Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  Adoration. No other word for it.

  She flicked her eyes in my direction and saw that I had seen. That chased away the blankness of the stare she had been dealing me for days and, as she looked at me properly for the first time since all this had happened, as I stared into those blue eyes so like my own, I felt like I was falling into them. They held everything now, those eyes. Pity and pity's opposite, her complete scorn.

  Whichever way I looked at what Star had done, a finger pointed back at me. The night before, I'd dreamed she was a baby and I was feeding her a bottle, but when I looked closely it had no milk in it, only dust and dried-up leaves.

  I wanted to go back, that was what I wanted. Back to the days before she knew I had a father, back to when I was her all-in-all and she was my twinkling, twinkling, little star and further back, to when we were even safer, to before I was even born myself, when she was already buried fast inside me, a tiny egg, a whisper of a possible promise.

  Star's eyes now seemed to beg a question: what would you give to go back? What would you give? It came to me then, all in a rush: the only answer.

  In front of me was a pencil. I picked it up and wrote on a piece of paper that I passed to Mags. Her eyes boggled as she read the words and – predictably – she shook her head furiously at me. I nodded, insistent. But calm now. Serene as a mountain.

  I took a big breath, settled into my new solidity. Around me, everyone else in the court began to grow restless. I closed my eyes to their growing unease, the coughs and the shuffling of papers and the shifting of feet. I knew what was coming. I took the time it needed to take. Then I pushed my chair back and started to stand to make my announcement. Mags pulled at my arm, forced me back down and stood herself. "M'Lord," she said. "I wish to request a recess. I need to speak to my client."

  He wasn't impressed but he granted it.

  In the inner chamber, Mags slammed the door behind us. "If you're not careful, he is going to throw the book at you for wasting the court's time. I refuse to do what you wrote down in there." She couldn't even bring herself to say it.

  "It's what you said you wanted me to do."

  "Yes, back at the beginning. Not now. For Christ's sake, Mercy, if you do that, you'll get the absolute worst of both worlds. He'll give you life."

  "So be it."

  "You can't! I won't let you. It's going well in there, there's a good chance of getting you off. Why would you do this?"

  "I'm sorry, Mags, I know it's inconvenient for you but..."

  "Incon – bloody – venient! It's a damn sight more than that."

  "I know it's hard for you. I wish I'd known earlier that this was what I wanted, but I didn't. I'm sorry -- but if you don't tell him, I will."

  Something in my voice communicated itself. She sat down. Her shoulders slumped. She looked so unlike herself I almost laughed.

  "Have you any idea, Mercy, what prison is like? You'll be an old woman when you come out."

  "So be it," I said again.

  "I don't get it," said poor Mags. "I just don't get it. Tell me why."

  How could I explain that my going to prison was going to liberate us all? The only way for us all to salvage...something.

  I didn't try.

  "I should never, never have taken this case," she said, flinging her pencil down on the desk. "I knew you were trouble, from the first day. Christ! I am never going to forgive you for this."

  We went back out.

  Mags approached the bench. "M'Lord, my client wishes to change her plea to guilty."

  Reporters woke up out of their snoozes and followed their colleagues rushing for the exit. Star's hands flew to her mouth, one over the other. Zach found my eyes and held them and sent me a small smile, knowing somehow, no words needed, that whatever I was doing, I was doing right.

  Part Four: STARLIGHT

  |ˈSTÄRˌLĪT| [NOUN]

  the light that comes from the stars.

  star |stär| [noun]

  a fixed luminous point in the night sky that is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun.

  light |līt| [noun]

  the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible

  *

  I didn't sink my mother's precious manuscript that day by the lake. I crumpled and threw some of the first pages, ones I had already read, watched them bobbing on the water and tried to summon the will to do the rest.

  When I failed, I went back to the house and told Shando, who told me she had left another copy with him just in case, and so, finally, I succumbed, shouting half the time at its pages, interjecting for a while but then, a little way in, caught despite myself.

  Imaginative sympathy, she used to say, in the days when I let her draw up lists for me and prescribe books like medicine: a measure of Dickens, a dose of Eliot, a soupçon of Keats. That was the reason to read. To develop your imaginative sympathy.

  Ironic, no?

  Imagine is what people always say, whenever they hear our story. Imagine: the mother, the daughter, the same man. Just imagine.

  And imagine this: Sixteen years they made her serve. One hundred and ninety-five months of avoiding the drugs and sex and dramas that got the other inmates through the days. On visits, she told us all the dirty secrets that seeped out from under the cell doors -- the punctures and jabs of drug abuse; the sex connections that were a kind of hate; the aggression and belligerence and occasional violence; the screw who forced himself on the most hopeless of the hopeless cases; the self-harmers who broke plastic cutlery to cut themselves.

  She recorded her thoughts in hard-backed notebooks, filling pages with the details of these days which, from the outside, looked so identical to all the other days around them.

  This prison isn't Doolough lock-up room, Star, or those two places I called prisons before: my father's house, or the kitchen that contained me when you were small. This place is the real Victorian deal, complete with clanging steel doors, hard beds and chamber pots. They laugh like crows and cry like owls and hardly know the difference.

