The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (3 page)

“No ma'am,” I say.

Outside, the grass sweats dewy beads, the sun bakes the mud banks of the bayou to cracking. From the backseat of the car, an old junker Maw Maw bought cheap off the scrap lot, I grab a towel and spread it on the torn pleather of the driver's seat so I won't burn my thighs. The steering wheel is squishy with heat; I touch it gingerly as I reverse out of the gravel drive. Summer is here—the long, empty days without the team, the egg-cooking heat. By the water's edge, cypress trees weep through their branches. Tangles of velvety morning glories grow inky blue and secretive in the thicket at the roadside, bursts of Mexican hat cascading into the drainage ditch like spilled paint. On the air, the smell of ripening things. Or maybe it's decay, like Maw Maw says. The world gone rotten.

At Annie's, I punch in the security code and the gate comes alive, opening on silent hinges. I drive up the driveway, hugging the concrete curve of the fountain, where a bronze fish rises from the center, spitting water in a sparkling arc. Annie hates the fountain, says it's nouveau riche. Last Halloween, she vandalized it, filling it with laundry detergent and red dye. Her father blamed it on one of the many disgruntled boys she had dated and dumped. Annie laughed mirthlessly when she told me.
Dated,
she said.
So quaint.

I honk for her and wait, but she doesn't appear. I watch a Mexican man on a riding mower ride back and forth over the gentle slope of the hill that surrounds the house. Beau had the entire hill built special because he didn't want to live at sea level like the rest of us.

After a few minutes, I get out of the car. Passing the fountain, I run my fingers through its cool water. A few pennies wink from beneath the water, and I wonder who in the Putnam house has been making wishes. Maybe Lourdes, the maid, hoping for a job in a happier home. At the door I ring the bell and she answers, wearing the same forlorn expression as always. I can never tell if she's actually unhappy or if her face is just made that way. Perhaps she can't help her haunted eyes, the mouth freighted with worry. I say a quick hello, then bound up the stairs to Annie's room.

“Annie?” I call.

“In here,” comes the reply from the walk-in closet.

“For someone who says she doesn't give a crap what people think, you take an age to get ready,” I yell through the open door.

“Just another sec, promise!”

Annie's bedroom reminds me of hotels I see in magazine ads, walls painted in earth tones, a huge neatly made bed covered with a shimmering duvet that calls out for a body, bland landscape art hanging over the headboard. Lourdes cleans the bathroom every day. In the dish to the right of the sink, she leaves soaps with French names on the wrappers. The bedroom is sterile, no overflowing bookcase or desk cluttered with ticket stubs and out-of-focus snapshots, no postcards sent by friends on summer vacation,
Wish you were here
. Only the shelf of basketball trophies reveals that someone lives here. I guess it makes sense that Annie inhabits her room like a guest; she swears she's moving out the day she turns eighteen, going to college on the West Coast, where the air smells like orange blossoms and not swamp rot and refinery gas.

I'm jealous that Annie gets to display her trophies; I have to keep my hardware stashed in a box in the closet where Maw Maw won't find it. She doesn't believe in keeping mementos, no sense in getting attached to this world when it's fixing to end. I wander to the shelf, finger the golden statuettes, the miniature plaques on the pale marble bases. Not a thing from State this year, though, not even a ribbon.
Fourth place is like kissing your brother,
Coach told us.
Don't forget how you feel right now. Because I want you to come back angry, I want you to come back for blood.
I didn't dare tell Coach that I wasn't angry, just scared. Twenty scouts in the crowd, but I left without the scholarship offer I'd thought was my destiny. When I passed the pack of them on my way to the locker room, they avoided my eyes.
Please,
I wanted to beg.
Give me another chance.
Maw Maw said the loss was a humbling.
Now the town'll remember that Mercy Louis puts her pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else.

