Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  Tough, raising kids these days, especially on your own.

  That's what the best of them said and those who said worse didn't bother me, not any more. I was steadied by the presence of my neighbors. Their "Hi, Mercy" or "Afternoon, Mrs Mulcahy!" or "How is Star?" seemed like a small, everyday gift and reminded me of what I opted for when I moved here. Domesticity, suburbia, a place where I could fight free of my past. A place where I, and my daughter, could feel safe. I held onto those small connections, valuing what I still had, though much was lost.

  Freedom and safety aren't external, I knew that by then. A house and a good job won't keep you safe; a trip to Europe doesn't set you free. I wish, I wish, I wish...Those dangerous, soft-footed words still formed the backing track in my head. I never said them aloud, not even to Marsha, because I didn't believe in them any more, but I was still thrown forward on them, tossed up the road that day on their swoosh and slice. The draw of desire prodded by the rod, the wand, of I.

  On Fade Street, I crossed to talk to Mrs Hawkins, whose husband of forty-four years had died two months before. Then onto our old-fashioned library where heads looked up as the wooden double-doors swung closed behind me. Here too, I was well known. It was quiet today: no students from the high school as there were last time I was in, too far from exam time. I didn't have to ask for my books. Jenny saw me and bent for them behind the counter. I always rang ahead, a relic from busier days.

  She slid them across the polished wood. The new Edna O'Brien, especially ordered. A 'how-to' on writing fiction. The Bell Jar. I was rediscovering Sylvia Plath. I fished in my bag for my library card, grateful as always for the gift of free books.

  Tonight, after we closed the café, I would take them home and choose which one to read first. The O'Brien, I reckoned. I could do with an injection of her luscious, over-ripe sentences, her sense of the hidden dilemma within the obvious conflict. I would turn the key in the lock of my front door and sit immediately down at the work table I have set up in the hallway, leaving the book in its bag, delaying the pleasure of reading until after I had written something myself. The hallway faced west and was the place to sit at that time of day, to catch the evening sun.

  I would write until I grew too tired or hungry, whichever came first. A break to eat would mark the end of work for the day. The O'Brien would come out of the book bag and be taken to the kitchen and laid in on the pine table while I prepared supper. Bean stew brought home from the café, accompanied by a robust chunk of bread and a glass, or possibly two, (never a third) of red wine. The bright new cover of the book would gleam in its plastic library jacket, catching the light from the lamp overhead and, food warmed, I would sit and open it.

  Page one.

  A new story.

  After eating, my reading would continue in the living room. It would be dark by then and I'd put on the reading lamp in the corner. Plumping the cushions, I'd sink down, pulling a coverlet around me. After I have read my fill, I might watch the late news. The medfly outbreak that threatened California fruit farms was putting an end to Governor Jerry Brown's bid for election to the Senate. The nation was sinking into its worst recession since the Great Depression. More than nine million Americans were now officially unemployed.

  Watch is the word, with all the distance implied. I won't be engaged by these news stories as I am with the books, the reading of Edna O'Brien's, or the writing of my own. I'll let the TV information wash across me only because I feel I should. It's important for me to be informed about world affairs. Tomorrow in the café, earnest students or activists will debate the detail and their beliefs about them, with passion and rigor. Marsha -- who is always skipping with feeling about some injustice or another -- will come out of the kitchen to join in, with her always intelligent, always probing opinions. And I will join in a way that facilitates them to do the talking.

  My opinions are too watery to survive in Better World. The unfolding of political events feels inconsequential to me. I know millions of people are affected by these decisions but they don't feel real. People enter and exit the world and their own life story unfolds. Or not. That seems to me to be the beginning and the end of it, the only news worth telling.

  I admire Marsha and all the others who do care. I provide a place where they can work out what they think and share it with each other and make a difference, in the way they want. They are so taken with their own thoughts that they never notice I don't offer mine.

