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

father was always that way, putting his head down, lost in his studies. We’ll see you soon, Stella.”

He pauses and then speaks in a hushed voice. “Be patient with your father. He’s had to make some impor­tant decisions very quickly.” His concern is almost palpable, a deep tenderness that encircles Stella.

“And remind your father about the barbeque tomorrow at suppertime. My company sponsors it. A nice way to say goodbye to summer.” And then the brass bell by the door jingles as Frank leaves.

Mrs. MacLean smiles at Stella, who blushes. She wishes this kindly looking old lady was her grandmother. That she had a normal life. A normal father. Her eyes sting. Too much sunlight. She’s sitting in a library, surrounded by books but not reading, doing nothing but sitting. It’s hard to keep track of time. But she’s hungry. She didn’t eat enough for breakfast and it’s still an hour until lunchtime. Dinnertime.

“How about a drink of water?”

Stella shakes her head and the librarian heads back to her card catalogue.

When she gets back to the house, Stella feels her muscles releasing, her headache abating. The car is in the driveway but her father is not home; he has left a note saying he’s gone out for a walk before lunch. The house smells of lemon oil and old wood and dried flowers. Stella wonders if her grandmother smelled like this. Morgana. That was her name. Not just Mother. Or Grandmother. Stella’s stomach rumbles. The house feels infinite, full of echoes, every creak amplified. Stella thinks she hears a thump coming from above as she limps up the stairs to tend to her hip and wash her hands. It’s just noise in her head, Stella tells herself as she takes the dress off and sees she’s sheered a good three inches of skin off her hip and her elbow is scraped raw. It’s not deep, but it’s throbbing sore. She dabs at it with wet tissues and then flushes them. She opens the medicine cabinet but there aren’t any bandages. Stella walks back to her room, covering her chest as she walks, alone in the house but still feeling exposed.

She stops. A swishing coming from her aunt’s locked room? But when Stella stands by the door, there isn’t a sound. It must be her brain. Auditory hallucinations. What she remembers most from the hospital is the neurologist saying how mysterious memory is — it’s hard to predict the future of how her brain will work, how it will process grief, how it will encode, store and retrieve memory. If memory will come back, if it will form, if it will stay, or if it will be flirtatious, coming and going, coy. Her high level of intelligence will help her adapt. Stella doubts this. Her father waiting for her to be vivacious has failure flushing through her, a toilet inside that has a broken handle. Her introversion, which feels normal, is also a leash, holding her back, protecting her from danger while at the same time robbing her of life, of experience. It is a conundrum. The girl Stella is a watercolour memory, static memory. Her previous life is a series of photo albums she can sometimes find and at other times cannot locate. And Stella’s mother, always from behind, or the side, a mother without a face. Only changing the past would help and she feels a pang of despair that this isn’t possible. She is not Charlotte Sometimes. She is Stella All the Time and None of the Time.

It must have been the wind. Or maybe it was the sound of her longing, Stella thinks, the wry Stella inside the stiff, formal, twelve-year-old body at the top of the stairs with her hand on the glass doorknob. She turns it. Locked. The air is cool in the hall. Stella holds her breath and looks in the keyhole. She only sees a wooden floor — a wooden floor, illuminated by yellow sunlight.

In her room she puts a tissue on the wound and attaches it to her skin with some tape she finds in the writing table in the corner. Stella balls up her blue dress with the red stain and puts it on the floor in the back of the closet. She recalls when her mother bought her the dress. It has smocking on it and Stella knows it’s too young for her now; she’s almost a teenager. She’s so scrawny it still fits but it’s a dress from her past. Seabury is showing her this.

Stella makes a cheese and tomato sandwich and pours a glass of milk from a glass bottle. She looks at the bookcase near the table where she imagines her grandmother did her cooking, rolled out her pie dough, as Stella’s mother did. She misses her home cooking and wishes she had learned to cook too. She feels she has so little left from her mother other than her adoration of flowers and nature and literature. She forgot to ask her father when the moving truck will come, when she can open up boxes and the scent of her mother will waft out.

The kitchen bookcase has roll-up glass covers on each shelf. And if you take the handle and pull, the glass will tip back and then slide inside, just over top of the books. Only the middle two shelves hold books, recipe and cookbooks. Her father’s lucky the glass didn’t break when he knocked it over. Just before she pulls the glass door down again, she notices a long book with a tarnished silver flower running down the spine, a ledger-style book. There is nothing on the hard cover but a larger version of the same flower. Inside, on the title page, it says Commonplace Book of the Offing Society. She shuffles through it but all the yellowed pages are blank.

Just then she hears her father’s footsteps crunching on the driveway, and as he gets closer she hears him whistling. He isn’t very good at