A Matter of Mercy

by Lynne Hugo

  * * * *

  Caroline watched from the front window near Eleanor’s empty bed, tension rising on the back of wind while the barometer slid down and then further down. The northeastern sky blackened, the storm chasing its tail and coming back to swipe them on its downsweep. The incoming tide was relentless. Rid slogged through shallow water in his waders. Every few steps he bent over and stuck something in the water.

  And then a single boom of thunder that wasn’t like distant fireworks or artillery. A jag of lightning at the same instant, sky-splitting, too bright, too close, palpably electric on and around them. Beach, breakwater, bay, truck, road, even Rid flickered in black and white illumination, and Caroline’s heart thudded in her ears. The bay was an engine of noise beneath the intermittent cracks and booms. He knows what he’s doing, she advised herself. He’ll get himself inside if it’s dangerous. In a different life she’d been a person who’d leap in anywhere to help anyone—whether the recipient wanted help or not—and that woman would have been out the front door pulling up the hood of Eleanor’s slicker, Eleanor’s boots in hand, a good five minutes before the new Caroline was.

  Of course, he didn’t hear her over the rising wind and turning tide so she had to keep running along the high water mark on the beach until she was parallel with him, but then he didn’t see her either because now he was backing up, into the wind. Caroline hopped on each foot in turn as she pulled a rubber boot on the other one and then headed across seventy-five feet of mucky sand and cultch to where he worked. She’d not realized just how many raceways of hard-shelled clams he’d planted, how much netting was down, how large his grant was. From above the tide line, all that was visible on Rid’s or anyone else’s grant were Chinese hats and oyster trays and racks where the larger shellfish were being nurtured to legal size. Even those could only be seen when the tide was out. Once Caroline slogged out beyond his truck, backed onto the flats an hour before low tide, now resting in about three inches of rapidly incoming water, she found she had to detour several times to avoid stepping on quahog beds.

  “Rid! Rid!” She shouted his name four or five more times before he turned even though she was now only a couple of feet behind him. She couldn’t get to the side or front where he could see her without stepping on netting. “Rid!”

  Now he turned, startled. He took a step toward her and Caroline leaned in to shout in his ear, but she’d miscalculated; he wasn’t letting her break his work stride even long enough to hear what she had to say. Rid bent over and stuck a U-hook into the sandy bottom to anchor the net even though he already had rerod bars weighing it down. She saw that’s what he’d been doing—every other step, sticking another U-hook into the sand to double secure the netting.

  Infuriatingly, he wouldn’t stop. She did the only thing she could if she wanted to tell him anything, bobbing up and down to keep her mouth near enough his head, stepping backward in concert with him like a bizarre dancing couple.

  “Come in—you can come to my house. There’s lightning,” she shouted, gesturing skyward, feeling foolish showing him the obvious.

  Rid just shook his head. “Gotta anchor these … not enough rerod….tide….” The thread of his words unraveled on the wind.

  Caroline backed up as he advanced, watching as Rid placed three more anchors. Then, putting her hand on the mesh bag of U-hooks, she blocked his next step as she shouted, “I can do this.” She pointed to the end of the raceway. “I’ll keep going here so you can get the other side.” Maybe he couldn’t make out what she was saying; the sky and bay rumbled, arguing constantly. Several more lightning strikes had zigged over the horizon, these still distant but advancing.

  Rid started to shake his head no; hesitation was on his face, but Caroline bent and put in a U-hook and must have gotten it right because he released the bag to her and was gone. He didn’t go get more U-hooks though. He waded in deeper, bent again, and this time hoisted a nursery tray out of the water, and carried it to the bed of his truck where he shoved aside racks, crates and a bull rake to make space for it. Then another, another, and another, all the while Caroline made slow headway toward shore, stopping to place a U-hook every eighteen inches. When she looked up between steps, she saw Rid scanning the sky while he shouldered another tray. Rain began, not with single drops here and there, but in a pelting downpour.

  Caroline quit standing up between securing hooks because water poured in the gap between her neck and chin when she did. Her jeans were soaked from the flapping slicker, but if the wind plastered it momentarily against her body, rainwater slid directly into her boots. She couldn’t feel her hands anymore although the water felt warmer than the air now.

