Little Mercies

She shakes her head, her jowls bobbing with the movement. “I don’t know, hon.” I wish she would stop calling me that. “I’ll check in with a nurse.” She reaches out and touches my hand before I turn to walk away. “Do you have someone to wait with you? Would you like for me to call someone?”

“No, thank you,” I say coolly, pulling my hand away. The receptionist looks at me, first with bewilderment and then with suspicion. I know she thinks I’m acting oddly for a parent whose daughter has been brought near death into the emergency room. She thinks that I am acting exactly the way the kind of woman who would leave her daughter in a boiling van would act. Inexplicably, my mind turns to James Olmstead. Did he act so strangely after Madalyn was found on the sidewalk? I brush the thought away—I’m in social worker mode. It’s a defense mechanism that I’ve had to employ often in my line of work. I wouldn’t have survived for very long if I didn’t become clinical and detached. I want to explain this to the receptionist. I want to tell her that I will not be able to claw my way through this day if I don’t hold my emotions at bay.

The emergency waiting room is surprisingly busy for a Tuesday morning. Individuals in various degrees of pain and misery surround me. There is an elderly woman knitting what appears to be a baby’s blanket, her knobbed fingers deftly moving, turning out a mosaic of pink, blue, yellow and green. There is a hunched young man carefully cradling his heavily bandaged hand, blood oozing through the gauze. One woman is crying, hiccuping loudly into her phone, pleading with someone on the other side of the line to please not drop her health-care insurance. A small boy of about three toddles over, alternating happily between eating a cracker and sipping juice from a sippy cup. With a smile he holds out a soggy, half-eaten cracker to me as an offering and I take it, pretending to nibble at the edges. His apologetic mother rushes over, sweeps him into her arms and moves to the other side of the waiting room.

A woman and her two children approach the receptionist’s window. One of my families. I always make a point to acknowledge my clients, but take their lead as to how much interaction we have when we happen to meet by chance. Today, I hope she doesn’t notice me, hope that she doesn’t want to talk about her children, the damage that has been inflicted upon them. But she turns, eyes scanning the waiting room, landing where I am sitting. I smile in her direction and she makes her way over to where I am and sits down across from me. “An earache,” she explains as she protectively pulls her four-year-old onto her lap and reaches out for her nine-year-old daughter’s hand.

“Those are the worst,” I reply, but we both know this is a lie. The worst was when your boyfriend molested your daughter while you were at work or, for me, when you leave your one-year-old to languish in an oven disguised as a minivan. Nine-year-old Destiny, painfully thin, averts her eyes, pulls away from her mother and busies herself with examining the fish tank in the corner of the room.

“Excuse me,” I say, standing and holding up my phone to let her know that I am not being rude, that I am not moving to avoid further conversation with her, but that I need to make a call. She nods and her attention returns to her four-year-old son, who is fighting back tears and pulling at his ear. She rubs his back in slow, gentle circles. A good mom with an evil boyfriend.

The phone in my hand pulses like a beating heart and I can’t bring myself to answer it just yet. The display reads Love of My Life just as when I call Adam the display pops up as Soul Mate. An inside joke. Early in our marriage, before we had children, we argued over something inconsequential, who forgot to buy the milk or who was supposed to write the check for the cable bill. We didn’t talk to each other for three long, excruciating days. I went about my business, stood a little taller, held my chin high and my back straight, as if this would strengthen my resolve in not being the first to speak. We had each tried to fill the silence of the house in our own way. Adam plugged earphones in and listened to music while I talked on the phone with my mother. I tried not to bring my mother into our arguments, but she was an excellent listener and would support me even if I was clearly in the wrong. Not making eye contact, Adam and I would pass each other in our tiny apartment, rap music leaking from his earphones intermingled with my mother’s sympathetic chastising of my husband’s insensitivity.

Adam broke first, he always did. It was the end of the third day and Adam was standing at the kitchen sink, eating a bowl of cereal. “You’re lucky you’re my soul mate,” he said through a mouthful of Wheat Chex.

“You’re lucky you’re the love of my life,” I countered. And it was over. Like the fight had never happened. From then on whenever we got angry or argued, those words would follow. You’re lucky you’re my soul mate. You’re lucky you’re the love of my life.

I lift the phone to my ear not to call my husband, not just yet. The phone rings and rings until it goes to voice mail. “Mom,” I say, finally surrendering to the tears that have been collecting behind my eyes. “Something happened to Avery.”

Chapter 10 (#ulink_81969b2e-23e9-50a6-b65e-211285989ba3)

As the police officers approached, Jenny froze in fear, a chunk of pancake lodging in her throat midswallow. She reached for her milk, took a swift drink and swallowed hard, willing the mass to slide down her windpipe. Ducking beneath the table, Jenny pretended to search for something on the floor, only raising her head when she was sure the officers had retreated to the far side of the restaurant.

With a sigh of relief, Jenny dug into her breakfast and ten minutes later, the eggs, bacon and four red-tinted, chocolaty pancakes were gone and Jenny was licking syrup from her sticky fingers, her belly uncomfortably full. Jenny fished inside her backpack and pulled out an envelope addressed to Jenny at the apartment where she first came to live with her father. The return address sent a shiver of excitement down her spine. Margaret Flanagan, 2574 Hickory Street, Cedar City, IA. It was like discovering an unexpected world, like Narnia and Nimh, the places her teacher read to them about, were real. It was a card for her fifth birthday from her grandmother. Her mother’s mother.

The day the letter arrived she watched as her father held the envelope in his callused hands. The letters they usually received were stark white envelopes holding bills that caused Billy to swear beneath his breath. This one he held carefully, staring silently down at the lavender envelope and for a moment Jenny was scared.

“It’s for you,” he said. Jenny, bouncing in anticipation, squealed in delight when a ten-dollar bill fell out as Billy opened the card. Jenny begged him to read it to her and tell her who it was from. “Your grandma,” he said grimly. “It’s from your mom’s mother.” Dutifully, he read the birthday card to Jenny, then retreated silently to his bedroom where he stayed for a very long time. Despite her father’s obvious lack of enthusiasm about the letter, Jenny was thrilled and incessantly pestered her father about going to visit her grandmother in Cedar City someday. They never did. Her father lost his job, they moved from their apartment and Jenny never received another letter or card from her grandmother. Eventually, Jenny stopped asking about her.

But now, sitting in a restaurant in Cedar City, in the very town where Jenny’s mother grew up, where her grandmother may still live, she slowly, methodically deciphered her grandmother’s handwriting. It was written in tiny, cramped cursive and Jenny, on her best days, struggled to read a menu. In the card, her grandmother said she was sorry that her daughter, Jenny’s mother, wasn’t there for her. That she didn’t used to be this way. She was once a caring, loving little girl who spent her days riding her bike around Cedar City and evenings catching fireflies and playing Kick the Can and Boys Chase the Girls. Jenny couldn’t imagine her mournful-faced mother ever hollering Ollie, Ollie oxen free at the top of her lungs and kicking at an old rusty coffee can with all her might.