Mercury (14 page)

I
CAME HOME AND TOLD
you I'd just heard something astounding: Rick, the liberal, artistic accountant, owned a gun. You were in the garden, picking tomatoes, the last of the season.

“Maybe he's like you,” you said. “He learned to shoot at camp?”

“But that was a game. Shooting clay pigeons. Rick owns a real gun. If someone broke into his house, he could kill them.”

You removed a few faded leaves and held out an almost ripe tomato. “Hopefully that won't happen,” you said. “But you never know about people and guns. Remember Melanie's father?”

I did, and I remembered, longingly, your response. It was you who noticed that Trina had come home from Melanie's with a picture of a girl holding something small and black. You who gently questioned her and learned that the small black object was a gun. Melanie's dad had one. He kept it in a box.

“Sure,” Mr. Nichols had said when you phoned. “What's the problem? I have a permit.”

“Excuse me,” you said. “No one has a permit to show a gun to six-year-olds.” After you hung up, you had phoned all the parents in Trina's class.

Now the news about Rick's firearm barely reached you. Could I start the water for pasta? you asked.

A
T THE TIME THAT
I studied Margaret Fuller I had intense ideas about sharing everything with my affinities. And I still feel that way. I want to be truthful, and until last fall, barring my colleague Robert, I mostly was. Then you and Claudia, the two people I was closest to, disapproved of Mercury, and in the face of that disapproval, I began to follow your example: I began to hide things. I hid the amount of time I was spending with him; I hid the scope of my ambitions. You asked only practical questions—who was taking Trina to her violin lesson? Should we have the furnace serviced?—but Claudia was more perceptive. Why did the vet see Mercury every time she came? Why did he have special food and the largest paddock? So when Rick's photographs appeared in my in-box, it was Hilary I phoned. We arranged to meet at a café near her office.

I arrived to find her already seated at a corner table with two coffees. “I hope you like lattes,” she said as I opened my laptop. The photographs began to slide across the screen, Mercury growing ever more lustrous as the sun set.

“He
is
beautiful,” Hilary said wistfully. She asked who had taken the photographs, and when I said Claudia's boyfriend, she said, “Oh, I'm glad she has someone.”

“She does, and she doesn't.” I described the situation and, lured on by her attentive smile, confided my attack on Rick.

Her phone buzzed, but she didn't even glance at it. “You're such a good friend,” she said. “What would happen if Claudia delivered her own ultimatum?”

I explained Claudia's theory that Rick had never recovered from being sent away to boarding school. He was twelve years old, two thousand miles from his home in Nebraska, and allowed one phone call a week. “She says he has to decide for himself,” I said.

We both paused to watch Mercury approach a jump in one photograph, soar over it in the next. The neat way he folded his hind legs gave him several inches advantage over a sloppier horse.

“Perhaps,” Hilary suggested, “Rick's a Good Man.” Then—at first it seemed like a digression—she told me about her abortion. When she got pregnant, soon after she moved to Providence, her mother had phoned with the news that she'd once had a sister. Jessie had been born with Down's syndrome when Michael was three, and had died soon after her second birthday. “I'm telling you now,” her mother had said, “so you can make sure there aren't any problems.” But there were.

On what was already one of the worst days of her life, Hilary had arrived at the clinic to find a group of middle-aged men holding up bloody pictures, shouting “Murderer!” “Whore!”

“I kept thinking,” she said, gazing at me intently, “that these men went to church on Sunday, and for the rest of the week they looked at porn and hit their wives and molested their kids' friends. Or their kids. All that mattered was that everyone thought they were good. I hate Good Men.”

Rick's not like that, I wanted to say, but I recalled his anxious frown, his fear that everyone would hate him. Before I could speak, Hilary's phone rang again. She was needed at the office.

“Thank you for showing me the photos,” she said. “I wish Michael could see them.”

I was nearly back at the car when I caught sight of Jack across the street. Two minutes earlier, and Hilary would have met him, tapping along with his white cane. I went over to say hello, and he asked after you. You'd been so distant since Edward died. I'd been glad when Hilary said you were doing well by your patients. Now I was glad Jack had noticed your astronaut's
suit. I told him about our whale-watching expedition, and how it had seemed to cheer you up.

“So maybe Donald just needs to be in the presence of large mammals,” he said.

