This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel Read online

  She lay back down on her bed. She was quiet but her eyes were still open, and I could tell she was thinking about something. “I hope you can get some pictures of Mom soon,” she said. “I can’t even remember her.”

  “Bull-honky you can’t,” I said. “It’s only been three months.”

  “But I just can’t picture her,” she said. “I swear.” I thought about that for a second, and then I thought about how Ruby was only six years old and how three months must seem like a pretty good bit of life to her.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s been a while. But she’ll come back to you.”

  “I hope,” Ruby said.

  “She will,” I said. “Go to sleep.” I reached out and clicked off the lamp that sat on the little table between our beds, and then I rested my back against the wall. I looked through the dark room toward Ruby’s bed.

  “You waiting on him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you think he’ll come tonight?”

  “I do,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  I hated it when Ruby talked about not being able to remember Mom, but sometimes I hated that I could remember her so good. Whenever I thought about the day I found her, it seemed like I was another person, like another person with a life other than mine had told me about it. But the telling seemed so real that it was hard to pretend that I’d just heard about it from somebody else. I’ll never be able to forget that it was me who found her, even though I’ve spent plenty of time wishing it hadn’t been.

  Mom always said that she’d named us what she’d named us because those were her favorite things: Easter was her favorite holiday and rubies were her favorite jewels. Me and Ruby used to ask Mom all the time what her other favorite things were, and we’d pretend those things were our names instead. She’d told us one time that her favorite kind of dog was a Boston terrier and that her favorite color was purple. And when it came to music, she didn’t hardly listen to nothing but Journey, so I figured that had to be her favorite band. So that’s what me and Ruby started calling ourselves; I was Boston Terrier, and she was Purple Journey. Boston Terrier: I’ll admit it sounds silly when you first hear it, but if you split it up into a first name and a last name I think it sounds kind of pretty—fancy and a little bit dangerous, like the name of a woman in an action movie the hero can’t quite trust but falls in love with anyway. It seems crazy to say we played make-believe like that now, but we used those names so much they almost became real, and sometimes I wanted to call Ruby “Purple” even when we weren’t playing. We’d already promised each other that if we ended up having to run away from the home to keep from being split up then that’s who we’d become. We’d be Boston Terrier and Purple Journey for the rest of our lives. No one would ever know we’d been somebody else back in Gastonia.

  It’s easier for me to imagine Boston Terrier and Purple Journey getting off that school bus and walking past Lineberger Park on their way home to a too-quiet house. It’s easier for me to picture a girl with a pretty name like that finding Mom and him lying across the bed in her room, both of them passed out. I don’t know what his real name was, but he called himself Calico. When I found them he was down near the foot of the bed with his feet hanging off on to the floor; he had on a black T-shirt and camouflage shorts. Mom had her head resting on a pillow and looked like she just hadn’t woke up yet; she wasn’t wearing nothing but a pair of blue underwear and a big white T-shirt that had a picture of Tweety Bird on it.

  I’d gone into Mom’s room by myself, but I heard Ruby in the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator and looking through the cabinets for something to eat. I closed Mom’s door and locked it behind me, and then I walked over to the bed and stared at her chest, hoping and praying to see it move up and down with her breathing. But I wasn’t sure if I could see anything or not. Calico was breathing like he was asleep, and I reached out and touched his leg with my shoe.

  “Calico,” I whispered. He didn’t move, and I touched his leg again. “Calico,” I said just a little bit louder.

  His eyelids fluttered. I reached out and poked his knee with my finger. When his eyes finally opened he just laid there staring up at the ceiling. I watched him for a second, and then I whispered his name again.

  His head popped up, and he looked down the bed at me. His hair was long and wild and stood up everywhere. He blinked his eyes real slow like he couldn’t quite see me, and then he sat up on his elbows and looked around. When he looked over at Mom he just stared at her like he couldn’t quite remember who she was or how she’d come to be lying there beside him. He looked at me again, and I reckon he finally realized who Mom was and that I was her daughter.

  “Hey,” he said, jumping up from the bed as fast as he could. “We didn’t hear y’all come in.” He tried to smile at me, and then he looked back at Mom where she was still lying with her eyes closed.

  Calico squeezed past me and walked up alongside the bed and bent down and looked at Mom up close. “Corinne,” he whispered. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. “Corinne,” he said again. “Wake up, girl.” He looked up at me and gave me a half smile. “She’s okay,” he said. “She’s just sleeping.”

  There were all kinds of different pills on Mom’s bedside table, and Calico moved them around with his finger like he was looking for one in particular. Then he gathered them all up and dropped them into a little white medicine bottle and screwed the lid on. There were a couple of cans of beer on the table too. The first one he picked up must’ve been empty because he set it back down. But he picked up the other one and finished it in one long drink.

  The bed squeaked when he leaned his knees against it and bent over Mom again and put his fingers on her neck. He closed his eyes like he was concentrating, and then he stood up straight and walked toward the foot of the bed and squeezed by me again before unlocking the bedroom door. His hand stayed on the knob like he didn’t want to let it go.

  “Listen,” Calico said. “I’m going to go see about getting somebody to check on your mom. Y’all just wait here, and I’ll be right back. Okay? Y’all just wait here.” He opened the door, and I watched him walk into the hall. He opened the front door and closed it behind him, and I heard his shoes going down the steps. For some reason, and I can’t tell you why, I imagined him running once he got to the bottom of those steps, and I knew he wasn’t running for help.

  I sat down beside Mom on the edge of the mattress. My fingers touched her throat where Calico had touched her, and I closed my eyes just like he did. After a few seconds I could just barely feel her pulse, and I knew it meant she was still alive and that she’d be okay and it didn’t matter whether Calico kept his word or not. The floorboards squeaked, and I looked up and saw Ruby in the doorway. She’d already kicked off her shoes in the living room and was standing there in her socks. A little smear of peanut butter was on her cheek. “What’s wrong with Mom?” she asked.

  “She’s sick,” I said, pulling the covers up around her so Ruby couldn’t get a good look at her. “But she’ll be okay.”

  “What’s she sick with?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just sick.” Mom’s eyelids were jumping just a little bit, and I wondered if she was dreaming. “We need to let her rest.” When I raised my eyebrows Ruby got the hint and walked back toward the living room. I bent down and whispered into Mom’s ear in case Ruby was out in the hallway trying to listen. “You’re going to be all right, Mom,” I said. “You just rest now and get a little sleep. We’ll be okay for dinner.”

  I thought about walking down to Fayles’ on the corner and calling 911 and getting ahold of an ambulance, but after seeing those pills I knew what it meant to find her asleep like this. Anybody who came and found her like that would put her in the hospital and probably arrest her too. I knew for sure they’d take me and Ruby away. I figured if Mom was breathing and her heart was beating, it was good enough to leave her alone and let her sleep. I’d found her like this
before, and she’d always woke up a couple of hours later and come walking into the living room like a zombie from a scary movie. Me and Ruby would be watching television or working on our homework or maybe doing both at the same time. “When’d y’all get home?” she’d ask. It would be almost dark outside, and sometimes it would’ve been dark for hours.

  “We’ve been home for a while,” I’d say.

  “Okay,” she’d say. “Y’all want something to eat?”

  I told myself this time wasn’t any different from any of those other times, and I tucked the sheet around her even though it was warm in her room, and I closed her door as quietly as I could and walked into the living room and found Ruby sitting on the floor in front of the television.

  That night I heated up a can of SpaghettiOs in a saucepan on the stove. Me and Ruby ate in front of the television and watched Entertainment Tonight. I hated Mary Hart’s big cheesy smile, but I loved her hair: how huge it was and how it didn’t move when she turned her head. I wanted hair like that. I liked her name too. It reminded me of Boston Terrier—one of those names you wouldn’t think was real until you met somebody who answered to it.

  While Ruby brushed her teeth and got ready for bed, I went back into Mom’s room to check on her. It was pitch black and hot as it could be, but I could see by the light coming in from the hallway. I walked around to the side of the bed where Mom had been lying that afternoon. She was still in the same spot, and I sat down beside her. I was afraid that she’d gotten too hot with the door being closed and the sheet being pulled up around her tight, but she wasn’t sweating and didn’t feel warm when I touched her. She breathed softly, so I knew she was just fine, and I knew she’d wake us up for school in the morning like nothing had happened. I leaned over and whispered in her ear.

  “Good night, Mom,” I said. “Me and Ruby already ate something and did our homework, and I’m getting her ready for bed.” She didn’t say nothing or give any sign that she’d heard me, but I didn’t expect her to. I stood up and started to walk out into the hall, but then I heard her whisper my name. She’d raised her left arm up from the bed and was holding it out toward me like she wanted me to hold her hand. I walked back to the bed and held her hand in mine, and I just stood there holding it and waiting to see if she’d say something else, but she didn’t. “All right, Mom,” I said, letting her hand rest on the bed right beside her. “You get some sleep.”

  I went to bed too, but all night long I kept waking up and wondering if I’d heard her moving around the house: the sound of her feet dragging across the floor, doors opening and closing, water running in the sink.

  I woke up in the morning just as it was getting to be daylight outside. The house was silent, just like it was supposed to be at that time of the morning, but something about that quiet told me it was wrong. So I wasn’t too surprised at how I found her when I opened her bedroom door.

  She was lying sideways on top of the bed like maybe she’d stood up sometime during the night and had fallen back across the bed and just stayed that way. I knew she was dead right when I opened the door. She was on her side with her knees bent up close to her and her hands under her chin. Her dark hair was covering her face, so I couldn’t tell whether her eyes were open or not, but I didn’t move it out of her face to check because I knew I didn’t want to see. I didn’t even touch her, which seems strange to think about now because I’d give anything in this world to curl up in bed beside her, be able to smell her hair on the pillowcase, feel her scratch my back through my nightgown. But instead I just stood there looking down at her and went ahead and decided that I wasn’t going to cry, not then anyway. I knew it was more important to decide what me and Ruby were going to do next.

  Ruby must’ve felt something in the house too because when I went back into our bedroom I found her sitting up in the bed like she’d been waiting on me.