  They were waiting out their days, pointed towards release when life could start again, but she was dancing to an inner rhythm. She turned to writing travel books, relying on memory and research in reference books sourced by the prison librarian. Her Guide To Glendalough has been translated into ten languages and still sells.

  At first, her aloofness annoyed the others. "Her Ladyshit," they called her. "Her Ladyshit thinks her shit don't smell." Which made me smile, I have to admit. Before long, she was the old hand, the lifer watching the small-timers come and go and, as her acceptance of where she found herself settled in her, the others came to acknowledge it.

  She categorized her cellmates into two types: the ones who cried over their children and the ones who cried over their men. (Which always set me wondering: which type was she?) The particular details of neglect or abuse that led these women to their addictions, or their shoplifting, or whatever misdemeanor brought them in, came to fascinate her and became her subject later, after she got out.

  "How did you stand it for so long?" I asked her.

  "Whenever it got tough, and self-pity started up in me, I would ask myself: 'Can I bear this moment here and now?' I always could."

  Happy in prison. Her Ladyshit, serene in the face of hostility. That's who my mother became.

  When they let her out "early" for good behavior, she was forbidden from traveling to the States, and that was the hardest of all for her. She longed to see California again, to drive a top-down Chevy through Ben Sur, to go for a walk at sunset by the Pacific, to admire the soar of a red-breasted eagle, to lie under a moon burnt red by the Santa Ana. It wasn't to be and that, too, she accepted, traveling instead in the opposite direction, to Spain and Italy and the Greek islands, writing more travel books as she went.

  Not a bad life.

  When she died, a good contingent of prison staff and a few of the prisoners turned up to the funeral and all said they'd never had an inmate like her.
>
  The day she went down, she was not allowed to see us so she explained what she wanted from us in two letters. Seven pages to Shando, another even longer, to me, each of which I can summarise in a sentence:

  Dear Zach,

  I want you to work with Star, to take my father's house and turn it into your centre, to work on it together, to be together. That is my wish.

  Dear Star,

  Your Shando will need your help to make this work so be there for him. Be together, that is my wish.

  It was our wish too. We were all so fragile after all that had happened, it gave us a way forward. Even though I was furious with her for appropriating even this. If I wanted him, I wanted him to come on his own terms, his free will, not under my mother's directive. But we settled in together and set to remodelling my grandfather's house, with Mom encouraging us at each prison visit to use as much of "that man's" money as we needed.

  "What better use could it be put to?"

  Downstairs we knocked walls to make a large catering kitchen, where Janet and Bríd, two local cooks, came to prepare whole-food. We added a sun-lounge on the south-west façade and a dining area at the opposite end and extended the front rooms into a yoga studio and classroom. The Better World Center we called it, in tribute to Mom and Marsha's café and we carried over some -- big and neat! -- ideas from there. Marsha came across to visit, when she could, more often after she retired and when Mom came out of jail.

  At first, we had a struggle to keep going. We were ahead of our time in Ireland and it was a challenge to build a clientele and to win trust among the locals in Doolough. Mom's trial was only part of it. All sorts of crazy rumors flew. We were part of "a cult", we were witches, we were offering orgies and pagan practices. Pauline Whelan, who worked part-time for us in the office, would deliver the latest nonsense to us, shaking her head. I would have given up many times, but Shando never wavered.

  "You can't control what people think," he used to say. "If we stay true to the vision, everything will work out."

  He was right. By the mid-1990s, we were thriving.

  We used to visit the prison separately, one of us taking out the old Hiace van we had before we got the jeep, to make the drive to Dublin and come back and report to the one left minding the business. She made a great effort for those visits, I know that now from reading her notebooks. I suppose I always knew it, that it couldn't have been easy to seem so pleased to see us, so open to being entertained and amused, as my mother always was for visiting hours.

  One day we had big news for her, news we had to go together to deliver. I was so nervous that Shando had to stop the van twice on the way to let me be sick.

  Approaching the meshed door of the visitor room, I had balked. "You tell her," I'd said. "I'll wait out here."

  "Don't be silly."

  "It's not fair to her to have to deal with us both at once for this."

  He was having none of it. He made me go in and took my hand in his to tell her the news. She was better than good about it. The smallest flicker, just for a fraction of a moment, then she turned her eyes to hold us both and said, in her mawkish way, "A new life! How wonderful!" As if she was any other prospective grandmother.

  Exactly how Shando had said she would respond (and in case you're wondering, yes, it is irritating to be married to Mr-Right-All-The-Time, especially when he's so indulgent of your irritation). Still holding my hand, he reached across and took one of hers. I blushed blood-red, but they were smiling. We sat there, a small chain of hands with the two of them looking so serene, while my circuits surged into overdrive.

  It was only afterwards that I realized I should have reached over and taken her other hand, to close the circle. I was so young then, not yet able to grasp what Shando instinctively understood: the depths of my mother's need for reparation. Prison was her penance; she opened herself to it, utterly.