“Do you think there's anything we can do to help?”

He tapped his cane thoughtfully. “Besides keeping him company, and waiting for him to come back? No. He's on his own journey. Someday soon he'll realize how lucky he is to have you and the kids.”

I offered him a lift, but he shook his head. “It's my civic duty to remind my fellow citizens that, however bad things are, they still have their eyesight.”

“You'll only serve as a reminder,” I said, “when you're less handsome.”

T
HE PHOTOS OF
M
ERCURY
were my version of porn. When I was alone, I looked at them all the time. I pinned up half a dozen on the bulletin board. Matheus pronounced him superb; Charlie and the other stable girls were wild about him; Claudia said nothing. At my birthday party she led the singing and teased me about my hair, but the next week we had another quarrel. She tracked me down in the stalls, where I was getting a horse ready for a lesson, to tell me Hilary had phoned to complain about the bills from the vet and the farrier. “She said there's even a charge for silicone pads.”

“Mercury was a little off,” I said. “I needed the vet to do a full lameness exam. And he was due for new shoes. The farrier suggested the pads.” With another horse I would have waited a day or two to see if he recovered before paying for a vet's visit; as for the pads, they helped to absorb the shock of jumping. Of course Claudia knew all this. What she didn't know was how
much I was riding him. Already he recognized my car. When I arrived in the morning, he was waiting at the paddock gate.

“But why didn't you consult Hilary?” she said. “At least let her know about the shoes? And Matheus says you're giving him special food.”

“Just vitamins and alfalfa hay. I buy them myself.”

The mare I was saddling tried to nip me. She sensed my anger, and so did Claudia. “Viv, it's not the food or the farrier that's the problem. It's you. You're acting as if Mercury is the only horse at Windy Hill. He's not, and he's not your horse.”

Twice in elementary school I was sent home for hitting other children. Maybe that's why I was so worried about Marcus. For a few seconds I could have thrown my helmet at Claudia, or shoved her to the ground. Then my vision cleared. I was tightening a girth, talking to my oldest friend. I said I was sorry; I didn't want to lame an expensive horse; I'd let the farrier's zeal carry me away.

She nodded doubtfully. “You're so different.” She sighed. “It worries me.”

“I'm not different,” I said. “I'm myself again. Now I know why I didn't die in the subway.”

I smiled, hoping to win her over, and she returned my gaze, not smiling. She'd been there when Nutmeg broke my finger, when the
Challenger
disintegrated and we stood in the school playground, staring up at the sky, when I won first place in the Medway show, when my parents separated, when I met you: all those hours of riding and daydreaming and planning to change our lives.

“Okay,” she said at last. “But be careful. Remember what happened with Nutmeg.”

“I was twenty then. Just a kid.”

That afternoon, as I taught my lessons, what I kept thinking about was not Claudia's warning but Hilary's betrayal. She and I talked or texted several times a week, and at my party she had joined in like an old friend. Now she had gone behind my back to Claudia.

After supper I went to the study and dialed her number.

“Viv, I was just wondering which to do first: sew on a button, or go over Diane's homework?”

“The button. Listen, Claudia spoke to me about the bills. I'm sorry I didn't ask you first.” I explained that Mercury would need to see the farrier every five weeks but, barring emergencies, there wouldn't be any more major expenses. The vet had given him a clean bill of health. As I spoke, I drew the outline of a large M on the notepad you kept on the desk.

“Did I screw things up, phoning Claudia?” Hilary said. “I think of her as the money person, and you as the one who knows horses.”

I felt a rush of gratitude; she had seen past my apology. “Actually,” I said, “I'm the money person.”

“Oh, Viv, I did screw things up. Of course after a decade in business you'd deal with the bills. I'm sorry. You're my friend, and I didn't want to bug you, so I went to Claudia. I'll know better in future. Listen, I wanted to ask you about Jack Brennan.”

“Jack Brennan?”

“Yes. We've been hanging out since your party. He seems really nice.”

I could hear her smiling. I said he was great, one of your closest friends, and got off the phone. Hilary and Jack? Jack and Hilary? Alone in the study, I felt my cheeks grow warm. The thought of them together seemed to break some unwritten rule. I told myself it wouldn't last. There was no reason to tell you.

