Mercury (22 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING, EVEN
before I opened my eyes, I knew the wind was blowing from a different quarter. Viv made breakfast and took the children to school, two things she had not done in several months. When she came home, I was sitting drinking coffee among the breakfast dishes. Her response to disaster was to clean, mine to let everything slide.

She marched in, cheeks glowing from the cold, and, not even waiting to unzip her jacket, said, “I can't stand this, Don. Wondering every day if you're going to the police. The uncertainty is tearing me apart, which I know I deserve, but Marcus's teacher phoned yesterday. He's acting up in class. And Trina threw a book at Ivy.”

“I can't stand it either,” I said. “I still can't believe you bought a gun.”

“To protect Mercury from Charlie.”

Her bitterness scorched the table. I lined up the boxes of cereal, each with its gaudy promises, and said that was another thing I couldn't believe. “I lied to you, and that lie almost killed my friend. What happened when you spoke to Claudia?”

“I told her what I believed at the time: I'd left the stables unlocked. You, Hilary, and Jack had a boozy dinner and decided to visit Mercury. She filled in the rest. We'd had these break-
ins. By some awful coincidence the burglar also showed up that night. First I'm convinced someone is after Mercury, and it's Charlie. Now Claudia's convinced some killer is after all of us, and it's me.”

She was watching me over cereal boxes with an expression of equal parts sorrow and anger. “Yesterday,” she continued, “I was driving home when I suddenly thought, I've got a tank of gas, I've got my credit cards, I should just keep going. Head west on 90, or north on 93. But how would I live without the kids? And where would I go? Mom's sofa bed in Ann Arbor? Dad's basement in San Diego? Some dingy motel with plastic glasses and slippery sheets? I'm too old to be a stable rat.”

America is the country of reinvention, of moving on, but this possibility—that she might simply flee—had never occurred to me. I was trying, and failing, to imagine a life in which I knew nothing about Viv, had no contact with her, when Nabokov squawked. Why was he sitting here, rather than holding court in the waiting room? I took him a handful of peanuts, and he clucked with pleasure.

Perhaps still thinking of stable rats, Viv said Charlie had been away visiting colleges. She would fire her as soon as she returned.

“Is that really necessary?” Since her visit to my office, a visit I had not mentioned and did not plan to, I had an inchoate dread of crossing Charlie.

“Don, she lied, she stole, she trespassed, she betrayed me.” With each crime, Viv toppled a cereal box until they were all four horizontal.

“And how will you explain firing her to Claudia?”

She hesitated, looking now not at me but at her hand where it moved back and forth over the table, crooked finger bobbing.
“I was thinking, if it's okay with you, I'd tell her the truth: how you found Charlie riding, how she begged you not to tell anyone.”

Any step towards the truth seemed like a good thing, and I said so. “I behaved badly,” I said, “but I couldn't have guessed the cost would be so high.”

“Nor could I.” We both watched her hand following the grain of the wood. Steve told me once that trees carry the memory of human disasters. The Highland Clearances, Andersonville, the flu epidemic, the Wall Street crash, each can be read in the grain of an oak. When someone cuts down the maple in our garden, will they find evidence of these last few months: our silences, our fights, our lies?

“So you're okay,” she said, “with being the one who's blamed?”

I nodded—even a little blame would be a huge relief—and asked again about Charlie. “What will you say to her?”

“Why would you care?”

Steve might not notice anything missing in my response but Viv was watching me closely. Fortunately Nabokov, peanuts gone, intervened. “Hey ho, hey ho,” he called. I had an appointment in twenty minutes. Only when I was driving to the office, with him murmuring beside me, did I realize that, once again, I had failed to tell her I was going to the police. Another day would pass without a clear decision.

A
T LUNCHTIME
J
ACK WAS
sitting up, a tray of beige hospital food on the table before him, his dark glasses back in place. Hilary's chair was empty; she had gone to get coffee.

“Tell me this looks better than it smells,” he said.

“I can't. How are you?” When it seemed that Jack might
not wake up, his recovering consciousness was everything. Now other concerns—the state of his shoulder, the state of his psyche—flooded back.

“I'm not sure. The doctor who came this morning has done a course on how not to talk to patients. He mumbles very fast, and when you ask a question he mumbles even faster.”

“I'll see what I can find out. How do you feel?”

“As long as I lie still, okay. As soon as I move, definitely not okay. I want to ask you something while Hil's not here.”