  After the news, I will prepare for bed. Tidy the house, iron whatever I am going to wear next day, undress and go through my night-time routine. Cleanse, exfoliate, tone, moisturize, tweeze, brush. Tonight is Wednesday, so I may also manicure. Shiny and polished, I will take myself to sleep with some final reading, another chapter of the O'Brien or a different book, something lighter, or maybe the Santa Paola Sentinel, which comes out on Wednesdays. Then to sleep, in time to get eight hours before rising at seven.

  That's what I thought was ahead for me that evening. Instead, I left the library and walked on to Brown's and bumped right into Zach.

  As soon as I walked into the store, I saw him. His eye-catching back, tall and broad under a white T-shirt. For a second, or maybe two, I was unaware that it was him, but then realization dropped. I could feel it falling inside me. He was pointing towards the meat. As I drew nearer, I heard his voice -- "and six slices of chorizo" -- and knew for sure.

  "Zach?" I said, from behind his back.

  He stood shock still for a moment, frozen, before turning around. A splinter of something as our eyes collided. I felt it again, what I had felt the first time we met. His intense presence, stronger now, I thought. I'd forgotten how strong it was. A word from my childhood floated into my mind: charismatic.

  "Well, well," he said, voice breezy. "If it isn't Mercy."

  He wore a smile that said, I am pleased to see you but I am just as pleased to see this chorizo I am being handed. You are no more special than anything else.

  Instantly a thought rose in me: You can drop the nonchalance, my friend. You are mine, I'm getting you back. The sensations that swirled around that thought flooded my entire body -- with him, with us, with what it had been like to be with him and what it had been like to be without him.

  I flicked a quick look at his left hand. Naked. Zach would wear a ring, I thought, if he were married.

  "It is you," I said.

  "Me indeed."

  "Home for a visit?"

  "Maybe a bit longer than that."

  "Really? That's great."

  He turned back to the assistant behind the counter. "And a large slice of Camembert," he said, bestowing his beautiful smile on her.

  Mine.

  "Your hair," I said to him. "It's so different." It was short, very short, practically shaven. He ran his palm across the skull and stared at me, as if he didn't know what to say. No, as if he didn't have anything to say to me. Unthinkable thought. But words had also evacuated my head. Silence grew and grew like a big, invisible balloon pressing against us.

  It was he who rescued us: "How is your little girl?"

  "Not so little any more. She's in college."

  "No!"

  "It's been nine years, Zach."

  "I still think of her as a kid."

  "It's the kids who bring home what nine years means."

  I was now facing forty but until this moment, had not found that milestone oppressive. The American obsession with looking younger has always seemed ridiculous to me. All that running and bending, and now all that cutting and slicing, just to pretend you are a few years younger than you are.

  That day in Brown's, all such reasoning flew away. Under Zach's eyes, I was conscious not only of the lines around my eyes and mouth, the sag that was developing in the skin behind my chin, the wedge of padding that lined the top of my waistband, but also that I wasn't wearing any make-up, that I was in my second-best jeans -- only half as flattering to what was left of my figure as my best -- and that my hair color needed a retouch.
For the first time, I felt the impulse that drives women under the knife. If, in that moment, a surgeon was to promise that he could restore me to what I was at thirty -- the age I was when Zach and I first met, the age when my skin still glowed without make-up, when my hair was still dye-free and all jeans looked equally good -- I might have chosen to believe him.

  It didn't help that Zach was not less, but more, beautiful than he had been nine years before. He had filled out in the shoulders and filled out internally too: come into himself.

  Time was tunnelling in around us from all sides, cutting out the girl behind the deli counter, the two people now standing in line behind me, the shop and all the people in it. There was only us two. I knew not to approach him as I would another guy. The light swapping of banter, the game of the tip and parry you play so you don't expose too much too soon, wouldn't do for Zach.

  "Would you like to go get a coffee?" I asked.

  He laughed. Was that a bitter note? Was he still hurt? If he was, that meant I had a chance.

  Mine. Mine.

