Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  Now at the lakeside, kneeling on her script, I close my eyes and call them to mind again, the things I never thought I'd have. Husband, children, this place transformed from house of horrors into house of healing. It was I who did that. Not alone, but it couldn't have happened without me. My life has not been wasted. I am not a bad person.

  Two hundred-thousand words of hers beneath my knees tell a different story, I have read enough of it to know that. Well, no.

  I snap into standing, and assert again what should have been my birthright, but which I had to hand-stamp onto my DNA. The right to do what is right for me. Me. So I pick the hateful pile of paper up and I pull off the elastic, so determinedly that it breaks. I take a page and bunch it up and fling it, unread, into the lake.

  It's hard to fling paper. It doesn't carry, there's no satisfactory plop as it hits the water. It just hovers there, hardly touching the surface, wimpily uncertain. There are more than six hundred pages in this manuscript. I will clump each into a paper ball. I will cast them each and all upon the lake and I will watch them, bob-bob-bobbing on the lapping shore, slowly soaking up the water that will see them sink.

  Part Two: The Manuscript

  BLUE| BLOŌ| MERCY|ˈMƏRSĒ|

  an act of mercy that has unanticipated and injurious consequences or an act of revenge that turns out to be a mercy.

  [slang: Irish]

  *

  ZACH. CHRISTMAS EVE 1989.

  Doolough Lodge,

  Christmas Eve 1989.

  Dearest Mercy,

  I'm leaving this on our bed. The written word is always the best way to get your attention, isn't it, so maybe this might work? It's our last chance.

  Nothing good will come of this, Mercy. Asking me to go will not appease Star. We must do what we should have done in the first place, and each of us simply speak our truth to her, and she to us.

  She is neither as stubborn, nor as vulnerable, as you think. And she is certainly too old for this treatment.

  As for your father... Is he really the obstacle you claim, Mercy? If he was gone, you say, wistfully...

  If, if, if... Another version of the same problem. It does no good for you to keep telling yourself that you don't deserve these things that life throws at you. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Deserve is an illusion. Does a father deserve to die? Does a daughter deserve to rule?

  You're always quoting writers at me, Mercy, but long ago I gave you the only words you need to hear. I wonder if you remember? It was a line from The Talmud: "If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."

  I remember how you tried to understand. You tilted your lovely chin, the way you do. Your ear went down to nearly touch your shoulder and the other ear turned to me, really trying to listen. Always trying. I love that about you. But, Mercy, why is it so hard for you to hear?

  I say it again: this is our last chance. If I leave again, this time it really will be forever.

  So I plead, knowing your mind is already made up. So I tell you again: Star will not thank you and you won't thank yourself either, in the end.

  Life throws pebbles at us when we get things wrong, Mercy, and if we refuse to listen, we get stones. And if we continue to insist... Well, I'll be gone when the boulder comes crashing into this house but remember what I said and save yourself then, if not now.

  So I'll go and leave behind

  All my love,

  Always.

  Zach

  I'll begin with the evening Star left, the day after the funeral, with the moment my father's journals came falling from their secret compartment at the back of the bureau. The big one -- long and thick, with a red hardcover, born to be a shop ledger -- landed on the floor with an unforgiving thump. And five smaller, black-covered notebooks came tumbling after.

  Seeing them splayed across the floor prodded a memory: of my father sitting at this bureau to write, the bent back hunched over, the thick fingers clasped around a skinny pen. I reached for the big folder, opened it, flicked through. The familiar handwriting marched through the pink ledger lines, as though they weren't there. My pulse, already pounding, skidded at the sight.

  Traces of him were all over these pages. Not just his writing, but the dog-ear corners he turned down, which meant he must have read them back. And other marks. Some kind of oil all over one page, an ink spill on another. Even those pages that seemed clean would have been brushed by his hand trailing across. His DNA could be reconstructed from these, I thought, and I knew then I'd found what I'd been looking for, even though I hadn't realized, until I saw them, that I'd been engaged on a search.

