Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  “I needed his advice,” I said.

  The brightness vanished. “And?”

  I told her my decision. “I’m sorry,” I added.

  I had been ready to justify myself, to explain my reasoning, but she gave a small, curt nod. “For what it’s worth”—her gaze was surprisingly neutral—“I’m amazed you waited this long.”

  Quietly she stood up and left the room. I heard the study door close. Later, in a notebook on the desk, I read the list she wrote that night.

  Saddle pad for M.

  Talk to Claudia, kids, Peggy.

  Speak to Francesca re lawyer.

  Police.

  My jaw clenched when I read this for the first time, and still does when I reread it. The human brain often juxtaposes the sublime and the trivial. On the beach at Gloucester, in the midst of lamenting my father, I was momentarily distracted by what I thought was a seal. But that the arrangements of our lives came after a saddle pad for Mercury made me want to break things.

  That night at the kitchen table, though, the night after my day with Robert, I had no idea what she was writing. I sat there, looking at the print of Edinburgh Castle, wondering if I should go after her, tell her that, whatever came next, we would face it together. Instead I went over to Nabokov’s cage. He was sitting on his perch, one claw drawn up, his head tucked to one side. I opened the door and reached in to stroke him.

  “Tell me I’m doing the right thing,” I said.

  “Now is the winter of our discount tents,” he said in my father’s voice. Then, giving me a bright, attentive look, he reached out and pecked my wedding ring.

  In bed I did not read but turned out the light and lay there, my head full of thoughts about Robert and the movable room. Around the feet of the Money peacock the ground was strewn with little gold coins. The blue vase on the sideboard was from the Song dynasty, eleventh or early twelfth century. How had it survived nearly eight hundred years when I could barely survive forty? I was in that state between waking and sleeping, neither fully inhabiting my body nor entirely absent, when I heard footsteps. The mattress dipped. There were hands on my chest, my stomach, lower. One part of me drew back, watching; one part plunged into doing. Then Viv and I were making the beast with two backs: rocking, pushing, almost fighting. We cried out, and for a few seconds we were both free of the net of time. When I opened my eyes again, she was gone. Only a lingering warmth testified to her presence.

  16

  MY CONFESSION, AFTER ALL my agonizing, was surprisingly easy. At lunchtime—Viv had asked me to wait until noon—I drove to the police station; there was a parking space; Detective O’Donnell was on duty. Seated once again in her small office, I offered neither apology nor excuse. There was something I hadn’t told her. I had seen who shot Jack Brennan. My wife had accidentally fired the gun. Detective O’Donnell offered no reproaches. She thanked me and asked for details: Where did Viv get the gun? New Hampshire. Where was it now? She’d thrown it into the woods. Where was she? At Windy Hill. Did she know I was here? She did. The whole momentous conversation took less than ten minutes.

  “What will happen?” I said.

  “We’ll talk to Ms. Turner, and hopefully recover the weapon. It’ll be up to the DA exactly what she’s charged with.”

  “And me?” I said. “Will I be charged with concealing a crime, withholding information?”

  “In the circumstances—Mr. Brennan is recovering, the assailant is your wife—I very much doubt it. And you have children, don’t you?”

  As I rose to leave, I asked if she could wait until tomorrow evening to speak to Jack. “I want to be the one to tell him,” I said.

  She eyed me curiously; I was sure she was going to refuse. Then she said, “It’s quite irregular, but I don’t see why not.”

  All afternoon as I met with my patients, I was thinking, Is Viv being arrested now? Or now? Is she being taken away in handcuffs? I was waiting at the school gates when finally a text came: talked to police tell u later. In the supermarket I allowed Trina and Marcus each to choose three treats.

  “Is something wrong?” Trina asked.

  I was in the kitchen, unpacking the groceries, when there was a knock at the door. “Hello,” called my mother. Viv had phoned to ask her to babysit. She needed me at the stables. The code of the new security gate was the year of her birth.

