Mercy

by Jodi Picoult

  Mia wouldn't have expected any less. She smiled uncomfortably, not knowing if she was supposed to do anything else, like offer Ellen MacDonald a teakettle to make her infusion, or pluck the petals off for her. Ellen did not say anything, but she didn't seem inclined to leave, either.

  "So, you're Cam's mother," Mia said, realizing only after the words were out of her mouth how intimate they sounded.

  "The very one." Ellen reached deep into a pocket and drew out several small polished stones. "You seem a little piqued, dear," she said, rattling the stones in her palm like they were dice. When they fell, she began to sift through them. "This is rhodonite, that's for calming--here, you take it--and this is rose quartz, for love; and no, not this one, that's carnelian for sexuality . . . Ah!" With a flourish, she presented a tiny smooth green stone to Mia. "Aven-tutine. For tranquillity."

  Mia touched all of the stones, scattered like bright marbles across Allies desk. "Do these really work?"

  Ellen shrugged. "I suppose it depends on how much you want them to. When old Angus had a stroke the year after he moved to America and the consensus was that he was going to die in a matter of days, I sewed malachite into the lining of his hospital gown. It's supposed to strengthen the heart, the circulation. Wouldn't you know it, he walked out of the hospital on his own two feet the next morning."

  Mia's mouth dropped open. "That's amazing!"

  Ellen smiled. "It probably was not so much the malachite as the fact that he was a MacDonald," she admitted. "They're too stubborn to die until they're good and ready."

  The swing of the door on its hinges sent Mia running to the front to greet a potential customer. Bent over the worktable, carefully arranging two paper plates and utensils, was Cam. "Hi." He grinned when she came into the room. "Since it's in my best interests to keep up your strength--"

  "Cam," Mia said. "Guess who's here?"

  Ellen walked out, her coat buttoned again, her hands clutching fistfuls of stubby flowers. "Well. Two birds with one stone."

  Cam leaned down to kiss his mother on the cheek. "What are you doing here?"

  "Allie got me some linden," she said, holding it up for Cam to sniff. "I'm making a soporific today."

  "Well, hell." Cam smiled, in too good a mood to take issue with his mother's crazy ideas. "Somebody has to."

  Ellen glanced at the table, set cozily for two; at the calzones that Cam had purchased, leaking greasily through the bottom of the paper bag. She looked up at her son. "Don't tell me you forgot Allies gone."

  "It's for Mia," Cam said smoothly. "Allie asked me to make sure she gets regular meals."

  For a moment Ellen could not put her finger on what was the matter. But then she understood: Cam was feverish; he was burning up. He didn't seem to be acting sick, but she would have recognized anywhere the flame behind his eyes and the flush that worked up from his neck.

  Ellen stared at her son, who was unwrapping something that looked like Parmesan cheese and whistling an old Scots lullaby. Then she looked at Mia, whose hands were moving restlessly at her sides. There was an amethyst in Ellen's pocket, which represented the strength of will, and she considered giving it to Cam, but realized this was something he'd have to discover himself.

  Then she thought of Allie, who was not there to bear witness; Allie with her back curved over Ellen's stove as she mixed beeswax and lanolin and what have you. She thought of the time she, Ellen, had oversteeped a tincture, so that when Allie tried to rub it over her face as a restorative, it had dyed her skin green. She thought of the way Allie had looked at her own wedding, how she'd stood in the receiving line clutching Cam's hand so tightly that she left behind faint bruises that lasted a week.

  Ellen set down her flowers and unbuttoned her coat. She perched on one of the work stools and propped her elbows up in front of a paper plate. "My," she said, smiling. "I hope there's enough there for three."

  The spare bedroom in Jamie and Maggie's house had been converted into a home office for Jamie, complete with a state-of-the-art computer system and virtual reality aids. Allie stepped into the room cautiously; computers made her nervous. She had taken an adult education course the year before which taught her how to inventory her stock and do billing on a computer system, but she'd never even seen some of the paraphernalia that littered Jamie's study.

