Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  As the shelves and drawers emptied and the bags and boxes filled, I saw how objects separated from their owners become pure junk. The blue woollen hat he wore when fishing was repellent: greasy at the edges but mostly because it was now redundant.

  It took us over two hours, to clear out everywhere except my bedroom and the parlor. "They've already been sorted," I lied. I knew she wouldn't want to be in those two rooms that Zach and I had made our own.

  She took a carriage clock as a momento, along with the photograph of my parents on the cliff. I brought out the last of the bags and, when I came back into the kitchen, I was shocked to find her beside the stove, crying. "Darling?" I crossed the room, put my arms around her shoulders, and she let me, just about, her spine stiff as a tree trunk. And not for long. She shrugged herself away, dabbed each eye dry with the back of her wrist. "Oh, Mom..."

  "It's okay, Star. I understand. You have to go."

  I knew what I had to do now was keep talking, fill the space between us with meaningless sound, hums and burbles and fuzzy static that would get us through. "Thanks for helping with the clearing. I needed to get as much of Granddad out of here as I could."

  I imagined myself stripping further back, taking up the carpets and polishing up the wooden floors. I fed myself that vision in my head and I liked it. Painting every wall white. Turning this place into a new blank canvas. That was what I would do, when she was gone.

  "It's too cold to go down to the gate," I said, knowing that if I did, I'd break . "I'll wave you away from upstairs."

  I left her then, so she could get on with it, and went up to the spare bedroom. This was my favorite room in the house, a corner room with a window on three sides. I went to the one that overlooked the drive. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the day was already faded and a soft rain was falling. I could barely make her out below, head bent to the rain, one hand holding her coat together, backpack in her heartbreaking, chubby grip. She threw it onto the back seat and waved up to me once, unseeing. Then she folded herself in behind the steering wheel.

  The car lights came on, front and back, and the red vehicle slipped down the laneway. Moran's dog, who hung around every part of the neighborhood, appeared out of somewhere to go running after the back wheels – Bark! Bark! Bark! – until the car sped up and he relinquished it.

  I watched on. It turned the corner, out onto the road and I followed its lights as they blurred and faded into the endless Irish rain.

  Beginnings are for beginners. When you get to my age, you know there's no one moment when it "all" began. Why not start the story when Zach came to Ireland to rescue me from my father, and I allowed it, though I knew Star was still sensitive about him? Or on the day I returned to Doolough, after all my years in Santa Paola, to nurse that ungrateful man?

  Why not the day I met Zach?

  No. As I harken back now over the long and sorry tale, the moment that seems most significant is the one that saw me sitting on the floor with my father's war-time journal, feeling like that act would save me, would knit past and present together into an answer.

  Misguided? Oh yes. Now, so many years on, I can see that I was not quite sane in those days after my father died. For twenty years, I'd carried him around in my head. In coming back to Ireland to nurse him, the picture I held -- a broad, red-faced bully -- had been reduced, as age and illness made him little more than skin shrouding bone. Then he died, and I had to accept that both versions of him -- the young and the old, the frightening and the fearful -- were gone.

  The strong arms that used to reach so readily for the strap: gone. The sour smell of his sickroom breath: gone. The size fourteen feet that had to have shoes and boots specially made: gone. The shriveled genitals and wispy, grey fuzz that surrounded them: gone.

  All gone, gone, gone. I knew it but something about it was unknowable.

  So when the Inspector told me he was arresting me, a part of me was unable to take it seriously.

  What I said, according to The Wicklow Gazette, which took a personal interest in my arrest and subsequent trial, was: "You must be joking." But, already, another, deeper part of me was whispering something I didn't understand, something that didn't really want to be heard.

  Establishing values other than, better than, my father's; pulling together the pieces he'd ripped apart, making myself whole again: these were the aims that had guided my life since I ran away from Doolough. I had traveled far in my effort to escape him -- more than 6,000 miles -- but, even at that distance, he held me. My body might be in Santa Paola, California, but my thoughts stayed in Doolough, County Wicklow; regurgitating what had been, what should have been, what might have been.

  Each I-wish twist and if-only turn of my mind only tightened the tie I longed to loose.

  Then, when his health failed and I was needed, I came back to Doolough to tend him. To try to find the closure my Californian friends recommended. He was no easy patient, but I prevailed and thought often of the time to come, when I would be alive and he would be dead.

  It didn't seem too much to ask, to be given some years after he was gone. I had thought it would be enough. That it would be over then, that I should have peace at last.

  Wrong, Mercy. Wrong, yet again.

  MERCY. CHRISTMAS EVE 1989.

  Early on Christmas Eve morning, hours before Zach left or Star arrived, my father asked me to kill him.

  I'd spent some of that night in a chair at the end of his bed. At one point, he woke and started to panic, then remembering, reached up to push the button that released liquid morphine into his veins. Through half-closed lashes, I saw him lie back, and his breathing was hoarse and loud, a sound like the sea pressing through a blow-hole.

  "Better," he said, as the pain relief kicked in. "That's better."

