A Matter of Mercy (3 page)

Chapter 3

“Don’t panic,” Elsie said, touching Caroline’s arm. “I think it’s a pleural effusion. It’s a common complication in advanced ovarian cancer.” Caroline nodded as if she understood. She found it nearly unbearable to watch or listen to her mother trying to draw in a breath.
What must it be like to endure?
“If we hospitalize her overnight—Dr. Simcoe has already approved it—an x-ray will tell for sure. It’ll just show up as a big area of fluid in her lung. Your mother will be much more comfortable if it’s drained, and she’ll only be in the hospital overnight.”

Caroline waited until Eleanor was settled and asleep after the procedure, mid-afternoon. “You don’t need to stay,” she’d said, and Caroline wondered if her mother knew how much she didn’t want to, in that terrible way mothers have of seeing through their children as if they were translucent. Nothing was in her control here, anyway. Not that at home the real outcome was in her control, either. But at home she could go into Executive Mode. She could do what she thought needed to be done. She could switch on the light that pushed back the edges of darkness, and she could keep it on, keeping her thoughts at bay. She could scramble eggs in the kitchen, rearrange furniture in the living room, give pills, and plump pillows wherever there were pillows. She could wait. And wait and wait and wait. She could wait for doctors to return calls, and pills to take effect, for test results, and for late respite care workers. Sometimes it was terrifying and hopeless, ducks she tried to keep in a row all waddling off in opposite directions to die while she wept. But mostly, she coped by staying in charge, by making lists and schedules, by doing. The hospital made Caroline quite crazy.

“You don’t need to stay. You know she’ll likely sleep pretty much from now on,” the charge nurse said, echoing Eleanor. “You could get a break. Caregiving is exhausting. And with this storm coming, you shouldn’t wait until you’ll be driving in it.” So Caroline swallowed her guilt and slipped out of the hospital furtively, as if her purse was full of stolen goods.

An hour later, she was curled up on the couch with a novel and a cup of tea trying not to worry about whether thunder would waken her mother. The afternoon light was fading fast. Eleanor was used to Cape storms, but she might be disoriented, Caroline thought.
Maybe I should have stayed.
She put down her book. It was almost too dark to read, and she needed to turn on a few lights. The radio said the storm was going to be a big one.
What if Eleanor wakes and doesn’t know where she is?
Caroline stood to look out the living room window. That’s when she saw him: Rid out on the tidal flats. Later, when she tried to retrace the course of events, it seemed her whole life once again had turned on chance.

* * * * 

Forecasters said the eastern edge of the hurricane that had grazed the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Connecticut had bounced off and spun oceanward. They thought it might miss the Cape entirely. They were wrong. An ominous sky and high hot winds had buffeted Rid all afternoon. He could have gotten an earlier start pinning the nets over the quahogs he’d planted in early spring if he’d realized how much storm was going to make its way back to the outer Cape. His Chinese hats—the cement dome-shaped forms the aquaculturists molded to catch wild oyster seed in the bay, much cheaper than buying seed oysters—were in the water and loaded with spat. Not only that, he had nursery bags with beautiful matchhead quahogs, a small fortune’s worth in a year when the hatchery in Dennis didn’t have a lot of seed to sell and were rationing them in fairness. He’d gotten these beauties by luck, from a hatchery up in Maine. He had to get extra U-hooks down to hold the nets in his raceways, plus pull the nursery bags of seed clams out of the water. He had to pull the hats out, too.