Involuntarily—did he know about Viv?—I stepped back.

“I keep having flashbacks,” he went on. “This excruciating pain, and then Mercury going berserk. I was sure I was going to die. Why would someone shoot me? Who hates me enough to do that? Haven't I already paid my dues? This morning Hilary dropped a book. I almost leaped out of the bed. I think I should break up with her. Not only am I blind, but I have terrible karma. I worry I'll bring it into her household and—”

No wonder, I thought, he and my father, each offering divorce to a woman he loved, had gotten on so well. I interrupted him with his own words. “Remember,” I said, “what you told me about Odysseus. How for years and years nothing goes right. He's tested over and over—Circe, the sirens, the Cyclops—and when he finally arrives in Ithaca, he has to disguise himself as a beggar and kill the suitors. You've said yourself that being blind doesn't protect you from anything. What happened at the stables was an accident. It could just as easily have been me who was shot, or Hilary.”

“You're sounding like me,” Jack said. “Intellectually I do know I'm not being singled out for special persecution. But I'm having a hard time believing it. Or accepting it. Or something.”

Sentence by sentence, I had been approaching the bed. Now,
in the blackness of his glasses, I saw my own reflection. “I'll believe it for you,” I said, “until you're ready. That's what friends do, have faith for each other. Being shot is a major insult to the body. You can't expect to feel like your old self immediately.”

When he still looked unconvinced, I repeated my feeble joke about how he could write about blind people being shot. My comment did serve to nudge his thoughts in a new direction. His next chapter, he said, was going to be about the differences between those born blind and those who go blind later. The French philosopher Diderot had described asking a man who'd been blind since birth if he'd like to be able to see. To his surprise, the man had said no. If he could have an extra sense, what he'd like was longer arms.

“You don't miss what you've never had,” Jack concluded. “And I'm always going to miss what I've lost.”

Before I could reply, we both heard footsteps. “Hilary,” he said.

And there she was, carrying two espressos, announcing that Jack could come home tomorrow. His surgery would be next week.

I
N THE LOBBY OF
the hospital two boys were fencing with plastic swords. Watching them jab and parry, I found myself thinking about something that happened with Robert in the playground of our Edinburgh school. Most of the time we played nicely, but occasionally, for no obvious reason, we boys would gang up,
Lord of the Flies
style, on a classmate. One day Robert was the chosen victim. Several boys seized sticks and drove him towards the far corner of the playground, where a chestnut shielded us from adult view. A few yards from the tree he stopped and, empty-handed, turned to face his pursuers.

“Hit me,” he said, “if that's what you want. It won't make you better than me.”

“Scaredy-cat,” called one boy. “Cowardy custard,” called another.

“No,” said Robert. “You're the cowardy custards.” He raised his hand and counted steadily. “One, two, three, four, five—”

At “five,” the ringleader, Angus—he could climb a rope in under a minute—leaped forward and swiped his stick at Robert's legs, bare between shorts and socks. Robert stumbled and cried out, but he kept watching his assailants, looking from one to the other.

Meanwhile I hung back, hoping for adult intervention, vacillating. Siding with Robert would only anger the boys, and we would still be outnumbered. But if I were the one in trouble, I knew he would come to my aid. As another boy flung a stick, I at last pushed through the crowd to stand beside my friend.

Angus stared at the two of us for a moment. “This is boring,” he said. And just as suddenly the boys were gone, leaving Robert and me alone beneath the chestnut tree.

“Almost conker time,” he said, bending to pick up a spiny green nut.

As I left the hospital I thought that this incident revealed something crucial about each of us. Robert, like my father, had an immediate sense of justice, whereas I tacked back and forth between various arguments—on the one hand, on the other—and sometimes hid from decisions: Exhibit A: Robert, Exhibit B: Ruth, Exhibit C: Jack and Viv. When our family was running smoothly, in that period after she began working at Windy Hill and before my father got so ill, Viv used to tease me about my caution. She seemed to make decisions effortlessly. Let's take the train to Portland. Let's go to the movies. That shirt is per
fect. Shooting Jack, although accidental, was the result of a long line of decisions.

Or perhaps there was only one decision—to buy a gun—and everything else followed. Guns aren't magical; they're logical.

Perhaps it was also logical that once I had lied to the police, once she had failed to confess, once Jack had woken up, Viv started arguing that there was no need for either of us to confess. Doing so would not help Jack, and would only damage our children, terribly, irrevocably.

