Mercury

by Margot Livesey

  I remembered Hilary in the emergency room, telling me that they wanted to have a child. But it was none of my business and never would be.

  “I liked your reserve,” Jack went on, “and I admired your relationship with your father. You were so devoted. After he died, I worried you’d go off the rails, but I never imagined anything like this. I can understand you lying to the police at the hospital, wanting to talk to Viv first. But that you kept on lying, even when you saw my despair, saw that I felt singled out by the universe, seems like cruel and unusual punishment.”

  He was quoting, I realized, another part of the faded Bill of Rights I had not been able to read. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I said. “It just took me a while to figure out the right thing to do.”

  He sighed, a long, slow sigh. The fingers of his good hand clenched and unclenched. “That’s my whole point,” he said. “You weren’t thinking about me.”

  I wanted to protest; for days, he had occupied most of my waking thoughts. But before I could speak, he said, “Did you know that Hilary’s decided to sell Mercury?”

  Dumbstruck, I stared at the photograph of Moonshine and Michael. The irony that now, when it was much too late, Mercury could have belonged to Viv was piercing. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I thought you’d be thrilled to see the last of him.”

  “I’m just wondering,” I said slowly, “what this will mean to Viv.”

  “Why should it mean anything?” His face was stony. “A guy named Adams came by Hilary’s office. He offered fifteen. She got him up to eighteen and the promise, in writing, that she can visit Mercury whenever she wants. If he decides to sell, he’ll come to her first.”

  “Adams?” This time I recognized Charlie’s last name immediately. Once again, with a single sentence—“He’s Hilary’s horse”—I had changed everything.

  “Stop kneeling there like some goddamn martyr,” Jack said, “and pour me another glass of wine.”

  I fetched a tumbler and poured him the remains of the bottle. “Hilary loves you,” I said. “Find a good psychiatrist. The black moods aren’t you. They’re caused by the chemistry—”

  He held up his hand. “Don’t,” he said, his voice almost kind. “You and Viv, between you, you’ve caused me so much physical pain, so much mental distress. In a way I can understand what Viv did. It was a mistake of passion. But you lied to me day after day. Even when you were helping me, you were lying. All that crap about Odysseus, about our friendship. It seems so cold-blooded.” He raised his glass, drank deeply.

  I know many of the tricks our vision can play, that our eyes can persuade us one arrow is longer than its identical twin, that a book is simultaneously opening and closing, that pink is blue or yellow is green, but I had not understood that my claim to have imagined what it would be like to lose Jack hid the deep conviction that I wouldn’t. Once again I had been deceiving myself. Perhaps, eventually, as Robert had said, he would forgive me, but for now he was lost to me. I stood beside the sofa in the well-lit room—I had turned on the lights to scrub the carpet—and let my eyes rest on my friend. I would see him across the street, at the gym, but I would no longer have his permission to gaze at him, no longer walk by his side. I had not saved everyone. Indeed it was not clear if I had saved anyone.

  “One of the first things Viv told me about Mercury,” I said, “was that he was hot-blooded. It’s the cold-blooded horses that do all the work, go into battle, plow—”

  Again he cut me off. “I see where you’re going with this. You’re the humble, hardworking Dobbins. I understand you found yourself between a rock and a hard place, but in the end you hurt both of us, Viv and me.”

  “Are you saying I should have kept lying? That that would have been better?” Only a moment before he had said the opposite, that my continuing to lie was the worst offense of all.

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “I don’t f’ing know. Ask me again in a year. If you’d been stronger, you wouldn’t have lied in the first place, but once you did, maybe you should have kept going. Maybe that would have been kinder, less self-indulgent. Now Viv’s going to prison. I’ve lost one more person. Your kids are thrown into this maelstrom. How exactly is the world a better place because you finally deigned to tell me the truth?”

