A Tangled Mercy: A Novel Read online

  Sketching a scene had always helped her sort the chaos of life one line at a time: the world at its core, shadow and light. She’d sketched her mother sometimes during Mass, those rare and shining moments when Sarah Grace seemed almost at peace.

  Kate had sketched her father, too, though not nearly as often, his being all but gone from her life once she and her mother left Charleston. After each of the handful of times since age four that she’d seen him, she’d sat down to sketch what she could recall of his face—her way of decoding the man underneath: the broad, intellectual forehead, the jawline that was strong and firm and square, the mouth that was a straight, unreadable line but that could, without warning, curl into a sneer.

  Just once, she’d tried mailing a sketch to her father—a kind of apology after he’d shown up unannounced just in time for the first round of a national spelling bee where she’d earned a place. Watching his face, Kate had heard the word that was hers to spell—fittingly, the word annihilation—and known that she’d spelled it wrong not by the judge’s I’m sorry, that’s incorrect but by the disgust on her father’s face. He’d sent back her sketch by return mail. Over the pastel lines that she’d labored so long to get right, their proportion and tone and expression, he’d scrawled in red ink:

  Thank you for this, but as I assume you and your mother do not wish to expose yourselves to yet more public scorn, you, Katherine, might wish to spend your time studying in the future.

  Sarah Grace had turned away. “He means that for me, Katie. Not you.”

  But Kate had kept the note tucked in the flimsy pine desk where she’d done her homework, and she’d often pulled it back out in the wee morning hours before major exams when she thought she could not study one minute more. She would never, she’d promised herself—not even if she had to study in place of sleepovers and ball games and dances and dates—be that stupid again.

  Running a hand back through her hair, tangled and windblown by the drive down and now by the sea breeze, Kate squinted at her sketch of the shoreline.

  “So this,” she murmured, “is Charleston.”

  “Yep,” came a voice from below.

  Soft and small as it was, the voice nearly knocked Kate from her edge of seawall.

  Scrambling up on top of the wall from a thin strip of beach below, a child looked up at her through a fringe of long lashes, with brown eyes too big for his face. “Never was a city more sweet on itself than Charleston.”

  He stood there with a mop of black curls on his head, baggy gym shorts over spindly brown legs, and a man’s sweatshirt flopping too long on his wrists. “It’s what my daddy says about Charleston.”

  Kate found her balance again on the seawall. It was hard enough to sort through her own thoughts, the jumble and mess of them, without some random child showing up—perfectly nice, probably, as kids went, but wanting to jabber just when she most needed to think. She tried not to sound annoyed. “I bet your dad’s pretty smart. Listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Since my last birthday, my daddy trusts me to go out for a run in the mornings—me and my uncle, we’re runners, the both of us—long as I give a shout back through the door ’fore I hop on the bus, even if I am sweaty going to school. My daddy says it’s no shame to work sweaty, so long as the work’s good. Just now, I stopped to snag me this shell from below.” He held out his palm.

  Only half listening to the boy’s scattershot thoughts, Kate nodded, not looking at him. “Good for you.” Then, to be sure he went sweetly along on his way, she glanced toward his palm. “That’s nice.” She stopped. Turning back toward the child, she slid a finger over the stippled brown shell in his palm. “Wow, kid. A knobbed whelk. A really large one.”

  He brightened. “You know its name?”

  A wave slapped the seawall below. Then another.

  Kate could see her mother beside her, the two of them kneeling in the surf as it dropped away from high tide, Kate’s short, chubby legs covered in sand. And there, Sarah Grace was saying, is one worth adding to our collection: a knobbed whelk. How clever of you to find it. And here, this stripy one is a lightning whelk. See the difference?

  That must have been on the Isle of Palms, just off the coast here, where they’d sometimes walked as a young family. And later, after she and her mother had fled whatever it was they had fled, Kate had sat on the cold linoleum floor of their duplex with the starfish and sand dollars and scallops and oyster shells all mounded around her, clutching a conch to her chest and sobbing, I want to go home! Why can’t we go home?