Some of the others left everything in, even in a nor’easter, but Rid knew what Hurricane Bob had done to his father: demolished trays, nets, rerod, everything, leaving parts of the grant literally bare, even old cultch snatched and deposited somewhere else. Other parts of his grant had been a mess of tangled torn nets, U-hooks lifted out by an easy lick of storm tongue and hopelessly chewed up along with broken trays and racks and hats, some his and some of Mario’s, Tomas’, Barb’s, Austin’s—even some of Tweed’s and Clint’s, whose grants were at the Blackfish Creek end of the harbor. Rake had lost more than a year’s harvest and even now, Rid was still paying on the loan his father had had to take to resupply with equipment and seed. Rake had picked in the wild to make enough to feed the family all the while he was working his grant back into shape. And money had nothing to do with the time it took to build new hats and trays, cut new nets. The whole winter after that hurricane had gone into the effort. Some of the other farmers had losses almost as crippling, but were temperamentally still more inclined to take their storm chances than he was. A few had been stung to cautiousness as great as Rid’s. It depended on where the tide was when the worst of any storm hit, of course. A moon tide rising was the worst time for bad weather, but moon tides are the best for working because the stronger gravitational pull makes the water recede farther. Yet even a storm that clouts during the front of a moon tide can be capricious enough to leave one grant almost untouched while those adjacent might be fouled or wiped out.

Twice Rid moved his truck further inland after the turn, when the water started advancing on him and crept halfway up his rear tires while his back was turned. It was coming in fast and this whole blow would be compounded by it being a moon tide anyway, the biggest of the month and getting toward the biggest of the year, which would come in October. Only Clint’s and Barb’s trucks were parked on the shoals now. The rest had left already, maybe nobody pulling out or anchoring as much as he was trying to. It bothered Rid, mostly because if their stuff got loose and washed onto his grant it could do a lot of damage. Technically, it would be the other guy’s responsibility to replace what he lost, and they’d all say as much themselves, but he’d have to be able to show whose stuff had damaged his. And they couldn’t give him back the two years it took to grow quahogs, and three-year oyster aches of nursing his seed toward picking and sale. They couldn’t replace his legal-size oysters and clams if their own were as lost as his. No way. They wouldn’t have the stock and they wouldn’t have the money. Insurance was a joke; so expensive you’d be broke before your first harvest, so none of them had it. No, starting over was a matter of taking thirty thousand dollars, throwing it in the bay, breaking your back and gambling that you can beat predators, weather and disease for three years before the first harvest while you live on more borrowed money. Who among them could do that anymore? Not Rid. Not anyone he knew.

* * * * 

Caroline watched from the front window near Eleanor’s empty bed, tension rising on the back of wind while the barometer slid down and then further down. The northeastern sky blackened, the storm chasing its tail and coming back to swipe them on its downsweep. The incoming tide was relentless. Rid slogged through shallow water in his waders. Every few steps he bent over and stuck something in the water.

And then a single boom of thunder that wasn’t like distant fireworks or artillery. A jag of lightning at the same instant, sky-splitting, too bright, too close, palpably electric on and around them. Beach, breakwater, bay, truck, road, even Rid flickered in black and white illumination, and Caroline’s heart thudded in her ears. The bay was an engine of noise beneath the intermittent cracks and booms.
He knows what he’s doing
, she advised herself.
He’ll get himself inside if it’s dangerous.
In a different life she’d been a person who’d leap in anywhere to help anyone—whether the recipient wanted help or not—and that woman would have been out the front door pulling up the hood of Eleanor’s slicker, Eleanor’s boots in hand, a good five minutes before the new Caroline was.

Of course, he didn’t hear her over the rising wind and turning tide so she had to keep running along the high water mark on the beach until she was parallel with him, but then he didn’t see her either because now he was backing up, into the wind. Caroline hopped on each foot in turn as she pulled a rubber boot on the other one and then headed across seventy-five feet of mucky sand and cultch to where he worked. She’d not realized just how many raceways of hard-shelled clams he’d planted, how much netting was down, how large his grant was. From above the tide line, all that was visible on Rid’s or anyone else’s grant were Chinese hats and oyster trays and racks where the larger shellfish were being nurtured to legal size. Even those could only be seen when the tide was out. Once Caroline slogged out beyond his truck, backed onto the flats an hour before low tide, now resting in about three inches of rapidly incoming water, she found she had to detour several times to avoid stepping on quahog beds.

“Rid! Rid!” She shouted his name four or five more times before he turned even though she was now only a couple of feet behind him. She couldn’t get to the side or front where he could see her without stepping on netting. “Rid!”

