Blue Mercy: A Novel. (9 page)

And it was hard to keep an apartment and a car and a child on such jobs. It meant scrimping and saving, recycling and salvaging, and help from friends, which always has a price, no matter how kind they are. It could actually be done but I did it, didn't I, Star? I got you your schooling and your violin lessons and your summer camp. I carved out a good life for us in the gentle town between the mountains and the ocean.

The Golden State has the highest mountain in the US, the greatest bird, the biggest vineyard, the plumpest oranges, the hottest desert, the tallest waterfall, the oldest living trees...It's a waking dream of noise, smog, beach, sky, mountain, fog and open, golden light. It's a nostalgia even while you're living it. Never was a place more put upon by fantasy but for me, for us, it delivered. The ever-present ocean, the spectacular sunsets, the Redwood pines, the mountains wrapped in raiments of snow or mist, dependable. I made them ours.

At weekends, I would take you on the back of my bicycle out to the wilderness, to enjoy the gift of year-round sunshine. Coming from Ireland, a country that often did four seasons in a day, I loved the consistency of Santa Paola's climate. Two seasons, wet and dry, with subtle variations that arrived, on schedule, each year. We moved there in November and those first sunny winter days will always stay with me. Wind full of dust and dried-up leaves and the parched land seeming to listen for the rain that, when it came, was nothing like an Irish downpour but more a gentle baptism, wafting in from the sea in mild and mellow veils, followed by days of softer sun and cooler air. Quickly, in a matter of days it seemed, the brown hillsides turned to green.

I didn't know it that first year but this was Santa Paola's false spring, tricking plants into budding -- or even blossoming out of season -- and people into throwing off their clothes. In January, the real rains came: in torrents, not from the ocean this time, but from the clouds directly above cracking open like eggs. Around us, dry river beds and arroyos raced with water but, unlike Ireland, between each downpour we had blue skies and warmth again.

By the time the last rains came in April, in fitful squalls, real spring had arrived with its blaze of color. Then it was the long, hot, dry season, greens gradually bleaching again. In May, the first desert winds came sweeping down the canyons, like somebody up there had plugged in a giant air heater. It ripped off palm leaves, sometimes even branches, and shifted the mountains closer. Inland was baking-hot, desert-hot, headache-hot, but in Santa Paola, we had our kindly fog bank. Throughout the summer it sat there, offshore on the water, about 1,000 feet thick. As night fell, it would move in, filling the spaces between our homes and in the morning, as the sun climbed, it would obligingly roll back out to sea.

Most of this I told to Joseph Plotkin, leading up to asking him the question I had to ask. Despite my efforts, ensuring Star was clean and healthily fed, brought out at the weekends when I felt like sitting her in front of the TV, sending her to the best school and all the extra-curricular activities I could afford, might this behavior of Star's be a reaction to having a working mom?

"Maybe, maybe not." His unibrow frowned. "I'd like to fill some gaps, Ma'am. Can I ask you about your sex life?"

"I don't see how..."

"Oh, believe me, it's gonna be relevant."

I felt the way I imagine any woman, hearing that sentence while alone in a room with an unknown man and a bed, would feel.

"How long have you been single?" he prompted.

"I'm a widow."

"For how long?"

"Four years now, nearly five."

"Any boyfriends?"

"Nobody serious."

"But you're dating? There have been men?"

"Em... a few."

"Women?"

"No!"

"How many men?"

"I've never counted. I really don't see..."

"Please, Ms Cunningham. If you and I are going to work together, you need to trust me to do my job. If you would..."

I didn't know how many, none of them mattered but after Brendan's going, it comforted me to see admiration in a man's eye. Flirting was the only opportunity I got to have some fun, and casual encounters -- slipped between work and Star -- suited me well.
 

Joseph Plotkin was waiting. "Em... About eight," I said.

"When asked a question like this, a significant percentage of people underestimate. It is important that you tell me the truth."

"I have."

"Okay. Good. Now, tell me what sex is like with these men."

"It depends on the man, I guess."

"Can you identify any pattern? Anything at all?"