  "Unless you'd rather not. Unless there's somebody else?" I said.

  His eyes widened, surprised at my directness. "No, it's not that."

  "Will that be all, Sir?" asked the deli girl from a long way off.

  "Come on, Zach, this doesn't need to be so hard. Just say yes or no. Your call."

  As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. Too blunt. Yet if I played it as cool as him, he'd let me walk away. I played my last throw. "Zach, I'm so sorry about what happened. Not just for what I did to you but also to myself."

  "It's all a very long time ago."

  "It was the biggest mistake of my life."

  "You think I don't know that, Mercy?"

  "Then let's not make a second one."

  His silence stared me down, face full of so many saids and unsaids. I held his eyes and would not let them go.

  "That will be $6.40, Sir."

  "Please Miss," I said, without turning my head. "Can you give us a second?"

  Still he didn't speak, so I had to. I put my hand on my heart. "I forgive myself, Zach. I forgive me even though I put myself through the wringer by leaving you. I forgive me, because if I don't, I'd only be doing the same thing all over again to myself. And to you. Zach? Do you understand?"

  "Sir, Ma'm, I really must ask you..."

  "So don't forgive me if you don't want to, Zach, but know what you're doing, okay?" I felt like I was fighting for the life of a child. "Know that it's you making the mistake this time."

  Still he stood.

  "Sir?"

  I took one of the business cards I always carry in my purse and wrote my home number down on the back of it. "Call me," I said.

  He looked at the card. "Better World Café?"

  "Or call in there if you'd prefer. Anytime. Come and meet my friend Marsha. You'll like her."

  And she'd love him. I could imagine them, having long intense talks about how best to save a world that didn't think it needed saving.

  "Sir, I really have to ask you to --"

  "Just wait, will you?" I turned on her, hardly knowing what I was saying.

  I turned back to him. "Zach?"

  "Ah, go on, son," said a man from the line.

  "If you don't, can I?" shouted another voice.

  "Yeah, man, you crazy?"

  "I'm out on a limb here, Zach. Look at me."

  He looked, he let himself look. A spark jumped in his eyes, I saw it. Time tunnelled in closer. "Help me," I whispered.

  He reached out his hand. I dropped my basket so I could take it. My feet were stepping towards him. He opened his arms to me and I half-stumbled into them.

  "Yes!" cried the old man from behind, as if it was his embrace I was falling into.

  I was locked against that white T-shirt, my cheek warming against what it felt beneath. His skin, his muscle, his bone. Mine. His hand came up to hold me there.

  "Don't make me regret this," he whispered into my hair.

  "I won't. I promise you, Zach. I promise."

  I looked up at him and he was smiling. The people in the line behind us were smiling. The deli girl was smiling. And me, oh yes, me too. Even my pores were smiling.

  Since Zach and I had last been together, he had got God. He didn't call it that and he wasn't aligned with any particular religion or tradition, but that was what it was. After Brown's, I brought him back to the café, enjoying the look on Marsha's face when she saw me swinging in with him, hand-in-hand. She sat him down in the corner table to share a pot of green tea and some get-to-know-you-time while I fixed up the tables. Then she insisted I take the rest of the day off.

  I brought him back to my house, his first time there, knowing how he would appreciate that. I showed him around. The west-facing entrance vestibule where I like to write. The open-plan kitchen and dining and sitting room at the back, opening out onto the yard. Upstairs past the bathroom, which needed decoration: too frilled and flouncy for my taste now. Past Star's locked door, forbidden territory. Past the spare room for guests and Marsha, who often stayed over if she'd had too much wine to drive home. Slowly, slowly, each delay a sort of commitment to our destination: my bedroom.

  "This is great," Zach said, almost wistfully. "I can see your life since we parted, here, all laid out."

  "Settled and boring."

  "Not at all but you're rooted now, compared to before," he smiled. "Solid."

  "Solid? Charming. Makes me sound like a kitchen table."