  And then the seashell collection had disappeared entirely. Like everything else—without explanations that made any sense.

  Because it makes you cry, Katie, her mother had said. My poor, sweet little Kate. It makes us want to go back.

  She’d hugged Kate so tightly then that her chest hurt. I’m so sorry, my Katie. So sorry, she’d cried. But, please. No questions. For your momma’s sake.

  “Whelk,” the boy on the seawall was saying, relishing the sound of the word. “A big awesome brown whelk.”

  “Yep,” Kate said. “I know a few names of some shells. That one’s worth stopping a run for, I’d say. Nice find. Now, if you don’t mind, I really need to be—”

  The boy cocked his head at her. “You know, lady, wherever you’re from, they gabble fine—talk fast as hell. Hope it’s not bad I said hell. Gave up my goddamns last year when Mrs. Buckshorn—she was my teacher for third, and I didn’t have to repeat—charged us a quarter per cuss. Only hell, she said, didn’t count if you’re meaning the real actual place, which I mostly do.”

  Kate turned back, nearly startled into a laugh—but caught it in time, the boy’s brown eyes round and earnest. She cleared her throat instead. “I can see where that could get pricey.”

  “So you wouldn’t be from around here?”

  “Me? No. That is . . .” She returned his gaze, which was steady and waiting, as he cocked his head to the opposite side. This ought not to be a hard question, and yet here she was with no answer. And too many. “My family was from here—at least, both of my parents were. But home for me . . .” She frowned at the boy.

  Maybe it wasn’t his fault. But he’d asked the question.

  Kate plucked at the front of her sweatshirt, a deep crimson, and pointed with one finger to the white crest at its center, the word Veritas inside the shield and the all-uppercase word HARVARD, like a royal pronouncement, beneath it. “I’m from somewhere else. Up north. Far away.”

  The boy crossed his arms over his chest, the sleeves of his runner’s pullover too long and flopping. He shook his head.

  Kate had wanted a few moments of quiet to take all this in—this vortex of feelings stirred up by coming back here—to weigh whether she’d screwed up her life beyond hope, but this kid with the curls in his face couldn’t leave her alone. “Can’t you read, little guy?”

  “Read fine. But you can’t be raised by any kind of a college. Can’t come from there.”

  Kate looked from the boy to the crest on her sweatshirt and back.

  “And ‘little guy,’” he added, “wouldn’t be what you’d want to call me.”

  “You know, for a kid who’s no bigger—”

  “Than the thick of a rice sickle?” he suggested. “How my daddy says it. But I’m older than my looks might deceive me to be.”

  “Is that right?”

  He blinked long lashes back at her. “And I sure as smack hate to say it, but you . . .”

  “What about me?”

  “You got some kind of slippery grip on your stack of nice.”

  Kate stared at the child. Her mouth dropping open, she crossed her arms to match his. “My stack of nice?”

  “But my daddy says we make exceptions for folks that got too much lonely on them.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Says it’s the folks say they’re not lonely who’d be the saddest of all. ’Cause they hadn’t grown the insides big enou
gh yet to admit it.”

  “Is that right?” Kate could hear the irritation ridging her voice. “Well, with all due respect to your dad, he doesn’t know me.” She meant to walk on then. Instead she stared down at the boy’s face, the cheekbones high and strong, carved sharp under the soft spill of black curls. Striking in that way that pain sometimes chisels a face into beauty that hurts to look at—pain etched on the raw of your heart.

  “You,” she said softly, “know about lonely, too. Is that it?”

  Brown eyes lifted to her and did not blink.

  A pelican dove into the water behind them, but neither one of them turned.

  The boy stepped closer and reached for the scrap of paper that Kate held. His brow furrowed as he studied it. “You draw this your ownself?”

  “I sketch,” Kate explained before he could ask, “wherever I go—like other people take pictures.” She plucked the pen from her pocket to show him. “Kind of an old habit.”

