This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (27 page)

“We’re not scared of him,” Ruby said. “He’s our dad.”

“I know,” Brady said. He reached out and opened his door, and then he looked back at Ruby again. “I know.”

It had been two weeks since we’d left with Wade, and now it was the middle of September and the summer was definitely over. Even though the past couple of days had been hot ones, it was almost cool out there in the park with all that shade and all those tall trees around us. The park was full of people, and me and Ruby held hands and followed Brady toward the playground. He sat down on a bench, and we went and stood in front of him. Ruby looked at everybody around her like she expected Wade to walk up and say “hey” at any second, but I only looked at Brady.

“That’s why you wanted to bring us out here, isn’t it?” I asked. “To see him.”

“No,” he said. “Well, that’s not the only reason anyway. I really did want to see y’all one more time before you have to go.”

A bunch of guys were out on the courts shooting basketball up on the hill behind Brady. Down here at the park, kids were playing, running past us and laughing and hollering at each other. I didn’t see any police, and I was happy for that, but that didn’t mean somebody else might not recognize Wade from the news and call the cops.

“He’s going to be in trouble if he comes out here, isn’t he?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Brady said. “We’ll have to see.” He looked toward the playground and pointed at the little merry-go-round. It was empty. “Do y’all want a push?” he asked, standing up.

I pulled Ruby toward the playground. “She’ll only let me push her,” I said. “She don’t like to go too fast.”

Ruby climbed on the merry-go-round and stood right in the center. “Hold on tight,” I said.

“Not too fast,” she said.

“I know.” I started pushing it around.

Brady walked over and sat down on a bench beside an old woman who was reading a book. He sat there and just looked around at all the other people in the park like he was waiting on something, but he didn’t quite know what it would be.

A little girl, maybe a year older than Ruby, came and stood beside me and watched me spin the merry-go-round. “Can I get on?” she finally asked.

“Sure,” I said. I stopped it and let her climb on, and I made sure she got ahold of one of the bars before I started spinning it again.

“I’m getting dizzy,” Ruby said. She was smiling.

“I’ll spin you the other way,” I said. “That’ll get you un-dizzy.” I wanted to laugh at Ruby, but the whole time I couldn’t help but look at every single person in the park, half expecting to see Wade. Brady was still there on the bench, looking all around him, and I figured he was probably expecting to see Wade too. The old woman sitting beside him must’ve been the little girl’s grandmother, because she’d set her book down on her lap and was watching me push the merry-go-round.

And that’s when I saw Brady lean over and whisper something to the woman. She pulled back and stared at him for a second like she couldn’t believe what he’d said, and then she leaned closer. He whispered to her again. She closed her book and stood up and grabbed her purse. Then she walked over to the merry-go-round and reached for the bars to try to stop it from spinning.

“Come on,” the woman said. She reached out her hand to the little girl, but the girl didn’t move.

“Are we leaving?” she asked.

“Yes,” the woman said.

“But we just got here,” the girl said.

The woman looked back at Brady, and then took the girl’s hand. “It’s just time for us to go home,” she said. She picked the girl up without saying anything and walked back toward the parking lot. The girl started crying, and the woman turned her head and looked at me and Ruby, and then she looked over at Brady. Other people were looking at us too.

“Why’d she leave?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What did you say to her?”

“Nothing,” he said. He smiled, but I could tell he was hiding something from me.

I started pushing Ruby again, the other way this time. She was sitting down now, turning her head around and around, watching the old woman carry the little girl back to their car. It felt like a lot of people were staring at me and Ruby after what had happened, but when I looked around I saw that a couple of them were staring at Brady. One of them was a man up on the hill to our right, sitting on a bench, holding a newspaper. He let it drop to his lap so he could see, even though he’d been too far away to hear anything the woman had said. And then I noticed a man closer to us, standing on the bridge that ran over the little creek off to the left of the playground. He was staring at Brady too. When he saw me looking at him, he looked away, and I swear I saw him say something to himself.