S
OMETIMES AS I CLICK
the lenses back and forth, asking, “Better? Or worse?” my patients say, “I'm sorry. I'm not sure.” Don't be sorry, I tell them. That means we've nearly got the prescription right. But in my own case doubt did not lead to certainty. Hour by hour I sank deeper into indecision. Driving to and from the office, I sometimes pictured Bonnie sitting beside me, listening to my hesitations and deliberations, saying, “Have you considered . . . ?” “Maybe . . .” So when Merrie said she had made an appointment for her daughters, it seemed the answer to my secret longings. Somehow, without either of us mentioning Jack or Viv, she would tell me what to do.

And there she was on Wednesday, wearing a turquoise jacket, standing with two girls beside Nabokov's cage.

“We're talking to the famous Nabokov,” she said. “This is Alice.” She put her hand on the shoulder of the taller girl. “And Suzie. Girls, say hello to Dr. Stevenson.”

They did, bobbing their heads. “Thank you for making Mom better,” Alice said.

Nothing was obviously different. Bonnie's face, her hair, her clothes, were all much the same as on previous occasions, but as soon as she said my name, I knew that whatever had made me
reach out to her, whatever had made her name chime so sweetly on my inner ear, made me believe that chiming was reciprocated, was gone. She was just another patient, albeit with a more interesting condition. They all three came into my examination room. I explained to the girls about dilating their eyes. The drops didn't hurt—the first one was an anesthetic—but they made everything bright and fuzzy.

“You'll have to wear sunglasses for the next couple of hours,” I said.

“Cool,” they said in unison.

Half an hour later I returned to the waiting room to find them delighted by their new vision. “We look like Sadie,” Suzie said. “The cat,” Bonnie explained. One by one I examined their eyes and was glad to be able to pronounce all well.

“When someone asks you to list ten good things about yourself,” I said, “you can say, I have an excellent retina.”

They giggled, and Bonnie thanked me. Everything was unspoken, yet she too had felt the shift. Her smile was measured, almost businesslike.

“Do up your jacket,” she told Alice, and then, turning to me, “I heard about your friend. I hope he's going to be okay.”

“He's recovering,” I said. “Thank you.” How incredulous she would be to learn that her childhood story had played even the smallest part in Jack's injury.

No sooner had she left my office than Merrie appeared. “What great kids,” she said. “I'm glad their mom's on the other side of that operation.”

All along, I realized, she had known about my feelings.

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON
H
ILARY
phoned: she was at her wits' end. Twice Jack had shouted at her, and once he'd shouted
at Diane for setting a cup of tea down out of reach. “It's like we have this monster in the house,” she said. “We never know when he's going to start yelling.”

I told her that general anesthetics often affected people's moods for several weeks; the drugs would wear off soon. “You've been wonderful,” I added.

“I have,” she agreed, “but I'm just not sure how long we can cope with the new Jack. He keeps playing the cripple card over and over.”

I did my best to reassure her, promised to visit soon, but I put down the phone with a new dread. Jack had already lost so much. What if he lost Hilary too?

U
NLIKE SOME LESS FORTUNATE
colleagues I have, so far, had little to do with lawyers. After Trina was born, Viv and I went to one to make our wills. Our only disagreement was around the choice of guardian for the children; I wanted my mother; Viv wanted Claudia. After learning of my father's condition, the lawyer suggested we name Claudia with my mother as a backup. Then we had signed DNR forms and promised to honor each other's wishes. That night, I remember, we told ventilator jokes. “What exactly is a ventilator?” Viv had asked.

Apart from this, and the paperwork around buying our house and setting up my business, my only other encounter with the legal system has been jury duty. Twice, since we moved to our town, I have been called. The first time was high summer, and my prospective fellow jurors had opted for shorts and tank tops. In my white button-down and chinos, I felt staid and grumpy. Didn't the judicial system deserve some respect? I thought as the young man to my left dozed and the young woman to my right filed her nails. Shortly after noon a court official announced that all the cases on the docket had been dismissed, and so were we. I drove home in my respectful clothes, baffled. Why had forty-seven people given up their morning to sit in a stuffy room? At supper my father said that often happened in the case
of minor offenses: traffic violations, petty thievery, D and D. He had been called for jury duty seven times, and regarded himself as an expert.

“But it's so wasteful,” I said. “They show this inspiring film. Then they send us home.”