  Strange geometric patterns were swirling on the screen, as if the user had stepped out to the bathroom and was planning on coming back in a moment. This, Allie had seen before--they were screen savers, or something like that; they were supposed to save energy when the computer was turned on but unoccupied. It surprised Allie that Jamie hadn't thought to shut off the system before leaving with Maggie; then she realized other things had probably been on his mind. Still, with Jamie away in Wheelock, the drain of electricity would be costing him a fortune. Almost shyly, Allie sat down at the swivel chair and reached for the power switch on the computer.

  As soon as she stretched out her hand, the geometric patterns vanished and a bright yellow ball blinked at her, like the flash of a camera. The ball skidded from left to right, leaving a string of letters behind. WELCOME, Allie read. PLEASE PUT ON GLOVE AND HMD.

  Entranced by a computer that seemed to know just when she'd arrived, Allie reached for the glove. She slid her hand inside and wiggled her fingers, then stared at the headpiece lying beside the computer. She had no idea what an HMD was, but this was the only other piece of equipment attached to the system. Gingerly she lifted the helmet and fit it over her head and eyes.

  She jumped. Instead of staring at a computer screen, she was in it. Allies peripheral vision, even when she swung her head back and forth, revealed a simple cell with gray walls and aqua carpeting, like a doctor's waiting room. Words began to form inches from her face, trembling in the air like hummingbirds. You have entered Northrup Architectural's Virtual Design System, Allie read. She stretched out her hand, allowing the letters to balance on her palm, delighted to discover they had weight and texture. Then, in smaller print: Conceived and implemented by Techcellence, Inc., copyright 1995. Frowning, Allie wondered about that. She would have expected Jamie to be working on something more current.

  But before she could let herself question any further, the room fell away around her and she found herself staring at three hovering holograms: a skyscraper, a hotel, and a flagpole. A disembodied TV-announcer voice began to speak. "Please indicate which project you'd like to tour by pointing with your gloved hand," he said. As Allie reached out, he enunciated each choice. "Rystrom Towers," he boomed. "The Four Seasons, Toronto . . . Carter S. Wilder Elementary School."

  Allie curled her fingers around the flagpole. "You have chosen Carter S. Wilder Elementary School," the voice said. "If you would like to proceed with your tour, please say so now."

  Allie cleared her throat, feeling a little foolish. "I'd like to proceed with my tour."

  All of a sudden she was standing on a grassy slope, staring down at the new brick building with its shiny bike racks and wooden jungle gyms. She could feel the wind stirring her hair; she could hear the cries of children playing. Astounded, Allie squatted down and rubbed her hand over the grass. Inside the glove, she could swear she'd felt the crisp spikes and stubby needles of a just-mowed lawn. "Jamie," she whispered, "you are a genius."

  She stood up, walking and wondering why she wasn't bumping into the computer unit that she knew was right in front of her--there must have been a moving platform she'd missed seeing. At the front door of the school, she reached out and pulled at the heavy aluminum door. It swung open at her touch, but not before Allie noticed that her hand, which was surely wrapped around ordinary air, had felt a handle, and resistance.

  There was a trophy case in the main hall, and bright children's paintings on paper that curled at the edges like eyelashes. Allie examined the stick figures of one artist, and was brought whirling around by the sound of the disembodied voice again. "Please choose the image you'd like to assume for your walk-through." Again, hovering before h
er eyes, were several forms: a woman, a child, a man, a wheelchair-bound boy. Unsure of why she was being asked her sexual orientation and physical capabilities, Allie pointed to the figure closest to her. "Female," the voice boomed. "Adult."

  The tiny image grew and grew until Allie realized she was standing face-to-face with someone. Narrowing her eyes, she took in the thick hair, the guileless smile, the unmistakable image of Maggie MacDonald.

  "Step forward," Maggie invited, and Allie wondered if it was her real voice. She took one step and then, as Maggie urged her, another, until she realized that the Maggie-image wanted Allie to literally walk right into her. Of course, Allie realized. This was the way Jamie had chosen for the computer user to "see" him or herself in the school. Allie remembered the quick flash when she'd sat down at the computer--it must have been an internal camera, capturing her own features to map onto this programmed female form. That way, during the walk-through she would be able to reach for things and see a female hand; she would be able to look in a bathroom mirror and see her own face.