  I put my arms around his neck and gave him the full-on kiss I'd been planning to give him since Brown's. Now more holding back, I was all his. I smelled the tang of him as our lips met, his own, unmistakable essence.

  "I think it's time this table was laid," I whispered in his ear, which made him laugh again.

  Then he grew suddenly serious. "Mercy," he said, with a small frown. "I have a lot to tell you."

  I stroked the crease the memory made, the know between his eyes.

  "We've a lot to tell each other, Zach. But we've all the time in the world to tell it. First..."

  I kissed him again.

  "Mercy, Mercy," he whispered into my hair, and again, after we'd slid each other's clothes away and tracked pathways along each other's skin with fingers and lips and were reaching to pull the nakedness of each other in close, he said it again, "Mercy, Mercy," only louder this time, as if I was in danger. Or maybe was a danger. I don't know.

  I was determined that everything was going to be fine. With my ambiguities and reservations out of the way, happiness would be ours, that day and forever, all the coming days.

  "Stop," he said.

  I lifted my head. "What is it?" Excitement was thrumming through me.

  "Stop for a moment. Listen."

  "To what?"

  "Just listen."

  I laid my forehead in the soft hollow beneath his shoulder, stopped the forward press of my desire for a moment, and listened. I could hear the thumping of my pulse, birdsong outside the window, the ventilator in the bathroom, two kids shooting hoops next door, a car driving past and the hum of my own blood, pressing against my temples... And yes, the silence wrapped around each of the sounds.

  "That's better," he said and he kissed me again, with cooler, gentler lips, a kiss that lasted on and on and on until again, I was lost to sound and to anything except touching and being touched. I drew him down and we were together as we had never quite been together before, heartbeats knocking hard on each other's ribs. Two floating souls touching through heaving flesh.

  Afterwards, after we'd slept a while, we talked and he told me about the years we'd been apart. Some of it -- his academic appointment and his publications -- I knew. Now he told me what lay under all that achievement.

  "After you left me, I didn't want to live. I blamed you for the way I felt. And at the school there was all this wrangling and competition, first for tenure, later for advancement. I found myself anxious all the time."

  "Anxious?" I
asked, from the pillow beside him.

  "Then, one night I woke with a feeling of intense horror. Everything felt so utterly without meaning. I hated the world and what I hated most about it was me. I lay thinking what I'd often thought before -- how could I bear this struggle any longer? Only death could bring me peace."

  "Oh, Zach."

  "I hope this isn't too heavy for you, Mercy. I hated myself. I thought myself the most loathsome person in the world. Why had I said such-and-such? What did so-and-so mean? Thoughts kept churning until I thought they'd drive me out of my mind."

  He laughed and then kept on laughing, too long.

  "What's so funny?"

  "It is funny. That's what I did," he said. "Which was precisely what saved me."

  "Sorry?"

  "Out of my mind."

  "Zach, I..."

  "Bear with me. A thought that kept flashing across my head as I lay there was: 'I can't stand myself any longer.' I'd had this thought before but now, for some reason, I became aware of the illogicality of it. How could I not stand myself? Was I one person or two?"

  He sat up on his elbow. "As I tried to solve this puzzle, I felt -- actually felt -- my mind stop its endless jabbering. I was awake, still wide awake in the dark room, but I wasn't thinking. A moment of peace. Then..." He paused, dropped his eyes, hesitating at the brink.

  "Go on."

  "Oh Mercy, I hope this isn't going to sound too crazy to you -- as if my stopped mind was an aperture, what felt like a surge of white light came rushing in. My head felt ablaze with white."

  I kept my eyes open to him. To turn from what he was saying would be to turn from us. I knew that much.

  "I could feel myself being sucked into it. What did it mean? I started to shake, all over," he said. "And then I heard a voice."

  "A voice?"

  "A voice," he said, firmly, but with a quick glance to see how I'd take it. "It seemed to come from my chest but it also seemed to be outside of me."

  "What did it say?"