Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  I phoned the hospital. A nurse reported that Mr. Brennan was still asleep.

  Marcus texted: great time bowling. pancakes for b’fast. I texted back: lucky you.

  Then I sat looking at the screen of my phone as if it would tell me what to do next. The words I had kept in a cage the night before banged around. I longed to call the police, let them fly. I pictured the man with the scratch on his cheek writing them down. I pictured Viv in a prison jumpsuit, handcuffed, being led by two policemen to a room with a table, a chair, a small barred window.

  At last I forced myself to leave the sofa. I washed, brushed my teeth, put away the blanket, plumped the cushions. The windows of my car were still clear, and not until I was behind the wheel did I notice the piece of paper wedged beneath the windscreen wiper: “D, please come home. V.” At some point in the night, after cleaning the house, she had driven to the hospital, to Hilary’s, and finally to my office. She had not dared to knock.

  As I approached St. Catherine’s, the bells began to toll. A few months before, at my patient’s funeral, I had stood with the rest of the congregation to say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned in thought, word, and deed.” If only, I thought now, I could go to confession. But how could I ask for absolution before I knew the size of my crime? I kept driving and stopped instead at the café where Viv and Hilary had met to look at the photographs of Mercury. As I stood in line, listening to the hiss of the steamer, the people around me talking, I felt briefly taken up into ordinary life. All would be well, as my father used to say. All manner of things would be well.

  “Dr. Stevenson.” The woman ahead of me, her gray eyes familiar, turned to greet me. “Happy Sunday,” she said. “We’re so thrilled your office is sponsoring science week.”

  Before I could reply, she had turned back to the counter and was reeling off a complicated combination of caramel and soy milk. What the blazes am I thinking? I thought as I asked for my black coffee. Ordinary life is over. Nothing will ever be well.

  I HAD MADE—I COULD make—no preparation for what to say to Viv. I knew I would open the door of our house; then something unimaginable would occur. And that was what happened. I parked my car beside her car. My key, which sometimes stuck, turned smoothly; the door, which often creaked, swung open. Viv was standing by the kitchen table, empty-handed, hair still damp. She wore a blue sweater I liked (used to like) and clean jeans tucked into boots. She took a step towards me.

  “Don,” she said. “Donald.”

  Then she too came to a standstill. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, before I took the children to my mother’s, we had made French toast and discussed who to invite to Trina’s birthday party. Whatever Viv had been through since we parted had passed like an iron over her features. Only her red-rimmed eyes betrayed her wretchedness. As for my own expression, I could feel all the tiny muscles in my face pulling in different directions. She tried again. “How’s Jack? He was still asleep when I phoned.”

  “When I phoned too.”

  “Did you tell Hilary? The police?”

  I stared at the floor, this time the gleaming blond wood of our kitchen rather than the linoleum of the hospital.

  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” said Nabokov.

  My silence betrayed me. Then I did something that surprised us both. I raised my phone and took a photograph. I needed evidence of the bewildering fact that Viv, as she herself said, looked just the same; she had not sprouted laurel branches, or turned into a swan.

  “Did you go to the police?” I said, already knowing she hadn’t.

  “Not yet,” she whispered. “They phoned, but I turned out the lights. And I texted Claudia I had a migraine. I have to see Marcus and Trina first.”

  I asked what she had done with the gun, and she told me.

  What sort of conversation does a man have on the occasion of his wife accidentally shooting his dear friend with a gun she has purchased secretly, and owns illegally? I am afraid I cannot tell you. I know I made tea; I found the mugs later that day as I set the table for supper. I know we sat at the table and talked. I know Viv did not cry; I think I did. The phone rang several times; each time one of us checked to make sure it was not my mother or Hilary. Viv told me the bare facts of her evening. After walking Samson round the arena until his colic subsided, she had driven home, stopping at China Garden. She was sitting on the sofa, watching TV, reaching for a dumpling, when she realized she couldn’t remember setting the alarm.

  “I remembered putting Samson back in his stall,” she said. “Closing the tack room, and then . . . Finally it seemed easier to drive back and check.”

  She had been almost glad to find the barn door open. It meant she hadn’t been worrying in some OCD way. She decided to take a last look around. If she’d forgotten one thing, perhaps she’d forgotten another. The gun was already in her jacket pocket, the ammunition in the other pocket. She had left the lights on too. As she reached for the switch, she heard voices. At once she knew they came from Mercury’s stall. Fate had brought her here, to save him. She slid the magazine into the gun and made her way quietly to the far end of the stalls. She could see Mercury’s head, a man beside him. Two other figures.

  She took the safety off. That was her worst, her very worst mistake. She meant to shout a warning. Get away from the horse. To let the intruders see the gun—but there were three of them. She was afraid. The man raised his hand. Was he injecting Mercury? Poisoning him? She didn’t notice her finger tighten around the trigger. The sound was huge. Mercury was screaming, like a human. And the people were screaming like humans too.

  “But you had a gun,” I said. “Where on earth did you get a gun?”

  She told me.

  Then she asked what we were doing at the stables, and I understood she still believed she had left the door unlocked. I did not enlighten her, not then.

  The conversation was by no means as calm and orderly as this record. We both shouted. Viv screamed. I whispered. For several minutes one or the other of us would refuse to speak. Viv flung a book on the floor; I banged the table. I kept waiting for her to convince me that she would give anything not to have bought a gun. And she did say, over and over, how sorry she was, how terrible she felt. But heavy as lead, sharp as glass, the thought persisted that, given what she saw—three strangers trying to hurt her beloved horse—she still believed, in her heart of hearts, that what she had done made sense. Whereas to me it made no sense at all.

  “Do you think the police will let me out on bail?” she said.

  AT TWO O’CLOCK, WITH nothing settled, I went upstairs to shower before heading back to the hospital. Viv went to buy groceries. For now we would tell the children Jack had slipped on the snow. So we pulled ourselves together as parents do.

  In his room Jack was still unconscious, Hilary beside him. “It’s over twelve hours since the operation,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem a long time for him to be asleep?”

  Jack’s breathing was steady, his color good, but it did seem a long time. Invoking my doctor’s status, I went to make inquiries. After clicking through several screens, the nurse at the desk reported that Mr. Brennan had been awake in the recovery room; he had known who he was, and where.

  “Oh, I feel so much better,” Hilary said. “Sleep as long as you like, Mr. Brennan.” She added that the police had been by again. “They asked if I thought the attack might be connected with the break-ins at the stable. Why didn’t Viv tell me they’d had a break-in?”

  “Everyone thought it was just kids,” I said. “She didn’t want to worry you.”

  “But we’re friends,” Hilary said. I remembered making the same plea to Jack.

  She went to the cafeteria, and I took her place. Jack’s face was still, his breathing shallow. Only the pneumatic compression stockings, rippling up and down his legs beneath the blankets, seemed to promise a return to health.

  “So,” I began, “you and a fat man are standing on a railway bridge, and you see that a
train is on the wrong track. If it keeps going, it will collide with another train. Many people will die. You can stop the train by pushing the fat man off the bridge. Should you?”

  That spring Jack had posed this philosophical question to the four of us. Marcus had immediately said, “Yes, push him.”

  “But what if you like him?” said Jack. “Or a family of ten depends on him? Or he’s about to discover a cure for cancer?”

  “Can’t you push something else?” said Trina. “A rock? Or a branch?”

  “And what if both trains are filled with horrible people? War criminals and psychopaths?”

  “Let them crash,” said Marcus.

  “But then suppose the trains are full of good people—teachers and ophthalmologists and horse trainers and well-behaved children—and the fat man is good too.”

  “It’s too difficult,” Trina exclaimed. “I want to save everyone.”

  Jack had reached over to pat her arm. “We can do that,” he said. “We’ll make the engineer switch the points so that the first train goes onto another track and everyone is fine and the fat man diets and becomes a thin man no one would ever ask to stop a train.”

  “And the horse trainer teaches him to ride,” said Viv.

  But Trina was not so easily distracted. “Even if one person can save lots of people,” she said, “it seems awful for that person. Shouldn’t they get to decide if they want to be a savior?”

  “There are some very smart people who think so,” Jack had said.

  Sitting at his bedside, I thought, I am my daughter’s father. I don’t know who to save, or how to count the costs. And neither Jack, nor my father, is here to help me.

  AT HOME MARCUS WAS talking exuberantly about the Museum of Science. They’d seen a skeleton and two kinds of metal; one felt hot and one felt cold, but they were exactly the same temperature. Trina asked how Jack was, and I said still asleep. As soon as we were alone, Viv said, “Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”

  I repeated what I had said to Hilary: gunshot wounds inflict deep trauma. What mostly kills people is the shock, not the actual wound. Sleep allows the body to recover. “What did you say to Claudia?” I asked.

  I saw at once that she had said nothing. “The police will have told her what happened,” I said. “That I was there. You can’t hide.”

  Grim-faced, she went to the study. She was gone for so long that I had to summon her to dinner. Somehow we got through the meal. Afterwards, at Trina’s request, we watched a movie about elephant migration. Suddenly—neither Viv nor I had been paying attention—Trina was crying. The screen showed a railway line in northern India where several elephants had died. A calf had got stuck on the tracks, and the adult elephants had surrounded it, trying to save it from the oncoming train.

  “They love their children like we do,” said Viv. “Time for bed.”

  Waiting at the kitchen table, I remembered the dream Hilary had recounted at Il Giardino about her and Michael walking along the railway line. Please, Jack, I thought. Wake up. Viv returned, poured herself a glass of Scotch, and sat down opposite me.

  “The short version,” she said, “is that Claudia is totally devastated that Jack’s been shot and totally freaked out that he was shot at Windy Hill. She kept saying the baby could have been shot, or I could have, or one of our students. It was even worse than telling Peggy.”

  I swore, using a word I’d never used before. Why the hell had she told my mother?

  “The same reason you made me phone Claudia. Anything else would be too weird.”

  Of course she was right. This was no longer, if it ever had been, a domestic quarrel; the battle had overflowed the stables, our house. But she had told the two people closest to us a lie. The lie was getting stronger.

  “Tell me again,” I said, “why you got a gun. You were always so anti gun. We even went on that protest at the State House.”

  Stumbling, stopping frequently to qualify or explain, she described the chain of events—her fear, Rick and his gun, Tiffany’s father, Michael, the second break-in, New Hampshire—that had led her to buy a gun. “I needed to protect Mercury,” she kept saying.

  I heard the name differently now, not just a messenger god or a shining liquid or the smallest planet but a toxic substance that could cause blindness and death. When I phoned the hospital, the nurse said, “No change.”

  5

  STRANGE AS IT HAD been to sleep on the waiting-room sofa, it was even stranger to occupy our familiar bed, with Viv lying a few inches away. I was conscious of every scrape of fabric, every breath. If I could, I would have slept at the opposite end of the house, the opposite end of the street. Hour after hour I lay awake, clicking away on my nocturnal abacus. I know I slept at last only because I had the sensation of waking. The bed was empty: Where was Viv? Then I understood: she had already left for Windy Hill. What else could she do? And what else could I do but take the children to school and Nabokov to my office? As soon as he was safely in his cage, I broke the news to Merrie. When Jack was my patient, the two of them had enjoyed trading Catholic jokes.

  “Oh, my god,” she cried. “What kind of person shoots a blind man?”

  For several minutes I endured her shock, fury, incredulity, dismay, horror: a carousel of emotions. Finally I retreated to my office and, once again, telephoned the hospital. Mr. Brennan’s vital signs were good, the nurse said. The wound was healing well.

  “So he’s eating and drinking?”

  “Not yet. He hasn’t woken up.”

  “You mean,” I said, “he’s still unconscious?”

  “Right,” she said. “Asleep, unconscious.”

  Better? Or worse? I asked patient after patient that morning. My own answer was worse, always worse. Everything was shrouded in darkness, mired in confusion. When Hilary phoned, I tried to reassure her—Jack’s body was healing, resting, etcetera—but I could not reassure myself. Then, at lunchtime, my mother phoned.

  “Viv was beside herself,” she said. “She seems to feel responsible because it happened at Windy Hill.”

  I reached for my model eye. Silently, while she continued to exclaim, I named the sclera, conjunctiva, cornea, iris, vitreous humor, retina, choroid, optic nerve. My world was in ruins, but this little machine went on working in exactly the same way. “Our main concern is Jack,” I said at last. “He still hasn’t woken up.”

  “Oh,” said my mother, suddenly understanding.

  I promised to let her know as soon as there was news.

  Alone with my eyeball, I recalled how Viv, when she first met my parents, had asked if my father minded that my mother was so much more successful. I had been startled—I had never thought of my parents in this way—and told her what I believed at the time: my father had too many interests to devote himself to work. But soon after he moved into the nursing home he had told me another version. “Made your mother crazy,” he said. I leaned close to his chair, struggling to understand. His slurred speech was the subject of his last haiku.

  My words, once fitted

  close and straight as stones,

  now scattered on dry ground.

  That afternoon at the home I did not catch every detail of his story, but enough to understand the implications. My father had noticed that certain maintenance jobs at the railway were routinely awarded to the highest bidder. One day, at a local restaurant, he had run into the department head, who awarded the contracts, dining with his brother-in-law.

  “My bad luck,” my father mumbled, “that I recognized his name.”

  Later my mother had filled in the gaps. He had pursued the matter over hill and dale, first talking to his supervisor and, when nothing changed, moving relentlessly up the hierarchy, oblivious to threats, overt or subtle. Finally he promised to notify local newspapers and radio stations. “After that,” she said, “he was never going to get promoted.”

  “What would you have done,” I said, “if your company was involved in something shady?”

  “Asked
Edward. Remember when I stepped down from that yogurt campaign? It was a big account, but he’d discovered the company had dubious connections. He’s never bought the argument that if you don’t do it, someone else will. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.”

  I cannot begin to count how often, in those days and nights, I longed for my father’s counsel. Nor how many mirrors I avoided.

  6

  THE AUTUMN I WAS twelve, still struggling to make friends in America, my mother had urged me to join the Boy Scouts. You’ll learn to light fires, she had said, recognize birds. Both were appealing, but almost immediately I discovered I could not bear the scoutmaster’s constant refrain to be prepared. I quit after three meetings. Certainly nothing could have prepared me for Jack not waking up, for the awful prospect that he might become one of those people kept alive by machines, his excellent brain generating a barely flickering line. At the hospital that evening I found a note on the bedside table: “Gone to café.” I bent over Jack. His beard had come in thick and dark, making him look even paler. The bones in his forehead were sharply visible. Once again I reached for his good hand.

  “Jack,” I said, “come back to the daylight world. We need you here.”

  Mindful of his complaint that people often shouted at him, I kept my voice low. I reminded him of how he loved Latin and Greek and swimming, of how his friends and students loved and needed him, of how the world was waiting for his book. “You can write a chapter about what it’s like for a blind person to be shot,” I said. It was a Jack-like joke.

  I was telling him about the research into an artificial retina—a sheet of electrodes combined with a camera that offered the possibility of vision—when Hilary returned.