  August 6th, 1914. "War has been declared," he wrote. That was his reason for beginning this book, as he immediately resigned his job as a butcher's assistant in a Paris meat market to sign up. "Ma patrie," he wrote, though his country was Ireland and he was only sixteen years old.

  Not that it made any difference where you were from. Ireland, England, France; young, middle-aged, old; Europe, Russia, America; men, women, children: all were about to be caught up in the bloody mobilization, the mass movement towards the biggest war the world had ever known. I touched the inside cover where he'd stuck his conscription card and medical records. They slid free, the glue dry and dead. It would have been against regulations for him to keep this diary, but he was never a one for regulations, my father, not for himself. A policer only of others.

  Yes, that's where I'll begin. With me, sitting to the floor to read about my father's coming of age, butcher boy to military man.

  I could start a little earlier, with the moment when I first spied the hammer sitting under the corner table in the kitchen. It had been a long day. I'd already endured my father's funeral, Dr Keane's insinuations, Star's leaving, when my eyes snagged on the sight of that hammer, left there since I'd nailed a sprig of holly over the kitchen door a week before, my feeble effort at Christmas decoration. Its two curled fingers, the side used for prising out nails, seemed to twitch and beckon me across.

  I picked it up, tapped its flat head against my palm, felt the weight of what I was about to do.

  Pulling my mind shut -- no more thoughts allowed -- I let it swing, hard and fast, into the TV screen. Smash. Shards of glass went spiking through the air. Smash again. The glass cabinet this time. I regretted that Star and I had cleared the glasses and ornaments from the shelves a few hours earlier; I would have loved to unleash myself on them.

  Thump. I brought the hammer down on the little side table but it only made a dent. I threw it aside, running out of the room, through the kitchen, out the back door. It was dry outside and not cold, not for December. The security light came on, spotlighting weeds that cracked through the gravel, tough survivors.

  Jerking open the bolt on the shed, I grazed my knuckles. I sucked on the pain, my tongue moving across bone and blood, as I hurried on. I felt like a hurricane, like a snowstorm, like a raging ocean, hurrying, hurrying through my wild throbbing hurry that kept thought at bay. In the corner of the shed, I found what I was looking for: the sledgehammer. Its heavy head pulled me down as I ran back inside and went entirely amok.

  I smashed the coffee table and the sideboard. I smashed the fiddly occasional table that always wobbled, making us fearful for the lamp. I smashed the lamp.

  I turned my back on the piano -- that I couldn't destroy -- and when I came to the bureau too, I hesitated. This was my father's most precious piece of furniture: bought in Paris, his only relic of his time in France. All through my childhood, I had watched him sitting at this desk to write, or do what he called "the books", the accounts that measured his income against his expenses, the largest of which – as he never failed to remind -- was me.

  Smash. The lump hammer put a deep V into the desk's top and the back fell open. As it did, a torrent of paper tumbled out. Money. Notes. Old pound notes and fivers and tenners and twenties, one of my father's secret stashes. He had them all over the house: in a biscuit tin under the floorboards in his bedroom, inside an old plant-food co
ntainer on a high shelf in the back pantry, and no doubt in lots of other places that I knew nothing about.

  It was the other bounty, though, that had made me pounce: those notebooks of his tumbling to the floor. What would it do to me to read them? The thought set my heart fluttering around its cage of ribs, as if he were still alive to catch me, but down I sat in the middle of the devastation and opened the largest one, hand on my chest as I started to read: "I went to the conscription office this morning, with a pair of jokers I met on the train..."

  It was quite a while later -- I have no idea how long -- when the doorbell rang. My thoughts flew immediately to Zach. Could he have heard that Star had left and decided to come back to me?

  The bell rang again.

  No, I had made my choice and we both knew what it meant. Whoever it was going to be, it wasn't Zach.

