Blue Mercy: A Novel. (8 page)

And at the weekends, or sometimes after work, to go for a few drinks with the boys. Was I really saying he didn't deserve that much?

Well, no, I wasn't. But I was worried that everything outside the house was more interesting to him than anything in it. And when he was home it was TV. Baseball, football, basketball. Crime dramas and comedies.

The rest I could rationalize, but that drove me nuts. He'd never watched TV his whole life long, yet now our routines -- when we could talk, have sex, go out -- had to fit around the schedules.

What was that about?

Brendan looked back over his shoulder at me. "We're not on the right road."

"Oh, no," I whispered, looking up from the map. I was whispering so I wouldn't wake Star, asleep in her little car seat beside me. "Please don't say that."

"It"s not what I say that counts, Merce. What does the map say?"

"It says...um...oh shit, I think we took the wrong exit."

"For God's sake!"
 
Brendan banged his two palms against the steering-wheel. "What are you doing back there?"

"My best, maybe?" I tried to keep the wobble from my voice.

"Oh, great, now the bloody waterworks."

It was the day before Star's second birthday and we were driving her to a motel in Truro, Cape Cod, for her first ever vacation. That's what we called it, though Star felt no need to be somewhere else. It was we who needed to get away from what we had become.

I had chosen the destination, a village where -- a lifetime ago -- we had slept on the beach, under the stars, in two sleeping bags zipped together to make one. We both knew exactly what I was trying to resurrect, but it was all going horribly wrong.

"Stop shouting," I hissed. "You'll wake her."

It had taken me ages to get her off to sleep, reading to her, waving toys in front of her face, taking her onto my lap and rocking her off, then slipping her into the car-seat. I was exhausted myself. She had taken to waking in the night and the broken sleep left me stupid and helpless during the day. She walked around the house, jettisoning toys, juice, building blocks, clothing, toast, marbles and I followed, half the time on my knees. Bending and picking, wiping and cleaning, tucking and clearing, like a servant.

No, servants get paid. I was like a slave, one of those immigrant women who gets locked up in a house by tyrannical employers, except the tyrant was Star. Or, rather, the poverty that didn't allow me to buy some help. But, while I complained about housework and baby chores, another part of me was stunned that I had been entrusted with this child. This object of beauty, this precious treasure, this crown jewel of a daughter.

Look at me,
I'd think, driving her to the store, lifting her into the tub, feeding her in her high chair.
Me.
 
On my own. I am allowed to look after her.
It didn't seem possible. It seemed like something bad must happen. That must be why I was always issuing warnings to her. "Don't do that!"

"Be careful!"

"No! Bad fire!"

"Get down, honey, get down NOW!"

"Mind the edge."

"Come back
here
!"

With much sighing, Brendan got us back onto the right road and eventually to the hotel. In the bedroom, we closed the curtains against the glare of the day, spread ourselves on the big double bed and let ourselves play with her. Her favorite toy at that time was a letter-board that used to make animal sounds when she struck the right first letter of their name. It was a bit too old for her, she didn't know her letters yet, but she loved to bash the squares indiscriminately and hear the sounds.
Moo. Quack. Oink.

Her enjoyment and the half-dark, muffled peace of the hotel bedroom soothed us.
 

"I'm sorry, Bren," I said, after a time.

"Me too. Give me a kiss." So I did. A long kiss.

When we finished, he threw himself back on the pillows, body rigid.
 

"
Ahhhh
!" he shrieked and I laughed, knowing what he was going to say next. "Struck by Lightning!" Something he used to say a lot, once upon a time.

I laughed again and shimmied in close. "Snakebite," I whispered in his ear, and offered him my neck.

"
Ssssssssss
!" went Star's toy, as she struck the snake box in the moment Brendan's teeth nipped my skin.
 
She gurgled up into our surprised faces, not knowing why she suddenly had our attention, and we burst out in a duet of laughter.

