Mercury (19 page)

T
WO DAYS LATER
I
was approaching Mercury's stall when something brought me to a standstill. For a moment I didn't know what it was. My eyes registered the change before my brain. Then I understood. The ropes I'd draped around the bars of his stall the night before now hung from the saddle post.

Someone had been here. Someone had visited Mercury. I looked up and down the corridor: empty. I looked in his stall: empty save for him. I didn't know what to do first: phone the police, phone Claudia, check the building. He settled the matter by whinnying. I ran my hands down his legs but found no bumps, no hot spots.

“Who was here?” I said. “What did they want?”

I hurried back to the car. With the gun in my pocket, I went around the building, testing windows and doors. In the office I made a cup of tea and tried to calm myself. There was no point in calling the police—I'd already done everything they'd do—and there was no point in telling Claudia. She'd only worry. And besides, how could I tell her without mentioning the ropes? My cunning precaution would strike her as evidence, yet more evidence, of my obsession with Mercury. I clasped the gun until I felt calm enough to return to him.

In the arena I swung myself into the saddle, adjusted the stir
rups, and walked him forward. We circled only twice before I urged him into a canter. I gave myself over to his drumming hooves, his steady breath, his muscles moving beneath me, his mane flying. Then we turned toward the jumps. The day before I'd set each one an inch higher. Now Mercury cleared them greedily. And with each jump I felt myself not flying, but even better than that, entirely one with him, each of us exerting every bone, every brain cell, to clear the jump, each of us thrilled as we arced through the air.

Give me more, he was saying.

“I will,” I said.

This time I was determined. Nothing, nothing I could prevent, would go wrong. Can you understand? I loved you, Marcus, and Trina, but I loved Mercury too. I was going to ride him to victory. After more than a decade I was going to fulfill the promise of my second life.

W
HAT
I
HAVE RECOUNTED
so far is my experience of events more or less as I lived through them, and Viv's account of those same months, which she delivered at our kitchen table during several late-night conversations. Like the three blind men, each encountering different parts of an elephant, each believing he grasped the whole, I had believed myself the possessor of the 20/20 vision my progressives promised. That night at the stables, when I saw Viv holding a gun, I realized my vision was almost as limited as Jack's. There is listening and listening; there is also seeing and seeing. I had missed, or misunderstood, almost everything. Which surely means that, despite everything Viv told me, I am still missing a good deal.

Even as I came to a stop outside the emergency room, Hilary was running towards the door. Jack was deep into shock, moaning softly. Then two orderlies were sliding him out of the car, wheeling him through the waiting room and the swing doors beyond, into a curtained cubicle. A nurse began to cut off his jacket. Briefly the sound of scissors ripping through fabric carried me back to that afternoon at my mother's house when, while I opened the box containing the bookcase, she had urged me to let Viv pursue her dreams. Now Hilary held
Jack's hand. “You're at the hospital,” she said. “They're cutting off your clothes. You're going to be fine.”

But Jack was far from fine. His skin, always pale, shone white as Mercury's mane; his mouth was screwed tight with pain. For nearly three years I had seldom seen him without his dark glasses. Now they were gone—safe, I learned later, in Hilary's bag—and his eyes were the same disconcerting, vehement blue as they had been the last time I examined them.

Dr. Gaitonde appeared, slight and narrow-shouldered. “So Mr. Brennan got in the way of a bullet,” she said, bending over him with her stethoscope. How long ago was he shot? Did we know his blood type? Any heart problems or allergies? I introduced myself as Jack's optometrist, and answered as best I could. She typed my answers into a computer terminal.

“Please,” said Hilary, “will he be all right?” In her blue dress, lipstick still gleaming, she looked as if she were on her way to a party.

“I can't promise,” said the doctor, “but he's young, his heart is strong, I don't think he's lost too much blood. There's every reason to think he'll make a good recovery. As for his shoulder, we won't know until we see the X-rays.”

Jack was wheeled away to radiology.

“So who shot Mr. Brennan?” she asked, still typing. “And why?”

A word once let out of its cage, Jack used to say, quoting one of his beloved ancients, cannot be whistled back. I longed to answer Dr. Gaitonde, to tell the truth, but I was reeling from what I'd seen outside Mercury's stall—the incomprehensible spectacle of Viv, my wife, Marcus and Trina's mother, holding a gun, a gun that she had, only moments before, fired at my
friend. Even in my muddled state, I grasped that these words, once released, would fly far and wide.

In the next cubicle a woman's voice rose. “I told them the exterminator can't work with a dog in the building.”

I was still gazing at the empty linoleum where Jack's gurney had stood when Hilary spoke. “We don't know what happened. After dinner we went to visit my horse at the stables. We were in his stall, and someone shot Jack. We didn't see who. Mercury, the horse, went berserk. All we were thinking about was getting Jack out of the stall. Getting him here.”