  I had thought I knew the answer—that it was, as my father had argued, always better to tell the truth, that to live as a liar would ruin my life, and those of the people I loved—but in the face of Jack’s weary question, the certainty I had found with Robert was gone. I was deep in the cold, dark water, the daylight of forgiveness far above. I picked up my jacket and walked out of the room.

  As I stepped into the street a man strolled by, whistling a bright, complicated tune. In my Edinburgh childhood I often heard men whistling, but as an adult in America I seldom do. Now I stood listening until the stranger carried his melody out of earshot.

  18

  THAT EVENING WE TOLD the children, or to be precise, Viv did. “I did something bad,” she said, “something terribly wrong. It was an accident, but it’s going to make things hard for all of us for a while.”

  When she finished, Marcus said, “So Jack was in the hospital because of you.”

  Trina began to cry. Poachers shot elephants, she said. We were no better than poachers.

  “I was only trying to protect Mercury,” Viv said. Then, seeing my face, she stopped.

  We went to the Mexican restaurant, and she and I took turns reciting stories from our family lore. Viv described teaching Marcus to swim; she’d let go of him for a moment, and he was halfway across the pool. I described the time a neighbor’s cat got stuck up our maple tree and Trina had coaxed it into a basket. We talked about visiting the Brooklyn Zoo, and our long-postponed family trip to Edinburgh

  “Your mom—,” I started to say.

  “Please, Dad.” Trina scowled at me over her untouched plate. “Don’t start talking American.”

  After they were in bed, Viv told me she had hired a lawyer. Hopefully she could get one or two of the charges dropped.

  “So there’s no chance of a fine, or probation, or a suspended sentence?” I was throwing out all the terms I knew.

  She shook her head. “Even if the judge accepts that the shooting was an accident, there are mandatory sentences for buying a gun illegally, bringing it into Massachusetts. The thing that will count the most is the victim impact statement. If Jack were to forgive me—”

  “I’m afraid that’s not very likely,” I said, and told her about our conversation.

  I had imagined, over and over the prison clothes, the handcuffs, the bars, the narrow bed but now, listening to Viv, looking at her, her fair skin and blue eyes, her long neck and elegant collarbones, her strong hands and crooked finger, her lean hips and small feet, none of this was remotely imaginable.

  “Will you wait for me?” she said.

  No life is without suffering, my father used to say, but I hope never again to see on another person’s face what I saw on Viv’s when I told her that Hilary was selling Mercury, and that Charlie was buying him.

  19

  MY STORY IS ALMOST over, or at least I have set down the parts I want and feel able to tell. I never believed I was great or awesome, but I had my secret vanity. I was my father’s son; I believed myself to be a person of integrity. In the aftermath of that night at Windy Hill, I lost that belief. I lied out of (1) cowardice, (2) love of my children, (3) loyalty to Viv, (4) some essential flaw of character, (5) none, or all, of the above. I finally told the truth because I believed it was the right thing to do, morally and legally, but also because of my secret vanity. I do not fully understand my own behavior, so perhaps it is scarcely surprising that I do not understand Viv’s. Why did she buy a gun, load it, fire it? I will never entirely know. We live in a country where such things are possible. In the time I have taken to write these pages, many others have done more or less what she did, often with fatal results.

  Three weeks ago Viv appeared
before the judge, a saturnine man in his forties. My mother, Larry, Claudia and her three-week-old son, Viv’s friend Lucy, and I were present. Hilary sat watching us from across the room. I was glad she and Jack were still together. Viv was charged with five violations: purchasing a weapon illegally, carrying it illegally, shooting someone, etcetera, etcetera. The victim impact statement was one long howl of pain, a pain that Hilary corroborated in piercing detail. Viv received a sentence of a year, beginning after Labor Day, when the children would be safely back in school. With good behavior, it might be reduced to nine months. We will be able to visit her once a week.

