Mercy (36 page)

't been shaped by Allie; it was equally impossible to consider how he had s urvived all this time without Mia.

He looked at her, wondering what might have been set into motion if he had stopped at The Devil's Hand for a latte. What if he'd brought her back to Wheelock when his father died, and had married her instead of Allie? Some where in the back of his mind he knew that it would not have happened; tha t part of his attraction to Mia was the fact that she moved as freely as s he pleased. She would not have been the same woman if he had created her b oundaries.

He was overcome with a desire to keep her with him for a little while. His ey es darkened at the edges and Mia's mouth quirked as he bullied her down to th e floor--not gracefully, like in the movies, but heavily, falling hard the la st foot so that their breath came out in a collective whoosh. Jodi Picoult

Cam's face lowered toward hers. "We're going to ruin the waffles, " she mur mured, and then she buried her fingers in his hair and pulled him close. He was amazed anew at the image of her body. Her skin seemed to glow. His h and spanned the distance from her breasts to her hips. He told her he loved her, and it was not a confession, but a prayer.

Mia was on top of him, her head thrown back and her unruly hair making spir al shadows on his chest, when the back door that led directly into the kitc hen opened. She had heard it somewhere in the back of her mind, along with Kafka's paws padding along on the carpet upstairs and the temperature risin g a degree outside. But, as with these other things, when Cam was filling t he rest of her senses she was not inclined to pay attention. Ellen MacDonald stood three feet away, a spare key in one hand and a plate in the other. Her cheeks were as pale as the angel food cake she had brough t for Cam. A treat, because Allie was not there.

"Something's burning," Ellen said, and then she threw the cake down on the counter and left without another word.

11 ecause he didn't want anyone around who was liable to eaves-JLJ drop, Gr aham asked Jamie to meet him at the foot of the pass in the Berkshires that made Wheelock so picture-perfect. There was a path there that eventually f ed into the Mohawk Trail, but for a good ten miles before that it was just a dirt road used by ambitious teenagers on neon-painted mountain bikes. Wit h the few inches of snow that had fallen over the past week, Graham knew he

'd be assured of privacy, and it was finally time for his client to tell hi m the truth.

Jamie knew why he was there; knew he was going to have to talk about it wit h Graham sooner or later and in much more detail than he'd gone into for hi s voluntary confession. The two men walked in silence for half a mile, thei r heads bent against the wind, their hands buried deep in their parkas.

"When did she ask you?" Graham said.

"First? In January. We were in Quebec. It was after the chemotherapy, but bef ore the radiation treatments for the eye. I sort of laughed it off." 253

"And then?"

Jamie bent down to pick a twig out of the snow. He traced the footprint of a rabbit, white on white. "After her doctor's appointment that week in Sept ember. She went on a Friday--she always scheduled the last appointment of t he day, because she wanted to put in a full day of work before hearing bad news. So she usually got home about six.

"She didn't get home until after nine o'clock at night." Jamie smiled faintly

, caught in a memory. "Of course by then I'd called every local hospital and police station looking for car accidents and hit-and-runs. She was carrying a box--a big one, I think it was a Stolichnaya box she must have gotten from t he liquor store. She didn't say anything to me. She walked upstairs and start ed putting all her clothes inside it."

'VU'That are you doing?" he asked. "What did the doctor say?" W But Maggie continued to fold her clothes. She put the shorts in first, and he though t maybe she was going through her drawers and sorting them for the winter. But when she packed her underwear away, and the nightgown she had worn th e evening before, he knelt down beside her and grabbed her shoulders, forc ing her to look at him.

"Jamie," she said, "I'm not going to do this anymore. " Do what? His mind grasped at straws. Fold clothes? Talk to him? He pulled a t her hands until she came to sit beside him on the bed. "I don't so much m ind the dying," she said. "It's not knowing what's coming next that's killi ng me."

She asked him, flat out, to take her life. He told her he absolutely wouldn't do it. She said he ivas being selfish. He said she was being selfish too. She told him she had every right to be.