  With her eyes wide open Allie walked into Maggie's body, shuddering at the feel of being under someone else's skin and staring out at the world through borrowed eyes. And she wondered whether the sorrow she felt was something Jamie had intended, something Allie herself had imagined, or such an intrinsic part of Maggie that it floated through the halls of this untried school like a sunken, dissatisfied ghost.

  Cam sat at the work station in the flower shop, watching Mia rewrap the wire around the eight bonsai trees. "Looks like it hurts," he said.

  Mia smiled. "When was the last time you were wrapped with copper wire?"

  Cam laughed. "Now, there's an idea."

  It was his third night with Mia. With the exception of his mother, who had arrived the day before at an unfortunate time, no one would have suspected him of unlikely behavior. And even she had no proof. Cam had been acting the way he always did during the day, going into the station and checking the schedules and the court book and doing whatever needed to be done. But at six o'clock, he'd lock his office and tell Hannah that he was going to take Mia Townsend to dinner. That Allie had asked him to keep an eye on her.

  He thought that telling half the truth might be better, in the long run, than lying.

  Then he'd walk to the flower shop, stopping to chat with the old-timers in front of the coffee shop and on the steps of the post office, and he'd knock on the locked door. When Mia opened it, his senses would be assaulted by the fresh, sweet scent of the flowers she'd been working with that afternoon. She always looked as if she was surprised to see him, but she'd draw him into the shop and lock the door again and kiss him, her fingers kneading the short muscles of his lower back.

  The first night had been something he would never be able to put into words. Making love with Mia was a bit like waking up one morning to discover the color green. You saw it in the grass and the trees and the road signs and you could not imagine that you had spent so many years of your life in the absence of this hue, which seemed to make the rest of the world fall into place.

  Tonight he had been watching her work, knowing how swiftly and gently her hands could move and shape and heal. She began to dig around the roots of a Chinese juniper. "Tell me what you were like as a kid," she said. "I want to know what I've missed."

  Cam grinned. "When I was six I plugged up the drain in my mother's bedroom shower. It was one of those glass stalls, you know, and I figured I could make my own swimming pool for the winter. It leaked through the floor and ruined the dining room table downstairs."

  "Ah," Mia said, walking behind him and trailing her hand across the back of his neck. "That tells me quite a lot."

  "I used to stick dimes between the black and white keys of the piano," Cam added.

  "No doubt." She wrapped her arms around him.

  "My mother used to tell me," he murmured, feeling Mia's lips run down his neck, "I had one foot on the road to hell."

  She crossed in front of him and straddled him as he sat on the stool. Cam felt the heat from her skin through all the layers of clothing between them. "And," Mia said, kissing him, "now here you are."

  He stood up and carried her with him to the couch. As he bent his head toward her, she touched her hand to his lips. "Tell me your darkest secret."

  Cam laughed. "I wanted to be a travel writer," he admitted, his breath warm against her throat. "I wanted to go to the Yucatan, and Singapore, and Culebra, and Prague and tell the world what they'd been missing." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I would have been good at it. I know I would."

  Mia pictured Cam on the steps of the white temple in Sagaing, walking along the gray ribbon of Burma's Irrawaddy River. She saw a pencil tucked behind his ear and a notepad in his back pocket. "Why didn't you do it?"

  "I had to come back here. When my father died, I was supposed to be the clan chief. I couldn't do that without a permanent address."

  "You could do it now," she said.

  Cam closed his eyes and thought of Mia in white linen, barefoot and sunburnt beside him on a catamaran that wove its way through Sail Rock and Mustique and the other Windward Islands. He shrugged, pushing away what had not been meant to be, and touched Mia's cheek.

  "What's your deep dark secret?" he asked.

  Mia blinked at him. "I love you."

  The words stunned him. They were simple ones, ones he knew had been coming, ones he had heard a million times before from his wife. It made no sense to him, but just as Cam knew that his soul belonged to Mia, this ordinary phrase belonged to Allie. He did not want to hear it from Mia, could not bear to hear it, because it reminded him of the colossal price he had to pay and the pain he would have to cause to take what should have always been his.

