A Matter of Mercy

Chapter 1

The dune fence between their house and the beach still tilted toward the water. It had always seemed an invitation to Caroline, like a gesturing hand, and as a child she’d been secretly glad when her father’s work to straighten it didn’t last. It had pointed to shiny afternoons at the edge of the shore with her mother. Later it pointed the way for her friends, teenagers gathering on summer nights around a driftwood fire to laugh and drink beer a boy had swiped from his parents. Recently though, since she’d come back, she’d imagined it pointed to an escape route. If she just stuck to the sand and walked west out of Wellfleet, she’d cross the bay beaches of Truro and end up in Provincetown. The passenger ferries to Boston left from the wharf there.

“I don't see why you can't go back to teaching,” Caroline’s mother said to her back. Strange how her voice could sound so weak, yet relentless, like a hungry kitten. “Can’t you apply for reinstatement? It's been a long time.”

Caroline sighed and kept looking out through the picture window in the living room. At the shoreline, the water appeared distinct with separate white-lined laps, but toward the horizon it was the color of fog, sea merging into sky, one realm dimming into another in the aging day, just as her mother’s life was fading from this world into the next. A silent rise out of the slow breath of sleep—like the blurring of bay and sky—was how her mother’s life would likely end. That’s how Elsie, the hospice nurse, had described it when she explained the use of a morphine drip. When would be the time to say good-bye in that drifting scenario?

“Rake's not out yet.” Caroline’s left forefinger examined the nails of her right hand as she spoke. “I'm surprised. The tide's more than half-down.” She was trying not to revert to biting her nails by painting them Crystal Mauve. Eleanor used to say polish looked cheap on a woman, but the clay she worked would have made a mess of it, so Caroline attributed the opinion to suppressed envy. She’d thought of offering to paint her mother’s nails now, but what would that imply?

“You’re changing the subject. Will you look at me please?” her mother complained, and then couldn’t curtail herself. “Anyway, it’s not Rake there anymore. It’s The Junior.” Caroline heard the rest as if by telepathy: 
I told you, Rake is dead. 
“Came back to take over before Rake died. Settled right back home,” Eleanor said, the last meaning 
it’s past time you did the same
. “Sure doesn’t look like his father, does he?” She paused and Caroline knew she was supposed to recall the image of the tough, skinny Jake, whose full moniker, Jake the Rake, had been a riff on his resemblance to the bull rake with which he harvested quahogs. “The Junior’s built like a brick shithouse.” Eleanor had abandoned prim language with no explanation after she was widowed.

“I wouldn’t know, Mom. I haven’t laid eyes on Rid, or any of those guys, since high school.”

“Never heard him called anything but The Junior,” Eleanor mused.

“By his parents. I doubt he appreciates it.”

“Pffft.” Eleanor brushed the notion off with a weak-wristed gesture. She pushed with her heels and wrists, trying to hike herself up in the bed, dislodging a pillow that landed with a 
whoof
 on the wood plank floor. A wheeled bedside stand, moved aside after she’d relented and taken a little applesauce, held an artful smattering of red, gold and pink dahlias Caroline had salvaged from the garden. They were the brightest color in a room of sparse oak dominated by an old stone fireplace. If there was any daylight at all, the eye was drawn to the view, which Eleanor always insisted 
was
 the decor.

Caroline left the window to pick up the pillow and resettle her mother who tried to shoo her away with bird-like hands, her bones a network of twigs scarcely covered.

“The Junior is a worker, though,” Eleanor pushed on, needing to make some point about a local. The day before she’d gone on about Tomas, the son of another of her retired friends who’d taken over for his parents. “I watched him yesterday. Got a brown dog that runs around the beach.”

“See? You 
do
 love being able to see the water,” Caroline said, a bit of I-knew-it in her voice, glad she’d persisted about moving the furniture around and having the delivery men put the hospital bed in the living room. Eleanor could hear the bay from her bedroom if the window was open, but couldn’t see it. Caroline sat next to her mother, but angled the straight-backed chair so she, too, could see the water.

“It’s holy to me,” Eleanor conceded. “The worst is leaving you and this place behind. I don’t know how you ever left.”

“You 
know
 I couldn’t stay after the accident.”

“People are better than you think,” Eleanor said. “There’s a time for leaving, I’ll give you that, but there’s also a time for coming home.”

“Mom, no one here is going to celebrate my return by killing the fatted calf. And this isn’t about me. I’m here for you. Anyway, what I don’t get is why someone would come back to work the 
flats
, of all things.”

Eleanor’s eyes reddened with tears, which she did not try to wipe. After a pause, she said, “Rake worked up a … life … to leave The Junior.” She attempted an arm swoosh toward the window, though which the bay glinted. “Big call now for Wellfleet oysters. Quahogs, too. They fly ’em to New York and Chicago, all over. Charlotte said she heard there’s oysters going to Paris from right here. Best in the world. Right here.”

Not for the first time, Caroline wondered if dying was something her mother had arranged just to get her home.

* * * *

It was dusk when Eleanor nodded off after her mousy nibbling at the edges of food and two-foot journey to the bedside commode with Caroline’s help. It might have been two miles, it seemed to exhaust her that much. Elsie had warned Caroline that a catheter would be needed soon, and a diaper. Caroline folded back the sheet across her mother’s chest and smoothed it into a neat cuff. She licked the tips of her fingers to subdue a few strands of patchy grayish-white. “A woman’s hair is her glory,” Eleanor used to say when Caroline was little and she’d wedge her daughter between her knees and brush out her hair before she did her own. “A hundred strokes a day brings out the shine.” Caroline shook her head, refusing the tingle of incipient tears, and kissed her mother’s forehead with butterfly lips.