Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  And it was hard to keep an apartment and a car and a child on such jobs. It meant scrimping and saving, recycling and salvaging, and help from friends, which always has a price, no matter how kind they are. It could actually be done but I did it, didn't I, Star? I got you your schooling and your violin lessons and your summer camp. I carved out a good life for us in the gentle town between the mountains and the ocean.

  The Golden State has the highest mountain in the US, the greatest bird, the biggest vineyard, the plumpest oranges, the hottest desert, the tallest waterfall, the oldest living trees...It's a waking dream of noise, smog, beach, sky, mountain, fog and open, golden light. It's a nostalgia even while you're living it. Never was a place more put upon by fantasy but for me, for us, it delivered. The ever-present ocean, the spectacular sunsets, the Redwood pines, the mountains wrapped in raiments of snow or mist, dependable. I made them ours.

  At weekends, I would take you on the back of my bicycle out to the wilderness, to enjoy the gift of year-round sunshine. Coming from Ireland, a country that often did four seasons in a day, I loved the consistency of Santa Paola's climate. Two seasons, wet and dry, with subtle variations that arrived, on schedule, each year. We moved there in November and those first sunny winter days will always stay with me. Wind full of dust and dried-up leaves and the parched land seeming to listen for the rain that, when it came, was nothing like an Irish downpour but more a gentle baptism, wafting in from the sea in mild and mellow veils, followed by days of softer sun and cooler air. Quickly, in a matter of days it seemed, the brown hillsides turned to green.

  I didn't know it that first year but this was Santa Paola's false spring, tricking plants into budding -- or even blossoming out of season -- and people into throwing off their clothes. In January, the real rains came: in torrents, not from the ocean this time, but from the clouds directly above cracking open like eggs. Around us, dry river beds and arroyos raced with water but, unlike Ireland, between each downpour we had blue skies and warmth again.

  By the time the last rains came in April, in fitful squalls, real spring had arrived with its blaze of color. Then it was the long, hot, dry season, greens gradually bleaching again. In May, the first desert winds came sweeping down the canyons, like somebody up there had plugged in a giant air heater. It ripped off palm leaves, sometimes even branches, and shifted the mountains closer. Inland was baking-hot, desert-hot, headache-hot, but in Santa Paola, we had our kindly fog bank. Throughout the summer it sat there, offshore on the water, about 1,000 feet thick. As night fell, it would move in, filling the spaces between our homes and in the morning, as the sun climbed, it would obligingly roll back out to sea.

  Most of this I told to Joseph Plotkin, leading up to asking him the question I had to ask. Despite my efforts, ensuring Star was clean and healthily fed, brought out at the weekends when I felt like sitting her in front of the TV, sending her to the best school and all the extra-curricular activities I could afford, might this behavior of Star's be a reaction to having a working mom?

  "Maybe, maybe not." His unibrow frowned. "I'd like to fill some gaps, Ma'am. Can I ask you about your sex life?"

  "I don't see how..."

  "Oh, believe me, it's gonna be relevant."

  I felt the way I imagine any woman, hearing that sentence while alone in a room with an unknown man and a bed, would feel.

  "How long have you been single?" he prompted.

  "I'm a widow."

  "For how long?"

  "Four years now, nearly five."

  "Any boyfriends?"

  "Nobody serious."

  "But you're dating? There have been men?"

  "Em... a few."

  "Women?"

  "No!"

  "How many men?"

  "I've never counted. I really don't see..."

  "Please, Ms Cunningham. If you and I are going to work together, you need to trust me to do my job. If you would..."

  I didn't know how many, none of them mattered but after Brendan's going, it comforted me to see admiration in a man's eye. Flirting was the only opportunity I got to have some fun, and casual encounters -- slipped between work and Star -- suited me well.

  Joseph Plotkin was waiting. "Em... About eight," I said.

  "When asked a question like this, a significant percentage of people underestimate. It is important that you tell me the truth."

  "I have."