  He ran a dark finger over the lines of the horse with an earnestness, almost a reverence, that made Kate take another look at his face. He was assessing her sketch line by line.

  “A habit,” she admitted quietly, “that’s kind of important to me.”

  “You got it down good—perfect, even, I’d say—the boat and the buggy and trees. But how come you got ropes coming down all out of the trees, like folks about to get hanged?”

  “What? No.” Kate peered over the child’s shoulder. “No, see, that’s just the Spanish moss dangling there, and wisteria vines.” But the kid was right: the drape and loop of the moss and the vines did suggest something like nooses.

  “Maybe I’ve been reading too much about hangings lately,” she said. “For my studies. My work.”

  The boy’s eyes popped wide. “Must be some kind of work. How come they let a girl do it?”

  “A girl? How old are you? You look—”

  “Like the milk hadn’t dried good off my mouth yet? I know. But recollect I said I wouldn’t be near so young as I look. You hung any pirates?”

  “Pirates?”

  “The hangings. Your work.”

  “Oh. Nope. No pirates. That I recall.”

  Deflated, the boy dropped his shell in one pocket of the gym shorts, then dug in the pocket on the other side. “Here’s what I keep with me alltime, like you do that pen. Calms me down good if I’m getting worked up. If the mad’s coming on.” On his palm now sat a cube of bright-colored squares.

  “A Rubik’s Cube?”

  “Something crosswise about that? I like things I can sort into straight. How things ought to stand.” His fingers flew over the cube, spinning each side into one ordered color within seconds.

  Kate touched the cube with one finger. “No. I don’t suppose there’s anything crosswise about that. Maybe that’s why I sketch, you know? Trying to sort life into straight. Only I think it takes me a lot longer to sort things to straight than it does you.”

  “Algorithms. That’s what you’re needing.” Dropping the Rubik’s Cube back in his pocket, he knelt for a stone and with one snap of his wrist sent it skipping over the water. The arm jutting out from the too-long cuff was nothing but bone and a tight swath of dark skin.

  Kate frowned. “You need to go home, don’t you think? Before catching your bus. Get something to eat.”

  He shrugged. “Had a rice waffle with syrup. And I’m fine right here, talking with you.”

  “You need a second waffle, for sure. And I’ve got things I have to do. Adult stuff.”

  “I know about adult stuff,” he said. And something hard—glinting and sharp as tin torn into bits—reflected in his eyes.

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but maybe you shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

  The boy pitched back his head. “And maybe you oughta learn how to make friends when you’re fresh-new in town.”

  Kate’s hands went to her hips, but the boy’s eyes shone up at her. Sighing, she let her hands drop. “Okay. You win. But I drove all the way down from Boston last night, so I’m pretty worn out. And I’ve got a whole lot of things to . . . sort through, you might say.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  Like my whole life, she wanted to say. Like what shattered my family. Like why both my mother and father loved Charleston and both of them left, separately, and did not come back. Like why my father, who died last year all alone, avoided seeing me at all costs—except for a handful of visits that came too late and the one time he tried to summon me and I shut him down because I was mad and hurt and bitter, and I didn’t know he was sick. Like wanting to know where things went wrong for us all and why.

  But there were things, Kate knew all too well, you did not say to a child. There were things that were too much for them to understand, much less to carry.

  Her gaze out on the water, she crossed her arms over the crest on her sweatshirt and shivered, suddenly cold. “Like, I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  The boy checked the man’s oversized watch on his wrist. “I still got a whole ten minutes at least. So we got time for you telling why you came down here to Charleston from”—he nodded to her sweatshirt—“off. How we say it down here: from off.”

  “I really don’t . . .” Want to was the end of that sentence.