  I used to compare our family, in those years when everything worked, to the orrery in Edinburgh. We each had our preoccupations, and yet we were all orbiting the same sun. But after my father died, after Viv met Mercury and bought a gun and I lied about Charlie’s riding, after she shot Jack, after we both spoke to the police and I confessed to Jack, the orbits in our orrery were vastly altered. We were still busy with school, work, meals, music and swimming lessons, homework, play dates, movies, but for Viv and me, and for the children too, I presume, everything changed as the people closest to us learned what had happened that night at Windy Hill. Viv told Claudia and our neighbors. I told my mother, Merrie, Steve, and Marcus and Trina’s teachers. Our orbits wavered. The sun was often eclipsed. Our main priority, Viv and I agreed, was our beloved children. How could we help them to emerge from this relatively unscathed?

  I do not know what occurred between her and Claudia, but Viv continued to work at the stables, to take care of the horses, give lessons, manage the accounts. The day after she spoke to Claudia, Helen phoned to say she was an idiot, but if there was any horse that would make her, Helen, pick up a gun, it was Mercury. Steve, when I told him, said, “Fuck me gently with a chain saw. Donald, you never fail to surprise me.” Merrie didn’t speak to me for two days. Then she told me that the father of her youngest daughter was in prison for armed robbery. If all the guns in America ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, she would crawl from here to Lourdes in gratitude.

  As for my mother, for the third time we met at the bar. I walked there after work and ordered our Bloody Marys. I felt, as I had when I stood on Jack’s doorstep, that my life was about to change in momentous and irrevocable ways. She arrived in excellent spirits, her fair hair gleaming against her dark coat, her blue eyes bright. She had landed a new account with a big pharmaceutical company. Congratulations, I said, and before she could offer further distractions, launched into my increasingly practiced story.

  My mother exclaimed, swore, asked for clarification. When I finished, she said, “What an ungodly mess. I can’t believe Viv would do this to Jack. To you and the children. What on earth was she thinking?”

  I drank and let her anger wash over me. All around us on the TV screens football players, hockey players, basketball players, were flashing by. Viv had aspired to be among these star athletes. At the bar three men leaped to their feet, flinging up their arms in triumph.

  When my mother finally stopped exclaiming, I said, “I lied too.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s not like you, Donald.”

  She was looking at me steadily, and I knew she understood how the Simurg had nearly carried me away and how, day by day, I was seeking to make amends. Like Jack, I wanted to get back to the person I believed myself to be. I told her how I had finally found Robert and how we had met in the Peacock Room.

  “I’m so glad,” she said. “I still remember the phone call with his mother when I realized he didn’t know we were staying in the States.”

  “If you had to do it over again,” I said, “would you decide to stay here?”

  “Edward asked me that just before he went to the nursing home. I told him I didn’t know. When he got too ill to travel, I wished his cousins were nearby, but the doctors here are terrific. We had opportunities we would never have had in Edinburgh.”

  As she raised her glass, I noticed something was missing: her wedding ring. When had she removed it? I wondered. Yesterday? The day after Jean died?

  “What I do regret,” she went on, “is not realizing how one thing would lead to another. I really did think we were coming here for two years. Then I got this amazing job offer, and we decided to stay until you and Fran finished school. But by that time Edward had his garden, and he was walking in the Adirondacks, and I had a great team . . .”

  She trailed off, looked down at her bare hands, and met my gaze again. “I would have done anything for you and Fran, but I had to live my own life. I’ve always been grateful that you were less selfish. You came back when we needed you. Edward often said—we both did—how lucky we were to have you in our lives.”

  My mother raised her glass and turned to look at the nearest TV screen, giving me my privacy. I sat there, silently repeating her words. In the midst of many mistakes, I had done one good thing.

  “So,” she said gently, “will you wait for Viv?”

  I was no closer to answering the question than I had been when Viv asked it. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Now she was watching me, trying to read in my face what I could not, or would not, say. “You’ll take good care of the children,” she persisted, “run the household, but when she gets out of prison, will you go on being married?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “I need to figure that out.”