She wanted him to do it then; he wanted to have one more weekend with her. She wanted to get everything in order so that he would not be cleaning up after she was gone; he forced her to put her clothes back in the drawer, saying a shadow and a memory of her were better than nothing at all. He to ld her he would pick the place, since he could not continue to live in Cum mington if he always remembered it as the town where he had suffocated Mag gie.

On Saturday they slept late so that Jamie could wake up with Maggie's hair twined over his hands and his face. They had a picnic on the roof Jodi Picoult

of their house, from which they could see nearly twenty miles. They went to a movie they did not watch and kissed and stroked each other in the silence of the very last row.

On Saturday night they ivent to the very expensive restaurant where eleven years before, Jamie had asked her to marry him. They ordered the priciest e ntrees on the menu and they ate with their hands, holding ripped pieces of tenderloin and lobster to each other's mouths. They crashed a wedding party at the Red Lion Inn in Lenox and danced until the swing band went off to b ed.

On Sunday, they watched the sun creep over the Berkshires like an unfolding fan. They spent the day looking for the richest colors--the blues of a bri lliant sky, the yellowest dandelion, the reddest fire engine--so that Maggi e would be able to take them with her. They held each other on a black nigh t when the moon was too embarrassed to appear, and gave names to the childr en they'd never had.

On Monday morning they drove to Wheelock and checked into the Inn. Jamie bought a bottle of champagne from the bartender downstairs and they dra nk this and ate pizza and discussed how it would be done. They made love Monday night, passed out in exhaustion, and woke up still j oined together.

On Tuesday morning, Maggie kissed him goodbye.

/t took less than five minutes," Jamie said, shuffling his boots in the snow

. "I used a pillow. She scratched at me in the middle of it, but this was so mething we'd talked about, and I wasn't supposed to stop. So I just leaned c loser and whispered to her--you know, things I knew she would want to be thi nking, and then she stopped moving completely."

Without a word, Graham started back down the incline to the foot of the hi lls. He looked behind him when they reached the main roads of Wheelock Cen ter. Jamie's face was red and chapped, his nose was running. Graham imagin ed he looked the same. It was another reason Graham had chosen this place for their interview. In December, coming back from the pass, you would nev er be able to tell if a man's face was raw with the cold, or if he had bee n crying.

"Jamie," Graham said, turning to face his client. "I know 255

you would do it over again. But would you do anything differently?" He watched Jamie's face fold in upon itself as he struggled with control. "I'd like to say that this time I'd kill myself, too," Jamie answered quietly, "bu t I've never had that kind of courage."

hen her son Cameron was sixteen, Ellen MacDonald had walked in on him wit h a girl. She had knocked on his bedroom door, like she always did, but i t was a quick one-two, and then open. And on the bed, kneeling before eac h other, were Cam and a girl she had never seen.

Cam's shirt was off, but then again so was the girl's. His hands were fasten ed on the girl's breasts, and for a moment, that claimed all of Ellen's atte ntion--with a middle-aged jealousy, she focused on those high, round globes that looked a way hers never would again. She must have made a noise, becaus e the girl looked up and squeaked. Cam whirled to face his mother, his lips soundlessly moving over syllables he couldn't utter.

For a long time after that, Ellen could not look Cam in the eye. It was not h is shame, or her embarrassment, that strained their relationship. It was what she never would have believed secondhand; what, after all these years, still stood out in her mind like a red flag: that in a matter of seconds, she had watched her child turn into a man.

Ellen had not stayed at Cam's house after finding him with Mia. She didn't t rust herself. When this happened before, she had consigned the episode to a teenager's raging glands. This time was entirely different. And where she ha d once been silent, she now felt as if she was volcanic, ready to explode in her indignation.

If she had known where Allie was, she would have called her. In-257

stead, Ellen spent two whole hours trying to restore herself to a state of peace. Then, giving in to her anger, she took out her dowsing rods. She hel d them at hip level, comfortably setting her wrists so that they acted as s hock absorbers. With the dog following her, Ellen walked from room to room-starting in her bedroom, where Cam had been conceived, moving to the room that had been the nursery before it became Ian's office, then down the hall to the room that would always be Cam's.

