The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (11 page)

EACH MORNING ILLA
watches for the mailman's white car. As soon as he drives away, she beelines for the mailbox, the sun a rebuke against her pale skin. On these short walks, she dreams of living in a cooler place, maybe in the mountains, someplace where a cold front doesn't warrant mention in the supermarket checkout line. At first, the mail yields nothing of interest—junk ads, coupon pages, medical and utility bills. But on the third day, a standard white envelope materializes, hand-addressed to Mama in messy script and bearing a stamp with bluebonnets on it. The return address is a post office box in Austin. Hovering in the entryway of the house, Illa examines the envelope carefully. Who is in Austin, and what do they want with Mama? After the explosion, she let her old friendships wither like the yellowing photographs in the closet.

“We get anything good?” Mama asks, wheeling into the hall.

“Depends on what this is,” Illa says, handing over the letter.

Mama eyes it, then slips her finger under the envelope's flap. As she scans the letter, a bewildered look chases across her face.

“So . . . ?” Illa says. “Who's it from?”

“No one you know,” she says distractedly, looking past Illa and out the front door. Before Illa can ask more questions, Mama spins around and wheels into the kitchen, where a minute later Illa hears the static click of the television turning on, then the muffled dings and applause of
Jeopardy!

AFTER LUNCH, WHILE
Mama naps, Illa goes up to school to develop her photos. The whole area is a ghost town except for a handful of pro-life college students who are holding vigil in front of the Market Basket. They arrived on a bus the day after the medical examiner determined that the baby was born alive. Mostly, they sit in lawn chairs with graphic posters of aborted fetuses propped against their knees. Occasionally, when a car passes by or someone ventures into the convenience store, a girl with bobbed black hair stands up to shout things through a megaphone. Illa is glad that at this distance she can't hear what the girl's saying, because she looks seriously pissed. The black-haired girl and her angry cohort are at odds with the lazy heat of summertime.

Illa knows the mother will be tracked and tried like a murderer based on the findings of the medical examiner's report. She wonders if it's one of her classmates, perhaps one of the chubby girls whose body could hide that kind of secret for months. It seems like the kind of desperate act only a young woman could commit, someone without options or knowledge of options.
Murderer.
It doesn't seem like the right word for the situation, somehow. At the end of the article about the medical examiner's report, there was a sentence about how the ulcer drug, when taken in excess of the recommended dosage, could cause not only fetal demise but also severe cramps and heavy bleeding. The police already searched County Hospital and a handful of other clinics to see if anyone checked in with those symptoms, but so far they haven't found any leads. Illa imagines the girl squatting in the woods behind the Market Basket, groaning in agony. To know something is dying inside you, to feel that sickening ache. Illa hopes the girl, whoever she is, has found someplace clean and quiet, far from these angry college girls and their lurid signs that would remind her of that pain.

One afternoon as Illa is parking her car in the student lot, she sees Lucille Cloud and her dog sprawled out on a blanket in front of the Mr. Good Deals. The wind off the Gulf carries the rotten sweetness of gardenia. From where Illa sits, they appear to be snoozing, a broad straw hat pulled partway over Lucille's face. There's no mistaking her, not with that giant hound by her side or the long dreadlocked hair spread out behind her. Illa wonders how Lucille can stand to be out in the heat before remembering that she doesn't have the luxury of air-conditioning at her cabin, and that maybe even the word
cabin
is too luxurious for the cinder-block-and-soda-bottle structure, crowned with blue FEMA tarp, that Lucille calls home.

Illa went there once, a few months after the refinery disaster, hoping Lucille might give her a magical potion that would make Mama's legs strong again, or even something to startle her out of depression. On a hazy Saturday afternoon in May, she set out by bicycle. No way was she going there close to dark—she didn't believe about all the reported Lucifer sightings, but the woods made her jumpy; there were plenty of other devils who did business out there, she knew that much from listening to the police scanner that Lennox kept on in the journalism room. The shanty listed against a tree not a hundred yards from the Century Oak. Illa spotted a sizable herb garden set back in a clearing where the midday sun slanted through the tops of the trees.

As she approached the cabin, Illa was surprised to find her hands shaking. In town, Lucille sparked all manner of loose talk—that she worshipped Satan, making animal sacrifices to him on a full moon; that she was descended from a long line of Indian witch doctors and had the power to hex you and ruin your life; that, as revenge for her people's displacement, she lured white men out to her cabin, had sex with them, drugged them, then robbed them blind. What Illa discovered that day, though, was not a sex-addled freak but a young woman so poor she ate gator gar barbecued over a small fire just outside the cabin's entrance. That was how Illa found her, stinking of beer, crouched over the fire, turning gar flesh on a spit made of cypress branches. When Illa told Lucille about her problem, Lucille said it sounded like maybe the explosion had damaged Mama's spirit, and she gave her a jar of dried St.-John's-wort, which could be made into a tea to ease depression. When she spoke, she slurred ever so slightly.

Illa pressed her to help with Mama's legs because she'd heard Lucille could cure people of just about anything. At that, Lucille had taken a drink from a chipped mug and said, “So now I'm supposed to work miracles? You probably think this is an ancient Attakappa burial ground, and that I'm here to guard it from the white devils. Or that I give ten-dollar blow jobs to high school boys? Judging by how many punks come creeping around here, that seems to be the most popular one.”

