The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (30 page)

On the far side of the bay, the Praying Hands rise white against the blue sea. From here it looks as though they are begging something of the refinery, negotiating for the souls of the dead.

Raised voices on the radio catch my attention “ . . . election's a week from Tuesday, Beau, you still promising to get the case solved before then?” Beau Putnam answers that, as a matter of fact, he just got off the phone with Chief McKinney, who's going to give any high school girl who wants to clear her name once and for all the chance to voluntarily submit a DNA sample this Wednesday morning. They've already got it worked out with the school board, because everyone wants to see this case solved.

“A source says your daughter was supposed to be questioned first thing Monday,” the interviewer says. “But they've postponed it.”

After a couple false starts, Beau recovers enough to say that the whole town went to Annie's Purity Ball this summer and can testify to his daughter's commitment to remaining intact until marriage, but that yes, certainly, she plans to cooperate with the investigation if the chief deems it necessary.

“I understand the interview got postponed because your daughter is sick right now. Y'all were seen leaving the hospital on Saturday . . .”

“Well, the doctors have told us that they're healthy, so it's really nothing to get worked up about.”

“But Jodi Martin's told the
Flare
that Mercy and Annie won't play in Tuesday's game. According to the story that ran Saturday, Mercy has physical tics that make it too hard to play. The town wants to know, Mr. Putnam, what's wrong with the girls? What's made your girl so sick she can't cooperate with the law?”

“Tell you what, I believe that's a question for Mercy Louis,” Beau says.

No,
I think reflexively.
No, no, no.

He continues, “Annie was a happy girl until Mercy went down. What I can say for sure is that she'd follow Mercy off a cliff. She idolizes Mercy. Hell, this whole town does.”

“Mr. Putnam, what about the talk that it's the refinery poisoning our youngsters? There's been extra flaring lately, a bunch of kids up at the school feeling dizzy and such. Could that have something to do with your daughter's illness? We know Sands has given a lot of money to your campaign, so how does that make you feel . . .”

I swerve into the gym lot and dash out of the car. Down the steps, through the doors, into the gym where I knock on Coach's door. No answer. This time I bang hard.

“Coach, it's Mercy,” I shout through the door.
Bang bang bang.
“Please, Coach!” Still nothing. I fall to my knees and rest my head on the door. The pressure feels good, all my frantic thoughts dispersing into the wood. “Coach,” I whimper.

Someone says: “She's not here.”

I glance around to find Illa Stark standing behind me, arms laden with uniforms.

“I know,” I say, getting to my feet. Trying to gather my wits, I smooth my hair behind my ears.

“She was here earlier, but she went home.” She looks apologetic. “Is there anything I can do?”

I shake my head no.
One-two-three.
I clutch my arm, embarrassed.

“Do you have a minute?” she asks. “I have something I think you should see.”

The journalism room smells faintly of cigarette smoke and stale french fries. Illa walks me into the darkroom, and I appreciate its dimness for the cover it gives me and my arm.

“Here,” she says, pushing a photo across the counter toward me. When I see it, I remember the exact moment, the salty warmth of sweat as it streamed down my face and into my mouth, the explosive aftershocks of having driven full court, weaving through a forest of swatting arms and knocking Dawaun Brown on his rear end somewhere near the bucket as I laid in the most delicate kiss of a shot,
thump swish
. In the photo, I'm raging with happiness and pride.

“I entered this in a contest, I hope that doesn't weird you out,” she says. “The theme was ‘Euphoric Sport.'”

The words snare my heart, and just like that, I'm crying, tears sheeting down my face.
Euphoric.
I was, once.

“Hey, hey,” she says, kneading my shoulder with awkward little pushes. “I didn't mean for you to get upset. I thought it might help you feel better.”

We sit side by side on the floor as I try to catch my breath. Eventually, I ask: “How do you get back to a feeling? You can't just buy a ticket.” I wag my head back and forth.

“You'll get back there,” she says. “You've hit a rough patch, but come Tuesday, remember this picture. I can make you a copy, if you—”

“I'm not playing Tuesday,” I interrupt. “I have to quit the team.”

“What? Why? You can't give up, you'll get better, I know you will!”

“No point talking about it, it's already been decided. My grandmother . . .” I consider telling her the truth—that Maw Maw thinks I might be possessed, that the world is going to end in two months, so I need to focus on saving my soul—but I know it'll sound crazy to a nonbeliever, so I just say, “My grandmother wants me to focus on healing.”

“But what about . . .”

“It's a done deal.” I'm short with her, but she's making it worse; she can't make any argument I haven't already thought of myself.

“Want a Coke?” she asks, resignation in her voice. “There's a mini-fridge we keep stocked for when we go to press.”