Then I saw what looked like a little wire running up into the man’s ear. He was way too young for some kind of hearing aid, and as soon as I saw that wire I knew the real reason Brady had brought us out here in the first place, and I couldn’t believe he’d do this to us, to Wade. But he had.

I grabbed on to the merry-go-round and ran with it in circles as hard as I could. Ruby hollered out that I was going too fast, but I didn’t stop. She was half screaming, half laughing by the time I jumped on. The park moved past me in a blur, and I could just make out Brady where he sat on the bench, the man up on the hill, the one over on the bridge, and all the other people who may have been there for the same reason those three were.

Ruby was still sitting down, and I climbed to the middle and leaned up against one of the bars. I watched everything rush by, and I reached up and touched my nose with each finger, and then I touched both ears before rubbing my hands down my arms one at a time. I kept doing that until the merry-go-round slowed down, and then I hopped off and pushed as hard as I could and jumped back on and kept giving the same sign Wade had showed me.

Brady had stood up from the bench, and he hollered my name. “What are you doing?” he said.

Ruby was lying on her back, staring up at me. “Faster!” she screamed. She was laughing now, and she didn’t seem one bit scared anymore. I wasn’t either.

C H A P T E R   35

W
e didn’t see Wade that day, and we didn’t see him before we left Gastonia for Alaska either. I don’t even know for certain if he was there at Lineberger Park that afternoon, but I like to think he was.

That night, one of our last nights in the home, I laid there with my head against the pillow and realized I’d been wrong about what Wade was doing after he’d left us in St. Louis. For the past week I’d pictured him headed west in the opposite direction of me and Ruby, that black bag of money on the seat beside him, his brain working and working, trying to figure out what to do next. But he’d actually tried to come back for us.

I didn’t like what Brady had done, trying to use us to get Wade caught by the police and the FBI and whoever else, and I had a hard time forgiving him after that. But then I remembered that he didn’t know Wade like I did, and he’d probably never had his own father disappear on him twice and come back both times. Brady thought he was doing the right thing for me and Ruby, even though I thought he’d been wrong to do it.

It took a few days of Miss Crawford fussing over us to get us all packed, me and Ruby going through our bedroom as slow as we could, trying to decide what things to keep and what things to give away to other kids who could use them: the new bedspreads that finally matched our sheets, the books on our bedside table, the clothes hanging in the closet.

But there was one thing I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave behind; it was one of those old baseballs Wade had signed back before he’d left us, back when he thought he might be somebody one day and that baseball would be worth something to someone besides him. As hard as I’d tried to rub his signature off all those years ago, it was still there—even though you couldn’t hardly see it. That’s a little bit what it was like being Wade’s daughter too.

And then me and Ruby were in Anchorage with Mom’s parents. When we first got there I’d lie in bed at night in a room that was all my own for the first time in my life, and I’d listen to strange voices coming from strange rooms in a place I knew I didn’t belong. But the only thing those voices did was tell me how happy they were that me and Ruby had come to live with them and how much I reminded them of Mom.

But I knew better than that, and I knew that was just something they’d probably said to make me feel at home, to make me feel like I belonged. Once all that brown washed out of my hair and my tan finally faded for good they’d probably stop seeing Mom when they saw me, and that was okay. They’d have Ruby there to remind them of Mom. So would I.

My grandfather’s name was Nolan, and he was tall with skin that was even darker than Mom’s and Ruby’s. You could tell that his hair had been black once upon a time, but now it was silver and longer than mine, and he wore it back in a ponytail. My grandmother’s name was Barbara, and she was just the opposite. After seeing her, I realized just why I looked the way I did. Her skin was light like mine, and her hair was the same strawberry blond. She wanted us to call her “Grandma,” so we did. Nolan said he wasn’t old enough to be anybody’s grandpa and that the name Nolan had always suited him just fine, so that’s what we called him.

