The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

completed the paperwork. She could have said she was a brain surgeon. He didn’t care. He didn’t know she was lying. At first she had told him what she had told her mother, that she was on a sightseeing trip, heading out in a southwestern direction toward Seabury.

“Not much there besides nature,” he had said. “It’s pretty remote once you get past Bigelow Bay. Beautiful countryside though.”

Then Mal had tried out her story on him. “Awesome. Actually, I’m on a working holiday. I’m a journalist. I’m doing a story on the area, the history.”

Her face got hot as she waited for him to laugh or roll his eyes, but he smiled.

“Great.” Bored, not caring either way why she was here, for holiday or work. It was all small talk.

She looked out at the beach, to the stretch of meadow and grass where the sprawling old lodge had once stood. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and crouched down as she took another photo. To one side, in the shade of the forest, were brilliant orange flowers with fat green seed pods. They burst open as she brushed her fingers against them. Touch-me-nots, or jewelweed. The air was a fragrant blend of pine and hemlocks, towering maples with a few leaves just starting to turn red at the edges, the sweetness of lake water, and the heady smell of late-summer flowers and deep forest floor moss, all starting to settle down into end-of-season decay.

There was a dramatic stretch of fireweed, a brilliant fuchsia in the sun on this very hot August afternoon. A great black cloud of starlings lifted out of the treetops, a murmuration travelling through the feckless blue sky reflected in the calm of the lake.

Mal laughed out loud from sheer relief, tugged her backpack over her shoulders and slowly walked back to the trail.

She’d spent the previous year doing nothing but watching television and eating chips, lost in a depression she didn’t understand. Yes, her father had died, but the melancholy had been there before. Her parents described it as her artistic side.

Live life like it’s a novel and not a short story, Malmuria Grant-Patel. The problem with a short story is that it never really concludes. Your life will conclude, at some point. Live life as though you’re in a novel. You’ll put yourself in a position of having to make choices, of living knowing there is an ending. Famous last words, famous last ironic words from her father in the hospital bed, shrivelled like a mummy days before his death, every word from his hacking lungs a treasure, every word a gift. She was glad she and her mother had been able to be there with him, every day, right until the end. She was angry, was still angry, that he died of lung cancer, when he’d never smoked. He had been more sanguine about it. They had lived in Silicon Valley. Air pollution came for everybody. Of course they had relocated to Los Gatos where the air was a bit better, but not better enough.

Mal took a deep aromatic breath and exhaled, her body suddenly full of grief and longing for her father, who always knew what to do. She could go to him with anything. Her yellow shorts were covered in splotches where she had fallen in potholes full of swampy green water on the way in. She was hot and sweaty from the bushwhacking exertion needed to get this far. When her grandmother said there was a road to Mercy Lake, Mal had expected a road. And forty years ago it had been a road for sturdy vehicles making their way to the lodge.

She had called her grandmother in the spring, after she interviewed that young woman, Flora, for her podcast. Flora. Wasn’t her real name. Mal did the interview over Zoom. They had talked about how to survive in a world under lockdown, how to survive in a world where people thought you were broken. She had some interesting ideas about wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic that embraced imperfection and impermanence. And Kintsugi, Japanese pottery made with broken pieces, beauty made from what was broken, from remnants, the resiliency in what survives, what comes together in a new form. It was after they finished the interview that the woman told her about Mercy Lake, after Mal said her mother was from Nova Scotia originally. It was that word, mercy, that triggered this whole situation.

“Have you ever been to Mercy Lake?” the young woman had asked her.

“Never heard of it,” Mal said.

“Good,” Flora had said. That’s where it started. Flora said she’d overheard it when she was younger and in some trouble. There was a company, Cineris International. It was the link. To something called Sodality. And those who belonged to Sodality met every few years in Nova Scotia, at Mercy Lake. And then Mal had remembered — Sarah Windsor had done a series of paintings of a river, the Mercy River Study. Dark, creepy paintings.

Mal had called her grandmother in the nursing home. She was ninety years old and didn’t enjoy talking on the phone. When Mal asked her about Mercy Lake, her grandmother had said, “What do you want to know about that place for? Way back we were related to the people who owned most of the land in that direction. But that was way back.”

Mal had explained as much as she could. There had been a lot of silence on the phone, but her grandmother was ancient and hard of hearing. It wasn’t that though. Mal listened to her breathing. And then clucking.

“You stay away from that place.”

Mal had pushed and her grandmother had changed the subject.

A few days later Gramma Grant called, leaving a message on her cellphone, telling her to go to the Flying Squirrel Road, to the house with the fountain in the front yard — Mal would get answers there. The Offing Society. Find Lucretia. Lucretia will appear. And then the next week she developed