Now he turned, startled. He took a step toward her and Caroline leaned in to shout in his ear, but she’d miscalculated; he wasn’t letting her break his work stride even long enough to hear what she had to say. Rid bent over and stuck a U-hook into the sandy bottom to anchor the net even though he already had rerod bars weighing it down. She saw that’s what he’d been doing—every other step, sticking another U-hook into the sand to double secure the netting.

Infuriatingly, he wouldn’t stop. She did the only thing she could if she wanted to tell him anything, bobbing up and down to keep her mouth near enough his head, stepping backward in concert with him like a bizarre dancing couple.

“Come in—you can come to my house. There’s lightning,” she shouted, gesturing skyward, feeling foolish showing him the obvious.

Rid just shook his head. “Gotta anchor these … not enough rerod….tide….” The thread of his words unraveled on the wind.

Caroline backed up as he advanced, watching as Rid placed three more anchors. Then, putting her hand on the mesh bag of U-hooks, she blocked his next step as she shouted, “I can do this.” She pointed to the end of the raceway. “I’ll keep going here so you can get the other side.” Maybe he couldn’t make out what she was saying; the sky and bay rumbled, arguing constantly. Several more lightning strikes had zigged over the horizon, these still distant but advancing.

Rid started to shake his head no; hesitation was on his face, but Caroline bent and put in a U-hook and must have gotten it right because he released the bag to her and was gone. He didn’t go get more U-hooks though. He waded in deeper, bent again, and this time hoisted a nursery tray out of the water, and carried it to the bed of his truck where he shoved aside racks, crates and a bull rake to make space for it. Then another, another, and another, all the while Caroline made slow headway toward shore, stopping to place a U-hook every eighteen inches. When she looked up between steps, she saw Rid scanning the sky while he shouldered another tray. Rain began, not with single drops here and there, but in a pelting downpour.

Caroline quit standing up between securing hooks because water poured in the gap between her neck and chin when she did. Her jeans were soaked from the flapping slicker, but if the wind plastered it momentarily against her body, rainwater slid directly into her boots. She couldn’t feel her hands anymore although the water felt warmer than the air now.

She’d not quite finished when she saw the black rubber of his waders sloshing toward her. Her back locked into its bent-over position, she splashed in the hook she was holding and started to unfold herself, but before she could, Rid had her elbow and was pulling.

“Too close!” He shouted, leaning into her ear. “…Now! Gonna sink the truck.” The yank on her arm was in the direction of the pickup. The big tires were donuts half dunked into the black bay coffee. Straightening painfully and splashing behind Rid as best she could, Caroline realized that most of the apparatus of the grant was already submerged.

Rid wrestled opened the passenger side of the truck, boosting her into the seat with a hand on her rear before slamming the door and running through a fury of rain to climb into the driver’s seat himself. Later, Caroline would remember that she found the gesture oddly chivalrous. The engine coughed twice and caught. Rid dropped the gearshift into reverse, then rocked it into a forward crawl toward the beach. At the highwater mark, he made the left turn and drove along the sandy strip toward the access road. He stopped at the edge of the access road, still on the sand. Caroline’s house was faintly silhouetted across the horseshoe beach. She could feel as much as see the trees, dizzy in the torrent.

“God. Whew. Thanks,” he said, as their panting slowed and Caroline used her wet sleeve to staunch the trickle running from her hair into her eyes. “Wait, I’ve got something, I think.” Rid twisted to rummage behind the passenger seat and came up with a crumpled, ragged towel. “Oh,” he said. “This isn’t pretty. Sorry.”

“Gimme that.” Caroline laughed and grabbed it. “When you’re desperate, you’re desperate.” She blotted her hair. “You probably need to go, I know.”

“Nah, let’s wait for it to die down. Can’t drive you closer to the house than you are here. Can’t very well walk in this,” he said. “Stuff’s okay outta the water. I wanted to get the hats too, but they’ll do better than the nursery trays might’ve. I can’t replace that stock, ARC can’t get any seed now, it’s too late to plant anyway, and … you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Just thanks. Really, I mean it.
Thanks
.” Then, an afterthought. “But is somebody with your mother?”