He nodded, or perhaps his Parkinson's nodded, and said he'd thought that the first couple of times. “Then I started to regard it as a mechanism, like the safety procedures on the railway. Superfluous to requirements most of the time but, when something goes wrong, essential.”

The second time I was summoned to the superior court. Prospective jurors filled out lengthy questionnaires in one room and were herded into another. Finally the defendant, a boy of sixteen, was led in, shambling, head down, wrists cuffed. He had stabbed another boy to death in the presence of several witnesses and was to be tried as an adult. When my turn came to be interviewed, I told the judge that I detested violence, but I would hate to put a child behind bars. She dismissed me.

That evening I described the scene to my father, who had just moved into the nursing home. “Maybe the boy needed people like me on the jury,” I said. “Maybe I should have lied?”

“Bad to lie at any time,” he said. “Worse under oath.”

Six months later I read in the newspaper that the boy had been sentenced to life without parole. He had been photographed, clutching his teddy bear, on the way to prison.

Now, as I try to understand how Viv changed, I keep thinking about that boy clutching his bear. Would his parents and friends have sworn that he was a good person? Always ready to carry groceries and shovel the sidewalk? That the stabbing was some awful aberration? Or did they know something was amiss, that he carried a knife and might use it? Jack once described the
Greek idea of genius as an external force taking over a person. Had some force entered Viv—the mysterious Fate she sometimes invoked—and made her buy a gun? No, I believed she was entirely responsible for her actions. She had chosen, and she could have chosen otherwise.

During these difficult days I was meticulously attentive to my patients, double- and triple-checking tests, making sure people had no questions, no hidden fears, but when a woman came in reporting that the vision in her right eye had a hole in it—like a doughnut, Doctor—I sent her to Leah.

As for Viv, she went daily to the stables, where she rode Mercury and carried out her duties. Except for our nocturnal talks, she and I were like business partners, managing Marcus and Trina's lives. On the day Jack got out of hospital, I had to pick them up at Windy Hill. It was my first visit since the fatal evening, and as I drove up the hill I remembered the three of us laughing together, how I had pictured more such evenings with Viv there too. The snow was melting, and in the paddocks I spotted Samson, whose colic had caused so much trouble, and a sleek brown horse that might be Mrs. Hardy. No sign of Mercury.

In the barn, hoping to avoid Claudia, I walked briskly towards the office, but as I passed the lockers, the bathroom door opened. When I last saw her in the tack room I had not known she was pregnant. Now, as she came over and kissed my cheek, her condition was unmistakable. She asked about Jack, and I said he was at home, waiting for his second operation.

“I can't help feeling responsible.” Her forehead furrowed. “After all, he was shot here.”

I had a sudden, unexpected pang of sympathy for Viv. “If anyone should feel responsible,” I said, “it's me. Viv told you about our drunken dinner, how I had a key.”

“It must have been very drunken for you to drive here at eleven p.m. But nothing like that will happen again. We're having a gate installed at the bottom of the road, and a camera in the barn.”

I praised the new measures and, on the pretext of collecting the children, hurried away.

That night Viv described what had happened with Charlie. She had waited until the two of them were alone, mucking out the stalls, to announce that she knew about Charlie riding Mercury. This was her last day at Windy Hill.

“She started waving the shovel, yelling. I just wanted to keep Mercury to myself. I didn't give a fuck what was best for him. I was sure she was going to hit me. She's worked at Windy Hill for three years, and I thought she saw me as an ideal big sister. But actually she thinks I'm a fat old bitch with poor hands and a terrible seat.”

“You should have walked away,” I said. “Fetched Matheus.”

“I should, but it was like staring into the eyes of a snake. I was hypnotized by her anger. She knew exactly how to hurt me. Somehow she'd got it into her head she was going to compete on Mercury.”

“She's obsessed with him,” I said. A car drove by in the street.

“How can she be obsessed?” Viv's voice rose. “She's ridden him once, maybe twice. She knows nothing about him.”

As she continued to rant, as another car drove by, I understood two things: she had no inkling that she and Charlie were peas in a pod, and, despite everything, she still cherished her own ambitions for Mercury.

“For god's sake,” I said, pushing back my chair, “Jack nearly died. He may never have full use of his arm again, and he's suf
fering from PTSD, losing his temper all the time. Doesn't that change things?”

Standing there, looking down at Viv, I heard my own words and knew the answer. Yes, it did. There could be no more excuses. Tomorrow I must go to the police.

“She'll never see him again,” Viv said, “if I can help it.”