At last Annie emerges, wearing a thin black tee stretched tight over her chest. In the morning sun coming through the window, I see the outline of her bra, a hint of nipple. Her wardrobe makes me blush, and I have to remember that it's not me wearing the sheer shirt, not my nipples like pencil erasers against the fabric. We are so close that I often forget her body is separate from mine. Since we were twelve, we've played every single league basketball game together. Last year we added them up: 155 games. 4,440 minutes. That's over three days of nonstop ball, not to mention all the practice hours. On the court, I know where she's going before she gets there. That's a kind of connection you can't deny.

“Morning, sunshine,” she says with false cheer. She's a night owl, would probably do well as a vampire. “Let's go or we'll be late.”

“Because tardiness is such a big concern for you,” I say. She slaps my butt playfully.

As we tear down the stairs, we nearly crash into Beau, a column of a man, former lineman for A&M.

“Mercy Louis, you're looking well,” he says. His eyes linger on Annie and I notice his mouth tug down in disapproval.

“Thank you, sir,” I answer, out of breath, feeling like I should salute him. Standing there freshly shaved in his white ten-gallon Stetson and navy sport jacket, he looks like a man who runs things. Annie must have got her lizard blood from him. Never have seen the man sweat, not even during the investigation after the explosion or when he announced his resignation as refinery manager. They showed clips of the announcement on the evening news; halfway through, he held up his hand like he was choking up for the dead, but Annie swears his heart is so parched, the man can't cry. He's a showman, is what.

“Plans for the off-season?” he asks.

“Yes sir,” I answer. “Going to train every day. Strength, speed, and agility stuff, mostly. Anaerobic and aerobic, too. At least a couple hundred made shots a day.”

Annie rolls her eyes, hitches her thumb toward the door, then slips out. Though they live in the same house, she hasn't spoken to her father in years, not since the explosion three years ago. Sure, she says
yes
and
no
and sometimes
hello
and
goodbye,
but they don't converse. She blames him for what happened to those people. No criminal charges were ever brought, but Annie tried and hanged him in her head.

“Better work on your head game,” he says. “Never thought of you as the choking type.”

My face burns from his words. I hear Maw Maw's voice:
Nobody likes an angry woman.
But what can I do with this rage if not wear it? I manage to give a curt nod and follow Annie out.
Meek and mild, be meek and mild.

“Kiss-ass,” Annie says over the car's roof before sliding into the passenger seat. I duck down behind the wheel. She gives me a sour look. “Bet he wishes
you
were his daughter.”

No AC in the car, and I can feel sweat trickling down my neck. “Can you not sit on those?” I ask, trying to clear old team meal plans off the seat beneath her.

“God, why do you hang on to this crap?” she says.

“In case I need them in the summer.”

“The summer's
our
time, Mercy.” She flips down the sunshade, checks her makeup in the mirror. “Girl, obedience is only attractive in dogs and small children.” She pauses. “Sometimes I worry about you.”

“That's new,” I shoot back.

She shrugs. “Just saying you don't always have to be perfect.”

“And you don't always have to be such a B.” I ease into gear and we coast back down the driveway. Guilty at being sharp with her, I ask after her mom. If Annie has a soft spot beneath her spikes, it's for her mother.

“She's not doing good,” she says. “She's in pain whenever she's awake.”

“What does Dr. Morris say?”

“He says there's nothing they can do at this point. There are no meds to help with fibromyalgia. And get this: as he's leaving, he tells Mom she only has to
want
to be pain-free to start to see some real changes.” She snorts. “What a dickwad.”

When Beau made his first million in the late eighties, he threw a retirement party for Mrs. Putnam in celebration. There was this beautiful cake in the shape of a rainbow and pot of gold; the baker had sunk shiny plastic doubloons into the thick pink frosting. Mrs. Putnam was thirty-six years old and working as a nurse at County Hospital. When I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, sticky from cake, I found her sitting on the toilet, her face streaked with mascara, her red lipstick smeared clownishly from where she'd been holding a fistful of tissues against her mouth. Scared by the spidery black streaks, I tiptoed down the hallway to the other bathroom, hoping she hadn't seen me.
A man knows he's really made it when he can give his wife the gift of leisure,
Beau said, toasting Mrs. Putnam later that night.
Here's to no more late nights and long shifts at the hospital, sugar.

