Small Mercies полностью

“Could you tell me on the walk to my car? I’m several blocks away, and it’s a little dicey around here.”

“Sure.”

They turn up the sidewalk together.

It’s a soft summer night that smells of imminent rain. Bobby walks Carmen toward her car. He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

The phone rings and rings. Mary Pat stares at it, no idea how long she’s been sitting on the couch in the living room, no idea how long that phone’s been ringing. It stops. And then, a minute later, it starts again. Stops after nine rings. A minute of silence. Maybe more. Maybe five minutes. And then the phone ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. It’s halfway through the fourth ring when Mary Pat gently removes the cord at the back.

It must be Meadow Lane. She’s supposed to be at work right now. That realization almost breaks through the numbness that has defined her since she opened the bag Marty Butler gave her. But the numbness is still too strong. It’s head-to-toe Novocain. It’s numbness with weight — there’s nothing gentle or calming about it. It clamps down on her skin, blood, brain, and nerve endings. Like a hand gripping the back of her neck and pressing her face against the ground because it fears what will happen should she ever get to her feet.

It needn’t fear. She can’t imagine regaining her feet. Not in any way that matters. She definitely can’t imagine going back to work for a while. Doubts there’ll be a job still waiting for her by the time she’s ready to return. And that’s fine.

She’s found a station on her radio — WJIB — that plays only classical music, and she can’t stop listening to it. She doesn’t turn it off even when she goes to sleep (not that there’s much sleep happening in her life these days). She’s been a Top 40 girl her whole life, never into any particular band, just always liking the music of the day. This summer it’s been “Rock the Boat” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and her favorite, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” But all that music sounds silly to her now, because it wasn’t made with someone like her in mind. Even that lyric “Losing everything is like the sun going down on me” feels insufficient, because losing everything doesn’t feel like the sun going down on her, it feels like an atom bomb went off inside her and she’s now part of the mushroom cloud, a thousand little pieces of her breaking apart and floating out into space in a thousand different directions.

With classical pieces, she doesn’t know the song names or the names of the composers (unless the DJ chimes in at the end of a four- or five-song block, at which point the early songs are too far back to place a name to the appropriate tune), but the music speaks to her grief in a way nothing else can. It slides through the Novocain. Not enough to find her heart but enough to find her head. She floats through the notes as if the notes are currents in a larger body of water — a dark body of water, she’s sure, a wide river at night — and travels into a space in her mind where her entire history and that of her family before her and the family she’s made are all intertwined. She can sense — though not feel or articulate — a connection between all who have lived and died in her bloodline. Of course, part of the connection is ethnic heritage — they were all Irish and all married only other Irish since the first of them, Damien and Mare Flanagan, stepped off the boat at Long Wharf in 1889 — but the other part of the connection is more elusive. And yet, riding the current of Beethoven or Brahms or Chopin or Handel, she can touch a part of herself that feels far more true than factual, an Original Mary Pat, a Mother Eve Mary Pat, a Mary Pat rooted so far back she may have breathed her last on a peat bog in the village of Tully Cross in the townland of Gorteenclough back in the twelfth century. And that Original Mary Pat understands something in the music about the ties that bind them all in this family — from the firstborn American Flanagan (Connor) to the lastborn American Fennessy (Jules) that gives meaning to the story of the bloodline. Present-Day Mary Pat can’t put her finger on what that is, but she listens to the notes in numb belief that she might one day.