She stood in its center, her rods quivering. She glanced from the wallpaper

--big clipper ships with unlikely, topheavy masts--to the narrow bed, which Cam's feet had hung off of from eighth grade on. Glancing down at her rods

, she cursed. They were shaking a bit, but they weren't crossing. In fact, she could not be sure that the shivers which ran down the sleek copper were n't coming from her own internal imbalance.

But she would be damned if she'd stop trying. She walked back to her bedro om and retraced her path to the nursery and then Cam's room. Ellen sniffed at the air, catching only a trace of Lemon Pledge when there should have been something rank and strong; surely something that had festered for so long would be dark and deep and malodorous. She crawled on her knees to lo ok beneath the radiator; she checked the spot beside the fireplace where t here had once been dry rot. She would not give up, she told herself, until she found the puddle of immorality which must have seeped into her own ch ild's soul.

Damn his mother. Cam followed Mia around the house as she dumped the burned waffles into the sink and picked her socks up from the crevices in the cou ch and collected her toothbrush from the bathroom. He had a hard-on like he couldn't believe because of what they hadn't been able to finish, and he w anted to speak to her, but all he could think of to say was that they still had twenty-one hours left.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

Mia tossed Kafka into her knapsack. "Where do you think?" Cam rubbed a rough spot on the hardwood floor with his bare toe. "I'll come by later, then. After I strangle my mother."

"Don't." Mia slipped the knapsack over her shoulder. The vinyl made a faint zipping noise against her down jacket that sounded terribly final to Cam. "I have things to do."

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"You were going to do them with me," he said. "You planned to spend the w hole day here."

"That was before," Mia said. She brushed her hair back from her eyes, and her cuff fell over her hand, obscuring it like a small child's. He took the knapsack off her shoulder and slid the sleeve of the coat up her arm so that her fingers peeked out again. He curled his hand over hers and kissed her knuckles. "She won't say anything," he promised.

"It doesn't matter if she does or if she doesn't. She knows." Cam knew he couldn't stop her, so he followed her down the stairs. At the door, when she would have walked out without saying goodbye, he put a hand on her shoulder and spun her around. "Do you know what it's like," she sa id, "to know that the only way you can be happy is if you make everyone el se's life miserable?"

Cam watched his hand cup Mia's cheek. When he drew it away, his palm was cr ossed with fine wet lines. He thought of his mother's pinched face, and the n he thought of Allie. "I have a fairly good idea," he said.

/n her hurry, Mia had left half her clothes behind. A bracelet, which Cam pocketed, a clean pair of underwear that had tumbled out of her knapsack d uring her hasty packing, and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt marked with a day-camp

-style label that said Mia Townsend. These things Cam stuffed into a drawe r with his boxers and socks. Then he dressed in a St. Andrew's sweatshirt and a pair of jeans and drove to his mother's.

The front door was open; his mother was nowhere in sight. Her dowsing rods were lying on the kitchen table, crossed, which was a better sign to Cam of her emotional distress than any amount of yelling could have been. You never crossed dowsing rods; how many times had she told him that? Carefull y, he picked up the copper sticks, surprised at the hum that rang through his forearms, and set the rods into their protective wooden box. He glanced up to find his mother standing three feet in front of him. "Damn,

" he said, trying to smile. "You're good at sneaking up on a person." Ellen folded her arms across her chest.

"Are you going to tell Allie?" Cam asked.

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She looked directly into his eyes. "That's your punishment," she said. He could hear the house settling around them, creaks and groans that had on ce made Cam run from his room in the middle of the night to sleep in the so lid protection of his mother's embrace. "Are we going to talk about it?" Ca m said quietly.

Ellen shook her head. "I don't know you. I didn't raise you to do this." Implicit in her statement were the words Neither did your father. How many times had he heard the lecture? MacDonalds don't cheat and they don't ste al. They honor their word. And they never, ever break a vow that has been sealed.

If you were a MacDonald and you made a promise, you took it to the grave. An image of Jamie flashed across Cam's mind. What had he sworn to his wi fe?