Blue Mercy: A Novel. (22 page)

I brought her to dinner that evening but again, she barely ate. At the end of the meal, she said: "Mom, I want to give up college. I want to come home."

"What about your degree?"

"I'm not studying anyway. I cut two classes today. I can't concentrate. I can't stop crying."

"You'll get through it, sweetheart. You're not going to be like this forever."

"You don't want me either."

"Don't be silly, Star." It was actually one of my motherly fantasies. Star asleep in her bedroom, home with an illness. Nothing serious, a flu or suchlike, nothing that a few days in bed and a little tenderness wouldn't fix. I'd bring her books and magazines, the kind I despised but she liked. I'd set her up with lots of pillows and the TV remote control. I'd fix her lemon remedies and a little food, nothing heavy on the stomach. Soups, custards, plenty of fluids. "You do know it's not that, don't you?"

"Yeah, Mom, sure. Whatever."

I left her, with money and presents and a promise to take a phone call every night. I left her because I was sure it was the right thing to do and had, in a stronger moment, won her agreement on that.

So I arrived back to Santa Paola, months early. Marsha was disappointed for me but pleased for herself, she said. She had missed me.

I slotted back into my life, everything the same, except a nightly phone-call from Star. She was not coping but she was managing to force herself through her days, often giving me a hard time on the phone but always calling again the next night. We hadn't been so close in years.
 

And then, right in the middle of this sensitive time, Zach arrived back to Santa Paola.

Early one Wednesday afternoon, during that lull time in the café between lunch and afternoon coffee, I headed out for my break. I had two chores to do that day: to go to the library to exchange my books and to
 
Brown's Healthfood Store to get my supplements. Both were on Ocean Avenue, close enough to walk, so off I swung, out into the sunshine with my book-bag over my shoulder, heavy but not weighing me down.
 

For seventeen years now, I had lived in this college town -- population 50,000 -- swollen in term time by the student population to almost double that. Sixteen years of basking in its sunshine (325 days a year is its boast), of tending my house, running my business, raising my kid and living out my life.

Here was where I knew best; here was where I was best known. I was Mercy Mulcahy, the Irish woman. I lived on Westcliff in the smallest house on a lovely road, almost in view of the ocean. And, in that little house, it could be said, I had lived the life I'd chosen sixteen years ago, negotiating its clear spaces and islands of homely furniture, nurtured by its books and music, comforted by its cushions and blankets.
 

I was also one half of Better World Cafe, still known as the "new" cafe down on the boardwalk, one of the minority of the town's businesses that were run by women. Nice place, and the food was good, if you didn't mind things a bit hippy-dippy.

And I was Mrs Mulcahy, single mom, mother of Maria, more commonly known as Star. Such a sad case, that girl...They remembered seeing her around town as a girl, riding her bike along the boardwalk, or strolling the stores with her friends, such a pretty little thing before she put on all that weight and started wearing those awful clothes. Drink and drugs, it was said. An eating disorder? Probably, yes. And my, so aggressive. Remember her walking down this very street with that friend of hers? One hand held inside their leather jackets, some sort of affectation. Stomping like a pair of off-duty soldiers, angry eyes up front.

Tough, raising kids these days, especially on your own.
 

That's what the best of them said and those who said worse didn't bother me, not any more. I was steadied by the presence of my neighbors. Their "Hi, Mercy" or "Afternoon, Mrs Mulcahy!" or "How is Star?" seemed like a small, everyday gift and reminded me of what I opted for when I moved here. Domesticity, suburbia, a place where I could fight free of my past. A place where I, and my daughter, could feel safe. I held onto those small connections, valuing what I still had, though much was lost.

Freedom and safety aren't external, I knew that by then. A house and a good job won't keep you safe; a trip to Europe doesn't set you free.
I wish, I wish, I wish...
Those dangerous, soft-footed words still formed the backing track in my head. I never said them aloud, not even to Marsha, because I didn't believe in them any more, but I was still thrown forward on them, tossed up the road that day on their swoosh and slice. The draw of desire prodded by the rod, the wand, of I.

