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

would protect them. They would find each other again. Cynthia had proof. She would keep it safe until the right time. For now they would hide.

Age moves forward, a tsunami of a thing, pulling moments with it, days and weeks and years.

It was a vintage card, with pale colours, a photograph of two girls in a wooden boat. Rowing on the Mercy River at High Tide. It must have been taken not far from where Stella’s father grew up, his childhood home in Seabury where he took her that summer in 1980. After the car accident. Her mother driving. Her mother in the seat. Her mother outside. Her mother in pieces. Stella smelled salt water. Surf on a rocky beach. The wind whistling through the pines in the night.

HA

HA

Must not think of the HAHAs.

Stella was hyperventilating. A panic attack. She needed to be back on her meds. The ocean in her mind was swelling now, rising and falling, the shells rattling. She rubbed the sides of her head above her ears, listening for the hippocampi, the seahorses in her skull. Cynthia said she would come if there was trouble. Hide. Cynthia said this — Stella is sure she said to HIDE. The years had passed. It could only mean danger. Stella’s eyes teared up, drops rolling down her cheeks, salty over her lips, falling on the postcard.

The postcard girls wore white dresses. The girl in the middle held the oars, her face turned away, looking at the girl in the bow who faced the camera.

There was a moment, a slack tide, when Stella’s breath stopped and her mind emptied. The beating of her heart, a rush in her ears, sound simultaneously amplified and muffled. The moment turned. Sweat crept over her skin, rivulets coursing down from her hairline and over her spine.

“Stella, the postcard came a long time ago. Do you remember? Years ago. Isaiah said you might start to remember. We just had to be patient,” she heard Dianne say.

Cynthia was swimming up in the dark waters, ripples on the surface of her mind. Stella tried to push Cynthia down to the bottom, to quiet the rocking seahorse, to tuck Cynthia into a shell, to close the shell, Cynthia banging inside.

Stella wanted to see Isaiah. Where was he? Had he visited yesterday? He used a cane and was driving less and less. Stella wanted to go to her room, to sit in her chair and look out the window, to have Cat jump on her lap, soft fur, quiet purr.

Stella’s father floated into her mind. He looked as he did that long-ago summer, fifty-five, shaggy dirty-blond hair in need of a cut, a rumpled white cotton shirt, a coffee stain he hadn’t noticed on the pocket, unshaven. Those shells Stella collected in her mind, those shells where she had stored her memories, were opening, this oyster shell lifting and her father tumbling out.

The postcard reminded Stella of her father’s album of postcards about her father’s hero, a man named Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, famous for the Kirkbride Plan for mental institutions built in the Victorian era. Kirkbride believed the building, as well as the setting, had healing properties. Kirkbride had written a discourse, On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane. Stella’s father had been writing a paper that last summer of his life on the healing power of architecture.

Her father’s history lessons had stayed with her. His gifts to her, she supposed. The problem, he had said repeatedly, was the drastic funding cuts, the overcrowding, where a room intended for one person housed fifteen — the staff shortages and the resulting return to inhumane treatment. The Kirkbride hospitals were set in the country on stretches of land. They had farms where patients worked. Her father had postcards of asylums from all over North America, from when people would visit and send a card of the asylum to a family member. There were postcards of the French Devil’s Island, the Australian French Island. In Vietnam the French shipped dissidents to Con Son, where thousands of Vietnamese suffered and died. The Riverside Hospital had been put on North Brother Island, in the East River in New York, for isolating people with infectious diseases. People do well in community, Stella, her father would always tell her. Intentional community, accidental community, a place where they are with like-minded people, where they are not alone.

But Stella knew any community could be corrupted. And the most unlikely place could provide sanctuary.

The Nova Scotia Hospital, the NS, was where patients worried they’d get sent if they acted out. It was originally a Kirkbride hospital and still existed, although the main building — which was called the DeWolfe building when Stella had spent time there — was torn down in 1996, and the rest of it renovated beyond recognition. There was one postcard of the main building and a black-and-white photo taken from Citadel Hill looking across the Halifax Harbour to Dartmouth. With a magnifying glass you could see the hallmark “batwing wards” of the hospital stretched out. That architecture and setting had an enormous impact on health, her father said. Stella’s mother had told her that Elizabeth Bishop’s mother had been in the Nova Scotia Hospital, when it was called Mount Hope, and had died there, back before the city of Dartmouth had grown around it, before the government had started clawing away the sprawling grounds.

I don’t want to think about my mother. Or my father.

This was Stella’s mind’s voice.

Dianne sat on the bench by the river with her eyes closed. Stella looked over at the graveyard. It must be getting later in the afternoon. The sun wasn’t as bright. The modest graveyard was abandoned, only numbered stone markers for the buried. Once there had been a lecturer in the Community Room who had talked about the history of the County Home Road the Jericho Centre was located on. He said that the tombstones were unmarked to respect privacy, that