Mercy loved to ask questions. She was a question machine. Spitting out question after question after follow-up question. What’s that? Who’s that? What are you doing? What’s Grandma doing? Why? It had started early, as soon as she could talk. And that’s when Tammy had disappeared — when the questions started.
Trudy remembered every detail, every moment, of the day Mercy was born. Her memory of that day had a special glassy clarity about it. A bright, crisp September morning. There had been a chill in the air. The smell of wet leaves and cut grass. A bright blue sky and the sun sparkling on the river as they drove to the hospital. Trudy was driving, Claire was fidgeting in the passenger seat, and Tammy was a writhing mass filling the back seat, her soft face turned to the ceiling, appealing to her saviour.
“Jesus Christ! Jesus. Goddamn!”
“Almost there, Tammy. Hold on,” said Claire. Trudy turned on the radio. The Bee Gees, Captain & Tennille. It made her cringe. Her kingdom for some rock and roll. Claire was on her knees, turned around, facing the back seat.
“Fuck ME, that hurts!”
“Tammy, that’s horrible. Please. Think of the baby.”
“Urgh! Mom! How can I think about anything else?”
Trudy turned the radio off and rolled her window down and breathed in the fragrant autumn air. The baby, the baby. How could any of them possibly think of anything else?
And then the hospital.
That same hospital in Harristown. Dirty white paint flaking off the red-brick exterior. Stone steps worn smooth in the middle by generations of shuffling patients, the hollow makeshift wooden ramp on the side. Lit-up exit signs boxed in with wire grates. Pale yellow walls and grey and white and black speckled terrazzo floors. In reception, there were nurses with white caps, spotless white belted dresses, white stockings, and flat white rubber-bottomed shoes. The ones smocked in dull green did their work elsewhere, out of sight.
Trudy remembered.
As her sister was admitted — as Tammy testily answered the nurse’s questions between the painful waves of her contractions — Trudy could think only one thought: she is here for this and I was here for that. What a distance there was, she thought, between this and that.
And when it was all over,
when Tammy was sleeping, her cheeks still purple-red from pushing,
when Trudy took the baby from her sleeping sister’s arms,
when she ran her hand over the tiny baby’s head and smoothed down her sparse, soft, dark hair,
when Trudy held that baby against her breast, leaned in and smelled her skin, kissed her plump cheek, she had felt something new. This was a new kind of love. The kind that was mixed with terror.
Mercy, she thought. God, have mercy on this child. Make her different from us. Make her better, stronger, faster.
Make her relentless and clever and mighty.
And she would be. She was.
Trudy knew it right away. Mercy was all that and much, much more.