Blue Mercy: A Novel. (10 page)

It's like stepping into a finger-painting, trying to remember my childhood. The strokes are too broad, without shading.

I tilt my head back to drain the coffee. End of break. How ordinary life remains, even when extraordinary things are happening. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee; work, rest, exercise, leisure; family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances: that's all life comes down to. Most days I struggled through, with loneliness ever knocking at my poor defenses. But I had moments too when the shadow of what lay ahead, the possibility of prison, concentrated my appreciation of daily things. A robin's bobbing head. The aroma of the coffee. A walk down the lane to the road and back.

And writing. Time to get back to it. On the long desk behind me, the papers and notes and jottings that made up my life and my father's and Star's are spread, in a fan of files and folders. My fifteen minute break was over and if the writing wasn't done early, it wouldn't be done at all.

Later in the day, my mind would wander, to my father's intentions in his last days, to the impending trial, to the whereabouts of Star, and indeed, of Zach. My courage would disintegrate, my thoughts and memories congeal. But now, I had good morning energy to take me through. I went across to the desk and placed Zach's letter with the other papers. I couldn't afford to think any longer about his meagre words and what they might mean.

Oh, Zach, if you were here, you would order my days and soothe my nights. You would know how to cope with this trial that's ahead. You would make it so I would find something other than grey in this deep Irish winter, something besides darkness in sixteen-hour nights. With you, nighttime was my best time, not my worst. Oh, Zach, soul of my soul, come back to me.

I met him in the spring of 1972 when I was almost thirty. He was on his college spring break. Yes, yes, I know. But in my defense, Zach Coleman was no ordinary nineteen-year-old.

My job back then was waitressing at Honolulu Bar and Restaurant on the ocean front. It had a stream running through it, dissecting the building and we had to run forwards and backwards over the little bridges, without bumping into each other. The bartenders wore bright green shirts spattered with orange and blue palm trees and we, the floor staff, wore green halter-neck tops over faux-grass skirts and a yellow flower behind the ear.

We were having a busy evening, with too many Europeans. Spoiled by their high-wage welfare states, Europeans were unaware that we relied on tips to make up our wages. Jim-Bob, our manager, allowed us to "grat" them, add a tip to the bill without them realizing, but not too much.
 

Not enough.

It was Lindie, one of the other waitresses and also a single mom, who saw Zach first.

"Mine!" she elbowed me, as soon as he walked in. We had a mock rivalry running over good-looking punters.

I looked to the door. Tall, young, a small beard, and dark hair long and straight, like Jesus. "Not so fast, Missy," I said. "I do believe it's almost eight-thirty and time for your break."

She looked at her watch. "So it is. Nyah, he's only a tadpole anyway. You're welcome."

When I brought him across the menu and he turned his eyes up to me, the joking stopped. His eyes were the deepest grey I have ever seen on anybody, the color of the sky on a new-moon night. He did look like Jesus. And he had the kind of presence I imagine Jesus must have had.

All through the requests from the other tables -- a to-go box for table 6; three more beers for 12; ketchup bottle on 8 is empty; high chair for the picky party of ten and their variation on their orders (hold-the-gravy on the chicken and mash, extra cheese on the pizza, the burger without salad or pickle) playing havoc with Honolulu order system -- I felt him there. Whenever I looked across, he was looking at me. Each time, I looked a little longer, but each time it was me who drew my eyes away.

At last, I was able to go to him. I went across and lifted his plate. He had hardly eaten.

"Was everything all right for you, Sir?" Everybody over fifteen was "Sir" or "Ma'am" in Honolulu.

He nodded.

"Can I get you anything else?"

"Nothing, thank you." Nothing but you, his eyes seemed to say. Or was that just wishful thinking?

"I'll get your check then?"

He paid, his tip generous, and I watched him leave, the tallness of him swaying past tables, leading with his left shoulder and then with his right. Moving with soft, sleek grace, like a dancer. Or a big cat. A dark, silken panther. Then he stepped through the beaded curtain and was gone.
 