"Who's a clever girl?" I said, though she hadn't done anything clever at all. And then we found we couldn't stop laughing -- at the silly coincidence, at Star's adorable smile, at the satin coverlet so silky against our bare legs, at the good feelings now filling the room, at the daft names we used to have and the naïve people we used to be. A laugh filled with tenderness for our daughter and our own younger selves. For youth itself, its carefree ignorance.

 
I was so happy in that moment, that's what I remember, still as I sit here now, in Doolough, writing this. Parenthood might be tough, but we were surviving it. Beneath the squalls and storms of living, despite Brendan's dead-end jobs, even with my poor domestics, we still had love to give each other and our little girl. I was proud of us for that.

After a while, we went down to the poolside. We had it to ourselves. The sun was low in the sky, the evening glowing orange and still warm. Brendan put on Star's water wings while I lay on a sun-bed, watching. He swung her up onto his shoulders and climbed down the little ladder into the glinting water. This released a memory in me that I'd forgotten, of my father holding me like that on his shoulders, walking us both into the water at the beach. "Ready?" he would ask me, his voice smaller in the wide outdoors than it was in the house and, without waiting for an answer, he walked us in, me on top, him below. I held the sides of his head under me, unsure of my grip, frightened he'd go too far, that the water would come right up over his head and then over me.

I shook my head. This was 1962, I was here with Brendan, it was Star's anxiety I was feeling. He was gently lowering her into the water, holding her out in front of him like the figurehead of a ship and she was loving it. "More," she whooped whenever he stopped, and off he set again, her chubby little hands slapping the water.

And then. The breach.

"
Aaaaargh
!" Brendan went, a roar as he went down.
 

I don't want to recall any of this now, the story I repeated so often afterwards, how I saw him twitching in the water, then flaying, his face contorted. How I saw Star's face sinking under the surface, and quicker than thought, was in the pool with them, water to my thighs, grabbing her.

Even now, I can still feel her costume, wet and cold against my chest, and see Brendan thrashing forward, face down, spectacularly splashing until he was just as spectacularly still. And hear the silence that followed, and in it the slap-slap-slap of the lifeguard's bare feet on the tiles, running towards us.

deprived of a loved one through a profound absence, esp. due to the loved one's death.

*

Buzzzzzz.

"Yes?"

"It's Iris Cunningham."

"Come on up."

I pushed open the door and a tang of must prickled my nostrils. An old carpet, pattern worn to grey all the way up. The bannister looked sticky and I avoided touching it as I climbed up the flight of stairs, and around and up again, and again a third time. I came to the blue door, as described on the telephone, and found a homemade, cardboard sign, inscribed unevenly with black marker: JOSEpH PLoTKIN, PsychoTHerApIst.

I was about to turn and sneak back down, but the door was ajar and a voice called out, "Com'on in." A billyhick, Southern drawl. I hadn't expected that: my thoughts had been of somebody urban and urbane, with a dark beard and spectacles. Instead, I found a fat man with bushy, black brows that met in the center, over two bulging eyes set too far apart.

He was seated in an armchair with wooden arms and didn't get up.

"Miss Cunn-ing-ham?" His drawl made three separate syllables of the name.

"No, er --" I'd momentarily forgotten my alias. "--I mean, yes."

"Well now..." He raised one half of his unibrow. "Which would it be: no or yes?"

"It's 'Ms'," I said, recovering. "Not Miss."

The unibrow wilted, returning to its rightful place. "Allright-y Ma'am. I'll try to remember that."

He reached under his chair and brought out a clip-board with a plastic pen dangling on a grubby length of string. "Maybe you'd fill out this here form for me." A registration form: name, address, details of payment methods.

"I'd rather not sign up just yet. I'm...em...I'm talking to a few therapists before deciding who to go with."

"Oh. Allright-y." He returned the clipboard to the floor. "So what appears to be the trouble?"

"It's not me," I said. "I'm here about my daughter."

He nodded. "Go on." Go
aw-h-nnn
.

"She has taken to saving trash. Any scribbled piece of paper. Juice cartons from the playground. Her friend's discarded lunch wrappings. All sorts of garbage and junk. She keeps it all in her bedroom."

"Uh-huuh."

"That's it. I want to know why she's doing this. I want it to stop."