Me and Ruby had been there for almost a month when Grandma went out on the front porch to get the mail and carried a big cardboard box into my bedroom. I was sitting on the bed, listening to my CD Walkman and doing homework, when I looked up and saw her standing there, her eyes just barely peeking out above the top of that box. She set it down on my bed and stood back and looked at it. It was addressed to me and Ruby.

“This came from Cordova,” she said. “That’s a few towns over. I don’t know anybody over that way, and I don’t think Grandpa does either. Do you?”

“I don’t hardly know anybody in this whole state,” I said.

She picked up a pair of scissors from my desk and cut the packing tape and opened the box. There was an envelope sitting right inside on top of some tissue paper. Grandma picked it up and pulled out a letter. “You want me to read this?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. I got up on my knees to look inside.

She started reading.

Dear Easter and Ruby,

Please accept this gift as a welcome to Alaska. I have seen you on the news and read about you in the paper, and I’m very sorry for all that you have been through. But I think you will enjoy living here. It is a very safe place, and the people are very nice and happy to have you. Please know that I am praying for you both.

Sincerely,

A Friend

But I only heard half of what she’d read. I’d already pulled back the tissue paper and seen what was inside the box. It was the teddy bear that Wade had won for us that night in Myrtle Beach. I pulled it out of the box and held it up and stared at it, and I tried to keep Grandma from knowing that I recognized it and that I knew exactly who’d sent it.

“Well,” she said, “this is a nice surprise. It was awfully kind of somebody to do that.”

“Can I see the letter?” I asked.

She handed it over, and I saw that it had been typed instead of handwritten.

“Your sister’s out in the backyard,” she said, “helping Grandpa set up the bird feeder. I’ll go grab her.”

“Okay,” I said, folding the letter and sliding it back into the envelope. I listened to her footsteps going down the hallway toward the kitchen, and I heard her open the sliding-glass door and call for Ruby. She slid it closed behind her.

As soon as I heard that I stuck my hand down the front of the bear’s overalls and felt around for what I’d left there that night back in South Carolina. My fingers closed around the stack of money, and until I pulled it out and saw it I almost couldn’t believe it was still there. But, when I turned it over in my hand, I saw something that hadn’t been there before. One of the tickets to the game in St. Louis was tucked behind the band. I slid the ticket out and looked at it; on it was a picture of Mark McGwire tipping his hat to the crowd. I turned the ticket over, and there on the back, scribbled in Wade’s messy handwriting, were three words:
Stay on base.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the following people and institutions for their kindness and support:

David Highfill, my editor at William Morrow, for his honesty, patience, and vision.

Nat Sobel and Judith Weber, my agents at Sobel Weber Associates, Inc. Nat, I wish you could ensure the New York Jets’ future as well as you’ve ensured mine. A heartfelt thank-you to the rest of the Sobel/Weber team: Julie Stevenson, Adia Wright, and Kirsten Carleton.

The Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and Highland Springs Farm in Wellsburg, West Virginia, where so much of this novel was written and revised.

All of the amazing people at William Morrow/HarperCollins, past and present: Liate Stehlik, Michael Morrison, Jessica Williams, Sharyn Rosenblum, Stephanie Kim, Abigail Tyson, Shawn Nicholls, Kimberly Chocolaad, Tavia Kowalchuk, Carla Parker, Mike Brennan, Jeanette Zwart, Doug Jones, Caitlin McCaskey, Gabriel Barrilas, Anne DeCourcey, Ian Doherty, Karen Gudmondson, Jim Hankey, Kate McCune, Cathy Schornstein, Robin Smith, and, holy moly, Eric Svenson.

My colleagues and students in the MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University.

The friends and family who either read drafts, gave advice, listened, or did all three: Cliff Cash, Amy Earnheart, Walker Barnes, Patrick Crerand, Christian Helms, Michael Jauchen, Thomas Murphy, Chatman Neely, Harry Sanford, Brian Sullivan, and Reggie Scott Young.

Last of all, but most of all, Mallory Brady Cash, my wife, best friend, and first reader: if not for her, then nothing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR