The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (24 page)

“I
CALLED DETECTIVE
LaCroix to find out what's going on with the hotline,” Lennox says when Illa arrives in the journalism room later that afternoon. “He said they got a lot of false leads from over three hundred calls but that five contained good information.”

Three hundred
calls. In a town of ten thousand people, the number is shockingly high.

“Did he give names?” she asks.

Lennox shakes his head. “Said he couldn't comment on specifics.”

“What about the rest of the tips?”

“Backbiting, finger-pointing.
So-and-so's a ho bag, just ask X boy. I know so-and-so is having sex, I saw a condom fall out of her backpack.
Women calling in neighbor girls they've caught making out in cars. People in this town seem to think that wearing a miniskirt and eyeliner counts as evidence.”

“They feeling pressure to solve the case before the election?”

“He got a little defensive when I asked.” Lennox exaggerates his accent in an approximation of Hamp LaCroix's. “
We put the pressure on ourselves, election or no. You put that in your article. I want people in this town to know we're serious about our jobs, but we got to do things the right way, not rely on a bunch of he-said, she-said.
”

“I hardly think that's the problem,” Illa says. “If anything, girls feel like the cops are going to show up at any minute to cuff them and drag them away.”

IN EARLY OCTOBER,
Coach calls her “refresher class.” She doesn't waste time with housekeeping, just gets straight to the point and reminds the girls what's considered in-season contraband: cigarettes, drugs, booze, and boys. Hers are not empty threats, she reminds them. As if they need reminding. Sometimes she and Coach Thibodeaux case the hallways wielding yardsticks pinched from a classroom, waiting to catch Annie or Keisha or Melissa mooning over some boy so they can wedge a yardstick between the offenders.

“From now until March, no one's allowed inside your personal bubble of space except the girl you're guarding,” Coach says. “I don't want to see a single one of my girls draped over some boy like a one-legged hooker at last call, hear?” She smirks. “This year, I even got the law on my side. Y'all are better off putting on a wimple and acting like nuns, way things are going.”

The girls, normally jocular, don't so much as cough.

After lunch, Illa dumps the contents of her tray in the trash and wanders in the direction of her next class. When she passes through the senior hallway, she notices a disturbance at one of the lockers. A large group of students swarms around Abby Williams, who's pacing a short strip of hallway, her face blotchy with tears.

“What the fuck is that?” Abby wails. “I mean, who the fuck
does
something like that?”

Illa strains to see what has caused the commotion. Peering over the shoulders of her classmates, she catches sight of the offending locker. Someone has written BABYKILLING CUNT in permanent marker, along with a crude caricature of Abby sporting devil horns. Below the scrawled message is a graphic photo of a bloody fetus. Illa ducks away from the crowd and finds the nearest drinking fountain, where she takes several gulps of water, then splashes some on her face, trying to erase what she's seen.

ILLA REREADS CHARMAINE'S
letters until she's memorized everything about them, down to the zip code on the envelope. As she moves through her days, the lines float through her head.
Get out of there, go find someone you trust
. Even if Mercy hasn't personally shared the information with Illa, it's as if she is destined to have it in order to help protect Mercy. But from what, exactly?

SOON IT'S BASKETBALL
season. The first weeks of practices go well; the team is strong and focused. Most of the girls played summer league, so when they step onto the court, it's as if they've never left. Mercy looks game-ready, running plays from the top of the key, driving past defenders with such ease that Coach Martin stops play to make the defense run lines.

“Got a bunch of sleepwalkers on the job,” she says. “Mercy pay you to make her look good? That it? Nike making sneakers out of bowling balls now?”

At one point, Annie fires a missile of a pass to Mercy at close range; the ball speeds through her fingertips and thumps her hard in the chest. When Mercy looks askance at Annie, rubbing the spot where the ball hit, Annie says sorry, but it's obvious she doesn't mean it. Illa remembers their argument at the party, Annie's bitterness over being left out about Travis. Nobody seems to think much of the pass, though, and practice continues. Coach seems almost jovial, ribbing the girls rather than talking to them in her usual lockjaw shorthand. The school board is set to announce the new Jodi Martin athletic complex at the first game that Friday.

After practice, Illa squirrels away in the equipment closet, pulling boxes of uniforms and warm-ups so she can wash out the summer mustiness. Flipping open the cardboard flaps, she buries her hands elbow-deep in the cool nylon of the jerseys, closes her hands around fistfuls of navy fabric. Beyond the door, the slow rhythm of a couple of basketballs being indolently dribbled. She breathes in the smell of the leather balls and mineral concrete and dank old uniforms and thinks
happiness.
She's sure the game will save them all by helping the town remember that it loves its girls.

T
HE STENCH CHOKES
me awake, a fist of burlap down my throat. Still foggy from dreams, I thrash off the bed. The impact clears my head.

Living in a refinery town my whole life has prepared me for wretched odors, but this is the worst I can remember. When I stand up, I sway a little, my head filled with a dull ache like I've been wearing a headband for too long.

I stand and walk to the window. Drawing back the thin yellow curtain, I look toward the tree line, half expecting to see a fireball rising over the tops of the live oak trees like the day of the explosion, but there's only the same dozen plumes of smoke. I try breathing through my mouth, but it's no better, the smell so thick I can taste it on my tongue. Across town in that room covered with words, Travis is waking up. I pray he has an easier time of it than I did.

Today is my birthday. I am eighteen years old. A legal adult, but I don't feel like it. Before Travis and I broke up, Sylvie said that come October, she'd make me a 1–2–3–4 cake with pineapple and coconut, like she does for all her kids on their birthdays. I wonder if Travis remembers that today is my birthday, or if he's forgotten about me and moved on. I told him don't bother getting in touch, I won't return his calls. I made so many mistakes this summer, but when school started, I knew I did what was right. I don't guess loneliness knows the difference between right and wrong, though.

I remember the night of the Rodair: I never felt worse in my life. That's when I decided I had to break up with Travis. Snuck out to the Hotel Sabine to do it, but that's the last sneaking around I've done. I don't feel good or healed or anything like that, but at least I don't feel as bad as I did that night.

Charmaine has sent a cheap drugstore birthday card with a hokey message on the outside. When school started back up in August, so did the letters. They come in care of the front office, like the first one. She's wrong in the head, I've decided. Why else would she keep writing when she knows I'll never write back?

I read the letters just to confirm she's got a screw loose. Or maybe I'm trying to prove something to myself. But her notes still pierce me. I am the carnival lady in the leotard spinning on a wheel while she throws daggers in my direction. Only difference is, she isn't trying to miss; she aims straight for the heart. I will keep reading them, waiting for the day when I can open one and feel nothing at all. Then I'll know I've beaten her.

I pick up one of the recent letters off the vanity and reread it:

           
There are two sides to every story, I only want to tell mine. You are now older than I was when I had you. I was scared. I wasn't ready to love anyone. When you were born, you were so pure I was terrified I would drop you, mess you up. But that wasn't why I got wrecked and had to let you go. Someday I'll tell you, when I don't have to write it in a letter. The dope helped me forget your fat little sweet-smelling body, the way it felt to nurse you. You didn't cry when I left, you weren't old enough to know. They say that attachment stuff happens later, once kids realize what leaving means. The day I left, I just slipped out the door like I was going to get milk, and you didn't bat an eye.

Practice is in an hour, first game's tomorrow. I decide I'm ready to read the card. Here is what Charmaine says to me on my birthday:

           
I have a dream most every night. It is you and me in a diner and you reach your hand across the table and let me hold it and when I touch it, it is like plugging something into a socket—I feel a spark like electricity and then all the love you've deserved these years flows out of me and into you and when you let go I feel tired but so happy I wake myself up because otherwise I might die of happiness and I know you're not supposed to let yourself die in your dreams. Please meet me Mercy. I just want to hold your hand and see your face is all.

And for the first time, she leaves a phone number. It messes with your head to hurt over someone you don't even know. Seems I can't get away from the fact that eighteen years and a day ago, I lived inside this person, neighbor to her heart and lungs.

The only phone in the stilt house is halfway down the hallway, between my bedroom and the living room, on a rickety wooden stand that trembles each time the phone rings. I creep to it, listening for Maw Maw between steps. But she's still asleep, nothing but silence from her room.

I hold the receiver to my ear as if the dial tone will give me instructions. It's early yet. Is Charmaine asleep, too? I dial slowly, waiting as each button sticks and pops up again. As the phone rings, I remember late nights on the bus back from away games in middle school, girls talking breathlessly in the dark about phoning boys—searching for words to say to them, the pauses when they could hear the whistling of the boys' breath. Some even wrote down questions to ask so they'd remember when nerves wiped their memories clean, writing
like
and
so
and
um
into the question so it would sound authentic, spontaneous.
Silly girls,
I thought at the time, and yet here I am, wishing I had a script of some sort.

The ringing clicks over and my heart flips, but it's just an answering machine. Not her voice, just some robot.
Please leave a message.
So I do. I tell her I don't believe I owe her anything, that the sooner she stops these selfish letters, the sooner I can forget about her. “You made your choice, now you got to live with it. Don't contact me again.”

On my way out the door, Maw Maw calls to me to wait: “This stench . . .” she pauses. “I fear a dark tiding, Tee Mercy. Remember Isaiah, when God punished the women of Jerusalem for their vanity and pride by replacing their perfume with putrefaction. That baby has brought a curse on this town, mark it.”

“It's my birthday, Maw Maw,” I say, feeling like a child, but I need someone other than Charmaine to recognize the fact.

“Pray for that baby. Pray for yourself.”

I'm late for practice. As I drive, my right hand goes stiff, refuses to close over the gearshift. I press my fingers against my jaw, extend the wrist in a stretch, shake the hand hard, then will my fingers to close over the stick. They do, but then the sneezy feeling comes on, my hand thrusting down once, twice, three times.

Please, God, no.
When the light changes, the car glides forward in neutral, nosing toward the canal. A blue Chevy coming fast from the other direction honks as it flies past.
Dear Lord, help me, I place my life in your hands, please. I did wrong, but I repent. I gave him up, I want to be pure again. Forgive me!

I grab the clutch and grind into gear, whipping back onto the road.