  “How’s Mom?” she asked. I just stood there looking at her, trying to figure out how I was going to explain what had happened. “Is she better?”

  “No, Ruby,” I said, “she’s not.” I sat down on her bed and told her. I told her about how Mom was tired all the time and that was why she was always sleeping. And I told her that Mom’s body just couldn’t take that tiredness and that she’d finally had enough. Ruby just sat there and looked at me while I found my way through whatever it was I was saying. I can’t promise that I quite remember it myself, but I do remember telling her that now wasn’t no time to be sad. I remember telling her that there’d be plenty of time for that later, that right now we had to be tough and figure out what we were going to do next to make sure we stayed together now that we didn’t have a mama or a daddy like most kids our age.

  I asked her if she wanted to go into Mom’s bedroom to see her one more time, and I could tell she thought about it awfully hard, but in the end she decided that she didn’t want to, and I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t go back into that room again either.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked. She shook her head. “We probably should eat something anyway.” I turned to walk toward the kitchen.

  “Where you going?” Ruby asked.

  “I’m going to the kitchen,” I said. “We need to eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you don’t have to eat nothing if you don’t want to.” I walked into the hallway.

  “Hold on,” Ruby said. I stopped walking and waited until she was right behind me, and then we went into the kitchen and opened the cabinets and looked for something to eat, but there wasn’t nothing there for breakfast. There wasn’t hardly no food at all. I looked around and realized that we didn’t have anything, and I saw what our house really looked like, and I knew how people would think of us when they came inside in a few hours to get Mom and take us away to wherever we’d be going. They’d see that we didn’t have any furniture except for a plastic deck chair and two folding chairs that you might take to the beach. And they’d see that me and Ruby didn’t have beds but just slept on mattresses on the floor that had mismatched sheets on them. They’d know that I’d called them from the corner store because we didn’t have a phone, and they’d see that even if we’d had food we didn’t have no clean plates to eat from. I stood there looking all around that kitchen with a knot in my throat and an empty stomach, and I swear I could hear flies buzzing in just about every windowpane in that house. I just wanted to leave it all behind.

  “You think we need quarters to call 911?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I ain’t never called it before.”

  We spent forever looking for those two quarters. I finally found one in the bottom of my book bag, and Ruby found one behind the dresser in our room. The sun had come up all the way by the time we’d gotten dressed and were walking down the street toward Garrison Boulevard. It would be hot later, but the morning felt nice, and down the hill on the right mist rose up from the creek that ran through the center of Lineberger Park. A few people slept on picnic tables under the shelters. They’d been out there all night because they didn’t have no place else to go.

  There weren’t any cars in the parking lot at Fayles’, and I took Ruby by the hand and led her through the lot to the corner where a phone booth sat by the sidewalk. The quarters were ready in my hand, but when we got closer I saw that somebody’d come along and torn the phone loose from the cord and taken it with them. They’d yanked out the phone book too. I stood there looking at that cord where the phone should’ve been, and I held Ruby’s hand and asked myself what Boston Terrier would do.

  Then I remembered that you could see a pay phone inside the pool room at Fayles’ whenever we walked past it with Mom on the way to the library. I led Ruby back across the lot to the store, but when I let go of her hand and tried to open the door I saw that it was locked. The sign said they didn’t open until 7:30 A.M. Through the glass, I could see a man inside the store messing with a coffeemaker, and when he heard me tug on the door he turned around and looke
d at us over his shoulder. He pointed to his watch. “We ain’t open yet,” he said. I had to read his lips because I couldn’t hear him through the glass. Me and Ruby sat down on the curb in front of the store and waited.

  “What are you going to say to 911?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll wait and see what they ask me.”

  A few minutes later we heard the lock turn on the door, and we stood up and walked inside. Smelly coffee dripped into a pot, and the man had already cranked up the hot-dog-turning machine. Hot dogs aren’t good for breakfast, but seeing them laid out and roasting on those rollers reminded me that we hadn’t eaten nothing yet.

  I took Ruby’s hand and walked through the store, past the counter, and into the pool room. The man who’d unlocked the door was standing behind the cash register, and he folded his arms and stared at us when we walked past him. I figured he was wondering what two little girls were doing alone at the store this early in the morning.

  A cigarette smell came up from the carpet in the pool room when I stepped on it. A big window looked out onto the parking lot, and I could see the phone booth that was missing its phone out on the corner by Garrison. The road was starting to get busy with traffic. In the corner of the room was the pay phone hanging on the wall. A stool was sitting under it. A jukebox sat beside it. I pushed the stool up against the wall and picked up the phone. Ruby leaned against the jukebox and watched me. A plastic Coke bottle sat on top of the phone, and an old brown cigarette was floating down inside it.

  I dialed 911 and waited. It rung once, and then the operator picked up. “911,” she said. “What’s your emergency?”

  I waited a second before I said anything because I wanted to make sure I used the right words. “I think my mom might be dead,” I finally said.

  “Okay,” the operator said. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because she won’t wake up,” I said. “And yesterday she was in bed sick and she slept all day. She’s still there, and now she won’t move. I don’t think she’s breathing.”