The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  Andy let go of my hand and pressed both of his to the sides of his head.

  “We can stop right here, son,” Joseph said.

  “No, Uncle Joe,” Andy said. “We got this far. I have to know.”

  Do you, Andy? I wanted to say. Do you need to be ripped in half?

  Let him get free, Kirsten. Ya gotta let him get free.

  “I couldn’t handle that,” Joseph said. He took in a breath and set his face. “I kicked in the door . . . saw that DeLuca was across the room from you . . . and shot him in the chest. Three times.”

  One for every time Andy jerked beside me.

  “Then I grabbed you and I brought you back. Your grandfather had just come home and found his daughter. I told him to call the police and have them take me away—but not to let them touch you. You were home and that was where you needed to stay.”

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Joseph Maxwell went to prison. Because you don’t gun down a rich man and get away with it.”

  My father was on the other side of the gate again. This time I didn’t pause to catch his pose. I hurled myself past Frankie and past Joseph and over the gate, into his face.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Did I not say that thirty minutes ago?”

  I led him straight to the rented Lincoln parked on the grass and yanked the driver’s side door open.

  “Please go,” I said.

  “Let’s do it. Get in.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.” I hit the top of the door with the heel of my hand. “How dare you come here and . . . smirk at this family’s tragedy?”

  “Because I don’t want it to become your tragedy.”

  “You don’t give a rip about me. If you did you’d know that this place, this family is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

  My father put his hands on top of the door too. I started to move mine but he planted his on top of them, and they baked right into my skin. The smugness was draining from his eyes, leaving behind glints of anger.

  “How would you know what the best thing is for you, Kirsten? You’re a mess. I looked into this cutter thing, and as I understand it you’ve got something seriously mental going on.”

  I wrenched my hands away. “I am not a cutter. I am a person who used to hurt myself so the inside pain would make some kind of sense. The pain you inflicted on me. You and Mother and—”

  “There you go. It’s just like you to blame everybody else for your so-called pain.”

  “Then the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I said. “Only the difference between you and me is that I’m trying to do something about my self-destruction. And now you’ve probably even ruined that for me. I don’t know how I’m going to face those people after what you just did.”

  For a wretched moment I thought he was going to hit me. I watched his nostrils flare as he stared, options flipping through his eyes. Which one to choose that would put Kirsten firmly back under his thumb.

  He chose shrugging. “So don’t face them. Leave. Right now.”

  “Like you always do when the going gets tough?” I shook my head. “I’m done with that, Dad.”

  And then he did hit me, with the last words he said before he climbed into the Lincoln: “Then I’m done with you.”

  I stood there until I could no longer see the car or the dust that rose and fell behind it without a trace of remorse. It wasn’t only that I wanted to make sure he was really gone. I just didn’t know what to do now. I couldn’t go to the barn to the family my father had just brought to its knees. Andy had to know about his parents eventually, but it shouldn’t have come out the way it did. I wanted to put my arms around him and comfort him, support him the way I’d promised I would. But I was going to have to wait until he came to me. If he came.

  I climbed the hill to the Cloister, intending to wait for Andy on the porch. But Emma met me at the door and pulled me inside by the wrist. She was obviously frantic.

  “What’s going on, Petersen?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  And then it was my turn to cry in her arms again. Without asking a single question she cried with me. They were tears of solidarity.

  But the solid feeling was short-lived.

  For the next hour, no one came to the Cloister, including Andy. Emma made coffee early and we sat on the front porch not drinking it, until Andy’s Jeep flew down the driveway. We watched until the speck of him turned onto the public road and disappeared over the rise.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s going on,” Emma said. “But—”

  “I can’t,” I said. I repeated Frankie’s words: “It’s not my story to tell.” I couldn’t help thinking that my part in that story was over, now that Andy had driven away without a word to me.

  We were still waiting when Joseph and Frankie brought the sheep in, Joseph on horseback, Frankie walking with her head bowed.

  “Should we go help with evening chores?” I said.

  Emma shook her head. “When we turned back on the horses—when we saw that Lincoln driving up here—Frankie and Joseph told me to come here and stay. But if you want me to, I’ll at least go check on the supper situation.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “This thing,” Emma said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  Emma reached over and rested her hand on the arm of my rocker and we waited some more. Finally Frankie came around the side of the house with the dogs and put one foot on the bottom step. Undie and Norwich sat on either side of her, tails unnaturally still, as if they knew now too.

  “Can you ladies make do with sandwiches or something here tonight?” she said. “Joseph needs me.”

  Emma was immediately on full alert. “What’s wrong with Joseph?”

  Frankie’s eyes went to me.

  “I haven’t told her,” I said. “I am so sorry, Frankie. I had no idea my—”

  Frankie put her finger to her lips. “First things first.” She turned to Emma. “I’m going to let Joseph tell you when he’s ready. But don’t worry. He’s going to be okay. You can pray for peace for him, all right?”

  After one last, full look at me, Frankie hurried off with the dogs at her heels. It was a look that said, Not a word, please.