  Only now, writing this, do I realize that I could have ignored her summons, gone to Paddy’s Lunch and enjoyed a solitary beer. At the time I seemed to have no more choice than one of my father’s trains. It was just growing dark, and the road outside town was still lined with snow. I listened to the CD Hilary had played as we drove to the stables. In all the turmoil, I had never once thought to call my sister. Without our father, we had less and less in common. On the barn door was a note: “In the arena.” The windows shone as they had the night I came to retrieve Marcus’s book. When I stepped inside, Viv and Mercury were at the far end. I sat down in the viewing area.

  As they approached, I saw the dark shine of his eyes, the muscles rippling in his shoulders and haunches, his tail flying like a flag carried into battle. I had never seen Viv ride him before. Now she was offering me her most persuasive argument: Mercury in motion. After circling twice, she approached the row of jumps. I watched, and then I shut my eyes and listened. Gradually I began to separate out the sounds. The thud of hooves, the snort of breath, Viv’s comments when they were close: “Good boy.” “Pay attention.” The way Mercury’s pace slowed as he neared a jump. The brief silence while he was in the air and, when he landed, the rhythm different again until he hit his stride.

  I opened my eyes to see him galloping towards the highest jump. He and Viv leaned forward, hurling themselves into the air. Mercury drew his hindquarters under him. His forelegs reached for the ground. During one of our early dinners Jack had described the Centaurides, beings half horse, half woman, the two halves not fighting, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but in harmony. This was Viv’s ultimate version of the beast with two backs. This was what she had risked our lives for.

  And with that thought, the spell was broken. I was on my feet.

  “Wait,” called Viv.

  In a moment she and Mercury were beside me. I could feel his warmth, hear his breathing. “What happened with the police?” I said.

  Her face, looking down at me, was shadowed by her helmet. “I told them everything, except Chance’s name, and I took them to where I’d thrown the gun. One of the policemen went back and forth with a metal detector. He found the ammunition but not the gun. They’ll try again when the snow’s gone. Then I went to the station and made a statement.”

  “But you’re not under arrest.”

  “Not yet.” Her voice was calm, almost gentle, as she described how sometime this spring the district attorney would decide the charges. Then Viv would appear before a judge, who would decide her sentence: probably six months to a year.

  As she spoke, Mercury swung his head; his bit jingled. Did he sense her grief? Or mine?

  SURELY IT WAS NO coincidence that that night the Simurg finally came. I was walking beside the Firth of Forth on a summer’s day, bright but not warm, when suddenly the air overhead was thick with wingbeats. Before I understood what was happening, a pair of claws encircled me. The Simurg clasped me to its feathery breast. Slowly we rose into the air until I was looking down at the Hawes Inn and the houses of South Queensferry, the gray water of the Firth and then the city of Edinburgh, with its castle and its church spires, the city my parents, Robert, and I had left far behind. When the Simurg set me down at the country railway station, the willow herb was in full purple bloom. My father was standing at one end of the platform, waiting.

  The next morning at breakfast I described the dream to Trina and Marcus.

  “Did the bird talk?” Trina said.

  “It must have been huge,” said Marcus.

  “It was, but I wasn’t frightened. I don’t remember either of us talking. There was no need.”
/>
  I did not tell them about my father, how he had smiled as I approached and how, just as he was about to speak, my eyes had opened.

  17

  THAT AFTERNOON I BOUGHT a bottle of wine and drove to Jack’s apartment. As I climbed the stairs, I was keenly aware of how far I was from forgiving Viv. In the city of my brain, there was no road, no route, from the hot, crowded street of anger to the courtyard of calm. And yet here I was, seeking forgiveness. The door was ajar, but for a few moments I stood, staring at the welcome mat, knowing I might never stand here again. I recalled the story of Iseult’s clever lie, and my father’s response. Would Jack understand how desperate I had been?

  He was seated on the sofa, a braille book open on his lap. He raised his head when I came in, and I knew he saw the shadow of my approach. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “What did you bring?”

  “A merlot.”

  “Do you mind doing the honors? I can truthfully claim to be hors de combat.”

  His kitchen was unusually tidy, a single plate, bowl, and cup on the draining board. Hilary had not given up on him yet. Since I spoke to Detective O’Donnell, I had been consumed with the need to tell Jack, to confess, but I had no speech planned. My only thought was to offer the cliché—I have something to tell you—and stumble forward. In the living room, I set down our glasses.