O
NE DAY SOON AFTER
we moved here, Marcus rode his tricycle straight into Main Street. In the instant that he shot out into the lanes of cars, I was running after him, shouting, “Stop! Stop!” My love for him was like a skyscraper, dwarfing the danger. All that mattered was his safety. I had the same single, towering emotion when the police called at Thanksgiving to say the alarm had gone off at Windy Hill. You know what happened that night at the stables. What you don't know is how it made me feel. When the police escorted me to the corner of Milton Street, I saw our house, dark except for the kitchen lights.

Who lives here? I thought. For a moment I was sure I'd step into rooms I'd never seen before.

Do you remember when we visited Edinburgh, we went to a pub called Deacon Brodie's? You told me that Brodie had inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. By day he was a respectable cabinetmaker; by night he became a burglar, robbing the people who bought his cabinets. “Surely everyone feels like that sometimes,” you said. “Like inside us are two people who want completely different things.”

I was still sitting in the parked car, still trying to remind myself I was Marcus and Trina's mother, when you appeared
in your bathrobe. At the kitchen table I gradually returned to myself. I told you about the police, the glove. Suddenly it occurred to me that you might mention the break-in to Jack; he might tell Hilary; she might worry about Mercury. I could see you were bewildered when I swore you to secrecy.

What happened the next day was nothing I planned. The police came back early to finish their report and were gone by the time Claudia arrived. At lunchtime she and I were in the office, eating our turkey sandwiches. The clock above the filing cabinet sounded like a man with a little hammer. “Tell her, tell her,” he was saying.

Instead I praised last night's pecan pie: not too sweet. Then I mentioned that the police had come by that morning. “There've been a couple of break-ins in the neighborhood,” I said. “They want us to update our security. I thought I'd make some calls.”

“That would be great,” she said. “The other day Helen was telling me about the summer two horses were stolen and a third poisoned. They never did find the culprit.”

So you were wrong, I thought. They did steal horses in Massachusetts. And Mercury was so well trained he would be easy to steal. I arranged for the workmen to come when Claudia was busy, minimizing work and cost. When she queried the latter, I invented a windfall. Some bonus stocks had finally matured. My Christmas present to the stables.

“Viv,” she said, “that's so generous of you.”

I tried not to think about my credit card bill. That afternoon, when I rode Mercury, I raised all the jumps.

W
HEN
I
WAS
T
RINA'S
age, I loved stories about the great hunters who could track a bear to its cave, find the buffalo by the way the grass bent. Later, in my office near the Prudential Cen
ter, I sometimes thought of myself as a modern hunter, tracking the market. So I noticed that Claudia was drinking more mint tea, that she asked me to lift a bale of hay, but I didn't follow the signs to their conclusion. When I came into the office the day after the security lights were installed, and saw her sitting at the table, clasping her head, my first thought was that she'd discovered the break-in.

“Do you have a headache?” I said.

Silently she pointed at a chair. I stared out the window, longing for a bird to fly by, or a plane, anything to fill the empty sky.

“Viv,” she said. “I'm pregnant.”

I was so happy I nearly knocked her to the floor. When we stopped laughing and embracing, she told me she was nearly nine weeks. Around the time I lectured Rick, one of his sperm, more intrepid than its owner, had reached its goal. “Have you told him?” I asked.

“Not yet.” She was smiling and frowning at the same time. “But already everything's different. For nearly three years I convinced myself that his going home to Nan every night was proof he loved me. He tells me the truth, not Nan! He hurts me, not Nan!” She shook her head in amazement. “Now I'm scared. If his first reaction to the baby is fear, or anger, then my love will sink without trace. Whatever happens, I want this baby.”

“Oh, Claudia,” I said helplessly. A flock of black birds flew by the window.

“I was worried about you too,” she said. “That you'd think I was crazy to keep it.”

I said again I was thrilled; this was the best possible news. When did she plan to tell Rick? After the holidays, she said. With his sons coming home for Christmas, and Nan's father
visiting, he couldn't cope with one more thing. Then she swore me to secrecy, even from you.

As I helped the next rider to adjust her stirrups, I thought this was the best possible news for me too. Now Claudia wouldn't care how long and hard I trained Mercury.

I came home to find Marcus and his friend Luis making tacos. After dinner, when they were playing in the basement and you were in your usual position, reading a book, the TV on mute, I seized the opportunity to tell you I'd changed my mind about Greenfield.