  I had no intention of telling Emma anything. But why couldn’t Frankie tell me where Andy went? Why couldn’t she reassure me that he was going to be okay?

  “Will you be all right alone, Petersen?”

  I looked back at Emma, who already had the screen door open.

  “Yeah.”

  “No offense,” she said, “but I have to go to my room, because if I stay out here with you I’ll badger you until you tell me what’s going on with Joseph.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s okay. I get it. Just let me know if—you know, whatever.”

  I nodded and waited for the door to close.

  “Just tell me this one thing.”

  “Emma, come on, please?”

  “This has something to do with your father, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s the point: it doesn’t. He just made it about him.”

  “So what does that have to do with—” Emma cut herself off and closed the door behind her.

  After her bedroom door slammed I went inside and got my jacket and my cell phone. When I returned to the porch, the vacant chair rocked in the wind. Like I needed that reminder that I was completely alone. And yet I wasn’t. I didn’t need Emma out there badgering me as the hours passed, because I did a fine job of that myself.

  I should have remembered my father saying he wasn’t done when he left the last time.

  Today I should have pushed him out before he had a chance to tell Andy anything.

  I should have told Frankie that Andy was having disturbing memories even though he asked me not to.

  I was ten shoulds into it when I remembered Frankie saying they didn’t do should
there at the ranch. “We work with what we hear from God.”

  “If I heard from You,” I said to the night, “I promise You I’d work with it.”

  I had probably just nodded off when my cell buzzed in my jacket pocket. I jolted forward and juggled the phone like a bar of soap trying to bring the screen to life. There was a text from Andy. I’d waited all night for it, and now I read it with fear lapping at my throat.

  Driving ’til something makes sense, it said. No matter how long it takes.

  I closed my eyes, but not fast enough to block out his final sentence: You might not want to wait for me.

  When the sun found me, I was still sitting in the rocking chair trying to think of nothing and thinking, instead, of everything. Frankie found me there when she came by to fetch me for chores.

  “Kirsten?” she said. “Have you been here all night?”

  I nodded.

  She sank into the chair that had mocked me for hours. “We’re worried about Andy, and I won’t lie to you, there is reason to be. He has never done this before—never taken off and not let me know where he is, what he’s doing . . .”

  So they didn’t get the same text you did.

  No.

  So Andy only wanted you to know.

  Yes.

  But I couldn’t leave it that way. I couldn’t keep another one of Andy’s secrets from Frankie, or I would be covered in should-haves for the rest of my life.

  “You need to see this,” I said, and handed her my phone.

  Frankie glanced over the text and gave the cell back to me. For a moment she closed her eyes, and then she stood up. Undie and Norwich circled nervously.

  “I’m going to ask you and Emma to start on the chores,” she said. “I’ll meet you after I talk to Joseph.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She left the porch at a brisk walk and headed toward the bunkhouse. I was almost inside the Cloister when she called back to me.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

  That didn’t help much—because I knew Andy wouldn’t say it was the right thing. If I ever heard from him again.

  Emma and I didn’t talk much while we fed chickens and lambs and got some milk out of Hildegarde, who was even more cantankerous than ever, as if she, too, knew the beautiful balance of Bellwether had been turned on its head. When I told Emma about Andy’s text, she gave me a sympathetic nod, but there were no tears of solidarity.

  And definitely not when we were setting the pail next to the pump and Joseph roared past us in his truck. Emma left the milk sloshing and ran after him, calling out his name like an abandoned child.

  Joseph’s brake lights flashed and he lowered his window so Emma could lean in. Between the wind and the impatient idle of the truck’s engine I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and yet I wasn’t surprised at what Emma reported when she stumbled, arms hugged around her, back to the pump where Frankie had now joined me.

  “He’s going to go find Andy and bring him back,” she said. “And he won’t let me go with him.” Her dejection was palpable.

  “He’s right,” Frankie said. “This is between Andy and Joseph.”

  “What is?” Emma said. “What this are we talking about?”

  Frankie put a hand on her shoulder. “Something that happened a long time ago and needs to be resolved.”

  Emma wrenched herself away, her eyes on me. “No. I think it’s about something that happened just yesterday.”

  I looked at Frankie, begging her with my eyes, but she deflated like a sad, forgotten party balloon. “There is nothing more I can tell you right now, Emma,” she said. “I’m going to the garden to pray. If you’d like to come—”

  Emma was already gone, but not before I saw the pain that shot through her eyes. She might be angry with me, but the fear of losing Joseph trumped that. Trumped everything.

  When I turned back to Frankie she was gone too—walking her steady walk toward the main house. I wasn’t sure if the invitation to come and pray with her was meant for me. If it was, it seemed like a reluctant one.

  My hand reached automatically down to my side and groped for a furry head until I remembered that Bathsheba wasn’t there either.

  Or anyone.

  I looked down at the half-filled pail, forgotten next to the pump. Nothing was the same today, my forty-ninth day. Nothing but the loneliness and the guilt I’d brought with me, the feeling that once again I had done something horribly wrong. And I was never going to be able to make it right.

