Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  “Any sign?” she said.

  “Not yet. His breathing seems a little stronger.”

  She laid her hand on his chest. “I know it’s stupid, but I feel that if I leave him for more than a few minutes, something terrible will happen.”

  I did not say—I did not need to say—that the terrible thing had already happened.

  AT SUPPER, WHEN VIV asked her standard question, Marcus said he had learned there were numbers that just went on and on. “Whenever you picture the last number, you add one more.”

  Carefully rearranging the lettuce in her tacos, Viv said she’d learned that Claudia had decided to install a security camera at the stables, and a gate at the bottom of the road.

  “So you’ll be in a movie,” said Trina. “I learned that mice smell like sweet cardboard.”

  “Why would you want to smell mice?” said Marcus. “What about you, Dad?”

  I learned that my best friend might not wake up; that grief and guilt are infinite numbers. Speechless, I stared at my plate.

  Trina leaned over to pat my arm. “Dad, it’s okay if you didn’t learn anything.”

  She gave me an encouraging smile. Viv offered seconds. In the back-and-forth of plates and food, I managed a question to Marcus about his swimming; a few minutes later I told a feeble story about Nabokov and a patient. After supper Trina insisted on following me to the study. While I read about bullet wounds and comas, the scratching of her pencil—she was working on a portrait of my mother—kept me company. At last Viv took her off to bed.

  Once again we sat at the kitchen table, each with our Scotch. “My turn,” I said.

  I had shielded Hilary from my fears, but I wanted to inflict every last one of them on Viv. I began with what I had just learned about comas. As I spoke, I glanced around the room, taking in the red vase my mother had given us, Trina’s paintings on the fridge, the cacti on the windowsill, the print of Edinburgh Castle that Viv and I had bought on our visit there—all the evidence of our shared life, the life that she had sundered.

  “So is there anything to be done?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Would it help if I went to the hospital?”

  “This isn’t a fairy tale. You can’t just knock three times and say you’re sorry.” I had no interest in her regrets, was desperate to confide my own. “Remember the night Marcus left his book at the stables?”

  She nodded; I hurried on. When I described stepping into the arena, Charlie riding Mercury, Viv let out a wail of pure sorrow.

  “You mean,” she said, “all the break-ins were Charlie?”

  “She and her boyfriend. She’s like you. She just wanted to ride Mercury.”

  “So it was Charlie who set off the alarm at Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes. Then one night after the second break-in, you asked her to lock up. She made a copy of the key.”

  “Oh, my god.”

  She began to sob with utter abandon. I had been braced for fury, not this outpouring of grief as she understood that Mercury had never been in danger. Everything she had done in the name of saving him had been unnecessary.

  Watching her, her face twisted, red, wet with tears, I in turn understood what she had still to grasp: if I had told the truth when I came home that night from Windy Hill, or indeed at any moment during the next few weeks, Jack would not now be lying in a hospital bed. I was not just an accessory to his shooting but an accomplice.

  7

  IN THE ORRERY OF the past, my wife, my children, my parents, and I had orbited each other in our own devoted system. Nearby, in their own systems, were Jack, Claudia, other chosen friends. Mercury, I had thought, despite his name, was only a random meteor veering into our little cosmos. Charlie was another. Until the night I found her riding Mercury, I knew her only through casual encounters at Windy Hill and Viv’s occasional comments. She lived in town, she attended the local high school, she had two younger brothers both keen on baseball, her parents worked in software. They had bought Charlie a horse for her twelfth birthday and been dismayed when she devoted every waking hour to the animal. When it sprained a tendon, they sold it, and she started working at Windy Hill. I thought of her as a child, but at her age Mary, Queen of Scots, had been married for a year.

  Four days before the fatal Saturday, Charlie had come by my office. I was typing up notes on my last patient when Merrie appeared. “Charlotte Adams is here. She says she knows you and was hoping to have a word.”

  “Charlotte Adams?” For a moment the name meant nothing. Then I said she was one of Viv’s stable girls and, when Merrie still wore her inquiring expression, added that I’d offered to talk to her about protective glasses.

