The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (4 page)

“Yeah?”

“I've got another one. I'll explode if I don't tell you.”

“Okay,” I say. “What?”

I wait for her to speak. Around us, kids hover in the lot, giddy from summer's promise, glancing at the action across the street. Girls in tank tops the color of sherbet sashay by, their calves slender in espadrilles and wedge sandals, their skin already burned from trips to the river and the Red Dump and Crystal Beach and Galveston Island. Boys hang out of idling trucks, cup the bills of baseball caps that bear the white salt lines of their sweat.

“I made Lennox hit me,” Annie says after a while, looking down at her folded hands. “He didn't want to. See?” She lifts up the left side of her T-shirt. Underneath, the skin is striped with bruises. “Afterward, he was really upset. I think he might have been crying, but it was dark, so I couldn't tell.”

I can't help it: I imagine Mama Charmaine doing what Maw Maw says she does—in a soiled bed grunting like an animal with a man who doesn't know her name. Annie, agitated, shifts back and forth in her seat, scratching her nails against her jeans.

“I'm such a fucking bitch,” she says, her voice low and ferocious. “God, Mercy. I'm so fucking
hard
. Everything breaks against me.”

Pitching forward, she rests elbows on knees and stares at the floor. From the school building, the first bell sounds. I vacuum up her words from where they hang unclaimed in the air; I perch them in the shadowed space where I keep her other confessions, a line of grackles on a bare branch by my heart. She looks at me with lost eyes. I think,
Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.
Then, because she doesn't want Scripture, I pet her hair, say what I always say: “I love you, Annie.”

But what if Maw Maw's right and we only have a few months before Christ Raptures the believers? Annie will need so much more than my love to be saved. I kiss her temple, say a silent prayer for her soul. She nods as if resigned to her fate, purses her lips, and then gets out of the car. As we stride across the lot, I take her hand. Together, we walk up the stairs to the main entrance, into the last day of our junior year.

In class before the second-period bell goes, kids are buzzing about the cop cars at the Market Basket:
I heard Half-baked found a finger in the dumpster, did you see that box of bloody tissue on the floor behind the register? Nah, dude, you got it wrong, they finally busted his ass for slinging dope. I'm telling you, something was bleeding hard-core by that dumpster.
I think of the vision troubling Maw Maw, girls sprawled on the ground, not dead but not well, either. The police should hire her, let her hold whatever shreds of evidence they find. How many cases could she solve with her gift?

The bell sounds, but kids keep chattering like they didn't hear. This Market Basket thing has put them near to a frenzy. Mr. Ball tries to shush them, but it's not until Krista Blythe walks in that everyone hushes up. She's a student aide for the front office, which means she's the one who delivers summonses to the principal. When she strides to my desk, someone whispers, “Oh, snap.”

Holding out a letter, Krista says: “Ms. Custer found this in a pile of faculty mail when she was cleaning out the lounge.” She inspects a fingernail, presses her lips together so the pink gloss glistens. “It's probably real late, but she only just now found it.”

When I thank her and take the letter, I notice my hand is shaking. It can't be a recruitment letter, those usually go to Coach, and anyway, I haven't gotten one since the semifinal. Embarrassed by my hopeful heart, I set it down like it doesn't interest me. With a shrug, Krista turns and walks out. Mr. Ball uses the break in talk to try to steer us to order, but it's impossible. “Fine,” he says after a minute, throwing up his hands. “As you were.”

He goes to his desk and leans back in the chair, props his feet up. Everyone cheers and talk resumes. When I'm sure no one's watching, I slide my pinkie beneath the flap of the envelope and jigger it open. From the fold of the letter a photograph falls onto my desk. It's a perfectly ordinary photo—something that might appear on an ID card or driver's license—but I draw breath loud enough that a few students turn and look at me, eyes glazed with boredom or maybe booze.

Maw Maw keeps no photos of her stashed in cupboards behind the flour or buried under socks in a drawer. On low days, I've looked, ransacked every possible hiding place in search of something of her I can hold on to. So how can I be certain of the identity of the woman in the photo? To start: her skin is pale like mine, hair bluish-black and unruly, eyes large and dark-lashed, blue like mine; not a happy shade, like the sky or sea on a sunny day, but the lonesome blue of deep night hours when no one but the devil and the drunks are awake. They seize on me with their sadness.

Good,
I think, glad that this woman who has caused Maw Maw such heartache knows something of pain. I want to stand, walk to the trash can, ball up the letter, and toss it away like it's as insignificant to me as an unwanted love note. I owe it to Maw Maw, the woman who raised me, not to care a fig what Charmaine has to say. But already I've glimpsed the looping script peeking from inside the creased page, and I'm struck hard by the fact that I've never seen my mother's handwriting—Sheryl Swoopes's autograph on the Tech poster hanging in my bedroom is more familiar to me.

I read the letter for the simple, pathetic reason that I want to know how Charmaine signs her name.

March 5, 1999

           
Dear Mercy,

           
I have no right to contact you but I want you to know that I think about you every day. When people ask if I have any kids I say no because I haven't been a mother to you and that's the honest truth. I read in the paper that you are coming to Austin for the state basketball tournament. First of all congratulations but second would you let me buy you a Coke or something.

                  
When I saw your photo in the paper I thought what a beautiful young woman you have become but it made me sad because you are seventeen years old and I found myself wondering what were you like before you were seventeen. What were you like when you were ten and seven and three. I remember you as a baby, you were a very sweet baby, you cried like a kitten, so quiet I could barely hear you.