  "Okay. Good. Now, tell me what sex is like with these men."

  "It depends on the man, I guess."

  "Can you identify any pattern? Anything at all?"

  I shrugged.

  "It's important, Ma'am. Take your time."

  In the shopping precinct on the street below, faint voices were bidding each other hello and goodbye, having ordinary conversations. What was I doing, trapping myself in this room?

  "It's easier with them than my ex-- my dead -- husband," I said.

  "Easier? Do you mean sexually?"

  I nodded. "I loved my husband very much but --"

  I could hear him breathing, noisily and damply, through his mouth.

  "Were you incompatible? Sexually." He just loved saying that word. "Go o-on, Mrs Cunningham. Did you enjoy sex with your husband?"

  I shook my head, hot with shame.

  "I see. Would that be lack of orgasm? Lack of desire? Or lack of pleasure?" He was like a laconic waiter listing off the dishes of the day. Each syllable was drawn out until it was almost a word in itself: or-gasm, dee-sire, pleas-uuure.

  "Maybe," I whispered into my lap. "I suppose. Sometimes."

  "Which?"

  "All, I suppose. I didn't think about it too much at the time. We were happy together."

  He nodded, as if he'd come to some conclusion. "Ms Cunningham, I need you to come across to the couch," he said. "I want you to lie down and close your eyes and relax."

  "Why?"

  "I want to ask you about your parents."

  "What have my parents -- or my sex life for that matter -- got to do with Star and her problems?"

  "A great deal, I'd say."

  "Look, I..."

  "Ms Cunn-ing-ham, don't fight shy now. You are doing very well, very well indeed."

  "I really don't see..."

  "If you don't feel able to continue, we can stop here and take it forward next week. But you do have" -- he glanced across at the clock on the mantelpiece -- "twenny-five minutes left."

  The clock ticked at me. He stared at me with baleful eyes, like he was begging me to take him onto dry land.

  "All right," I said.

  He led me across to the couch. I lay down. The bed smelled of body. He did sleep here.

  "So...Your daddy. Tell me all about him."

  "I don't know what to say."

  "He's alive?"

  I nodded.

  "What age would he be?"

  I did a quick calculation in my head. "He's seventy-six."

  "And you're fond of him?"

  "I never see him. He's in Ireland."

  "That's not what I asked, Ma'am."

  "Em... Not especially."

  "What about when you were growing up?"

  I hesitated.

  "Did he beat you?"

  "Only...Not...No."

  My nostrils had shrunk to pin pricks. The room was airless.

  "What happened between y'two? Feeling? Touching?"

  The air has evacuated. I cannot fill my breath.

  "Miss Cunn-ing-ham?"

  In the street, lunchtime was upping the activity: voices and cars bustling. He was calling my name but not even looking at me, making a note in his notebook instead. "What have you just written?" I asked him.

  "Mrs Cunn-ing-ham. For a girl, her father is the primary male bond. Through him, she learns how to respond to other men."

  "What does any of that have to do with Star?"

  "Just about everything, Ma'am."

  Could this be true? Could my father's poison, despite my best efforts, be leaking through and tainting
my efforts?

  "I don't understand how."

  "It is complicated, surely. We'll have to unravel the points of connection."

  "How?"

  "Get you into a state of relaxation. Some visualisation. Some rewritin' of outcomes. Once you're fixed up, you're gonna find your daughter's following along fast behind you."

  Rewriting my outcomes, I liked the sound of that. "Really, Doctor?"

  "Well, now...In this business, we don't give guarantees. The mind is a mystery, Miss Cunn-ing-ham, but in your case, I'd be confident of a positive outcome. Yes Ma'am."

  I lay back down. He was not a doctor. Why had I called him Doctor?

  "So... you ready to go? Close your eyes there."

  Behind my eyelids was a night sky splashed with orange.