“Sure,” I say, and we push back into the classroom's yellow light.

She starts to hand me a Dr Pepper, then remembers my arm and pops it open for me and hands it over. “Do you miss her?” she asks.

Huh huh huh.
I don't have to ask who she means. I run my finger along the cold ridge of the Coke can; I press the pad of my finger into the sharp metal of the tab until I draw blood, then put it in my mouth and suck.

“Never knew her, how could I miss her?” I say, polishing off the Dr Pepper and clinking the empty can against the desk. “Don't know the first thing about her. Favorite food, favorite color, when her birthday is.”

“It seems like she misses you.”

“How would you know?”

“There were a few more letters over the summer . . .” she stutters, looking sheepish. “I . . . I read them . . . Please don't be mad at me, I just felt so bad that there were these letters to you that you'd never read . . . Don't be mad, Mercy, I couldn't take it if I made you mad at me again.”

She says this fast, like I might not understand the words if she just speeds through them; she curves her body inward like a comma. She's waiting for me to lose it like I did at Park Terrace last summer, but if I lose any more, I'll disappear.

“Yeah, I miss her,” I say at last. “I miss her every single day. Even before she wrote to me, I missed her.” I bite my tongue, pinch my inner arm, anything to keep from crying again. “So why did Charmaine send the letters to
your
house?”

Illa stands and walks to the other side of the room, where she examines a line of books shelved there before pulling one off.

“They keep the yearbook archive in here,” she says, thrusting one at me, the 1980
Stingaree Jubilee,
laminate peeling back from the mustard-yellow cover. When I hesitate to take the yearbook from her, Illa flips it open to a dog-eared page. “Here,” she says. “Look. Our moms were friends back in the day. That's why we got the letters, I guess.”

On a page titled “Junior Life,” there's a photo of two young women standing on a beach, their arms thrown around each other in the casual posture of close friends. Illa's mom looks like the cat that ate the canary; Charmaine is round-cheeked, sunburned, a string bean of a girl. I see myself in the shape of her calves, her elfin ears. Maw Maw must have been horrified as I grew to look more like my mother with each passing year.

“What does your mom say about her?” I ask.

“Not much,” she says. “I just found out they were friends this summer, and when I asked her about it, she got upset.”

I want to get back in the car and drive to Illa's house to excavate Meg Stark's memories, every last one. Getting upset over Charmaine Boudreaux is something we have in common.

“You want to see what your mother looked like as a freshman?” Illa asks, fetching another of the books from the shelf. “Go on. There's an index of students at the back, you just look up the name and it tells you where in the book a person's mentioned.”

Hands shaking, I flip to the back of the book and run my finger down the row of
B
s until I find
Boudreaux, Charmaine
. Pages thirty-eight, fifty-three, sixty-seven. I turn to the first page, but I'm unprepared; freshman Charmaine is so young, her face squishy as a baby's, all cheek and lip. She wears a blouse with a Peter Pan collar, her grin guileless. She is not trying to act older than she is, like so many girls in high school. She is fourteen, and it shows. Beneath her photo is a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air,
as well as a list of her interests: church, movies, summer, basketball.
Basketball?

I have pictured her with a crack pipe in her mouth, under a rawboned man working his mean hips hard; I have pictured her emaciated and wild-eyed from the drugs, stumbling down the streets of New Orleans in torn stockings. Never have I pictured her capable of doing anything as disciplined as squaring up for a shot. What happened to her between this photograph and her years wandering the purgatory of Maw Maw's stories?

In the car on the way back to the stilt house, I remember what Charmaine wrote:
There are two sides to every story, I only want to tell mine.
Maw Maw never mentioned that Charmaine played basketball, though surely she must've known it would give me a nip of happiness. Is this the reason Maw Maw hates the game and refuses to watch me play? What else has she left out about Charmaine?

When I arrive home, I expect Maw Maw to lecture me about being out too long, but she doesn't even register my entrance. She stands frozen by the telephone, receiver dangling from her hand, the phone's busy signal beeping angrily.

“Maw Maw?” I say quietly, not wanting to startle her. She looks at me foggily, preoccupied. “What is it?”

“That was Jodi Martin,” she says. “Two more girls have been taken.”

A
FTER MERCY LEAVES
the journalism room, Illa guns it to a ramshackle roadhouse that sits on a lip of the bayou, orders a bourbon, and sucks it down, grateful for its spirit-shocking burn. She has just had the longest conversation of her life with Mercy Louis, and she needs to recover.

The roadhouse is not the type of place where a person's age matters much—everyone looks life-worn, herself included, and that's as good as legal. From a darkened corner, she hears the sound of coins dropping into the jukebox, and then George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” At the bar, a few men sit slumped over their beers. From across the room, the cracking of pool balls. Smoke makes a haze of the air. For the first time in a long while, Illa finds that she's hungry. Starving, in fact. It's such an alien sensation that at first she mistakes it for cramps.