I shrugged.

"It's important, Ma'am. Take your time."

In the shopping precinct on the street below, faint voices were bidding each other hello and goodbye, having ordinary conversations. What was I doing, trapping myself in this room?

"It's easier with them than my ex-- my dead -- husband," I said.

"Easier? Do you mean sexually?"

I nodded. "I loved my husband very much but --"

I could hear him breathing, noisily and damply, through his mouth.

"Were you incompatible? Sexually." He just loved saying that word. "Go o-on, Mrs Cunningham. Did you enjoy sex with your husband?"

I shook my head, hot with shame.

"I see. Would that be lack of orgasm? Lack of desire? Or lack of pleasure?" He was like a laconic waiter listing off the dishes of the day. Each syllable was drawn out until it was almost a word in itself: or-gasm, dee-sire, pleas-uuure.

"Maybe," I whispered into my lap. "I suppose. Sometimes."

"Which?"

"All, I suppose. I didn't think about it too much at the time. We were happy together."

He nodded, as if he'd come to some conclusion. "Ms Cunningham, I need you to come across to the couch," he said. "I want you to lie down and close your eyes and relax."

"Why?"

"I want to ask you about your parents."

"What have my parents -- or my sex life for that matter -- got to do with Star and her problems?"

"A great deal, I'd say."

"Look, I..."

"Ms Cunn-ing-ham, don't fight shy now. You are doing very well, very well indeed."

"I really don't see..."

"If you don't feel able to continue, we can stop here and take it forward next week. But you do have" -- he glanced across at the clock on the mantelpiece -- "twenny-five minutes left."

The clock ticked at me. He stared at me with baleful eyes, like he was begging me to take him onto dry land.

"All right," I said.

He led me across to the couch. I lay down. The bed smelled of body. He
did
sleep here.

"So...Your daddy. Tell me all about him."

"I don't know what to say."

"He's alive?"

I nodded.

"What age would he be?"

I did a quick calculation in my head. "He's seventy-six."

"And you're fond of him?"

"I never see him. He's in Ireland."

"That's not what I asked, Ma'am."

"Em... Not especially."

"What about when you were growing up?"

I hesitated.

"Did he beat you?"

"Only...Not...No."

My nostrils had shrunk to pin pricks. The room was airless.

"What happened between y'two? Feeling? Touching?"

The air has evacuated. I cannot fill my breath.

"Miss Cunn-ing-ham?"

In the street, lunchtime was upping the activity: voices and cars bustling. He was calling my name but not even looking at me, making a note in his notebook instead. "What have you just written?" I asked him.

"Mrs Cunn-ing-ham. For a girl, her father is the primary male bond. Through him, she learns how to respond to other men."

"What does
any
of that have to do with Star?"

"Just about everything, Ma'am."

Could this be true? Could my father's poison, despite my best efforts, be leaking through and tainting my efforts?

"I don't understand how."

"It is complicated, surely. We'll have to unravel the points of connection."

"How?"

"Get you into a state of relaxation. Some visualisation. Some rewritin' of outcomes. Once you're fixed up, you're gonna find your daughter's following along fast behind you."

Rewriting my outcomes, I liked the sound of that. "Really, Doctor?"

"Well, now...In this business, we don't give guarantees. The mind is a mystery, Miss Cunn-ing-ham, but in your case, I'd be confident of a positive outcome. Yes Ma'am."

I lay back down. He was not a doctor. Why had I called him Doctor?

"So... you ready to go? Close your eyes there."

Behind my eyelids was a night sky splashed with orange.

"You breathe deeply now. That's it. In through your nose, out through the mouth. Deep breaths. Now relax your muscles, let your body grow real heavy. Yes ma'am, that's it... very good. Now. I want you to picture in your head what I'm describin'. Your daddy has walked into your bedroom and he's comin' close to your bed. You see that?"

"Yes."

"Under those bedclothes, you're naked. You can see...
 
Snakes alive! Miss Cunning-ham! You can't jump up like that."

The door. Where was the door? I couldn't see the door.