  I pushed myself up from the floor and toed my way through the debris, the large notebook held in front of my chest like a shield. Anyone but Zach was an unwelcome intrusion. Except, maybe, Star. But it was even less likely to be her. Her departure this afternoon had been emphatic, complete with instructions on how she was, and was not, to be contacted in future.

  My lover and my daughter, both gone for good. For all our good, I suppose. And I, too, would be leaving soon. I had a sudden, painful ache for California, for the width of its ocean and the height of its trees, for a blast of its big breeziness to come and blow through the cramped spaces of this house.

  The bell rang a third time. When I finally opened the door, I saw from the faces of the two policemen standing there that I hadn't done myself any favors by delaying to answer.

  "Detective Inspector Patrick O'Neill," said the one who wasn't wearing a uniform, flipping a badge in my face. "And this is Garda Shane Cogley."

  They came in without being asked. I tried to steer them towards the kitchen but the Inspector -- with what detective instinct? -- headed straight for the parlor. He pushed the door open and the three of us stood in the threshold, taking in the destruction, the money all over the floor.

  "What...?" The inspector asked, turning world-weary, mind-made-up eyes onto me. "What in good God's name has happened here?"

  Without further preliminaries, he told me he was investigating the murder of Martin James Stanley Mulcahy, the full name, as if my own father was somebody I barely knew. And that he wanted me to come down to the station to help with their inquiries.

  "You're not serious?" I said.

  "Just a few routine questions."

  Garda Cogley snapped his notebook shut and put it back in his pocket.

  "Do you need to inform anyone?" the Inspector asked.

  I shook my head, dazed. "There's nobody to inform."

  "Your daughter...?"

  "No, she's not here."

  "Is that a fact? And when will she be back?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "We need to know, Mrs Creahy."

  "Mulcahy."

  "Mrs Mulcahy." His look told me that this was not the time to ask for Ms. "We need to know her whereabouts. She'll have to be interviewed."

  "She's gone traveling around Ireland. Sightseeing. She only left a few hours ago."

  "You didn't go with her?"

  "No, I stayed to look after my father's affairs."

  He took an exaggerated look around the room. "Right," he said, lifting an eyebrow at the devastation. "Let's be going."

  Maybe I should start earlier yet in the day, with my father's funeral. Star and I, chief mourners, daughter and granddaughter of the deceased, in our places in the top pew, the back of our black coats to the rest of the congregation, feeling their jabbing stares. That must be the daughter? When did she get in? Where was the boyfriend gone? Star's appearance would have given them extra ammunition. Her too-black hair, stiffened into spikes. Her bovver boots and ripped tights, her nose-ring. And of course, her extraneous five or six stone, carried like a soldier.

  The event was organized as my father had decreed. Remains to Stafford's funeral parlor in town. No wake. No viewing. High Mass in Doolough at 10am. Six priests. Ave Maria. Be Not Afraid. How Great Thou Art.

  Sitting in the front aisle with Star, I hadn't realized how many people were piling into the church behind us until the end, when we turned to follow the coffin. A full house, crowds bunched around the doors, upward of four hundred eyes nailing us as we walked down the aisle.

  The crowd parted for the coffin and we followed it out into the churchyard cemetery for a rosary at the graveside. Through it all, Star and I played our parts, standing and sitting as required, heads bowed, faces blank. Where I should have had a core, I had only space.

  Afterwards, continuing under orders, we went for a soup-and-sandwich lunch and drinks at the local pub, and it was there, once people had settled in over their soup spoons, that Dr Keane -- who had had his eyes on me ever since coming in -- leaned across the table where I was sitting with Star and asked if he might have a word.

  "Of course," I said, pushing my untouched food aside.

  Doctor Keane was Jimmy to my father, his oldest friend. Despite their different rankings in Doolough's finely-tuned social scale, they were bonded by their active history in the Irish Civil War, when they both fought to uphold a Treaty with England that others thought a sordid compromise.