“My heavens.” Dr. Gaitonde's dark eyebrows arched towards her dark hair. “What were you doing there so late?”

“My wife manages the stables,” I offered. “They're owned by her best friend.” Two sentences, both true. On the other side of the curtain the woman said that a dog was no different from a baby. And would you leave a baby to the exterminators?

“We'll notify the police immediately,” said Dr. Gaitonde. Then she held out Jack's wallet and told Hilary to talk to admissions.

I
N RECENT YEARS
I
have spent many hours at the emergency room with my father, but seldom late on a wintry Saturday night. At least half the people there were, like Hilary and me, waiting for news rather than attention, and more than half were drunk, or stoned, or in some uncertain state. While Hilary dealt with Jack's admission, I sat at the end of a row of chairs and dialed the number of our house. My own voice, sounding calm and reasonable, asked me to leave a message.

“I'm at the hospital with Hilary,” I said. “They're calling the police. . . .”

Was Viv standing in our study, listening? Had she driven di
rectly to the police station? Was she even now handing over the gun? At last the machine cut off my silence.

Hilary came back, holding two cans of Diet Coke. She offered me one and said she was worried about Mercury. What if the gunman had injured him too? Under cover of opening the can—that comforting little
pftt
sound—I said I'd just phoned Viv. She would check on him.

Hilary sank into the chair beside me. “I can't believe this. One minute we're in a nice restaurant, eating dinner. The next we're in the emergency room.”

I repeated the doctor's reassurances: Jack was young and fit; the bullet hadn't touched any major organs. “What we have to worry about is his shoulder.”

“And his spirit.” She told me then what I had not known before, namely how frightened Jack had been when he understood he was going blind, how, like my childhood neighbor, he hated never knowing who was in a room, or in the street.

“He always seemed so stoic,” I said.

“Jack's proud.” Her hair swung back and forth as she described how a few months ago a colleague had failed to meet him for lunch. Jack had eaten alone, but as he was leaving the cafeteria, he heard a familiar voice. “The guy had totally forgotten their meeting,” Hilary said, “and was eating with friends at another table. That's Jack's life in a microcosm.”

Listening to her, gazing at the worn chairs, I glimpsed the edges of outrageous grief. If Jack
x
'd, then I would
y
. Where
x
was lost the use of his arm, or ended up in a wheelchair, or died, and
y
was burn down the stables, or banish Viv to Patagonia, or rend my garments and put out my eyes. Beside me Hilary checked her phone, although the only news either of us wanted would come through the doors at the end of
the emergency room. I could feel her fidgeting beside me; I could feel myself doing the same. If there had been treadmills instead of chairs, we would have been running, furiously, side by side.

“So what on earth happened?” she said, giving up on the phone. “Someone else was at the stables? They tried to shoot us?”

If I told her what I had seen, then my life, my family, would not be over—nothing so simple as that—but changed almost out of recognition, like the flimsy Coke can I had unthinkingly, crumpled in my fist. “Maybe someone”—I was groping from one word to the next—“was trying to rob the stables. There's been a spate of break-ins recently at farms, garages. Lonely places.”

On the nearest TV screen the time flashed, and so I can report that I told my second major, premeditated lie at 12:27 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, March 6, 2011. Perhaps that was my second birthday.

W
E WAITED, AND
H
ILARY,
despite the magazines scattered around the room, waited mostly by talking. I heard the story of her marriage. Deeper into the night she described Jessie, her secret sister. The exterminator woman left. A young man arrived with a broken wrist and three drunken friends. A woman limped in with two small children, the older sobbing from earache. Hilary, happy for the distraction, walked her baby round and round the waiting room. At last Dr. Gaitonde returned. They were going to operate to remove the bullet; it was the only way to stop the bleeding. The shoulder—she shrugged her own—would be dealt with later by her expert colleagues. As she held out the permission forms, with their dire warnings, she added that the police would be here shortly.

Sometime after the doctor left, Hilary said, “I understood about Michael and women, but I never understood about him and horses. To him one horse was worth a hundred people.”

Was that really any different, I asked, from people who were mad about tennis or music or climbing Everest? Just because we didn't value the object, that didn't mean the passion was unworthy.

“What about people who collect garden gnomes?” said Hilary. “For Michael, horses justified everything. I think that's why I married Franklin. His fanaticism felt familiar.”

Years ago in Edinburgh one of my lecturers pointed out that
fan
comes from
fanatic
, an obvious connection I had never noticed and which I now pointed out to Hilary. Desperate to keep the conversation from turning to Viv, I continued to urge counterexamples. People who were trying to cure cancer, or stop the glaciers melting, surely they weren't fanatics?

“Because they know when to stop,” she said. “The first time Michael talked about Mercury, he said, ‘Hil, I've fallen in love.' But love became something else.”

