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

both back into the central nervous system of it. He cocks his head, as if he hears something coming from the room. Stella thinks he hears his memories. She listens to the quiet of the house, the grandfather clock downstairs in the hallway tick-tocking.

“What was her name?” Stella forces herself to ask this question, to break his trance. She wants to go to bed and escape from this strange night, with Ohio a dream in the past and Seabury the nightmare of the present.

“Her name was . . . Stella. You’re Stella Maris — or Stella Polaris, as I think of you. She was Stella Violette, the original Stella.”

Stella watches his blue eyes darting left and right, up and down, as though he’s following the flight path of an insect. Two Stellas. She swallows and tries to speak, croaking out the words from her dry throat: “We have the same name? My name?”

Her father taps his index finger on his chin. “Well, her name. Yes, you were named after my sister. We almost named you after my mother, Morgana Llewellyn. She was born out on an island in the Bay of Fundy. Her father was Welsh. Her mother was Scottish.”

“You never told me I had an aunt.” Stella’s voice is hoarse, the skin in her mouth and throat drying out as she sucks in one shallow breath after another.

“Stella! Don’t speak to me that way. You used to be so polite. The only reason I didn’t tell you was because it was so long ago. She had an accident. I can’t stand talking about it. And now with your mother gone . . .”

The implication hangs in the air between them, a toxic vapour that had come with the night air — it was Stella’s fault her mother and his sister and his mother had died.

He hasn’t come out and said how much he hates Stella’s new personality — the one that came with the head injury from the car accident. But his resentment is a living, breathing thing that follows Stella wherever she goes.

Her father raps on the locked door of Stella Violette’s room, maybe hoping the knob will turn, that his sister will appear, all grown up, and assume responsibility for her niece so her brother, the widower, can hide in his research, can prepare for his job that starts in two weeks. Stella’s father clears his throat. “It was locked after my sister died. I expect it’s been locked ever since.”

Stella shivers. “Well, that seems really crazy weird, doesn’t it, Dad?” Her anger recedes as quickly as it surged.

“It might to you. Children don’t understand grief any more than an animal does. It’s not uncommon for the living to just seal up a room.” He presses his hands together.

“How you did with this house?” Stella can’t help but point out the similarity.

Her father’s face collapses, his eyes perched over what her mother called jowls. “My father wasn’t sentimental. He was superstitious though. He didn’t go near Stella Violette’s room. They always despised each other. We all despised my father. There wasn’t an ounce of mercy in his blood. Too diluted with whiskey.”

Stella’s father slaps his hand against the plaster wall, clearly thinking he has made a mistake in talking about his dead sister. “It will be good for you to meet Sally, Frank’s wife. We’ll see her tomorrow. Do you need me to read you a story or anything? I guess you’re a bit too old for bedtime stories now.”

He clearly doesn’t understand bedtime or bedtime stories. He points to the cozy room across the hall with the lamp and vase on the nightstand. “It’s all ready for you, Stella.”

And then a loud clang from downstairs, the old phone ringing. He turns and thuds down the stairs and Stella pads into her new room.

The bed is turned down, a just-opening yellow rose in the bud vase beside the light. Cynthia and her mother must have done all this work of getting the house ready together. Stella looks in the bathroom mirror as she brushes her teeth. She is pale with dark circles under her eyes. Her hair is short now, cut to match the side of her shaved head where the stitches were, from the deep cuts on her scalp where the glass dug in. She was wearing a seat belt. She remembers buckling up before they backed out of the driveway. There was thunder. She knows this.

There is a little grate in the floor in her bedroom. Stella’s mother had told her about these, how they had heat registers in the house in Nova Scotia she had lived in when she was little, for air circulation, and in the winter for warm air rising from the wood stove. Stella can remember her mother’s voice, but since she woke up in the hospital she can’t picture her mother’s face. When she looks at a photo she sees her mother, her dark hair, her gentle smile, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, but as soon as she looks away, she can’t hold her mother’s face in her mind. All the photos are back in Ohio, being packed with the rest of their belongings and sent in the moving van.

She hears her father’s voice on the phone coming through the floor so she closes the register. She opens the window and props it up with a wooden stick that’s been left on the ledge. It’s quiet outside except for a few crickets. She tucks herself into the squishy old spool bed.

Stella drifts off but a creak on the stairs calls her back. Her father opens the door and the hall light falls in.

“Stella?” he whispers.

“Yes, Dad?”

Only the floor creaking as her father comes to her bed and bends down, kissing her good night on her forehead, something he hasn’t done since she was very small. His dry lips brush over her scar.

Stella’s stitches were taken out before she left the hospital, now a red scar running from