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

her temple around the side of her head and down the back. It’s been four months since the accident. She was in the hospital for two months after the crash, for April and May, unconscious for April. She kept asking for her mother when she woke up and her father avoided telling her the truth. When Stella was discharged in June her father drove her home, looking straight ahead at the road as he told Stella they were moving to Nova Scotia.

Stella realizes her father isn’t in her bedroom anymore. The door is closed and the room is dark. She remembers a summer night when she was nine years old, in her nightie in bare feet on the warm sidewalk in Athens, looking up at the night sky. It was warm, not the usual muggy hot, when the scorching temperatures and humidity turned the night sky into a cloudy dark ocean. It was, as it is here this raven night in Seabury, untainted by nocturnal clouds. Her father had taken her from her bed. He smelled of whiskey and smoke as he crouched beside her. Her mother was away, on a trip to Kentucky, to Pleasant Hill, the restored Shaker village that her people, the Settles, came from during the American Civil War. Stella’s mother had told her stories of how the Settles moved up to Nova Scotia.

They were standing on the sidewalk so her father could show her Stella Polaris, the North Star, which does not rise or set but stays in the same spot, the axis of the Earth pointed almost directly at it. “You’ll never lose your way if you can find the North Star. That’s your homing. I wanted to name you Stella Polaris, but your mother insisted on Stella Maris, her tribute to the ocean. It wasn’t worth arguing about.”

Stella can smell the rosebud in the crystal vase. It comforts her knowing the flower is there. Crickets sing into the night. Crickets, crickets, crickets, Stella repeats, although in her mind what she sees are the fireflies on their front lawn that she watched with her mother on hot summer nights when she couldn’t sleep, sitting on the verandah in Athens. Stella tumbles into a heavy slumber where the lullabies of insects become soft gusts of mother voice, carrying her away into trembling black.

The Fundy Waves Motel.

Now

The smell of acrid cigarette smoke lingered in Mal’s nose as she drove east on the highway, the early evening sky bright behind her. Phantom smoke. She knew it wasn’t in the car. The car had been locked. But the stale odour painted itself onto her sinuses, her mouth. Her stomach kept clenching and no matter how much deep breathing she did, she couldn’t relax or get the idea out of her head that maybe someone knew she was bumbling around, pretending to be a journalist, asking questions, trying to make connections. Her throat was sore. It couldn’t just be from a whiff of smoke hanging in hot, humid August air. A summer flu or traveller’s cold, the kind her mother said looked for exhausted, vulnerable bodies where it could lodge. In the back of her mind she was convinced that as soon as she had finally tried to take control of her life the coronavirus was ambushing her. But maybe it was just a cold. Her muscles were sore from the bush whack on that overgrown trail and from being “under the weather,” although Mal thought of it as the weather over the body, pressing down, pressing in, flattening out the person and then inflating the head with mucous, boggy eyes like seeping pools.

After Flora had confided in Mal about Mercy Lake, Mal had tried to casually find out more from her mother. They were having dinner, one of her father’s family recipes for curried lamb that they’d cooked together. Mal brought up the Mercy River paintings by Sarah Windsor. Her mother said it was in Nova Scotia, a river that led to a lake with the same name. All she recalled from her childhood, she said, was that a group of tourists on a backwoods hunting expedition had perished in a fire. She was just a girl then, so she hadn’t paid much attention to the news. And it was two hundred miles away from Bigelow Bay, where she lived. Mal’s mother did remember how her mother had turned the radio off whenever it was mentioned. And at school, she and her best friend talked about how two girls, twelve and thirteen, were the only survivors found at the site. They were never identified by name but they were the same age, and that’s why they’d talked about it at school. Mal’s mother had then abruptly changed the subject, switching to groceries and menu planning in a firm voice that signalled the conversation was closed. It was out of character for her. She had never mentioned any of her childhood friends before, for sure not a best friend.

Mal exited the highway in Middleton and pulled over on the side of the road. She glanced in the side mirrors, the rear-view mirror. There were no other cars. But there was still her mounting anxiety that someone had been in the woods. Had been near her car. Was it a tourist, a backwoods hunter? She remembered the threatening call and note before she left California. Was someone looking for her? Wanting to find her? Or just scare her? Before she left, she had googled the place for racial issues. Mal knew there had been BLM rallies in the province. There still were. She was surprised by this, the large size of the Black population, especially in the capital city. But the countryside seemed so serene. She always thought the North was a haven.

She never should have come here. She was being reckless. Paranoid, even. Neurotic. All the things her ex had found a turn-off in women. The right thing to do would be to change her