  “‘Figure,’” said my mother. “That makes it sound like you’re going to measure and calculate. Find the right prescription. But this is about your feelings, Donald. Maybe you should talk to someone like Graham?”

  “Would you like another drink?” I said. “Do you and Larry have summer plans?”

  But a few nights after our conversation, I started writing this account. I wanted to understand what had happened: how Viv had changed, how I had changed, how we had failed each other not in sickness or in health but in the hard task of leading our daily lives. If I imagine anyone reading these pages, then it is my father. Or perhaps the Simurg, with a pair of reading glasses balanced on his beak.

  ON A MONDAY MORNING in April, with Viv’s appearance before the judge still three months away, I walked Marcus and Trina to school, returned home, started the car, and went into the house to fetch Nabokov. When I emerged, his cage in one hand, my briefcase in the other, a police car was parked in the driveway. An older man in uniform approached.

  “Mr. Stevenson?” His long, good-natured face made it easy to picture him ignoring insults, quelling bad behavior.

  I acknowledged my name. Meanwhile Nabokov, perhaps mistaking his uniform for that of a train conductor, began to recite a railway timetable. “The train for Inverness will depart at eleven oh six precisely.”

  The policeman asked if Ms. Turner was at home. I said she had already left for Windy Hill. “Might I ask what this is about?”

  “We found the weapon.” It had, he told me, been retrieved from the woods two days before. Tests confirmed that the powder marks matched the bullet taken from Jack’s shoulder.

  Two cardinals were flitting around the porch; under the maple tree the first crocuses were in bloom. While I set Nabokov’s cage on the roof of my car, the policeman walked back to his car. He returned, holding a ziplock bag of the kind I had just used for Marcus and Trina’s sandwiches. There was the gun, the small black gun, that Viv had accidentally fired at Jack; that she might, if her aim had shifted an inch or two, have fired at me. He held it out for my inspection. It was much smaller than the one he carried at his waist. I stared, fascinated.

  “I’ve never held a real gun,” I said.

  I can no longer recall exactly how I asked the question, what words I used, but after a moment’s calculation he reached into the bag and, pointing the gun at the ground, handed it to me. It fitted my hand with the ease of a good tool. I stood there, holding it carefully, feeling the solid weight of it. The last time I had held a gun of any kind was as a schoolboy in Edinburgh, playing cowboys with Robert in the local park. Bu
t this was not a toy. This was an extremely efficient machine that had changed my life in almost every way.

  “Do you mind,” I said, “if I pull the trigger?”

  Again the policeman made some kind of calculation, taking in my clean shirt, my dark trousers, my freshly polished shoes. “Don’t point it at me,” he said, and stepped over to stand beside Nabokov.

  I raised the gun, aimed at the vivid male cardinal, and—it took surprisingly little effort—pulled the trigger.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FIRST THE BOOKS, THEN the people. A number of books kept me company, guided and informed me in the writing of Mercury. I am happy to say that Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet remains as wonderful as the day it was published in 1935. More recently Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit, Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, and John Jermiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses gave me great pleasure and suggested ways to think and write about horses. I am also indebted to The Nature of Horses by Stephen Budiansky; How to Think Like a Horse by Cherry Hill; The Horse in Human History by Pita Kelekna; The Eighty-Dollar Champion by Elizabeth Letts; Horse Sense by John Mettler; and Chosen by a Horse by Susan Richards.

  Keeping African Grey Parrots by David Aldington helped me to think about Nabokov.

  I am grateful to the authors of several lucid and inspiring books about the experience of going blind at a young age. Three in particular enabled me to empathize more deeply: Touching the Rock by John M. Hull; Cockeyed: A Memoir by Ryan Knighton; and Planet of the Blind by Stephen Kuusisto. I read All About Your Eyes by the physicians at the Duke University Eye Center too many times for comfort. Rosemary Mahoney’s For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind gracefully combines insight and erudition; I am grateful for both. Lastly I want to thank the librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind who patiently answered my many questions.