Blue Mercy: A Novel. Read Free

her, still and steady, all through the nesting season until her chicks were hatched and reared.
    We settled on a bench in front of the sculpture, while the children clambered over it and I read the bronze plaque inscribed with a poem about Kevin and the blackbird. It wasn't by Yeats, but the other guy who looks like a farmer. Even I could tell it was good, the way it asked us to imagine being Kevin, being able to submit your body to the needs of a bird. It moved me, so I was able to ignore Mom when she told me I should learn it off by heart.  
    "Poems have to become like the marrow in our bones to be appreciated", she pronounced. All my life, she'd said things like this. I let it go, and then was glad I had when I heard her murmuring the line to herself, "It's all imagined, anyway."  
    That was why I'd brought her here, why I'd thought she'd like it. That was her favorite word, always: imagine.
    Mom, I thought we were happy, watching the kids, enjoying the sunny day with the small breeze on our faces. For five whole minutes, I thought we were united, by this gesture of mine, the bringing of us both there, to the village where Dad was born and raised, to the spot where we'd run into such trouble before, back in those awful days of 1989.   I thought you got it. I thought we were enjoying a seemingly small but actually enormous great reward for having managed to make a life together that worked, despite all.
    But no. You couldn't let it be what it was. You had to pull the script out of your knapsack and park it on my lap, ruining everything.
    I told you again, straight up, as I'd told you so often before: "I'm never going to read it, Mom."
    "You must," you said, putting your hand on my arm, giving me a yearning stare.   And then: "It's your story too."
    I must . How had you never learned that was the worst possible way to get me to do anything?

    Now at the lakeside, kneeling on her script, I close my eyes and call them to mind again, the things I never thought I'd have. Husband, children, this place transformed from house of horrors into house of healing. It was I who did that. Not alone, but it couldn't have happened without me. My life has not been wasted. I am not a bad person.  
    Two hundred-thousand words of hers beneath my knees tell a different story, I have read enough of it to know that. Well, no.  
    I snap into standing, and assert again what should have been my birthright, but which I had to hand-stamp onto my DNA. The right to do what is right for me. Me. So I pick the hateful pile of paper up and I pull off the elastic, so determinedly that it breaks. I take a page and bunch it up and fling it, unread, into the lake.  
    It's hard to fling paper. It doesn't carry, there's no satisfactory plop as it hits the water. It just hovers there, hardly touching the surface, wimpily uncertain. There are more than six hundred pages in this manuscript. I will clump each into a paper ball. I will cast them each and all upon the lake and I will watch them, bob-bob-bobbing on the lapping shore, slowly soaking up the water that will see them sink.

Part Two: The Manuscript

BLUE| BLOŌ| MERCY|ˈMƏRSĒ|

    an act of mercy that has unanticipated and injurious consequences or an act of revenge that turns out to be a mercy.
    [slang: Irish]

    *

ZACH. CHRISTMAS EVE 1989.
    Doolough Lodge,
    Christmas Eve 1989.

    Dearest Mercy,

    I'm leaving this on our bed. The written word is always the best way to get your attention, isn't it, so maybe this might work? It's our last chance.
    Nothing good will come of this, Mercy. Asking me to go will not appease Star. We must do what we should have done in the first place, and each of us simply speak our truth to her, and she to us.  
    She is neither as stubborn, nor as vulnerable, as you think. And she is certainly   too old for this treatment.
    As for your father... Is he really the obstacle you claim, Mercy? If he was gone, you say, wistfully...  
    If, if, if... Another version of the same