  "You breathe deeply now. That's it. In through your nose, out through the mouth. Deep breaths. Now relax your muscles, let your body grow real heavy. Yes ma'am, that's it... very good. Now. I want you to picture in your head what I'm describin'. Your daddy has walked into your bedroom and he's comin' close to your bed. You see that?"

  "Yes."

  "Under those bedclothes, you're naked. You can see... Snakes alive! Miss Cunning-ham! You can't jump up like that."

  The door. Where was the door? I couldn't see the door.

  "Miss Cunning-ham, please. Lie back down. I stood, dizzy, getting dizzier.

  "Ma'am, I know it's difficult but... to leave without completion could be dangerous.

  "Can't."

  "You are over-reactin', Ma'am. This is likely what is causin' your problems. If you don't lie down now, it's over for you."

  I put my hands over my ears.

  "Yes Ma'am. And for your girl." His gimlet eyes fixed me in a stare, like the eyes on the dead fish my father used to catch in Doolough Lake.

  My vision cleared. The door emerged. I did what my instinct had told me to do at the start.

  I fled.

  Late February in Doolough. I stand by the window, looking down on the front yard, coffee cup in one hand and in the other, rolled into a scroll, a letter from Zach.

  A quarter of a page. Less than one hundred words and not one of them a word I need.

  19th February 1990

  Dearest Mercy,

  I have found a place where I can be. You were right about the West of Ireland. I spent the New Year on Inishmore and am now in this village in Connemara, below a mountain I have befriended. I go walking there every day, you'd love it. I hope all has come to pass as you wanted? That your father departed and your daughter arrived and both of them and you are at peace.

  Your

  Zach.

  "Befriended". It sounded so phoney on paper, though I knew that in the presence of his six-feet-two of sleeked muscle, in the hold of his piercing eyes, in the force-field of his presence, it would sound real and true.

  This letter was so abrupt, it hurt. I'd prefer not to have received it at all. But why was I surprised? He'd told me he was wary of words. It was the only thing he ever said that made me wary of him. We were in Santa Paola Central Park at the time. I replied, "The man who is wary of words is wary of life," which made him sit up.

  "Do you really think so?" he'd asked.

  "I was paraphrasing someone."

  "Who?"

  "An English writer you Yanks probably have little time for. Doctor Johnson."

  "Of dictionary fame?"

  "Yes. He once said the chief glory of every people arises from its authors. I happen to agree with him."

  "I don't trust words. All they do is feed our false sense of self."

  I was thunderstruck. To the young me, words alone were, as my favorite poet WB Yeats put it, the only "certain good". The lodestar of human achievement. Especially the written word that allowed us to reach across place and time. To me, only words were capable of encompassing it all, able to touch head and heart and soul, altogether, all at once.

  "It's a matter of balance," he explained, when I offered all this. "Words can be good but the babble's grown too loud. We so rarely turn off our thoughts or our talk. So what this world needs right now is more silence."

  Zach was only a student then, just setting out on life, how did he know so much? We walked on, me conscious, as always, of being a thirty-year-old woman with this guy who was barely out of boyhood. Then we came across a magnificent flowering bush, except I couldn't remember what it was called. I stopped to admire it and was saying, "I know the name of this, I just can't remember, it's on the tip of my tongue, I do know it..."

  "What does it matter what humans name it?" he said. "Be quiet so you can look at it."

  I quieted down. And immediately remembered it was a hibiscus.

  Halcyon days.

  No hibiscus in Doolough, in dead February. Down on the lawn, a robin is digging up worms. The grass is green, but the rest of the world -- the trees and the sky and the mountains and slivers of lake -- are grey, grey, grey. It's ten in the morning but the electric light is still on overhead and my desk lamp is also lit. I'd forgotten how long and low-hanging an Irish winter can be, with its fifteen or sixteen hours of darkness, and the day so grey when it finally does arrive. So damp and cloud-congested, that it feels like Planet Earth has a head-cold.