  "We'll step outside, if you don't mind," he said to me, causing a look to fly around the table.

  I put down my napkin and followed him through the crowd. It was cold outside, a point he remarked on, pulling his scarf tight around his ancient, scrawny throat and offering me a cigarette. When I shook my head, he lit one for himself and started talking about the funeral, praising my father and recounting some of his memories of their boyhood.

  Eventually, when he couldn't put off any longer what he had to say, he threw his cigarette to the ground, squashed it with the toe of his boot and said, "The autopsy found something wasn't right."

  At first, I didn't let in what he was saying.

  "If everything was all right," I said, "I guess he wouldn't be dead."

  "This isn't a joke, dear." He looked at me over his glasses. "The cause of death was an overdose of morphine."

  "But that's –"

  "It's beyond doubt. The pathologist said she never saw so much morphine in a body."

  "The pump? Maybe the pump was faulty?"

  "It's been checked. The pump was fine."

  "The pills?"

  "We don't know." He folded his arms across his chest, let a silence grow. "We were hoping you might be able to help us on that."

  "Help how?"

  "Like I say, we don't know. All we know is what the toxicology reports say. An unholy amount, apparently."

  Toxicology reports? Pathologist? Autopsy? With my father's medical history?

  "Oh, Doctor, does it matter? You and Pauline know what it was like for my father at the end. Pain, baby food, sleepless nights... An animal in that condition would long ago have been put out of its misery."

  "If I were you, m'girl, I wouldn't be going around saying things like that."

  "If he hadn't died that day, he would have died another day soon."

  "Aren't you wondering who did it?"

  "Did what?"

  "I'm telling you that somebody killed your father by giving him an overdose of morphine. And all you have to say to me is that whoever did it, did right."

  The nausea I had been feeling all day rose up my wind pipe. "What? I just can't believe that anybody did it. Who could have? Who would have?"

  "Indeed."

  "Maybe...Could he have done it himself?"

  "I spoke to him a week before he went. He said nothing that sounded suicidal to me."

  He tightened his scarf again.

  "I wanted you to be told first; that's only fair."

  I thought of the looks exchanged around the table as I got up to leave. Already, he or the pathologist or somebody else had been talking. Maybe that's why there had been so many at the funeral?

&
nbsp; They hadn't come to pay their respects to the little-liked sergeant at all, but to take a look at the daughter who was rumored to have seen him out.

  How much did the village know or think it knew?

  At the funeral Mass, in view of his coffin, memories of him came billowing back. That day when I was twelve or so, and I came in from school as I did each day to my dinner-place set on the kitchen table: a glass for milk, side-plate for potato peelings, knife and fork either side of a cork placemat, my plate wrapped in tin-foil with a smaller foil pack on top, made by Mrs Whelan, Pauline's mother, who cleaned our house and looked after our meals. It was a Wednesday, so beneath the foil was bacon and cabbage. And in the smaller pack, dessert: two chocolate biscuits.

  I let my schoolbag slide to the floor, opened the biscuits and began to eat (before my dinner -- such badness!) The biscuits were doing little for my physical hunger, though they were satisfying another sort of longing. I put my feet up on the table to better enjoy them, and felt my gut fluttering as if it had been colonized by a battalion of butterflies, ahead of my conscious thought. It wasn't until I had the biscuits demolished and the crumbs wiped from my mouth that I allowed the idea full form in my mind: I was going to have a bath.

  I'd been thinking about this for days, promising myself the next time he was on day shift I was going to do it.

  Doolough, in those days, had not progressed to showers, and baths were permitted only on Saturdays, or on once-in-a-lifetime occasions like First Communions or Confirmations, and then only in three or four inches of water, just enough to do the job. In our house, my father kept the bath plug in a hiding place in his bedroom. Having a bath necessitated asking him to turn on the immersion heater, which was controlled by a big red switch in our hot press that I was not allowed to touch.