  My feelings, as always, were more conflicted. The thought of her locked away from us -- from him -- consoled me one minute, plunged me into guilt the next. That day, the hand-holding day, resurrected all. I began to torture myself again with imaginings about what she and Shando said and did during those visits while I was not there. I would boil myself up to a pitch where I had to say something -- usually something stupid. He would respond with his trademark calm and then I would pick a row about his coldness. I would storm and he would be condescending and, in the middle of it all, I lost the baby.

  It was to be another nine years and two IVF attempts before I was pregnant again.

  That was the hardest thing I ever faced. Life was harder on my mother -- even I can admit that. The final blow was breast cancer, diagnosed two years after she got out of jail. She battled it, as they say, and went on to tour the world, and write more books but six years later, it surfaced again, and this time it had spread. She took treatment for a while, but then gave up and as she weakened, we had no choice, after all she had given us, but to invite her to live with us at the Center. And she had no choice but to accept.

  Her illness added daily guilt to my internal swirl of resentments. I even resented her cancer for bringing her back into my daily life. Like she'd arranged to have tumors gnaw at her just to get to me. Shando worked with me to dismantle these rages, which were really most unfair to her and destructive to me.

  I did see that, even as I pickled myself in them.

  Some weeks before she died. I woke around three a.m. to a noise that made me sit up out of sleep, discarding whatever dream I had been dreaming. This movement changed the rhythm of Shando's breathing beside me and I froze still. And heard it again. A cough? A call? With care, I slid from the warmth of the covers, the chill December air pouring across my naked skin. Naked in bed is a privilege I have always allowed myself since losing weight.

  At the door, I put on my robe, slipped out to listen down the corridor. All quiet. I paused by one of the corridor windows, made a circle in the condensation-covered glass to look out. Nothing to see, except winter darkness, blanketing us in. Often, on deep blacker-than-black winter nights like these, Santa Paola comes to mind, the warm swirling blue-black night-sky there, that smells of laurel and burnt offerings. I sighed, flip-flopped down the corridor in my slippers, stopped outside her door and put my ear to it. Yes: movement.

  I stuck in my head. The room was dark.

  "It's only me," I said. "I heard a noise. Are you okay?"

  "Fine, fine. I just went down for a drink of water."

  "You need your sleep, we'll be up early for the trip to Laragh."

  "Don't worry, I'll be ready. I'm looking forward to it."

  "Do you need anything else?"

  "I'm fine, Star."

  You can see we'd swapped roles by then, which neither of us was much good at, though we managed to keep it civilized.

  As I made my way back to bed, I did the work Shando taught me to do, took my focus off my coiling emotions, onto my breathing. Breathe in... and fill the belly with air. Breathe out... and all the badness with it. And again... in. And... out. There. Everything was fine. No cross words, not at all, and tomorrow was Christmas Day.

  I slipped back into the warmth of our bed.

  "Daddy could sleep for Ireland," Dean used to say, an expression he picked up from the schoolyard, and we all used to laugh, especially Shando.

  I arranged myself around the curve of his spine. His heat transferred itself to me and I kissed the knobbly bone at the base of his neck. If I slid my foot along his shin, he would be likely to waken. Our legs would straighten out and he would turn and we would feel the length and center of each other.

  I'm sorry but I needed to write that. I know it must it must stir some shade in you of the feelings we've learned to live with. It took us both a long time to allow ourselves to be together in that way and our strange history is always there between us, a ditch we continually navigate, into which we sometimes trip.

  We cope by accepting things as they are, by not wishing they were otherwise. In the interest of that, Shand
o says there's no need for me to be writing any of this about us, together, in bed. But I must. I have to claim him. For all that you have read, it's important that you understand that he is my husband.

  Mine.

  And that there's a whole story you haven't been told.

  So let me impress on you, just once, how I loved slipping back under the covers beside him. He was sound asleep and I decided not to disturb him, just to lay my hand quiet across his chest and enjoy a different pleasure, the feel of my naked front all along his naked back.

  So unlike those nights I endured after I found out that my mother – who had had so many men – had also taken him. Nights that used to slowly pulse past – mine – mine – mine -- each second a throb, a spike of jealous rage.

  He was my first love and he will be my last -- I know that. Even if I wanted, I wouldn't have time enough to learn again how to be so free, how to take and give with the mix of abandon and familiarity that only years together can give. Where, I would have liked to ask my mother while she was alive, is the poet who has done justice to that kind of love? The intimacy that takes years to build? The lovemaking that has within it all the other times you've been together?

  Not, of course, something I could ever ask her.

  She and he had only months together as lovers, not even a year, if you put it all together where he and I have had years. Years. We have shared so much, as husband and wife: the efforts of building of the center, of getting and staying pregnant, of having and raising our kids. We have grown into each other. We hold each other up. I am his wife. She was his mother-in-law.

  It doesn't work, all this truth, all these facts that I throw at the situation. He loved me but he loved her too, he'd tell you that himself if you asked. You cannot compare two flowers or two works of art, he once said, when I challenged him to choose, when I said loving me meant not loving her. Which wasn't the answer I wanted. As you can imagine. Yes, I was his wife but he shared something with her that we never had, a shared understanding of all that had happened that encompassed everything, including me and the children, in a way that infuriates me still.