  I am drowning in detail, but all I seem to hold from my early years is an intense but undefined embarrassment, a sense of blushing and shuffling through my days, especially when with my father in the presence of others. I was ashamed, but of what exactly? I rummage through my child's mind and find nothing but a swirl of feelings. Only Pauline stepped into the haze I had sprayed around myself, and forced me to see her face.

  I do have memories of this house, of course, especially of the kitchen. I can conjure up the border of walls, the solidity of the big kitchen table as I rode around it on my tricycle, the warmth of the fire, the grey light coming in the low window, everything tall and looming. And walking out, up to the mountain or down to the lake when the house was too full of feeling for me, face burning, feet tripping over the stones.

  It's like stepping into a finger-painting, trying to remember my childhood. The strokes are too broad, without shading.

  I tilt my head back to drain the coffee. End of break. How ordinary life remains, even when extraordinary things are happening. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee; work, rest, exercise, leisure; family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances: that's all life comes down to. Most days I struggled through, with loneliness ever knocking at my poor defenses. But I had moments too when the shadow of what lay ahead, the possibility of prison, concentrated my appreciation of daily things. A robin's bobbing head. The aroma of the coffee. A walk down the lane to the road and back.

  And writing. Time to get back to it. On the long desk behind me, the papers and notes and jottings that made up my life and my father's and Star's are spread, in a fan of files and folders. My fifteen minute break was over and if the writing wasn't done early, it wouldn't be done at all.

  Later in the day, my mind would wander, to my father's intentions in his last days, to the impending trial, to the whereabouts of Star, and indeed, of Zach. My courage would disintegrate, my thoughts and memories congeal. But now, I had good morning energy to take me through. I went across to the desk and placed Zach's letter with the other papers. I couldn't afford to think any longer about his meagre words and what they might mean.

  Oh, Zach, if you were here, you would order my days and soothe my nights. You would know how to cope with this trial that's ahead. You would make it so I would find something other than grey in this deep Irish winter, something besides darkness in sixteen-hour nights. With you, nighttime was my best time, not my worst. Oh, Zach, soul of my soul, come back to me.

  I met him in the spring of 1972 when I was almost thirty. He was on his college spring break. Yes, yes, I know. But in my defense, Zach Coleman was no ordinary nineteen-year-old.

  My job back then was waitressing at Honolulu Bar and Restaurant on the ocean front. It had a stream running throug
h it, dissecting the building and we had to run forwards and backwards over the little bridges, without bumping into each other. The bartenders wore bright green shirts spattered with orange and blue palm trees and we, the floor staff, wore green halter-neck tops over faux-grass skirts and a yellow flower behind the ear.

  We were having a busy evening, with too many Europeans. Spoiled by their high-wage welfare states, Europeans were unaware that we relied on tips to make up our wages. Jim-Bob, our manager, allowed us to "grat" them, add a tip to the bill without them realizing, but not too much.

  Not enough.

  It was Lindie, one of the other waitresses and also a single mom, who saw Zach first.

  "Mine!" she elbowed me, as soon as he walked in. We had a mock rivalry running over good-looking punters.

  I looked to the door. Tall, young, a small beard, and dark hair long and straight, like Jesus. "Not so fast, Missy," I said. "I do believe it's almost eight-thirty and time for your break."

  She looked at her watch. "So it is. Nyah, he's only a tadpole anyway. You're welcome."

  When I brought him across the menu and he turned his eyes up to me, the joking stopped. His eyes were the deepest grey I have ever seen on anybody, the color of the sky on a new-moon night. He did look like Jesus. And he had the kind of presence I imagine Jesus must have had.

  All through the requests from the other tables -- a to-go box for table 6; three more beers for 12; ketchup bottle on 8 is empty; high chair for the picky party of ten and their variation on their orders (hold-the-gravy on the chicken and mash, extra cheese on the pizza, the burger without salad or pickle) playing havoc with Honolulu order system -- I felt him there. Whenever I looked across, he was looking at me. Each time, I looked a little longer, but each time it was me who drew my eyes away.