“I can understand you loving Jack,” I said.

It was then that she told me they wanted to have a child. “I know it's crazy,” she said. “We've only known each other four months.” Her eyelids fluttered, rapid as a moth's wings.

A
ND WHERE WAS
V
IV
during these hours? As soon as we'd carried Jack out of the barn, she ran to Mercury. He was still wild with fear, kicking, screaming, and the other horses were whinnying and banging, their panic magnifying his. At the stables in Ann Arbor a stallion had killed a man by pinning him to a wall. People said the man was to blame—he'd whipped the horse—but she had always kept her distance. Now she was afraid of Mercury, and he was afraid of her. Perhaps he could smell the gun. She stood at the door of his stall, talking to him—No one's going to take you away. You're safe—until at last he lowered his head.

The boy at the shooting range had told her that when the police in his town shot a junkie, the bullet had passed straight through the junkie and hit another man, a teacher, in the throat. “He was a standup guy,” the boy had said. “No justice in that.” So when she took off Mercury's blanket and saw his dappled coat gleaming, no sign of blood, she gasped with relief. To have shot Jack was unspeakable; to have shot Jack and Mercury was unthinkable. She put his blanket back on, strapping it loosely the way he liked, gave him a handful of oats, locked the door, set the alarm, and then she was in the car, the gun on the seat beside her, not knowing what to do next.

“I kept telling myself,” she told me later, “you wouldn't let Jack die.”

She sat there, gazing out at the soiled snow. Should she go to the police? If Jack died, she was sure, I would accuse her. If he lived, she could not imagine what I might do. And all her wondering might be beside the point. Perhaps I had already told Hilary. Perhaps she had already lost everything.

At some point she started driving. When she reached the main road she stopped, removed the ammunition from the gun, and threw the magazine as far as she could into the woods. Then, with no conscious plan, only revulsion, she threw the gun. Back in the car, she knew she was not going to the police station that night. She had to see Marcus and Trina. But at the sight of our house, all lit up, she braked. What if I was already there and had barred the door? She pictured herself knocking on doors and windows, calling my name, while I sat on the sofa, my gaze fixed on one of my history books.

But the door opened easily, and inside everything was as she had left it, weirdly quiet. Even Nabokov was asleep. In all the years we had lived in the house, she had never been there alone at night before.

“I saw myself in the bathroom mirror,” she told me later, as we sat drinking Scotch at the kitchen table, “and I looked just the same. Like Dinos.”

For a moment I couldn't place the name. Then I remembered. When I still lived on Linnaean Street, Dinos had owned the shop where I bought my coffee. A handsome man, always ready for a chat, he had married his pretty manager. The year after Marcus was born, a photograph had appeared by the cash register: “It's a girl.” Beaming, Dinos told me that Natalie was named for his grandmother in Thessalonika. She liked the smell
of apples, and slept for six hours a night. We no longer lived near the shop, and several months passed before I returned to buy coffee. When I asked if Dinos was around, the boy behind the counter lowered his voice. Natalie had died ten days before; Dinos had been charged with shaking her to death.

I had been shocked to think that someone I knew, someone so genial, could have done such a thing, but in the ongoing emergency of my own life, I had gradually forgotten Dinos. Then last autumn, searching for a birthday present for Viv, I had gone into another shop near Linnaean Street. The saleswoman was flirting with a dark-haired man in a leather jacket. As I studied a row of blouses, she complained that she needed to lose weight.

“Honey,” said the man, “you look great, and I'm not just saying that because I haven't seen a woman in nine years.”

At once I recognized Dinos, and he, catching my glance, recognized me. Before I could move, he had crossed the small shop and embraced me. He asked after Viv and Marcus; I said he was looking well. He left the shop, and the saleswoman helped me choose a gift.

At home I had described the encounter to Viv. “Here was this person,” I said, “who killed his daughter, and he looked just the same.”

“But he served his sentence,” Viv said. “Shouldn't he be forgiven?” Her hair was still long, and it was easy to picture her as Portia, the role she had played in her high school production of
The Merchant of Venice
.

“I don't know,” I said. “I kept feeling it was too easy.”

“Nine years in prison isn't my idea of easy.”

“Even nine days, but all the time we were talking, I was thinking that if Natalie were alive, she'd be a year older than
Trina, old enough to pick apples. Perhaps that's what bothers me: I'd forgotten her, and he seemed to have too. I don't think forgiveness should involve forgetting. But if I remember Natalie, then I'm not sure I can forgive him.”

Viv's gaze had sharpened. “Dinos isn't a criminal,” she'd argued. “Just a person who made a terrible mistake, and who has to live with that day after day, knowing he can never ever go back and undo it.”

Which was, she told me, staring sorrowfully across the kitchen table, how she now thought of herself.