  “So,” I said, “does facial vision work with one arm incapacitated?”

  “Not really. When I saw my surgeon last week, he said it’ll probably be six months before I can raise my arm above my shoulder. Cheers,” he added incongruously.

  “Cheers.” Stalling again, I asked about his book. Had he had time to work on it?

  His knuckles whitened around his wineglass. “No. Either I feel like crap, or I’m fighting with Hilary. I do want to write something about the blind and trauma. How do we process terrible events without sight? You know how blind people sometimes rock or nod: like Ray Charles, or Stevie Wonder.” He moved his own head cautiously. “People used to think it was a sign of mental feebleness—the blind idiot—but it turns out that motion is a way of compensating for lack of visual stimulation.”

  “I’ve never seen you rocking.”

  “That’s because I went blind as an adult, not because I’m not tempted. The point is, seeing isn’t only about seeing. It’s also a way to deal with pent-up feelings.” He raised his wineglass. “How are things at Windy Hill?”

  I watched as he tipped his glass, swallowed. “Why are you fighting with Hilary?”

  “Because, to quote her, I’m surly and self-pitying. She doesn’t mind taking care of me, but she can’t bear me being such a gloomy son of a bitch. I don’t blame her. I came back from the operation, but I didn’t come back to the person I used to be. I can’t stop being angry.”

  I felt as I had that cloudy afternoon at Portobello Pool, standing alone on the diving board, the dark water far below me, Robert swimming in the deep end, looking up at me, his expression indecipherable, the cold wind turning my arms and legs to gooseflesh, and the sure knowledge that one step forward would change everything. “I have something to tell you,” I said. “It was Viv who shot you.”

  “Viv?” His voice was absolutely flat, his face absolutely still.

  “Yes.” Now I was hurtling down towards the frigid water, not knowing if I would touch bottom, let alone ever reach the surface again. “It was an accident. She didn’t mean to shoot you. Or anyone. She thought we were burglars. That we were trying to hurt Mercury. She pulled the trigger by mistake.”

  “Viv?”

  “I’m sorry, and I’m sorry I—”

  “You’re fucking sorry? I nearly died.”

  He was on his feet, overturning the coffee table, tumbling my glass to the floor, dropping his own. He swore at Viv, swore at me, called down the gods. “But where did she get a gun? And why would she shoot me? And if it was an accident, why wouldn’t you tell me? You saw how I was suffering day after day.”

  Beneath the hail of furious words I sat bolt upright, terrified and relieved. Suddenly he swayed. “I’m going to be sick,” he said.

  I jumped up and led him to the kitchen. I stood beside him as he heaved into the sink. “Do you feel better?” I said at last.

  “My arm is killing me.”

  I got him settled back on the sofa and brought two painkillers from the bathroom cabinet and a glass of water. “Drink slowly,” I cautioned.

  He rested his head against the sofa. I went to the kitchen and cleaned the sink. Then I fetched water and salt. Kneeling at his feet, I attacked the wine stains.

  “Did you get it all?” he said very quietly.

  “Almost.”

  “Tell me again. What the hell was Viv doing with a gun?”

  Still kneeling, I told him the story. “She was obsessed with Mercury,” I said. “She thought he could win all these competitions. That he was her last great chance. Then”—I hesitated and hurried on—“there were these break-ins at Windy Hill, and she got a gun to protect him. She never meant to use it. She should have gone to the police immediately. So should I. But when they came to the emergency room, I didn’t say anything. And then . . .” I faltered on the dark shores. “Then it was easier to keep saying nothing.”

  “To lie.”

  “To lie. It was wrong, and it was stupid. We wanted to protect the children. But it didn’t work. Marcus started acting up at school. Trina started having nightmares. As for me . . .”

  How to explain that I had wanted to save everyone? I scrubbed at a wine stain near the table. “It was partly my fault,” I went on, “that Viv got a gun. After my father died, I was very remote. She said it was like I was wearing an astronaut’s suit. Even after all she’s done, I hate to think of her in prison.”

