The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (32 page)

W
HEN MERCY SHOOTS
out of her chair and bellows, “Lucille Cloud,” it makes the hair on Illa's neck stand up. The gym goes silent. “Lucille Cloud, Lucille Cloud,” Mercy repeats, quieter this time, chantlike.

Principal Long attempts crowd control, barking orders into the microphone. “Everyone just stay calm, please! Make your way to the doors in an orderly fashion!” But even if people want to leave, they can't, the room is so jam-packed that progress in any direction is impossible. The families of the sick girls try to shield their daughters from the encroaching crowd.

Illa squeezes her way through the pushing bodies until she can see Mercy lying motionless on the floor, staring up to the ceiling, Evelia and a short man in a seersucker suit bent over her. Chief McKinney appears, herding people toward the door, barking into a walkie-talkie. “She's going to be fine, just fine,” he says. “Move along.” But how can he be sure? To Illa, Mercy looks half-dead.

With the help of her grandmother, Mercy sits up. Someone hands her a Dixie cup of water from the drinking fountain.

“You want me to call an ambulance, ma'am?” Chief McKinney shouts to Evelia, who shakes her head. “You sure? I've already got backup on the way.”

“Yessir,” she responds curtly.

“At least let me escort y'all to the door,” he says.

“Let's go,
now,
” Pastor Parris says. He positions himself behind Mercy as if he's going to help her up, then hesitates, distaste written on his face. Finally, he puts his hands under her arms and hoists her to her feet. She sways, then falls back against him, deadweight.

“Let me help,” Chief McKinney offers, stepping toward Mercy.

Pastor Parris holds up a hand to stop him. “That's not a good idea,” he says, lips a grim line. He rights Mercy, then gives her a push in the direction of the back door. “But if you'll clear a path . . . ?”

A confused look flashes across the chief's face, but he turns and begins using his large body to cut through the teeming people. Flanked by Evelia and Pastor Parris, Mercy takes halting steps forward. As soon as they see who's coming, people scuttle out of the way, and Illa notices some of them turn away quick or cover their faces. One woman pulls the neck of her sweater to just below her eyes.

Illa slips unnoticed behind the trio. Once they're out the back door on the sidewalk, she hides behind a concrete pillar. Chief McKinney touches Evelia's elbow, leans slightly forward in a posture of confidence. “I want you to know, Ms. Boudreaux, that I plan to bring Lucille Cloud back in for questioning, but first I'd like to have Mercy come in and make a formal statement. We need to know exactly what she thinks happened with that baby. We'll wait till she's better first, of course.” He clears his throat. “And I want to reassure you that Detective LaCroix isn't going to pay heed to loose talk and gossip, even if it comes from Beauregard Putnam.”

“Kind of you, sir, but it's not the law we're afraid of,” she says. “Now, if you'll excuse us.” They take leave of the chief, hurrying Mercy to the passenger side of the Lincoln.

“We'll begin the exorcism tonight,” Pastor Parris says, pushing Mercy down into the backseat like a cop with a cuffed suspect. “We can't wait another day or we'll lose her completely.”

“It's too soon,” Evelia says. “You said if we didn't prepare everything proper, she might get hurt. I haven't got the house right yet . . .”

“I've never seen someone gripped so tight by the devil,” he says. “We can't wait.”

Evelia reluctantly assents, and Pastor Parris says he'll come to the house at eight o'clock. He tells her to make sure she takes all the precautions they discussed, removing sharp objects from the room, getting rid of matches and lighters, candles and fire starter logs. Then Pastor Parris shuts the back door and gives a nod. Evelia puts the car in reverse and heads for the highway.

As Illa watches Pastor Parris disappear into the throng, she decides to go in search of Travis Salter. Of the people closest to Mercy, he seems to be the only one who loves her without agenda.

Once inside the building, she learns that Principal Long has canceled school for the day. They're supposed to gather their things and leave campus immediately. Illa hustles to the senior hall, hoping she hasn't missed Travis. As she speed-walks in that direction, students stream past her and out the door to the idling school buses that have been called in for early dismissal.

Along the way, she picks up snippets of talk
. . . she looked possessed, I swear I saw her eyes roll back in her head . . . does this mean the DNA testing is canceled?

The anxiety in the air reminds her of the day of the explosion four years ago, when students were herded into the cafeteria to the plea of the refinery's emergency sirens. Sitting in the cafeteria listening to the principal explain what had happened at the plant that day, Illa had felt it in her body: life, changing. She has that same dreadful inkling now, that something is badly wrong.

She spots Travis at his locker, packing up his books. He wears a faded Astros cap, his long fair hair curling out from under it, a Farm Aid shirt with a caricature of Willie Nelson's face on it.

“Travis,” she says.

He peers around his locker door. “Hey . . .” he says, stretching out the word as he searches for her name.

“Illa Stark,” she says, throwing him a bone.

He snaps his fingers as if the name had been on the tip of his tongue. “You're the team manager.”

“That's right,” she says. “Listen . . .” She hesitates, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “This is probably going to sound kind of cracked out to you, but it's Mercy . . .”