  She’d not quite finished when she saw the black rubber of his waders sloshing toward her. Her back locked into its bent-over position, she splashed in the hook she was holding and started to unfold herself, but before she could, Rid had her elbow and was pulling.

  “Too close!” He shouted, leaning into her ear. “…Now! Gonna sink the truck.” The yank on her arm was in the direction of the pickup. The big tires were donuts half dunked into the black bay coffee. Straightening painfully and splashing behind Rid as best she could, Caroline realized that most of the apparatus of the grant was already submerged.

  Rid wrestled opened the passenger side of the truck, boosting her into the seat with a hand on her rear before slamming the door and running through a fury of rain to climb into the driver’s seat himself. Later, Caroline would remember that she found the gesture oddly chivalrous. The engine coughed twice and caught. Rid dropped the gearshift into reverse, then rocked it into a forward crawl toward the beach. At the highwater mark, he made the left turn and drove along the sandy strip toward the access road. He stopped at the edge of the access road, still on the sand. Caroline’s house was faintly silhouetted across the horseshoe beach. She could feel as much as see the trees, dizzy in the torrent.

  “God. Whew. Thanks,” he said, as their panting slowed and Caroline used her wet sleeve to staunch the trickle running from her hair into her eyes. “Wait, I’ve got something, I think.” Rid twisted to rummage behind the passenger seat and came up with a crumpled, ragged towel. “Oh,” he said. “This isn’t pretty. Sorry.”

  “Gimme that.” Caroline laughed and grabbed it. “When you’re desperate, you’re desperate.” She blotted her hair. “You probably need to go, I know.”

  “Nah, let’s wait for it to die down. Can’t drive you closer to the house than you are here. Can’t very well walk in this,” he said. “Stuff’s okay outta the water. I wanted to get the hats too, but they’ll do better than the nursery trays might’ve. I can’t replace that stock, ARC can’t get any seed now, it’s too late to plant anyway, and … you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Just thanks. Really, I mean it. Thanks.” Then, an afterthought. “But is somebody with your mother?”

  “She’s in the hospital tonight.”

  “Oh no, is she worse?”

  “I don't know. The doctor says it’s terminal, but not right now. This is to drain fluid from her lung so she’ll be more comfortable. I was already there most of the day. She’ll be home again tomorrow. She’s on hospice. I’m hoping to be able to keep her at home—I mean, you know, the whole time.”

  He shook his head in sympathy. “You want a beer?”

  Caroline was confused. “You want to go into town?”

  “No. Here. I got it,” he said, interrupting. Rooting again, under his seat this time, he pulled out first one, then a second bottled beer and handed one to Caroline after he flicked off the cap with his thumb. “Warm,” he said, an apology.

  Caroline gave a small shiver. “It’s just as well. Warm’s good.”

  Rid made no comment but started the truck up again and put the heat on. Caroline stuck her hands in front of the vent.

  Fists of rain pummeled the top and hood and the jumble of equipment and nursery bags in the truck bed. No lights at all now from the rise around the bay inlet. Rid sucked a long d
raw of beer and sighed. “Power’s out. I hope my nets don’t get too fouled.”

  “Weird, isn’t it? I mean logically, you wouldn’t think more water,” she gestured at the rain, “could mess up things that already grow under water.”

  Rid pulled in his chin and looked at her sidelong.

  “What?”

  He rolled his eyes. “God, that’s so woman.”

  “That sounds dangerously like an insult, Mr. Neal. How so?”

  “Using logic to be completely illogical.”

  Caroline smacked his sleeve with the back of her hand.

  They teased that way for several more minutes. Rid drained his beer and when Caroline finished hers, he pulled two more out from under the seat. Again, he popped off the top before handing Caroline hers.

  “Sir, you are a gentleman,” she said lightly.

  “Uh oh. Sounds like a compliment. A minute ago you were as good as calling me a pig.”

  “Okay. A gentlemanly pig.”

