A Question of Mercy Read Free Page A

about a cup of grass. She did not know hunger could feel like this—a flat gnawing in her gut and the back of her throat. She knew that in these woods even small mistakes became large: the smell of food attracted animals, a tear in her jacket left her unprotected from the cold and rain—everything mattered. She began to carry a large stick and stay alert to the sudden appearance of coyotes or barking dogs.
    Soon her clothes began to hang on her body, like big pajamas, and she wrapped her waist with a rope to hold up her pants. She had left the French Broad River, going on back roads until she could walk no more. She had asked directions a few times and knew she was covering many miles. She used daylight hours, since she was afraid to walk at night and, for two days, she walked through a cold rain. She was young, but if she kept up this pace, she’d be old in a year.
    She sneaked through orchards and swampy marshes, drinking from a spigot behind a farmhouse. Her hair, usually lustrous and dark, grew knotted and grainy. She tried to interpret signs around her: the long look of a deer, the shape of a tree in the distance, scribbling on a stone. She wanted to read the signs. She wanted instructions. And though she was surprised at her superstition, what surprised her even more was the discovery of her own fortitude. Her main work lay in the effort to stay alert and hidden, dry.
    She stole shirts and jeans from a backyard clothesline, and ate from a sack of raw potatoes left on someone’s porch. After stealing forty dollars from her stepmother, these lesser crimes seemed as incidental as necessary. The order of her life was completely random. At night she found shelter in an abandoned car or an empty store, or slept under a tree with low branches.
    Last night Jess had awakened in the middle of a dream, or rather she was still asleep, but dreamed she was awake. She saw her mother, still alive, opening the bedroom door. She heard her say, “Breakfast is ready, Sweetie.” She saw her father, younger and smiling. Clementine Finney was not there, though Adam was sitting on the front porch. When she woke, the dream seemed perfectly reasonable. Jess heaved a sigh and shivered.
    The next morning, waking completely, Jess wanted to bring back the happy dream. Make it true. She bargained with the day: If I can find some food or a safe place to stay, I’ll go back home . She wasn’t sure it was a bargain she could keep. Already she was a thief, a scavenger, a missing person sleeping under trees. She ate the third pear, two more pieces of bread, and a raw potato. Her life had boiled down to food, shelter, and trying not to be found.
    She startled, when she saw a gray fox sniffing her shoe. She remained very still, not wanting him to go away—the small, young fox with its bushy tail, his eyes like tiny fires, steely in the early light. He stood for only a moment, then turned and was gone. Had she imagined it?
    At home, sometimes, Jess might hear a door slam, or a flop-flop sound, like a fish inside the wall, and she imagined her mother’s voice in another world trying to speak to her. Or sometimes she heard a movement down the hall, or saw a piece of light, something going around a corner, and expected to see her mother again.
    But the fox was gone, and so was her mother’s voice. All that was real was here. Jess put her face into her hands. Her palms smelled like burned ground.
    She thought of her mother, what she would say to her. Before the illness, their life had been easy and sure. If her mother were still alive, none of this would have happened. If her mother had lived, Jess would have a different life now.
    That’s when it all started—her new and unimaginable life: with her mother’s sickness, the smell of medicine in the house, those days of feeding her with a pewter spoon, then the funeral, the empty house, her father’s quiet grief—and later, the entrance of Clementine