  “Will you be okay on your own?” she said. “I have to pick up the dog.”

  She was thinking, I knew, of her friend the teacher. Reluctantly I said I would be fine. After she left, I lingered at my desk, trying to imagine what Charlie might want. Whatever it was, I must be on my guard. By agreeing to keep her secret, I had put myself at her mercy as much as, if not more than, she was at mine. Before going out to the waiting room, I pulled on my seldom-worn white coat. Then I recalled how Marcus, at supper one evening, had recorded our conversation on my phone. After three attempts I found the function and turned it on. Whatever passed between us, I would have a record.

  In the waiting room Charlie, like many of my patients, was standing beside Nabokov’s cage. Only as I came closer did I see that she had opened the door and was urging him to step onto her arm.

  “What are you doing?” I stepped over and closed the door, snibbing it tight. Nabokov eyed me askance but for once held his tongue.

  “Sorry, Dr. Stevenson. We used to have a parrot. I didn’t mean to take liberties.” Her manner was conciliatory yet subtly mocking.

  In my office I left the door open wide. The chair for patients was across the room, and Charlie sat down, feet together, hands clasped. “Help me,” she said. She was wearing a bright red sweater, and I noticed, as I had that night in the arena, how her lips glistened.

  “I think I already have.”

  “And I’m super grateful, but I never get to see Mercury anymore. Viv won’t let anyone else near him. It makes me crazy. I’m working all the time, and then I have to ride these old duffers. Viv doesn’t understand him. She’s pushing him too hard.”

  I offered the mildest protest: Viv was a very experienced rider.

  Charlie smiled enticingly. “My bad for going behind her back. What I want to know is, how can I persuade her to let me ride him in events?”

  As she described the competitions she wanted to enter, I recalled how Bonnie’s childhood story about the Pekingese had made me lie to Viv. But there was nothing childish about Charlie’s ambitions. “I’d be glad,” I said slowly, “to see Viv working less hard.”

  “And she’s too old for him.”

  She saw at once that she’d gone too far. She gazed at her clasped hands, letting the silence expand. “He’s Hilary’s horse,” I said at last. “Besides, aren’t you about to go to college?”

  “That’s right.” For an instant her face flared. “He is Hilary’s horse.” Then she was back on her feet, saying politely that I’d been awesome.

  I had watched her leave with a sense of relief, but as I drove home, I kept thinking I had said something wrong. But no, I told myself, it was only the aftermath of my actual wrongdoing of a few weeks earlier. Even in the emergency room, when Hilary mentioned Charlie visiting her office, I had not put two and two together. Only now, in the midst of Viv’s grief and my own, did I begin to understand. Charlie was no random meteor; she was a guided missile, as driven as Viv, unhampered by children or moral codes.

  BY TUESDAY AFTERNOON, WITH no sign of Jack waking up, I had become convinced that my lie was one more barrier between him and recovery. So much for rational thinking. Despite Marcus, despite Trina, I would go to the police station on my way home. I had just finished checking a patient for glaucoma when my phone rang.

  “He’s
awake,” said Hilary. “It’s a miracle.” And in the background Jack’s voice, faint and irascible: “No, it’s not.”

  I said something incoherent, and promised to visit as soon as my appointments were over. Merrie, when I told her, jumped to her feet and hugged me. Nabokov ran up the side of his cage.

  My next appointment had not yet arrived, and I stepped into the street. The day was brutally cold, the brick buildings rimed with frost. If during those forty-eight hours I had been asked to push a bell every time the thought that Jack might be going into a coma entered my mind, it would have rung almost without cease. Years ago a patient of mine, a woman in her fifties, described what it was like when she had a stroke. “In my head,” she said, “I was talking all the time—What’s this pill? I’m thirsty. Hold my hand—but no one heard me. I thought I’d die of frustration.” The prospect of Jack similarly imprisoned was more than I could bear. I stood on the corner of the street, arms outstretched, giving thanks to the unnamed god of atheists.

  And so an hour later I stepped into not the police station but Jack’s hospital room. The news of his accident—“Blind Classics Prof Shot at Stables”—had spread like wildfire, and the windowsill was lined with flowers. The fragrance reminded me of Robert’s parents’ shop, which all year round had been pungent with freesias and lilies. Hilary greeted me solemnly, her relief too profound for ordinary exuberance.

  “Jack,” I said. “How are you feeling?” I put my hand on his good arm.

  He gave a lopsided smile. “My shoulder hurts. My head aches. But I can talk, I can pee, and when no one’s testing me for something, I can listen to music.”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said, “how sorry I am.”

  “Why are you sorry? You didn’t shoot me. Hilary said you drove like the devil to get me here, and kept an eye on everyone in ER, wielding your doctor’s sword.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself.” Hilary smiled warmly. “We all three decided to go to the stables. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me for wanting to see Mercury in the middle of the night. We couldn’t know some madman was prowling around.”

  There was so much goodwill in the room. Now, I thought, was the moment to tell the truth, to explain how Viv had mistaken us for horse thieves, had accidentally squeezed the trigger. But I had barely begun to speak, a lame, throat-clearing phrase about that night at Windy Hill, when Jack embarked on one of his stories: something about a friend stealing his uncle’s pistol. He trailed off after a few sentences, and Hilary said he needed to rest. I left, promising to return tomorrow.

  In the hospital parking lot I discovered that I did not want to go home. The prospect of celebrating Jack’s recovery with Viv was like running full-tilt into a wall. For a few seconds, standing beside the car, I even thought of calling Bonnie. On the far side of the lot an ambulance swung silently through the entrance gates. I got out my phone and dialed Steve’s number. He agreed to meet at the Y in half an hour. Once again I texted Viv. Until recently I had almost always phoned; now I welcomed the curtness of the little box. Jack awake. Late home.

  “Thank God,” said Steve when I told him about Jack recovering consciousness. “But I still don’t understand who shot him. And why were you at Windy Hill in the middle of the night?”

  “Hilary wanted to visit her horse.” I slammed my serve into a corner. “As for the rest, I don’t have a clue.”

  “But you were there. You must have seen something.”

  I aced my next serve too as I said that the stables were poorly lit; we were all focused on Mercury. “One minute Jack was inviting him to their wedding. The next he was on the ground.”

  Writing this now, I find it hard to believe that no one noticed something lacking from my account of the shooting. I should have been ten times more furious, ten times more bewildered. I can only suppose that my reputation as a dour Scotsman protected me. I was a descendant of those men who in letters home described the first day of the Somme as “trying.” “Mustn’t grumble,” they wrote as the trenches filled with blood.

  Steve, the good scientist, explained that people often fail to remember trauma. For reasons not yet fully understood, adrenaline prevented memories from imprinting in the normal way. “And seeing someone shot,” he said, “is pretty close to the top of traumatic experiences. So what are Viv and Claudia going to do? Turn Windy Hill into an armed stockade?”

  I bent to pick up a tennis ball and said they were taking new security measures. Once again he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. My wife was working at a place where someone had been shot, and I was cool as a cucumber. But such thoughts came later. At the time I was overjoyed: Jack had returned to the daylight world.

  I beat Steve that evening by a memorable 7–3. At home supper was over. I slid easily into the household: taking a shower, eating leftovers, talking to Trina and Marcus. Viv caught me alone at the kitchen sink to ask if I had been to the police. When I said no, she thanked me and went to help Marcus with his homework. For the remaining few hours of the day I allowed myself to be happy.

  8

  THE NEXT MORNING, EVEN before I opened my eyes, I knew the wind was blowing from a different quarter. Viv made breakfast and took the children to school, two things she had not done in several months. When she came home, I was sitting drinking coffee among the breakfast dishes. Her response to disaster was to clean, mine to let everything slide.