  In full darkness now, the rain flogged on. The truck felt like a tank to Caroline, impervious, though every now and then the force of the wind swayed it and occasional debris banged the exterior. Rid glanced at the bay, winced, and looked away. There were breakers, as if they were on the ocean side instead of in the quiet natural harbor.

  The second beer and most of the third and fourth were spent on comparing kids they’d known in high school, cataloging geeks, preps, dopers, drudges. “You were just a baby,” she complained. “You’re naming people who were little brothers and sisters of people in my class.”

  “Oh, yeah, and you are sooo ancient.”

  They went on to teachers, praising a few, trashing more. “Nah,” he said once. “Didn’t take Algebra or Geometry, none of that stuff. General math, and I do believe I failed it, too. Truth is I pretty much fit the stereotype of the dumb local. I was probably the mold for it, in fact. Had a lot of fun, though.” He laughed and shook his head. After that, Caroline was careful not to talk about teachers who’d had only college prep classes. American History, English and Government; everybody had to take those. Not French, not Chemistry, not Anatomy and Physiology.

  When he said no, he hadn’t taken Music and not Art either, she said, “Why didn’t you? I mean, you’re smart, Rid. You could have gone to college. Did you just not want to?”

  “Outta my league. God, I spent more time suspended than I did in class. I could talk a good game, but I never could keep it together to pay attention to all that stuff when it came to taking tests or writing reports. Plus no money for it. Plus it did not sound like fun.”

  Her old teaching mind wondered if he had a learning disability and she asked if he’d ever been tested. Dyslexia? Attention deficit disorder?

  “Prob’ly. Don’t remember, don’t care.” He looked at her then and grinned. “Listen to you. Teacher. Why’d you really quit anyway?”

  There was a strange vulnerability in the question, Caroline thought. Still, she didn’t like his pressing her. She’d already put him off the subject once, and he was risking the implicit rejection were she to shut him down again. She hesitated, an honest answer on one side of the balance scale in her mind, a joke on the other. She looked across at him, weighing her response. The darkness erased the squint and sun lines around his eyes and the sanded tan of his skin. He had a light growth of beard on his square jaw, and in this light, he looked young, like a memory of himself years ago.

  “You must know about it. It was in the papers. The accident.”

  He swung his head no. “What accident? Was this while I was in prison?”

  Caroline realized he was reminding her of his history. “It was such a big story, I mean, I assumed you’d know.”

  “What happened?” Again, the forthright question. She’d never seen before how asking a question left you unguarded, sometimes as much as giving an answer.

  But still, she couldn’t say it headlong, give it out straight. “There was an accident,” she said. “A fatal accident. Actually, a lot of lives were lost. Including but not especially mine. And that’s why I got divorced, too. Or, more accurately, I should say was divorced.” Her little laugh was almost a giggle, the scalloped edge of drunkenness.

  “How so?”

  Pleased that she’d been clever, leading him to a branch off the main path he’d been following, she tipped her head back onto the headrest and exhaled. “I was the divorced, not the divorcee. I mean, the divorcee wasn’t actually the divorcer. She was the divorced.”

  “Huh?”

  Giggles, like bubbles through the wand of her mouth. “A divorce was enacted upon me, I was not the enactor.”

  He wasn’t as far gone as she. Maybe he’d had a late lunch. He didn’t laugh. “You mean you didn’t want the divorce? That’s rough. Did he have someone else?”

  “Not then, but now. And a baby.”

  “Why’d he want a divorce?”

  Was there no end to these naked questions? They weren’t so bothersome now, though. She felt almost nothing when she answered, “He wanted children. I couldn’t bear—get it, bear? —to have them. A plus B equals C. Oh, sorry. I forgot about you and math.” She was short-changing him with her flippancy, and she suddenly felt cheap, a too-bright portrait of herself. “The couldn’t was a wouldn’t turned to stone. There’s just too much bad that can go down. I couldn’t give it a chance to happen again,” she said quietly.

  It was more than she’d said to anyone about it almost ever. Rid gave an empathetic yeah, that he got it, how things could turn out that way. Caroline shook her head, and he started to say something else when his stomach made a feral growl. He slapped a hand against his belly and laughed.