Travis straightens out of his slouch, his eyes thirsty for whatever information she has. “I tried to get down there to help her, but that idiot McKinney shoved me out the doors before I could get to her. I mean, I know she probably doesn't want to see me, but God, I've been a mess wondering about her.”

“I need your help.”

“What's going on?”

She plunges ahead, the word
exorcism
fantastical and melodramatic there in the senior hallway, with its rows of colorful lockers, girls calling out
Heyyyyy bitch
to passersby. He takes off his ball cap and wrings it between his hands. “Unreal,” he says.

“Last time I saw Mercy at Evelia's, she was so scared. And my mom told me something awful about Mercy's mom. She was . . .” She pauses, then whispers, “ . . . raped by Mercy's dad.”

“But I thought her parents were married. Mercy never talked about it, but my mom remembered something about a wedding.”

“I don't know,” Illa says. “But we can't trust Evelia to take care of Mercy.”

He shakes the hair out of his eyes. “What does Lucille have to do with anything?”

“Judging by what happened to her dog, someone thinks she's guilty of something. I know Mercy visited Lucille this weekend.” She takes the amethyst necklace out of her pocket; she scooped it up after Mercy threw it into the brush. “Lucille gave this to her, and Mercy tried to get rid of it. Maybe she thinks it's cursed.”

“Lucille found us once,” he says. “In the woods. Caught us fooling around.”

Just then Annie descends on them, sneers at Illa, then says to Travis: “My God, you're the hardest fucking person to find. Look, Mercy is really messed up right now, I think she needs us . . .” When she realizes Illa is still standing there, she pauses and stares at her. “Get lost, stalker, this has nothing to do with you.”

“You get lost, Putnam,” Travis says. “Quit pretending you give a shit about Mercy. Illa and I have it under control.”

Annie's mouth hangs open in shock, but she quickly collects herself and looks witheringly at Illa. “God, you're a sicko, preying on Mercy when she's helpless like this.” She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “Enjoy it while it lasts, because when this is all over, she's going to go right back to not giving a shit about you.”

“Fuck off, Annie,” Travis says.

“I was just leaving.”

They watch her storm away, and Illa's hatred of Annie threatens to consume her until she sees Annie pause at the end of the hallway, head jerking
one-two, one-two.

“We'll figure something out,” Travis says. He doesn't sound very certain.

“Why don't I pick you up tonight?” she says.

“I'm on the east side of town. On Bird of Paradise.”

“I'll be there at seven-thirty.”

As Illa makes her way to the student lot, she thinks about Annie's accusation that she is somehow enjoying all of this. Everything about the last week has been a nightmare, not a dream. Though Mercy knows who Illa is now, this isn't the kind of closeness she prayed for all these years. She wanted a friendship predicated on love and respect, not need. But from Mercy, she is starting to grasp what she was never able to learn from Mama: that there is grace in serving someone who can give you nothing; and that sometimes love is purest in such needs-meeting.

THAT EVENING ILLA
steals out to her car and slides behind the wheel. She's about to turn the engine when a voice comes from the backseat: “Hello.”

Illa wheels around to see who it is, heart drumming. “Jesus, Annie.”

“I see myself as more of a Judas, really,” Annie says. “I would tell you to lock your car, but no one would ever steal this POS.”

“How long have you been out here?”

Annie twitches
one-two one-two,
then smiles the kind of spacey grin Illa sees on the faces of the alcoholics who drink from paper bags under the Sabine River Bridge. From her shoulder bag, Annie procures a fat manila envelope and holds it out between the shoulders of the two front seats. “Here,” she says.

“What is that?”

“An internal report created by the refinery's safety chief in the fall of 1995.” She withdraws the envelope, pulls out a stack of half-shredded papers, and flips to a dog-eared page. “And I quote from the concluding paragraph: ‘In my career at this plant, I have never seen a situation where the notion “I could die today” was so real as it is now.'”

She holds Illa's gaze through the mirror before Illa looks away. She stares at the shaggy shadows of the bougainvillea bushes, trying to absorb what she's just heard. Tears have sprung to her eyes, and she doesn't want Annie to see.

Annie continues: “This report predicts an accident on the level of the explosion that took your mama's legs four months before it happened; it recommends immediate action to fix a number of problems they term ‘not potentially, but inevitably, lethal.' You know what Daddy did when they gave him this report?” She paused. “He brought it home to shred, but he was so shit-faced that he didn't notice it was too thick for the machine, only made it halfway through. My mama found it like that.”

“Why would she hang on to something like this?”

“Same reason Monica Lewinsky didn't wash that dress, I guess.”

“Seriously, Annie.”

Annie looks out the back window, nodding. “When the leak happened last week, Mom decided she'd had enough of nothing changing, so she gave the report to me. I've been sitting on it a few days. Didn't know what to do with it until now.”

Stuffing the papers back in the envelope, Annie again holds it out over the console, where Illa can feel it pulsing with the truth her mother sensed all along.

“Why hasn't anyone blown the whistle on this?” Illa asks, trying to keep her voice steady. “It's been years.”

“The men who wrote this knew how easy it would be for them to wind up on the wrong end of a blown pipe. Especially after the explosion, they knew how little their lives were worth, let alone their jobs.”

“Why are you doing this?” Illa asks. “Won't your dad go to jail?”