  Share this chapter with your friends!

  I am not a cutter. I am a person who hurt myself so the inside pain would make some kind of sense. #TheMercifulScar

  Part

  FIVE

  And after the fire a sound of sheer silence . . . Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

  1 KINGS 19:12–13

  Chapter

  NINETEEN

  Three days passed with no word to anyone from Andy, and even Frankie couldn’t seem to find a peace about that. In the times when we normally talked—walking back from the pasture, coaxing milk from Hildegarde—she fell into deep quiet, often in the middle of a sentence.

  She did keep us to the work rhythm, she and I tending to the sheep, Emma doing what she could for the cattle. She hired the Cunninghams’ two sons to bring more alfalfa, and we three women bucked the hay, largely in sweating silence.

  Or it might as well have been silence.

  Granted, Frankie assured Emma in front of me that my father was not the reason this was all happening. And Frankie told me privately after a vacant-feeling communion Sunday evening that the whole situation was bound to come to a head sooner or later and I had no reason to blame myself for the way it had.

  But you still do, the Nudnik whispered that night as I wrestled with the quilts.

  Of course I did, because what Frankie didn’t have to say wagged at me like an accusing finger in the spaces between the lines. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Andy in the first place, I wouldn’t have been with him when my father came back with his heinous report. Andy wouldn’t have heard it from him; he could have remembered just as Frankie had told Joseph he should: as it needed to come to him. Now Andy was out there running after reasons he might not find before he tore completely in half, just as he’d been so afraid he would. The burden of that was almost intolerable.

  It might actually have been, if not for Petey. She didn’t need individual care from me anymore, but I liked taking her from the bum pen in the afternoons and letting her romp in the grass outside the barn. She had indeed learned from her fellow bums how to be a sheep, and I loved watching her trot along and suddenly stop to munch a tuft of something and then raise her fleecy chin to call for assurance that all was still well.

  “You’re good,” I’d say to her. “I’m watching you.”

  Guess that’s what parents are supposed to do, huh?

  I wasn’t sure how I would know that. My mother was only now doing it with Lara . . .

  As for my father, what had he ever assured me of? That I was hopeless unless he arrived in his armor to save the day? That I couldn’t possibly know how to figure out my own life? When I did try, he went to cruel lengths to show me that he was right, and I was wrong.

  Hate to say this but that pretty much brings you right back where you were when you came here.

  And that was nowhere.

  I could hardly see Petey now for the film of disappointment in my eyes. How could I have lived and learned and fallen in love on this ranch for fifty-two days and still be nowhere?

  “How can that be, Petey?” I said. “There has to be a somewhere for me.”

  She let out a tiny bleat. And I knew the one place that could be.

  Monday, when the deafening silence again dropped over the Bellwether after the morning work, I hiked all the way up to the shepherd’s monument, hoping with every muscle-burning step that somewhere would be waiting for me.
<
br />   But by the time I reached the monument I didn’t need the Nudnik to ask me what I’d been thinking. There was nothing here but the absence of Bathsheba’s shadow chasing—and the sight of the tiny ranch below, longing for Andy and Joseph—and the refusal of bat kol to ever, ever echo for me.

  It all ached so hard I couldn’t hold it in. I crumpled against the shepherds’ stones and let their jagged edges abrade my back, but they gave me nothing. There was nothing here except the vast emptiness that went on and on and on above the ragged mountaintops until I cried out to it: “What am I doing here?”

  It didn’t answer, not even in a whistle of wind or the trip of a pebble. Not even in a thought I could cling to for warmth. It whispered only a still, small question . . .

  What are you doing here, Kirsten?

  I couldn’t move.

  “Nudnik?” I said.

  She didn’t have to answer. I knew the words hadn’t come from her sideways tongue. Or from some memory of Frankie’s wisdom, or even from my own yearning. It was in me, but not in me, and all I knew was that it wanted a reply.

  I got to my feet and went to the ridge and stood at its edge. The stillness waited for me.

  “I’m here because I want to be free,” I said. Out loud. “I didn’t know that when I came and now I do.” I swallowed hard but it didn’t hold back the words. “I’m just so afraid.”

  I forced my gaze to the frozen tumble of rocks beyond me, stopped on their own path and forever suspended in the fear of falling.

  “I’m afraid if I let it all go, there will be nothing left of me.”

  Still the silence. Open and soft. Like a cushion inviting me to fall . . . to the place where Lara waited.

  She was always waiting. Always waiting but never able to understand. I didn’t understand either. Why did she have to pick that night to listen to me? Why couldn’t she have done what she always did: the opposite of what I told her to do?

  I inched my toes over the edge. All the other times that I had seen her about to flout yet another rule or dance on the precipice of adolescent danger, I had done everything to stop her but handcuff her to me. Everything except tell our parents that she was smoking and drinking and piercing and making out with the boy du jour behind the Sunday school building every chance she got.