On Fade Street, I crossed to talk to Mrs Hawkins, whose husband of forty-four years had died two months before. Then onto our old-fashioned library where heads looked up as the wooden double-doors swung closed behind me. Here too, I was well known. It was quiet today: no students from the high school as there were last time I was in, too far from exam time. I didn't have to ask for my books. Jenny saw me and bent for them behind the counter. I always rang ahead, a relic from busier days.

She slid them across the polished wood. The new Edna O'Brien, especially ordered. A 'how-to' on writing fiction.
The Bell Jar
. I was rediscovering Sylvia Plath. I fished in my bag for my library card, grateful as always for the gift of free books.
 

Tonight, after we closed the café, I would take them home and choose which one to read first. The O'Brien, I reckoned. I could do with an injection of her luscious, over-ripe sentences, her sense of the hidden dilemma within the obvious conflict. I would turn the key in the lock of my front door and sit immediately down at the work table I have set up in the hallway, leaving the book in its bag, delaying the pleasure of reading until after I had written something myself. The hallway faced west and was the place to sit at that time of day, to catch the evening sun.

I would write until I grew too tired or hungry, whichever came first. A break to eat would mark the end of work for the day. The O'Brien would come out of the book bag and be taken to the kitchen and laid in on the pine table while I prepared supper. Bean stew brought home from the café, accompanied by a robust chunk of bread and a glass, or possibly two, (never a third) of red wine. The bright new cover of the book would gleam in its plastic library jacket, catching the light from the lamp overhead and, food warmed, I would sit and open it.
 

Page one.
 

A new story.
 

After eating, my reading would continue in the living room. It would be dark by then and I'd put on the reading lamp in the corner. Plumping the cushions, I'd sink down, pulling a coverlet around me. After I have read my fill, I might watch the late news. The medfly outbreak that threatened California fruit farms was putting an end to Governor Jerry Brown's bid for election to the Senate. The nation was sinking into its worst recession since the Great Depression. More than nine million Americans were now officially unemployed.

Watch is the word, with all the distance implied. I won't be engaged by these news stories as I am with the books, the reading of Edna O'Brien's, or the writing of my own. I'll let the TV information wash across me only because I feel I should. It's important for me to be informed about world affairs. Tomorrow in the café, earnest students or activists will debate the detail and their beliefs about them, with passion and rigor. Marsha -- who is always skipping with feeling about some injustice or another -- will come out of the kitchen to join in, with her always intelligent, always probing opinions. And I will join in a way that facilitates them to do the talking.
 

My opinions are too watery to survive in Better World. The unfolding of political events feels inconsequential to me. I know millions of people are affected by these decisions but they don't feel real. People enter and exit the world and their own life story unfolds. Or not. That seems to me to be the beginning and the end of it, the only news worth telling.

I admire Marsha and all the others who do care. I provide a place where they can work out what they think and share it with each other and make a difference, in the way they want. They are so taken with their own thoughts that they never notice I don't offer mine.

After the news, I will prepare for bed. Tidy the house, iron whatever I am going to wear next day, undress and go through my night-time routine. Cleanse, exfoliate, tone, moisturize, tweeze, brush. Tonight is Wednesday, so I may also manicure. Shiny and polished, I will take myself to sleep with some final reading, another chapter of the O'Brien or a different book, something lighter, or maybe the Santa Paola Sentinel, which comes out on Wednesdays. Then to sleep, in time to get eight hours before rising at seven.

That's what I thought was ahead for me that evening. Instead, I left the library and walked on to Brown's
 
and bumped right into Zach.

As soon as I walked into the store, I saw him. His eye-catching back, tall and broad under a white T-shirt. For a second, or maybe two, I was unaware that it was him, but then realization dropped. I could feel it falling inside me. He was pointing towards the meat. As I drew nearer, I heard his voice -- "and six slices of chorizo" -- and knew for sure.

"Zach?" I said, from behind his back.

