pregnancy,” she’d said, herself all of about thirty-two, dark Portuguese eyes darting from Caroline to Rid and back with a question as to why there’d been no medical care in the first trimester. But the year-rounders on the outer Cape are their own people, and Rebecca Silva had been raised in Provincetown, so holding both judgment and her tongue came naturally. “You’re doing wonderfully, though,” she said, when no answer was offered. “The heartbeat’s strong and—” Rid’s head had whipped from the doctor to Caroline at that. “Did you get to hear the heartbeat?” he’d said, and it had been almost an accusation, but too filled with some other emotion for the word to fit. She’d nodded. Later, on the way back to his house, Caroline decided to ask Rid if he’d like to go to the ultrasound appointment with her next week, even though she was still resolved this was her baby if shove came to push.