                  
When you were a baby I held you up to my ear like one of those seashells, I swear I heard whispering through your breath, you were from another world, someplace old and beyond me. I can't believe there was anything I loved more than you at that moment you were so sweet-smelling and soft but that is addiction, a bad romance that eats you up.

                  
I will say sorry because that's what I am but the word looks a skinny thing written out here. Maybe I will come to your game just to see who you have grown into. You don't need to talk to me if you don't want.

                  
I hope you will write me back: PO Box 1984, Austin, Texas.

                          
Love true,

                          

She signs off sloppily, just a capital C and B followed by nonsense scriggles. Blinking back disbelief at the sight of her name, I look up at my classmates, who carry on with their gum-chewing and eye-rolling and gossiping, as if this is just another blah-blah day and not the first time in my life that I've had word from my mother. The letter is dated March 5, a few days before the state tournament. I remember how I felt in those days leading up to the semifinal game—like I was invincible, already thinking about which finger to wear my championship ring on. Imagine! Seeing the date written out makes me ache to go back and fix my head.

Was she there? I wonder. It makes me shiver to consider being so close to
Charmaine Boudreaux
without knowing it. Whenever Maw Maw speaks about her, she doesn't give her a surname, as if the minute Charmaine left us and Port Sabine, she gave up her right to family. If this letter landed in our mailbox at the stilt house, Maw Maw would have put it down the garbage disposal or let it sink beneath the rain lilies clogging the mouth of the bayou before it ever reached me.

For years, Charmaine has roamed through our house, a fleshless presence anchoring the tales that Maw Maw spins as often as her Bible stories and Cajun yarns.
The demon drugs bewitched your mama until she forgot herself, forgot God, forgot everything but pleasure. The devil knows how easily he captured her in spite of the godly household I kept. Beware, Mercy child, he knows your weak blood.
Hearing from Charmaine now is like receiving a letter from the Loup Garou or the old woman who lived in a shoe. Like Jesus and the devil, Charmaine is most alive to me in Maw Maw's stories.

As for my father, I've seen him only once in the flesh. He came by the stilt house when I was a girl of maybe seven. At the door, this scarecrow of a man scooped me up in his tan arms thin as straw. I screamed, which brought Maw Maw running from the kitchen. She snatched me back quick and sent me scooting to my room. On the way, I heard Witness say,
Cain't a man hug his girl when he comes round?
And she said,
Only if he put a cent toward the child's lookin' after and didn't flee the state to avoid the law on account of his being good-for-nothing
. He told her she still owed him money and he was come to collect it, and she said how dare he, and that was a lie. She called him a grifter and a fraud and sent him on his way. When I asked her later if that man was my father, she had said,
After a fashion,
and then returned to her needlepoint.

I reread the letter, then wish I hadn't, because this time, the words get me by the gills. Because I've never seen Charmaine, never touched her, can barely imagine her and only then with the help of stories, my mother's absence has seemed all right these seventeen years. But this featherlight letter makes me feel and want things I shouldn't, not after all this time. For instance, a mother to give a rose to on Parents' Night at the last home game of the season. And the story of how I came into this world. Annie has a pink baby book where her mother wrote out all the details of her birth: the nineteen hours of labor and how Annie broke her collarbone coming through her mama's bony pelvis, and how she was a colicky baby who didn't stop crying for the first three months of her life. Which surprises exactly no one familiar with Annie Putnam. All I know is I was born in the stilt house, and Maw Maw delivered me herself. She's not a trained midwife, but she helped her mother deliver four babies in Calcasieu Parish before she met Paw Paw Gaspard and crossed into Texas so he could work the refinery.

When my birthday comes around, we don't celebrate with cake and presents. Maw Maw says I should use the day for prayer, for reflection and repentance for the sins of my mother, even though I'm not the one who got pregnant, loaded, and gone.

I look back down at the letter.
Maybe I will come to your game just to see who you have grown into.
It would be just like Charmaine to show up and ruin everything. Maybe Maw Maw's right—that the sins of your parents belong to you no matter how right you try to live. That game a reminder of where I came from.
A humbling.

When the bell rings to dismiss us to third period, I steal another look at the photo while students jostle past.

She looks better than I imagined an addict could. Her cheeks are creamy and touched with pink, like she's embarrassed to have her picture taken. I'll admit, she's pretty; beautiful, even. I fold the letter around the photograph, tuck them back into the envelope, intending to toss it all into the trash.

But as I pass through the door and into the hallway, I slip the bundle into my backpack, stepping lightly as a burglar into the thrum of students. I half expect someone to appear and snatch the letter away before phoning Maw Maw with news of my deception. Part of me begs to be found out, but nothing happens.

I decide not to tell Maw Maw about the letter. The one time I told her I missed my mother, she got so angry with me I haven't ever forgotten it. I had just started kindergarten and realized that all the other kids had pretty young mothers to pick them up after school. I was ashamed of Maw Maw, with her creased face and brittle hair. That first day home, I cried and told her I wanted my mother instead. She told me my mama wasn't coming back, that she'd seen Charmaine on the streets of New Orleans, lips scar-bubbled from the crack pipe, hair scraggled, stockings torn, wearing the kind of towering shoes a woman puts on to spend her days flat-backed on a bed beneath a man.
Asking for your mother is like asking for a green-eyed demon to come take you away, that what you want?
For weeks I couldn't sleep, imagining every scratch to be the demon's toenails.