"Miss Cunning-ham, please. Lie back down. I stood, dizzy, getting dizzier.

"Ma'am, I know it's difficult but... to leave without completion could be dangerous.

"Can't."

"You are over-reactin', Ma'am. This is likely what is causin' your problems. If you don't lie down now, it's over for you."

I put my hands over my ears.
 

"Yes Ma'am. And for your girl." His gimlet eyes fixed me in a stare, like the eyes on the dead fish my father used to catch in Doolough Lake.
 

My vision cleared. The door emerged. I did what my instinct had told me to do at the start.

I fled.

Late February in Doolough. I stand by the window, looking down on the front yard, coffee cup in one hand and in the other, rolled into a scroll, a letter from Zach.

A quarter of a page. Less than one hundred words and not one of them a word I need.

19
^th
February 1990

Dearest Mercy,

I have found a place where I can be. You were right about the West of Ireland. I spent the New Year on Inishmore and am now in this village in Connemara, below a mountain I have befriended. I go walking there every day, you'd love it. I hope all has come to pass as you wanted? That your father departed and your daughter arrived and both of them and you are at peace.

Your

Zach.

"Befriended". It sounded so phoney on paper, though I knew that in the presence of his six-feet-two of sleeked muscle, in the hold of his piercing eyes, in the force-field of his presence, it would sound real and true.

This letter was so abrupt, it hurt. I'd prefer not to have received it at all. But why was I surprised? He'd told me he was wary of words. It was the only thing he ever said that made me wary of him. We were in Santa Paola Central Park at the time. I replied, "The man who is wary of words is wary of life," which made him sit up.

"Do you really think so?" he'd asked.

"I was paraphrasing someone."

"Who?"

"An English writer you Yanks probably have little time for. Doctor Johnson."

"Of dictionary fame?"

"Yes. He once said the chief glory of every people arises from its authors. I happen to agree with him."

"I don't trust words. All they do is feed our false sense of self."
 

I was thunderstruck. To the young me, words alone were, as my favorite poet WB Yeats put it, the only "certain good". The lodestar of human achievement. Especially the written word that allowed us to reach across place and time. To me, only words were capable of encompassing it all, able to touch head and heart and soul, altogether, all at once.

"It's a matter of balance," he explained, when I offered all this. "Words
can
be good but the babble's grown too loud. We so rarely turn off our thoughts or our talk. So what this world needs right now is more silence."

Zach was only a student then, just setting out on life, how did he know so much? We walked on, me conscious, as always, of being a thirty-year-old woman with this guy who was barely out of boyhood. Then we came across a magnificent flowering bush, except I couldn't remember what it was called. I stopped to admire it and was saying, "I know the name of this, I just can't remember, it's on the tip of my tongue, I do know it..."

"What does it matter what humans name it?" he said. "Be quiet so you can look at it."

I quieted down. And immediately remembered it was a hibiscus.

Halcyon days.

No hibiscus in Doolough, in dead February. Down on the lawn, a robin is digging up worms. The grass is green, but the rest of the world -- the trees and the sky and the mountains and slivers of lake -- are grey, grey, grey. It's ten in the morning but the electric light is still on overhead and my desk lamp is also lit. I'd forgotten how long and low-hanging an Irish winter can be, with its fifteen or sixteen hours of darkness, and the day so grey when it finally does arrive. So damp and cloud-congested, that it feels like Planet Earth has a head-cold.

I am drowning in detail, but all I seem to hold from my early years is an intense but undefined embarrassment, a sense of blushing and shuffling through my days, especially when with my father in the presence of others. I was ashamed, but of what exactly? I rummage through my child's mind and find nothing but a swirl of feelings. Only Pauline stepped into the haze I had sprayed around myself, and forced me to see her face.

I do have memories of this house, of course, especially of the kitchen. I can conjure up the border of walls, the solidity of the big kitchen table as I rode around it on my tricycle, the warmth of the fire, the grey light coming in the low window, everything tall and looming. And walking out, up to the mountain or down to the lake when the house was too full of feeling for me, face burning, feet tripping over the stones.