  His hand went up to press the machine again, but I knew nothing would issue from it again so soon. Maybe he believed it had, because he dropped off immediately into a more settled sleep and didn't wake again until breakfast time, when I brought him the bowl of mashed banana and yogurt that was all he could manage first thing. His eyes clicked open and he said, in a clear voice, "I need a pill."

  "What about the pump?"

  "No, a pill."

  I took the container, a new one, nearly full, from its place on the window, shook one pill into his hand. He took the glass of water and gulped to swallow, his whole throat working over it. He coughed, then drank again.

  "I need more."

  Thinking he meant water, I reached for the jug.

  "More pills, I mean."

  I looked at the phial in my hand. "You can't, you know that."

  He turned his eyes on me. "I've had enough now of living like this." His eyes held onto mine, as only ever once before.

  "Please."

  I shook my head, just as I had back then. "Let the one you've just had take effect," I said. "You'll feel better then."

  "There's no better for me." He put his fingers on my wrist, his grip surprisingly tight. "Please. Have mercy."

  But the pill was already beginning its work, or maybe it was the effort of making the request, of taking my arm, of saying such words. His eyelids began to droop.

  "You're a clever girl, always were," he whispered. "You know what to do."

  His eyes closed on the first compliment he ever gave me.

  BAIL |BĀL| [NOUN]

  the temporary release of an accused person awaiting trial, sometimes on condition that a sum of money be lodged to guarantee their appearance in court

  • money paid by or for such a person as security.

  bail out: eject, parachute to safety; desert, get out, escape.

  bail someone/something out: rescue, save, relieve; finance, help (out), assist, aid; informal: save someone's bacon/neck/skin.

  *

  The world was back to work. I had a lawyer, a no-nonsense woman called Mags Halloran, hired the Irish way, through someone Pauline knew who knew someone. Mags was the only girl in a farming family
of seven whose widowed mother had struggled and saved and steered them all into college. Each year in August, three of them took a week off their high-powered jobs in Dublin or London or New York to go home to Tipperary to help save the hay. This was the robust approach Mags took into the milieu of Dublin law, where she was known as "a character".

  Short and squat, she wore calf-length skirts, flesh-colored tights and flat shoes of a kind usually worn by women twenty years older. Her dull-white blouses gaped under the bust, exposing dull-white flesh. I never met a woman who made less attempt to be attractive. Mags liked to be underestimated.

  My case worried her from the start. She came to Doolough Barracks and sat opposite me at the table in the day room to explain that I might not get bail. The serious nature of my alleged crime, the strength of the circumstantial evidence, and the location of my home and business in another jurisdiction -- all these were against me.

  "Anything in my favor?"

  "You tell me. Any previous?"

  "Of course not."

  "So we'll go with good character, respectable, unlikely to offend again, yadda, yadda...They'll want a substantial surety, though. If they go for it."

  "If?"

  "Not going to lie to you, Dotes." Mags called everybody Dotes. "We're fifty-fifty at best."

  "And if not? I'll have to stay here in the barracks until the trial?"

  "More likely to relocate you to Mountjoy, I'd say."

  "What sadist decided to name a prison Mount Joy?"

  She shrugged. "A more pressing question: do you have the funds for bail? And for legal fees? They're going to want to be sure that you're not going to go skipadeedoo back to the States. And of course" -- this with a cheeky grin -- "the services of a good lawyer never come cheap."

  Months later, after it was all over, I wondered why I didn't go "skipadeedoo". It seems to me now that nobody would have cared, except perhaps Dr Keane. The Irish justice system knew I was no danger to society.

  Mags had brought a copy of The Wicklow Gazette to the barracks. I was their front page story. MERCY KILLING??? They loved the play on my name of course and their question marks never doubted whether he was killed, only whether it was an assisted suicide or something even more sinister. RETURNED EMIGRANT ACCUSED OF MURDER.

  A news story on page one continued onto page three and, in the middle of the paper, a double-page spread analyzed the event, complete with a large photo of my father in his uniform, taken at his retirement do. And a smaller, blurry photograph of me in my convent-school uniform. Where had they managed to turn up that?

  The reporter had talked to everyone he could find: to the police who said an arrest had been made; to old school friends who said they just couldn't believe it of me; to a neighbor who said I'd been estranged from my father for years before coming back a few months ago; to Dr Keane who said he was confident justice would be done. To everyone except Pauline or Star or Zach or me, the four people who were in the house that day.

  "Could have been worse," Mags said. "They're going with the mercy angle. That's good."

  "Why? Why is that good?"

  "We may need to use that ourselves."

  "I didn't do it," I said.

  "Right. Let's get you filling these forms then."

  She took them away with her. Eight days later, I was climbing into the back of the Garda car on my way to Dublin. We arrived at the Four Courts to a glut of reporters huddled around the entrance. Beneath the statues of Justice, Mercy, Authority and Wisdom, they hovered like bloodsuckers awaiting their feed: notebooks and pens, cameras and microphones poised to sup.

  "Your waiting party," said Inspector O'Neill.

  I shivered. I was wearing my most respectable outfit, as instructed by Mags, a brown linen suit, but it was too light for the Irish spring.