  She marched in, cheeks glowing from the cold, and, not even waiting to unzip her jacket, said, “I can’t stand this, Don. Wondering every day if you’re going to the police. The uncertainty is tearing me apart, which I know I deserve, but Marcus’s teacher phoned yesterday. He’s acting up in class. And Trina threw a book at Ivy.”

  “I can’t stand it either,” I said. “I still can’t believe you bought a gun.”

  “To protect Mercury from Charlie.”

  Her bitterness scorched the table. I lined up the boxes of cereal, each with its gaudy promises, and said that was another thing I couldn’t believe. “I lied to you, and that lie almost killed my friend. What happened when you spoke to Claudia?”

  “I told her what I believed at the time: I’d left the stables unlocked. You, Hilary, and Jack had a boozy dinner and decided to visit Mercury. She filled in the rest. We’d had these break-ins. By some awful coincidence the burglar also showed up that night. First I’m convinced someone is after Mercury, and it’s Charlie. Now Claudia’s convinced some killer is after all of us, and it’s me.”

  She was watching me over cereal boxes with an expression of equal parts sorrow and anger. “Yesterday,” she continued, “I was driving home when I suddenly thought, I’ve got a tank of gas, I’ve got my credit cards, I should just keep going. Head west on 90, or north on 93. But how would I live without the kids? And where would I go? Mom’s sofa bed in Ann Arbor? Dad’s basement in San Diego? Some dingy motel with plastic glasses and slippery sheets? I’m too old to be a stable rat.”

  America is the country of reinvention, of moving on, but this possibility—that she might simply flee—had never occurred to me. I was trying, and failing, to imagine a life in which I knew nothing about Viv, had no contact with her, when Nabokov squawked. Why was he sitting here, rather than holding court in the waiting room? I took him a handful of peanuts, and he clucked with pleasure.

  Perhaps still thinking of stable rats, Viv said Charlie had been away visiting colleges. She would fire her as soon as she returned.

  “Is that really necessary?” Since her visit to my office, a visit I had not mentioned and did not plan to, I had an inchoate dread of crossing Charlie.

  “Don, she lied, she stole, she trespassed, she betrayed me.” With each crime, Viv toppled a cereal box until they were all four horizontal.

  “And how will you explain firing her to Claudia?”

  She hesitated, looking now not at me but at her hand where it moved back and forth over the table, crooked finger bobbing. “I was thinking, if it’s okay with you, I’d tell her the truth: how you f
ound Charlie riding, how she begged you not to tell anyone.”

  Any step towards the truth seemed like a good thing, and I said so. “I behaved badly,” I said, “but I couldn’t have guessed the cost would be so high.”

  “Nor could I.” We both watched her hand following the grain of the wood. Steve told me once that trees carry the memory of human disasters. The Highland Clearances, Andersonville, the flu epidemic, the Wall Street crash, each can be read in the grain of an oak. When someone cuts down the maple in our garden, will they find evidence of these last few months: our silences, our fights, our lies?

  “So you’re okay,” she said, “with being the one who’s blamed?”

  I nodded—even a little blame would be a huge relief—and asked again about Charlie. “What will you say to her?”

  “Why would you care?”

  Steve might not notice anything missing in my response but Viv was watching me closely. Fortunately Nabokov, peanuts gone, intervened. “Hey ho, hey ho,” he called. I had an appointment in twenty minutes. Only when I was driving to the office, with him murmuring beside me, did I realize that, once again, I had failed to tell her I was going to the police. Another day would pass without a clear decision.

  AT LUNCHTIME JACK WAS sitting up, a tray of beige hospital food on the table before him, his dark glasses back in place. Hilary’s chair was empty; she had gone to get coffee.

  “Tell me this looks better than it smells,” he said.

  “I can’t. How are you?” When it seemed that Jack might not wake up, his recovering consciousness was everything. Now other concerns—the state of his shoulder, the state of his psyche—flooded back.

  “I’m not sure. The doctor who came this morning has done a course on how not to talk to patients. He mumbles very fast, and when you ask a question he mumbles even faster.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. How do you feel?”