  Because I don’t trust anyone. That was the truth, wasn’t it? The truth behind why she’d rather ignore a sweet random kid who had time to kill before catching his bus than simply tell him one true thing about her life. It was the truth behind every friendship she’d ever attempted and every man she’d tried to date and then found a reason to dump—there was always a reason if you looked hard enough. Because if you didn’t end things soon after they started, a friendship or a romance, either one, then you were setting yourself up for hurt. For learning once more what you’d already learned, sitting all afternoon and into the night alone on the curb, waiting for your father’s headlights that never came, or believing your mom would stick to her promise and stay sober through your high school awards dinner. The truth was that there was no end to the people you could not count on. Safer, then, to trust no one.

  But the kid’s curls were tumbling over big, innocent eyes. And he’d have to leave soon for his bus.

  Slowly, watching his face for signs of boredom—people could lose interest in you any moment—Kate plucked out two old Polaroids from her back jeans pocket. One of these was the photo that had started her down this road—quite literally—to ending up here in Charleston today, the photo that she’d adapted for her presentation, then let herself be overwhelmed by midlecture.

  The boy peered over her arm. The first photo showed her mother in the long, flowing satin beside the live oaks. More than anything, those ropes of dangling moss gave the scene an otherworldly quality, as if the young woman with the distant expression had only floated there for an instant—had no real tie to that moment or to the man holding the camera. In the second photo, Sarah Grace, this time in cutoff jean shorts, sat on top of a massive white pediment, like some historic site, high above the ground.

  “That you in the pictures?”

  “That was”—Kate took a breath at the gut punch of the past tense—“my mother.”

  The boy spoke in a whisper. “Your momma’s crossed over, too?”

  It was a phrase—from the Low Country maybe—that Kate remembered her mother using, and hearing it now, Sarah Grace’s death washed over her in a wave. A full moment swept by before Kate realized what else the child had said.

  She bent toward him. “Too?”

  He leaned into her side and slipped a small hand into hers. The two of them faced into the breeze and stood for a time there, letting low waves lap at the seawall beneath them. Kate’s eyes spilled over, and she batted the tears from her cheeks with the sweatshirt cuff above her left hand, which held the photos, rather than pull her right hand from the child’s.

  Other people, Kate realized, would have hurried to ask either of them—out of a socially expected concern—how lo
ng ago the loss had been and from what and how things were going. Other people would have babbled well-intentioned comforts and platitudes.

  But the two of them only stood there, side by side, saying nothing at all. Just watching the roll of the sea. And, strangely, that was just right.

  It was the child who finally broke the silence as he reached across her to gesture toward the two Polaroids. “A partner’s what you’d be needing.”

  Kate pulled gently away. “That’s a nice offer. Really. But these pictures aren’t even the official research I’m supposed to be working on. I’m sorry, but I don’t have time for a partner.”

  The boy bent closer to study the photos. “Why?” he asked suddenly.

  “Well, because partners take time to train.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the wrong slice of why. What I’m meaning is, why’s your momma so extra big smiling in this one”—he pointed to the photo of the tanned girl in cutoffs, perched high above the ground on the edge of some historic pediment, her head thrown back, laughing for the camera—“like she wanted to make people think she was happy?” His finger moved to the other photo, Kate’s mother in the long, flowing satin, and gazing off into the distance. “Your momma was pretty. But her face got all kind of sad behind the eyes.”

  “She was,” Kate agreed. “And it did.”

  “That why you’re here?”

  “I’m here mostly for my work.” Kate almost said it with conviction. Almost as if it were true.

  He nodded. “The hangings.”

  She managed a smile. “Yeah. The hangings. It’s my research on a slave revolt that was planned in Charleston. There are documents here in some archives that I can’t access online. Guess I want to understand what really happened one particular summer two hundred years ago. Who did what and what motivated them to do it. And why my mother—she loved history, too, and majored in it in college—made lots of notes about some of the main players of that revolt. It was like she was obsessed with reading about it.”

  Kate stopped. “So, yeah. I’m mostly here for my work. My academic research.”

  The child’s face had the same patient, utterly unconvinced look of Kate’s academic adviser. And probably of Botts, if she could have seen his expression at the other end of the line.