He stood shock still for a moment, frozen, before turning around. A splinter of something as our eyes collided. I felt it again, what I had felt the first time we met. His intense presence, stronger now, I thought. I'd forgotten how strong it was. A word from my childhood floated into my mind: charismatic.

"Well, well," he said, voice breezy. "If it isn't Mercy."

He wore a smile that said, I am pleased to see you but I am just as pleased to see this chorizo I am being handed. You are no more special than anything else.

Instantly a thought rose in me: You can drop the nonchalance, my friend. You are mine, I'm getting you back. The sensations that swirled around that thought flooded my entire body -- with him, with us, with what it had been like to be with him and what it had been like to be without him.

I flicked a quick look at his left hand. Naked. Zach would wear a ring, I thought, if he were married.

"It
is
you," I said.

"Me indeed."

"Home for a visit?"

"Maybe a bit longer than that."

"Really? That's great."

He turned back to the assistant behind the counter. "And a large slice of Camembert," he said, bestowing his beautiful smile on her.
 

Mine.

"Your hair," I said to him. "It's so different." It was short, very short, practically shaven. He ran his palm across the skull and stared at me, as if he didn't know what to say. No, as if he didn't have anything to say to me. Unthinkable thought. But words had also evacuated my head. Silence grew and grew like a big, invisible balloon pressing against us.

It was he who rescued us: "How is your little girl?"

"Not so little any more. She's in college."

"No!"

"It's been nine years, Zach."

"I still think of her as a kid."

"It's the kids who bring home what nine years means."

I was now facing forty but until this moment, had not found that milestone oppressive. The American obsession with looking younger has always seemed ridiculous to me. All that running and bending, and now all that cutting and slicing, just to pretend you are a few years younger than you are.

That day in Brown's, all such reasoning flew away. Under Zach's eyes, I was conscious not only of the lines around my eyes and mouth, the sag that was developing in the skin behind my chin, the wedge of padding that lined the top of my waistband, but also that I wasn't wearing any make-up, that I was in my second-best jeans -- only half as flattering to what was left of my figure as my best -- and that my hair color needed a retouch. For the first time, I felt the impulse that drives women under the knife. If, in that moment, a surgeon was to promise that he could restore me to what I was at thirty -- the age I was when Zach and I first met, the age when my skin still glowed without make-up, when my hair was still dye-free and all jeans looked equally good -- I might have chosen to believe him.

It didn't help that Zach was not less, but more, beautiful than he had been nine years before. He had filled out in the shoulders and filled out internally too: come into himself.

Time was tunnelling in around us from all sides, cutting out the girl behind the deli counter, the two people now standing in line behind me, the shop and all the people in it. There was only us two. I knew not to approach him as I would another guy. The light swapping of banter, the game of the tip and parry you play so you don't expose too much too soon, wouldn't do for Zach.

"Would you like to go get a coffee?" I asked.

He laughed. Was that a bitter note? Was he still hurt? If he was, that meant I had a chance.

Mine. Mine.

"Unless you'd rather not. Unless there's somebody else?" I said.

His eyes widened, surprised at my directness. "No, it's not that."

"Will that be all, Sir?" asked the deli girl from a long way off.

"Come on, Zach, this doesn't need to be so hard. Just say yes or no. Your call."

As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. Too blunt. Yet if I played it as cool as him, he'd let me walk away. I played my last throw. "Zach, I'm so sorry about what happened. Not just for what I did to you but also to myself."

"It's all a very long time ago."

"It was the biggest mistake of my life."

"You think I don't know that, Mercy?"

"Then let's not make a second one."

His silence stared me down, face full of so many saids and unsaids. I held his eyes and would not let them go.

"That will be $6.40, Sir."

"Please Miss," I said, without turning my head. "Can you give us a second?"
 

Still he didn't speak, so I had to. I put my hand on my heart. "I forgive myself, Zach. I forgive me even though I put myself through the wringer by leaving you. I forgive me, because if I don't, I'd only be doing the same thing all over again to myself. And to you. Zach? Do you understand?"