Illa felt sheepish for believing the gossip, so to atone for her mistake, she asked Lucille what her story was. “Got tired of all the drunks and pervs on the rez. And I like the ocean. I try to get by doing natural medicines like my aunt made.” Lucille offered Illa some gar, which she politely declined. Lucille smiled, ripped off a chunk of meat with her stained teeth. “Now I get why the medicine men were always so quiet back home. They knew too much about everybody's business.” She smiled down at her hands. “People tell you things they'd never talk to a doctor about, even if they could afford to go, which most of them can't.” She sucks her teeth and laughs, her molars dark with rot. Despite her soiled clothes and matted hair, Lucille was pretty, with large hazel eyes and smooth olive skin. “Speaking of getting by,” Lucille said, “that'll be five dollars.”

Sitting in the parking lot, Illa frowns, remembering her naïveté. That was back when she felt hopeful about Mama's future and her own. Since Illa parked, Lucille hasn't moved. Illa wonders if the girl's drunk or maybe sick. Where are her mom and dad? Does she have any friends? Illa feels a flash of pity for Lucille. But then who is Illa to feel sorry for anyone? Mama is all that distances Illa from Lucille's fate.

Once inside the school building, Illa sneaks past the administration area, glides down the silent hallways and into the journalism room. She likes being in the empty school building. Striding alone across the rotunda where students gather before school, she imagines them looking up from their conversations to watch as she passes by, arm in arm with Mercy, head back, laughing at some private joke.

When she gets to the journalism room, Lennox is sitting at a computer. He looks up and raises a hand in greeting.

“Is the world still ending in seven months?” she teases, thinking fleetingly of Mercy's order to
live to meet the end without dread
. Maybe she just meant death, though Illa didn't know many teenagers who thought so concretely about the subject.

“You jest, Stark, but we'll see who's laughing come January first. Ten bucks says you're sitting in my kitchen begging for Vienna sausages.”

“Don't tell me you're stockpiling food.”

“I'm not stockpiling.” He laughs. “I just have an impressive collection of nonperishable goods. How do you think I feed a family of four on five bucks a night?”

Last spring, Lennox started obsessively tracking news stories and message boards about Y2K, which seemed a little out there, but his dad's cancer had come back, and Lennox probably needed someplace to channel his anxiety. In a way, the millennial uproar was perfect. If chaos was coming for everyone in six months, then maybe it made it easier to accept the prognosis that his father had about that much time to live.

“I've got a surprise for you,” he says.
For you.
The words make her shiver. From beneath the computer desk, he produces a small cooler. “Refreshments.”

“Nice,” Illa says.

“To the Prrrraying Hands,” he says, speaking in a bad British accent, comically rolling the “r.” “Let us retire to the Hands and take in a view of the estate, shall we?”

“Dork,” she says, laughing. “Sure. Never been up there.”

“Come on.”

She wonders how many calories are in a can of beer. At home, she tries not to drink anything but water. He picks up the cooler and goes out into the hall, looking left and right theatrically before tiptoeing forward. The city built the Praying Hands statue in memorial to the victims of the refinery explosion. The Hands sit beseechingly just off the highway, in the shadow of the refinery towers, 110 tons of carved concrete, forty feet tall, set atop a man-made hill. At sea level, they make for a formidable landmark. Illa has heard of students, possibly subversive, probably stoned, climbing into the deep bowl where the heels of the hands meet.

“Let's take my truck, I've got a ladder in the bed,” he says as they make their way out to the parking lot and into his truck. Lucille lies unmoving on the sidewalk.

“Should we check on her?” she asks, pointing in Lucille's direction.

“Probably just sleeping off a bender,” he says. “Plus, that dog scares the shit out of me.”

She nods agreement. Windows down, they roar through the midafternoon stillness. Her excitement at being in this unremarkable social situation—going to drink beer with a friend—shames her. Before the explosion, she'd never felt especially lonely because she'd had her mother. When Mama would arrive home from work, they'd take two sweating glasses of sweet tea out to the sagging Adirondack chairs on the concrete block they called, grandiosely, “the terrace,” and sip their tea while revealing each little mundane detail of their days.

Near the Hands, there's a short fence at the base of the hill, which Lennox clears easily before helping her over. Shouldering the ladder and hauling the cooler, he powers up the hill toward the statue, which in full sunlight is a brilliant white that shocks her eyes. When they're both inside the sheltering cave of the Hands, Lennox pulls the ladder up behind them. From where she sits peering through the slit formed by the Hands' two pinkies, Illa can see the sprawl of the downtown grid, the curve of the seawall, the sleepy port where a huge red cargo ship sits, and finally, the sea with its undulant waves winking like spilled coins.

“Wow,” she says. “I don't know if I'd call it beautiful, but there's something about being up this high.”

“Here.” He cracks a Shiner and hands it to her. The bottle is icy against her palm. “Cheers. To Pit Sabine.”

“Our beloved hometown.”

“The place of our provenance.” When he talks, the stud in his tongue glints like a filling. For a moment, she sees him with his head between Annie's thighs. Illa is inexperienced, but even she's heard what those studs are for. Sometimes a first kiss seems as distant as the moon, first love even further. And now, thanks to the LeBlanc baby case, all of it seems dangerous.

“What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.” Lennox stomps a sneakered foot against the statue. “But if you're already dead, you're shit out of luck.” Bitterness has threaded its way into his voice. He pops open his beer and they clink bottles. The beer is more sensation than flavor, moving down her throat and hitting her bloodstream fast. The word
dead
brings tears to her eyes. In her anger, she often forgets that Mama could be just that. She blinks back the wetness. The refinery smokestacks belch white smoke that drifts overhead on the sluggish breeze, disappearing into the absorbent sky.

“How's your pops?” she asks.

“Furious,” he says. “Literally shaking mad. He's worried about what we'll do when he's gone.” He inhales slowly, and Illa can tell he's trying not to cry. “I keep thinking if he really only has six months to live, we should be doing things. Like our days should be special or something. But the problem is, I can't really wrap my head around it.”