  Jack took a deep breath, and another as I described the role I had played, inadvertently, in her decisions. Now I understand why Viv told me about sleeping with her colleague. I wanted him to know every last bad, terrible thing I had done.

  Finally he interrupted. “For Christ’s sake, Donald, I’m not your father confessor. Deal with your own shit.”

  We were both silent. In the kitchen the tap was dripping at long intervals: a solitary ping, ping, ping. In a low voice, he began to recite:

  Animula vagula blandula,

  Hospes comesque corporis . . .

  Later I looked up Emperor Hadrian’s famous poem and found forty-three translations. Here is one from 1625:

  Minion soul, poor wanton thing

  The body’s guest, my dearest darling.

  To what places art thou going?

  Naked miserable trembling,

  Reaving me of all the joy

  Which by thee I did enjoy.

  Even at the time, the Latin only vaguely familiar, I understood that Jack was trying to comfort himself. As he lapsed back into silence, I remembered his remarks at the swimming pool about anger and pain, how the former was only an attempt to hide from the latter. I knelt there on his wine-stained carpet, doing my best not to hide.

  Seated in a corner of the sofa, his dark glasses aiming straight ahead, he began to speak. Some parts of his story I knew already: the drunk father falling in and out of jobs, the moves from one cheap apartment to the next, the teachers who encouraged him.

  “I didn’t care,” he said, “if people knew I did drugs, or shoplifted, but I didn’t want anyone to know about my going to the library. One night—I must have been eight or nine—Dad came and sat on the edge of my bed and made shadow animals: a wolf, a squirrel, a rabbit. All the time he was doing it, I could hear my mother calling, ‘Colm, Colm Christopher, get your lazy ass out here.’ My father just laughed. He’d been fired again. We had no electricity for a month, but it was spring. We had a gas stove. We joked about our cold showers.

  “My bad sister escaped into religion. My good sister found her own way to the library. The police picked me up half a dozen times but always let me go with a warning. I went to the community college for a year and then
to U Mass. My only religion was avoiding my family. I remember standing in my dorm room, holding my letter from Boston University, thinking, Now I’m free. I’m nobody’s son, nobody’s brother. I moved to Boston, started on my PhD. Then one night I was in a bar with my friend Hector. We were arguing about the Roman emperors, and I brought my beer bottle down on his head.

  “When he came to a few minutes later, he had no idea what had happened. I told him, and he was amazed. Why would you hit me? he said. It didn’t seem to occur to him to call the police. I walked him home, and then I walked along Commonwealth Ave all the way to Boston Common. I swore on the monument to the first black regiment in the Civil War that nothing like this was going to happen again. I wasn’t going to be my father’s son.”

  I knelt there, saying nothing. As long as Jack kept talking, there was hope.

  “But there was one small problem,” he continued. “I couldn’t fucking see. I denied it long and hard. I went to movies, rode a bike, swam and hiked, made a fool of myself in nightclubs. My denial worked until it didn’t. One day when Marie-Claire was out, her ex-boyfriend rang the bell. He’d come to pick up his stuff. He went around the living room and the bedroom, made half a dozen trips to his car. When Marie-Claire came home, I told her about her ex’s visit. She went nuts. What else had he stolen? I said I didn’t know. But you were here, she said. You saw what happened. Not really, I said.

  “At first she didn’t believe me. Then she stood across the room. What am I holding up? What am I holding up now? When she got it—I was a fake sighted person—she threw me out. I came back and begged her, twice. The second time was when I tore the sink out of the wall.

  “I finished my PhD, got my job, and one day I wandered into an optician’s and let someone, you, examine my eyes. You said two bad Latin words—retinitis pigmentosa—and offered the small consolation that there was nothing I, or anyone, could have done; it was hereditary. When I reached my mom in one of her lucid moments, she said, Oh, yes, Colm was blind as a bat. Dad wasn’t just a feckless Irishman; he was a feckless, blind Irishman. Glasses were expensive, and he was always a prescription or two behind. My entire adult life I’d been determined to be the opposite of him, and here I was.”