He folded his fingers into a steeple under his chin. "What age is she?"

"Six."

"And how long has this been goin' on?"
Aw-h-nnn.

"For months now. At first, I hardly noticed. She just wanted to keep whatever she had touched. It started with price tags from new clothes, for example, or a piece of paper with a single mark on it, or wrapping paper torn off gifts. I didn't understand it, but it seemed harmless."

"So you indulged her?"

"I ignored it for a while, but it's been getting progressively worse. It's turned into anything that has been touched by anyone she knows. It's not normal."

"But you continued to indulge?"

"I don't believe I'd use the word 'indulge'. But it's turning into anything she sees. Trash from the streets and school, as well as home. It can't go on."

"I see. A moment, please."

He bent over his notebook and began to write. I looked around me. He had made some attempts to brighten the room with a pot plant and two scarlet, velvet screens to corner off the interview space. I peeped past them at the counter kitchen, with miniature cooker and fridge, that occupied one corner and the bed in the other. Did he live here as well as using it for clients?
 

"Do you think you might be able to help her, Mr Plotkin?"

"I do believe so, Ma'am. But I'm going to need more."

He wanted to know everything, not just about Star, but about me. I answered all his questions, told him about Brendan and coming to live in Santa Paola. With Brendan gone, Brooklyn had nothing to hold me and by 1964, it seemed like California was the place for beats and all the assorted refugees from 1950s conformity. Artists and rebels and gays and outcasts and seekers and wounded soldiers: California was calling us all.

So I set out to go where Brendan and I hadn't reached, to San Francisco. And I loved being there. I got us a place in a shared apartment in a three-story brick building, half of the second floor between five of us, all artists. The walls were covered in murals and drapes of Indian cloth, the huge mantel was covered in religious artifacts and candles and I went about half-hungry in order to pay rent and seething in a cauldron of
 
bereavement.
 

My husband had had a heart defect, previously undetected.
 
So I was now a single mom, alone in the world except for half the boho types of San Francisco, who used to find their way to our place.
 
I loved that, especially in the early days, when one of my roommates, a sculptor called Matt, looked after us well. But Matt began to press for things I couldn't give and stopped babysitting for me and it all became too expensive and the paint and art supplies became a danger to a toddler.

So I packed us up again and came down south to this coastal college town, to a more suburban existence. Santa Paola wasn't "the city that knows how" but it was sunnier and more child-friendly, with good public schools. I found us new friends a roomy apartment close to Westcliff Road, and Star and I settled into being Californian.

It was a good place for a widow and her child to draw together the tatters of a torn life. That was how I now described myself to the new people I met, and how I described myself to myself. Poor, lone, widow, bereaved. Poor me and my poor little girl, clinging to each other.

Here we had only one bed. I would lie in it, beside Star, still as I could so as not to disturb her, my fingers clutching the mattress. If it wasn't for her, I told myself, I'd give up, throw in the towel, quit for good. What that meant, I wasn't quite sure, but I knew that what pulled me through my days was having to get up when she cried, even if I was exhausted; having to produce healthy food for her, even if I didn't care what I ate myself; having to dress her up pretty and brush her hair, though any old clothes did me and though my own hair looked -- in Doolough parlance -- like I'd been dragged through a bush backwards.

Nothing in my life had prepared me to be both carer and provider. My choices were limited. I had a couple of part-time stints: stuffing packs to redeem coupon offers; calling telephone owners to offer them complicated discounts; sitting at a table in a dark hotel basement, asking people what they thought of a chocolate advertisement or an unnamed brand of margarine. For the most part, though, I cleaned and I served, the untrained female's fallbacks.

The worst thing about that kind of work is the managers. Bartenders and waitresses serve, cleaners scrub, pot-boys fetch and carry but all managers do is try to rein in staff or raise profits, usually through getting petty about ketchup bottles. There's not much that's wholesome in work like that, even before you add the personality failings. The ones who think you're available for a grope. The ones who act like your pay-check comes out of their pocket. The ones who get a kick out of making your evening a little bit tougher than it needs to be.