  Cam rolled away from Mia and sat down on the floor. He rested his head on the heels of his hands and took a deep breath.

  Mia scuttled to the corner of the couch, and when he turned she was huddled into a knot, as if she were trying to make herself smaller than was physically possible. "I shouldn't have said that," she murmured, picking at her cuticles. "I'm sorry."

  Cam reached up behind him and squeezed her hand. "Don't be sorry." He hesitated, weighing the fences that his mind was already building against the fire that had crawled from his belly to his throat. "I love you too."

  Mia became still. "You do?"

  Cam nodded. He was feeling faint, and he did not know if this was because of the lilacs and the marigolds that seemed to fill every corner of the shop, or because--in the blink of an eye--he had turned into someone he no longer knew. "God help me," he said, "but I do."

  Mia placed her hand, light and cool, on the back of his neck. "God has nothing to do with this."

  Mornings at Sunny Side Up, the local coffee shop, were crowded, full of colorful locals who had implicit reservations and tacitly assigned seats and could order the usual just by nodding at the short-order cook. Every now and then Cam stopped in too. He was rarely hungry enough to take more than the coffee pushed at him, since Allie unfailingly made him a healthy breakfast; but it was a good place to sit if you wanted to know which teenager was most likely to set the bleachers on fire after graduation, or whose wife had been wearing sunglasses to hide a bruise on her face.

  With Allie gone, though, there was nothing for breakfast but cold cereal. So Cam had driven into town, come into the restaurant, and ordered scrambled eggs with bacon. It was placed in front of him within two minutes, runny and malodorous.

  Cam looked up at Vera, the morning waitress. "That's amazing," he said. "I've never seen someone cook an egg so fast."

  She shrugged. "He's looking to impress you. Don't be shocked if you find shells mixed in."

  Cam spread the paper napkin in his lap and lifted the first forkful to his mouth. The eggs were greasy, almost unfinished, the sort of thing Allie wouldn't have been caught dead serving. He lifted his coffee cup and scanned the restaurant, trying to match the puzzle-piece edges of names and faces as he nodded and smiled
. In the rear of the establishment was Elizabeth Fraser, children's librarian, and Wheelock's newest citizen--her three-week-old baby. In the front window was Joshua Douglas, a nine-year-old kid who as far as Cam knew was on the straight and narrow, but all the same, shouldn't be sitting alone in a coffee shop having his breakfast. He made a mental note to check on the Douglas family as the man sitting to the left of him said goodbye and vacated his stool at the counter, leaving Cam an unobstructed view of Jamie MacDonald lowering a newspaper from his face.

  Jamie stared at him levelly. "Chief MacDonald."

  Cam snorted and turned back to his coffee.

  "Enjoying your breakfast?" Jamie asked pleasantly.

  Cam swallowed. "I was," he said. He fixed his attention on his plate, wondering what it was about Jamie MacDonald that rubbed him the wrong way. He'd been around criminals before, some far more dangerous than Jamie was, but this one set him on edge. Even more so, now that things had started up with Mia. Cam could not look the man in the eye and know Jamie was being tried for murdering his wife, without feeling, somehow, that he was the one who should feel guilty.

  If Jamie was telling the truth, he had done the one thing he least wanted to do, just because it was what his wife had wanted. Jamie, the felon. Whereas Cam, the upstanding police chief, could not get past what he most wanted to do: push thoughts of his wife aside and be with Mia Townsend.

  Disgusted with his own absence of honor and the line of reasoning that was turning Jamie into a plaster saint, Cam clattered his fork against his plate. In his peripheral vision, he watched Jamie separate the folds of the newspaper and hold out a section to him. "Sports page?"

  Cam grunted and took it from him. He stared blindly at the statistics for the regional high school teams and finally shoved the paper beneath his plate. Without looking at Jamie he rested his chin on his clenched fists. "Angus all right?" he asked.

  He could sense Jamie's head swinging slowly toward him as he realized that Cam had taken the first stab at a civilized conversation. But before Jamie had a chance to answer, the door of the coffee shop flew open, crashing against its frame and ringing the sleigh bells that hung from its handle. A man in a black raincoat with wild yellow eyes was waving a Beretta.