From the barkeep, she orders a burger with grilled onions and pickles. It arrives on a single square of waxed paper translucent with grease. She wolfs it down in three bites and decides it is possibly the best thing she's ever eaten; she orders another one and dispatches it with the same efficiency. To round out the meal, she gets a bag of potato chips and eats every last one, down to the salty crumbs at the bottom of the bag, which she collects by pressing her forefinger to them and licking them off.

It is her first real meal in days. Her hair has begun to fall out in clumps; she didn't get her period last month. She does not want to be lighter than air anymore; in a world that can bring down even the strongest girls among them—Mercy, Annie—making yourself deliberately insubstantial seems foolish.

For years Mercy's power existed in her beauty, talent, strength, and goodness. Now Illa understands that wretchedness, too, is a form of power, because seeing Mercy like this rocks Illa with an overwhelming desire to do whatever is necessary to get Mercy healthy. Guiltily, she thinks back to the summer when she hoped that Mercy might one day need her the way that other girls on the team did. She never imagined a situation this dire, only thought that perhaps Mercy would develop shin splints or something so Illa might have the opportunity to minister to her and perhaps, through those ministrations, befriend her.

Remembering Mercy's desperation in the forest and her great sadness earlier today, Illa is suddenly glad of her ability to meet people's needs, honed over years of caring for Mama and managing the team. Even if helping Mercy means she will go back to being a superstar with no desire to talk to Illa ever again. Illa will do that, sacrifice this newfound, prayed-for closeness if Mercy can just be herself again, powerful, shimmering, triumphant.

That afternoon Mercy confessed that she missed Charmaine every day. Yet she stubbornly refused to respond to her mother's letters and still thinks of the woman as the enemy. Illa admits that Charmaine doesn't have much going for her other than a few badly punctuated but earnest letters, sent years too late. Still, Illa has a soft spot for Charmaine, something about the blunt honesty of the letters and the adoring look on her face in that yearbook photo with Mama. Whenever Illa turned to the photo over the summer, that look made her proud of her mother. And it made her want to love her better. She failed, though. With Mama, she continued to be impatient and churlish, shaming her mother when she should have helped her. If Charmaine Boudreaux deserved a second chance after being gone seventeen years, then surely Mama did, too.

Illa finds a sticky pay phone in the hall by the bathrooms, dials information, and asks for Boudreaux, Charmaine, of Austin. No luck. What about Boudreaux, C? Still nothing. She scribbles down the numbers of the six Boudreauxs listed, gets change, and calls them. Two lines have been disconnected, one leads her to an answering machine for a Tuff Boudreaux, and the other three have never heard of Charmaine. Back at the bar, she asks the bartender for a piece of paper and pen. He has to hunt in back, but he returns clutching a Howard Johnson clicker pen and a yellow sheet of paper torn jaggedly from a pad. “Any chance you've got a stamp and envelope back there, too?” she asks. “I can pay you cash.” To her surprise, he doesn't scoff or reproach her, just leaves and reappears with a Forever stamp and a coffee-stained envelope. “Thanks a lot,” she says, sliding a dollar toward him.

He waves it away. “Anyone writing a letter in a bar needs whatever help I can give 'em,” he says, wiping down the counter with a yellowing rag.

Illa has Charmaine's address memorized from the summer, the PO box and zip. On the yellow sheet, Illa writes,

           
Don't panic, but Mercy is sick, and I think she needs you, though she'll kill me if she ever finds out about this letter . . .

When she finishes writing, she folds the paper in threes, slides it into the envelope, and carefully writes out Charmaine's name and address. She affixes the stamp and then pushes the envelope to arm's length, wary of what she's done. She orders a ginger ale. For as long as it takes her to drink the soda, Illa can pretend she hasn't just defied Mercy's most ardent wish. While she knows it will probably reach its destination in a day or two, she wants to give fate or chance or whatever the opportunity to intervene, if it cares to.

From the jukebox, Johnny Cash sings about Sunday mornings coming down, a mournful song well suited to a roadhouse bar on a stormy Monday night when all the world seems to be going to shit. Illa finishes the ginger ale, folds the letter into her pocket, and pays her tab. Back outside, rain dampens her face, steam rising from the low, wet country lining the highway. Thunder unfolds through the trees. After depositing the letter in the postbox, Illa pulls into the driveway on Galvez. She sees the upstairs light come on in Mr. Alvarez's house. She presses her cheek to the cool glass of the window, her head swimming a bit, her belly warm and full. Rain blurs the windshield, cocooning her inside the car. She thinks of Mercy's stricken face during warm-ups that Friday night, the arhythmic dance of Annie's disobedient body in the hospital bathroom. What
is
happening to the girls? And can it spread?