Now she rattles around the top floor of the house and never comes down, taking all her meals on trays delivered by Lourdes, the only reminder of her existence the occasional thumping you hear through the thick carpeting as she paces overhead. I imagine her swathed in silk robes, eating off silver-rimmed china, reclining on her feather bed with a cool washcloth pressed to her forehead. When she hears the car doors slam in the morning, does she look out her window, watch us drive away? Does she envy us our movement? Can she even remember what it's like on the outside?

At the Market Basket on the corner of Main and LeBlanc, two police cars are pulled nose to nose in the parking lot.

“Someone got an early start on things,” Annie says as we glide past. “My money's on Luke Fogarty. Or maybe they finally busted Half-baked.”

Half-baked is the kids' nickname for the pothead cashier; he's standing by the dumpster, arms folded across his chest. The officers are crouched down, examining something on the ground. Inside the store, a line of students has formed. Kids driving into the student lot are rubbernecking, cars backed up all the way to the traffic light behind us. Ahead, someone's laying on the horn.

“That's helpful,” I say to nobody, annoyed with the heat, with Beau and Annie, with the holdup and the end of another year. I should have a verbal agreement by now, a T-shirt to wear loud and proud on the last day of school:
Lady Longhorns
or
Lady Techsters
or
Lady Tigers
or
Lady Bears
. A promise for the future, four more years of ball.

“Wonder what's up,” Annie says, hanging her elbow out the window and resting her chin watchfully on the back of her hand. She is drawn to trouble, magnetized by it. Because of this, Beau keeps her on a short leash. People are surprised when I tell them Maw Maw doesn't put a lot of rules on me; I don't even have a curfew.
The Bible is your rulebook, Tee Mercy,
she says.
The Lord gave us free will
,
every day man chooses between damnation and grace, but it's always a choice.

There's Lucille Cloud sitting in front of the shuttered Mr. Good Deals, watching the scene. Her large dog, a German shepherd mix, is flopped out on the pavement beside her, and Lucille's wearing the same oversize men's jacket and army pants as always, her long dark hair limp with grease. A blanket crowded with wares spans the sidewalk in front of her. Every day she sits in the same spot, promising students cures for all manner of ailment—potions for allergies, oils for asthma, necklaces to help you get a boyfriend, that kind of nonsense. Some days one or another of the women from church parks herself nearby, holding a cardboard sign with a verse from John:
Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone into the world.
Once in a while, the woman holding the sign is Maw Maw. For years, she has petitioned the city to get Lucille booted off the street where she sells her wares. Officially, the petition cites loitering, but that's only because there's no box to check for practicing black magic or devil worshipping, both of which Maw Maw believes Lucille does with her velvet boxes filled with semiprecious stones and crystals, her tinctures of oils and herbs.

From across the lot, Lucille's eyes meet mine. I look away, embarrassed to be caught staring. They say last year she broke up Gum Hibbard's marriage, that she prostitutes herself, luring boys and men to her lean-to in the woods under power of her spells to steal their cash. People claim to see lights dancing near her lean-to in the forest at night, flames of the fires Lucille builds for her rituals. At lock-ins and youth group socials, kids dare each other to sneak to her cabin to try and find the baby-bone pile she is rumored to keep buried nearby.

On the radio, a jumpy pop song comes on, and Annie sings along in her husky alto. When we finally pull into the lot, I notice someone has festooned the live oaks near the flagpole with toilet paper.

“And so it begins,” Annie says, peering up into the trees. “My favorite season.”

I think of three months without Coach, no meal plans, the semifinal looping in my mind. As I pull into a spot, I try to breathe, but the car's too hot, my chest won't expand. I park, then stick my head out the window like a dog, opening my mouth to feel air on my tongue.

“Mercy? You okay?”

“It's so hot,” I say.

“Ding ding ding, the prize in observational arts goes to Mercy Louis!” Annie says, as she puts on another coat of lipgloss.

Gradually panic rolls off my chest and I can breathe again. Then Annie says my name in a more subdued voice: “Mercy?”