I was never going to see him again.

Don't be silly. He'll come back in.
 

But what if he doesn't?

The thought was enough. I found myself running into the back. Grabbing my jacket, I tried to slide past Jim-Bob's booth on the way out. "Hey, where do you think you're going?"

"Female emergency, Jim-Bob. I'll be back in no time."

"Female emergency my sweet Fanny Adam. You come back here, girl. You come back here now. If you go out that door, you needn't bother..."

I kept going. I only needed a couple of minutes. I had no idea what I was going to say to him and by now, he might well be gone, faded into the dark. The thought gave me a spur of panic but, when I got outside, there he was standing under the canopy, as if he knew I'd follow. Or maybe just sheltering from the rain?

"Hey!" he said, as I drew close. "It's you."

"Seems so." I was suddenly shy.

"That's so great. I was trying to work out whether to go back in to you or wait till you got off."

That's how he was from the start, my Zach. At first I didn't trust it, this openness of his. I thought that he was doing the thing some guys do. The frank thing, the disarming thing that says, it's okay, you're safe with me, but you're not.

"What's your name?"

"Mercy."

"That's pretty," he said, something Americans say every time. What they really mean is, that's unusual. "I love your accent. You're Irish?"

I nodded.

"I'm Zach." He put out his hand. "Zach Coleman."

I took it. I felt an energy, like electricity, but gentler, as if the cells of our hands were dancing round each other.

"I'd love to go to Ireland," he said.

"Really? Why?"

"Who wouldn't? Hey, maybe you'll take me?"

I laughed.

"What's funny? You could show me round. What part of Ireland are you from?"

"Wicklow."
 

Silence. He had no idea where Wicklow was but again he filled the space, simply and directly. "Do you want to go get a coffee?"

"I can't. I have to go back to work."

"Don't."
 

"Don't?"

"Come with me instead."

"Sure, I'd love to. Except, if I do, I lose my job."

"Maybe you will, maybe you won't. Anyway, there are other jobs."

I laughed. "This one suits me, actually."

"It's not worthy of you."

"Pardon?"

"Why do they have to dress you like that?" He made a face but with a smile that took the offense out of the words. "I saw you, the way you did everything. You're too good for them. Don't go back."

"You don't know what you're talking about."

But he had taken my hand and was tugging me gently and I was letting him. We walked out into the rain and, for once, because of the small rebellion of running out to him and the way he was looking at me, even the rain felt new and clean and lively. We found a coffee-house and I started to talk and I told him everything, even about Star. I never discussed Star, certainly not with men I'd just met, but Zach knew all about her before we'd even kissed.
 

It, the kiss, came four hours later, when I'd stopped talking and started to listen and we'd left the coffee house and were walking, aimlessly down a side street I'd never walked before, avoiding the rest of the world. I was drunk on the knowledge that I was doing something I shouldn't and Zach was drunk on me.
 

I haven't mentioned yet that, in my day, I was considered beautiful. I could give you the details -- shade of hair, span of waist and bust and hip, quality of legs, texture of skin -- but that's nothing. You have to see beauty to know it and yes, I've sometimes taken advantage of what the knowing does to some people.
 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if you
are
the beauty? Then, it's the look in a man's eye coming at you, telling you know more than you want to know. It's the dislike they deal you for desiring you. Beauty doesn't write the book or raise the child or learn the knowledge. It's for the beholder, not the holder. But
 

One good thing about it is how it wises you up early to what most men want from a woman. But like everything about him, Zach's way of looking at me was different. His eyes were two clear mirrors and I actually liked what I saw reflected in them.

So yes, the kiss. His lips were warm, tentative at first, then searching. I remember wondering how so young a man could know how to kiss like that, then recognizing that it wasn't him, it was him-and-me-together, then letting all thought go...It was a tender kiss, with a fluctuating rhythm, like a finely drawn violin duet and, after our lips parted, we were locked into each other in a new way.