COACH TELLS THE
team about Corinne Wolcott before practice Monday morning. According to Mrs. Wolcott, Corinne woke up Sunday morning with a bad stutter and can barely talk.

“They're at the doctor now,” Coach says. “But it's likely Corinne won't play in tomorrow's game.”

Brittny mentions that Corinne's twin sister, Mackenzie, is sick, too, that it started with stiffness in the neck that traveled down her back and left her bedridden.

“Actually,” Brittny says, “the doctor is making a house call because Mackenzie
can't even move.
I hope I don't catch it.” She shudders. “I spent Saturday night over there, we were drinking out of the same water bottle. What if it's meningitis? A couple years ago some kids at my sister's college got it. They got real stiff necks like Mackenzie, fevers, and headaches. One of them almost died.”

“No one's dying,” Coach says. “That's enough of that kind of talk.”

“What about Mercy and Annie?” Zion asks. “When are they going to be able to play again?”

“Not sure just yet,” Coach says. “We've got to give them some time to recover, but you know those two, they're fighters. They'll be back.”

Has Mercy not told Coach the news about leaving the team? Maybe she lost her nerve. After practice, Illa decides to let Coach know so that maybe she can talk some sense into Evelia. Mercy said it was useless to try to change her grandmother's mind, but people have a hard time saying no to Jodi Martin.

“What is it, Stark?” Coach says when she finds Illa waiting at her office door.

“It's Mercy, Coach. She was up here yesterday looking for you, I thought she told you already, but I guess not . . .”

“Spit it out, what's going on?”

“Evelia isn't going to let her play ball.”

“I know, she already told me about tomorrow's game.”

“Not just tomorrow's game. She's not going to let her play the rest of the
season.
She's withdrawing her from school today.”

Coach's face puckers like she's tasted something sour. “We'll see about that,” she says.

“You going to go over there now?” Illa says, glad to have a bulldog like Coach fighting for Mercy.

“I got class,” Coach says distractedly. “But I'll take care of it first thing after school.” Then she squeezes Illa's shoulder, smiles, and simply says, “Thank you.”

By lunch, the whole school knows about Annie and the Wolcotts. Nancy Cobb and Laynie Hibbard are home sick, too. In the cafeteria line, at the tables, by the Coke machines in the courtyard, everyone is talking about one of two things: the mystery illness or last night's radio announcement about the voluntary DNA testing later that week. Students buzz down the hallways, atoms of anxiety fusing with one another to form dangerous compounds.

Meningitis,
someone whispers over a lunch tray.
They call it the kissing disease. It's crazy contagious. Dude, if Annie Putnam has a kissing disease, the whole school is doomed!
Laughter and hissing.
Shit's real, y'all,
someone else pipes in.
I saw AP coming out of math, she looked awful. She shouldn't be in school.

Illa steals up to the Mrs. Ancelet's office so she can use the phone; she wants to warn Mercy about Coach's visit. When she knocks on the door to the nurse's office, she can hear someone inside coughing violently. When no one answers, Illa pushes the door open; she sees Brittny Wood reclining on a cot, arm drawn over her eyes. Keisha Freeman holds a blood-speckled tissue in her hand, eyes watering from the force of her hacking.

Mrs. Ancelet sees Illa and says, “Don't tell me you're sick, too?”

Illa shakes her head.

“Oh, thank God.” Harried, Mrs. Ancelet turns away, jabbering to herself. “I told them they should have canceled school with this god-awful smell, I remember what it was like after the spill in '84, kids lined up down the hall thinking the water was poisoned . . .”

“Can I use the phone?”

She looks back as if surprised that Illa's still there. “Oh. No, come back another time. I've got my hands full. And Illa, shut the door on your way out, please. Don't need anyone else getting any ideas.”

Illa nods and does as she's asked, backing out of the room and pulling the door closed behind her. She's glued to the spot, unable to decide which way to go. Maybe she should go home, too. For the first time, she's scared for herself. She can't afford to get sick. How will Mama manage? Illa turns toward the senior hallway and collides with Nancy Cobb, smashing her face against Nancy's shoulder.

“Jesus,” Illa says, touching her lip. She can taste blood trickling into her mouth.

“Sorry,” says Nancy, already looking past Illa, hand on the doorknob.

“I wouldn't go in there if I were you,” Illa says.

“But I don't feel well,” Nancy whines. “I think I've got the virus that's going around. Feel my forehead, do I feel hot to you?”

Obligingly, Illa puts her hand to Nancy's forehead, which is cool as a marble slab.

“You feel fine,” Illa says before hurrying away.