  “You want something to eat?” she said, glad to divert him.

  Rid peered through the windshield, squinting as if he could discern something, but the darkness was exceptional, elemental and mysterious. To their left, Caroline could make out stutters of white surf lines that broke like arguments, the incoming tide hard and its own answer.

  “Drive between lightning strikes, huh? Where do you want to go? Couple places in Eastham got generators, might be open. Road might be closed, though. Prob’ly trees down.” Rid leaned forward and grasped the key, dangling from the ignition as it had been when they got in.

  “My house,” she said, reaching to stop him. She wasn’t so far gone that she’d think about letting that truck move, not with someone who’d been drinking at the wheel. She’d put her body in front of it first. And not entirely because of her history, reason enough, but she wanted his company, a small bonfire by which to warm herself. He had a good laugh, chest-deep and unreserved.

  “That wind is dangerous. Debris flyin’. And we’ll get wet,” he said. It was several hundred yards across open beach just to the dirt lane in front of Caroline’s path, another hundred feet to her house.

  “A big problem, that one, since I’m so incredibly dry right now.” She held up a strand of wet hair for him to inspect. “Fortunately, I don’t melt. Do you?”

  “I work the flats. Let’s go.” With that, Rid flung open his door. He’d made it almost around the truck as Caroline was still getting out of her side and he grabbed her elbow and tried to slam her door hard, as he had his, but the wind fought him for it until he used two hands and the weight of his body to lever it. He shouldered a half-step ahead of her into open beach and hammering rain. Sometimes the wind pinned them in place or lurched them backward. Rid grabbed her hand as they pressed on, heads down. Once he jerked her sharply to the side to avoid a long chunk of driftwood. Flocks of debris had taken to the air, as beach grass flattened under the torrent. Rid tripped. “Watch it,” he yelled as he caught his balance. The umbrella of pines and hardwoods only slightly dulled the density of the rain once they crossed the lane, where Caroline splashed calf deep into a dirt pothole, another spill of water into one of Eleanor’s boots, and were on the brief pine straw path. The darkness was primal, the edges of the house utterly obscured. Caroline pitched forward
when she miscalculated where the first step should be, her feet slogging in waterlogged shoes inside waterlogged boots. She dumped both on the front porch.

  Inside, they were both gasping. “Whooie,” Rid said. “Nasty night.”

  Caroline felt for furniture edges and walls, making her way to the corner cabinet drawer handle, her feet cold in wet socks. Yes. Still there, a supply of candles and matches. There were flashlights in the emergency box in the basement, and a Coleman stove and lantern, but she wanted the candles. She struck a match and used its small circle of amber light to find a wick that in turn made a bigger circle. “Hold this.” She handed the first candle to Rid while she used its light to gather up holders. She took back the lit candle and used it to light five more, finally setting up the one she held and distributing them about the room. Self-conscious, she tried to finger-fluff her hair, but it was too wet. She imagined it, drab and flat, and was glad for the darkness. She shivered and clung briefly to her own elbows, feeling gangly and uncomfortable in her skin and clothes.

  “I gotta get out of these,” Rid said. He unhooked the suspenders of his waders and peeled them down, stepping out of them. “I’m sorry about the mess,” he said, pointing with his head toward the wet spots around him.

  “Forget it. I did at least as much damage as you. Wet floors are the least of our problems.”

  “Hmmm. What’s the most of them?”

  Caroline opened the refrigerator door. “Food. Everything I’ve got is, um, let’s see…applesauce…ice cream…mashed potatoes…you’ll love the contents of my refrigerator if you’re a hospice patient. Ah ha. Now we’re making some progress.” She pulled out a block of cheddar cheese. “I can’t believe we don’t have any oysters. How derelict of you!” She closed the refrigerator and started opening cupboards. “But look! Hospice comes through again—saltines. And the true bonanza, which I can’t say is hospice fare, but actually caregiver fare.” She lifted a bottle of cabernet sauvignon over her head triumphantly. “This stuff may have been here since 1980, but hey, it all improves with age, right?”