He ran the back of his forefinger gently along my jawline. "My God," he said, staring at me like I was a newborn baby. "You're stunning."

The kiss sent us swinging down the four blocks to his apartment and up his stairs. All felt natural and easy, even through the usually-awkward bits like finding the keys and getting the right one to fit the lock. Once we were inside the door, it was straight into the sliding off of fabric, the little tussles with each other's buttons and the first glimpses of each other's skin. I was in it, doing it too, not just the observer. Soon everything was off, off, off and we were down to the clear, open bareness of each other.

It was too much for him. In minutes, he was gone. "Oh, God," he muttered into the base of my neck. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what? We're just warming up."
 

I wasn't being kind, I was pleasured by his pleasure. That was as much as I hoped for in any sex encounter and as much as I usually got. Until that night.
 

Zach's desire rose again quickly, as I knew it would, but this time he was determined to wait for me. He stayed my hand, he stared me down, he noticed everything and asked me questions and knew very little about what to do. So I had to get involved, to show him. And somehow, in the showing, I found my own way with someone else for the first time.

Then we were off together, surfing wave after wave of astonishment, rising and dipping with desires and discoveries, until the first birds sang a false dawn and beyond, until the real dawn was rising and I really had to go. Kate, Star's night-sitter, would be awake soon, expecting me to be there.

I was sometimes late home from Honolulu, but never this late, and I didn't want to meet her -- or worse, Star -- beginning their morning with the sight of me arriving back.

He drove me home in his car, a Ford Falcon, through still half-dark morning light. The streetlights were still on. Their flash, along with the hum of the engine and his sated silence, made me drift. With the steering wheel in his hands, he appeared older, like a fully-fledged man, handsome and solid. Someone I could stay with, someone whose kindness I could allow.

What had just happened between us seemed to hold out a promise to me that I hadn't asked for and wasn't even sure that I wanted? Yet I felt I could maybe grow to love this.

To love him?

No. I snapped myself awake. I did not hear myself think that. A slip of the mind, and a damnfool one. It was our very first night, I didn't even know him twelve hours ago. And he was just a boy: nineteen years old, for Chrissakes.

The car braked; we were outside my house. The lights were all off in there, nobody up yet. All the houses around were in darkness: the whole world, except us, in the half-life of sleep. A question was pushing up in me and I had to ask.

"That wasn't your first time, I hope?"

"No," he laughed. "What chance do you think an American male gets to wait till he's nineteen these days? But I have to tell you," he brushed back my hair and touched my face, again with that honest tenderness that was half-frightening. "It was the first time I realized what all the fuss is about. The first time it was so completely, fantastically amazing." He whooped. "Actually, thinking about it: yes, it was my first time."

That was my Zach, charming and disarming, right from the start. What could I do but, there and then in the car, offer him seconds?

All is change and change is all, Star. That's the conclusion I've come to as I look back. Days and doings felt solid back then in a way that they don't now I'm in into my forties. With you, it was more obvious. The imperceptible day-by-day changes that take a child from six to seven to eight are more obvious than those that take its young mother from twenty-six to twenty-seven to twenty-eight. On the outside.

Looking back, I can see that life is always more fluid than it feels while you're living it.

Certain days come back to me again and again. The day you didn't get the Molly Dolly part. My heart tumbled over itself to see you coming out of school, placing one foot in front of the other with the strain of holding your walk and your head and your face as if nothing was wrong.

As soon as we got into the car, you collapsed into tears.
 

"You didn't get it?"

"No," you sobbed. "No."

"Oh, honey, I'm sorry."

"I have no part" --
sob
-- "at all."

"What? But everyone had to be in the school play."

"Everyone" --
sob
-- "does. Except I told Miss Rossi that I QUIT."

"What?"

You were devastated because Miss Rossi had given you the part of Mrs O'Brien. A silly old Irish lady, you said. Not a doll. Or a pony. Or even a tin soldier. The only grown-up. Boring. You wanted to be
Molly Dolly.