  "Do you want me to try round the back instead?" Garda Cogley asked his boss. "See if we can avoid them?"

  The Inspector nodded, curt.

  Garda Cogley swung the car through some narrow back streets, then got out to tap on a steel door. Inside, another guard opened it a crack, listened, looked across at us in the car and nodded.

  We were led through a warren of back rooms and when I saw Mags, waiting for us outside Court Two as arranged, I felt like she was an old friend. She led me through further corridors, her hand on my elbow, updating me as we walked. Pauline's bank manager cousin had arranged a mortgage on my father's house and farm to put up the bail and it had come through in time.

  Good news then. We took our places in court. After a twenty-minute sitting, bail was granted on condition that I surrendered my passport.

  We tried the back way out again, but this time we were refused and had to go round the front. "Prepare yourself, Dotes," Mags said, as we walked down the long, narrow corridor that led to the round hall and the front door. "They'll be out in force by now."

  She was loving the whole thing, stomping up the corridor in her tough-cookie shoes, steering me through, her hand on my elbow, as the cameras flashed and the questions were thrown our way, like the barking of dogs: "Is the trial date set?" "Did you get bail?" "What are your plans?" One of them called, "Did you do it?" Could he really have expected to me to turn around and say, "Well yes, actually, I did"?

  Some of the questions were for Mags. "Did she get bail?" "What's the plea?" As we pushed through, they moved with us, all of us together, like a multi-headed animal. Mags had her keys ready and, as soon as she had unlocked the car, she leaned across and opened the passenger door for me, but not before the journalists had come crowding round, popping questions like toy machine-guns. As we sat into the car, they pressed their faces to the windows, but it all had a forced feel, a going-through-the-motions of what they felt they should be doing.

  Mags revved the engine, not too gently, and they parted to let us through.

  She dropped me to the 1.30p.m. train back to Rathdrum and, from there, I took a cab to Doolough. As I walked from the cab to the front door, the windows looked down on me from under their fringe of eaves. Was anyone who lived in this house ever happy? I wondered as I approached. Did groups of children ever play here, giggle and do tricks on each other? I couldn't imagine it, but maybe the lack was in me.

  What I would have liked to have done, if I'd been free to, was get this house ready for sale. Not so much for the money, as for the activity. Fixing it up, dealing with estate agents, the coming and going of potential buyers would have filled my days, but my bail conditions meant I had to remain, with only my writing as distraction.

  I went in the back door to the kitchen. A blast of warmth from the stove greeted me. The house was back in order, the broken furniture chopped for wood, all the rooms cleaned and vacuumed and polished. The kitchen still seemed bare since we cleared it of my father's medicines and water-bottles, but he was still there. Part of him would remain, forever unburied.

  I picked up the kettle. I would have a cup of tea. My father always drank coffee, a relic of his years in France, but tea was Mrs Whelan's "pick-me-up" of choice. Pauline's mother tackled her work like she went at her prayers, steadily ticking off the cleaning and the cooking and the washing up just as she pushed each bead of the rosary through her fingers, all the way round till she was back where she began, only to start over again. Between each chore, like the little chains between the beads, were endless cups of tea.

  Nothing gave Mrs Whelan more pleasure than the sight of a meal for me and my father well cooked on its serving plate, surrounded by its subordinate dishes of vegetables and gravy and two kinds of potatoes. Except perhaps Monday evening's ironing stack -- sheets and pillow cases and tea-towels end to end, corner to corner -- admired from across the rim of a nice cup of tea.

  I've always feared domesticity. I've done what has to be done but I never gave myself over to the tasks, not until much later in life, when I came round to appreciating the virtues, the life-saving properties, of cleanliness and order.

  I know I should be keeping the house clean and neat now; th
at's what my head needs. And I should turn to the practices Zach taught me, that worked so well for me before. Eat and sleep well, balance work with play, meditate and walk. Instead I find myself hunkering at home, because going for a walk is like stepping onto a stage. All eyes are on me. I am the most exciting thing to happen in Doolough since the Civil War, when a shoot-out left a local man dead. The closest they've got to murder since.

  Not that anybody actually says so. It's all in the looks or the avoidance of looking.

  All right, Zach. I hear your voice telling me it's just resistance. You're right, it is. I'm under-eating and over-working, neglecting my better self. Only the writing saves me but it is hard, scraping up the past and fitting it to the present. That, too, would go better if I was able to do the things you taught me.

  Oh, Zach, I'm not just alone here, I'm incomplete. I get through the day, I put in the hours, I live out the minutes, but I want to be what I was when I was with you. All I know how to do, as I wait out what's to come here in my father's house, without you, is write.

  Each morning, I go to his bathroom upstairs and take off my clothes and step into the same tub I used when I was a girl. I hear the same water gush from the taps, see the same green light falling in through the opaque glass from the trees outside. I turn off the water and pick up the soap to circle it under my arms, between my legs, over my body, and slide down to rinse off.

  As I feel the water close over my face, is it any wonder that all I can think to do is write it down. What's happening now, what happened then, what went on before. So that some day I might be able to pass it onto Star and have her understand.