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

her bones were telling her, if a storm was coming, her opinions on flowers, on the quality of the food.

Stella knew Dianne was born at home on the North Mountain on the Flying Squirrel Road, and went to live in the Valley in Kingsport on the Minas Basin with Sorcha, her distant cousin, when she was a teenager. Stella had gone to Kingsport on a weekend pass a number of years ago to visit with Dianne and her cousin in the early summer. Dianne had told Stella she once fell on her head on the rocky beach and was never the same. Dianne could remember when she was different, when her thoughts were different, when she was somebody else. Someone she once missed but eventually forgot. Stella knew that she was different too, from many years ago when she was a child, when her mother was alive. But that was another lifetime. And you couldn’t live for other lifetimes.

Footsteps in the hall — Dianne in the doorway, her slate-grey hair in a braid.

“Get up, Stella. Don’t want to keep the hippies waiting.” Dianne clapped her hands together and her silver necklace flew into the air before landing back on its perch on her breast. Dianne resembled an ornament from an antique shop, one of those strange memento mori objects Isaiah kept on a shelf, with her lined face and her dark skin hanging over her cheekbones. Dianne had lost her teeth. She snorted when people said that. Pulled out. Didn’t lose them. Not a set of keys.

Dianne looked over her right shoulder. Then the left. Back at Stella. Then down the hall. Again back at Stella, smiling, trying not to alarm her. This was new and strange. Dianne was not paranoid.

“Let’s go.” Dianne hoisted the corners of her mouth but her lips fell down as quickly as they had lifted, a flag raised but not tied off, the collapsing smile Stella knew Dianne reserved for the nurses and workers, the people who took care of them. Dianne didn’t mention a visitor, a Black woman in a beautiful yellow dress.

Dianne played with her necklace with her left hand. “How are you managing without all them pills? Remember? That new psychiatrist wound back your meds to nothing. I still got my pills every morning. Never getting off those. For my ticker.” Dianne patted her chest as she glanced around.

If Dianne kept behaving this way, Stella worried they’d reassess her. Paranoid. Neurotic. They would insist Dianne was losing her proverbial marbles when Stella knew Dianne’s head was full of fine marbles, marbles made from the finest stone.

Stella remembered she wasn’t taking much medication anymore. Maybe none. She couldn’t quite recall. A nurse had always come to Stella’s room each morning after breakfast with a plastic container of pills. It had been this way for years. But she wasn’t coming these days. This was why Stella felt clearer-headed, but the clear-headedness was disorienting in itself. She recalled the brain zap, the feeling of electricity in her head as they cut the dosage down. But that was gone now. There was no weather in her head, just the calm blue sea and empty sky of her memory.

“Got waylaid by Nurse Calvin. She’s going on about my cousin Sorcha. Says she’s too old to have me over on weekends. What does that old bag know? Can’t wait till she retires. One more month and we’ll be free.”

“Hurry up, quickity-quick.” Dianne shuffled back and forth in her white running shoes and put her hands into the pockets of her blue house dress. She only wore blue dresses and always wore running shoes now to help with her back. She hated bare feet, and sandals were for hippies, Jesus and Pontius Pilate. Stella wore dresses and running shoes as well. She walked over to the door, picked up her knapsack and slung it over her shoulder.

Dianne called Stella’s routines a form of dead reckoning her way through life — figuring out where you’re headed based on where you are now. Every morning Stella reviewed the items on the top of her bookshelf, including a shell and a framed photo of Isaiah, Dianne and Stella on the beach by Periwinkle Cottage. The cottage belonged to Isaiah. It had been in Stella’s family for generations. The photo was from an outing on a weekend pass, Stella and Isaiah sitting on a log by a fire, Dianne playing her banjo and with her head thrown back singing. The date was written on the photo. Stella didn’t actually remember this outing. Still, she treasured the picture, the family cottage, painted periwinkle blue, named after both the creeping flower and the snails on the basalt beach rocks at low tide.

The word came from the Latin, from pina, and wincel from Old English, a pinawincel. (How did she know this? Who told her? Granny Scotia? She hadn’t thought of her in many years. Perhaps her mother? Isaiah? Had she always known?) Stella was a placid lake. Most of her life memories were far offshore, lost in the horizon, where she wanted them to stay. But it was at the cost of a different type of memory, the minutiae, the curios, the details — things that were boats to that remote region.

Stella never knew what would live in her short-term memory long enough to make it to the part of her brain that stored long-term memory. The doctors said it was the hippocampus (the small seahorse-shaped part of the brain, they said — the vessel of short-term memory — damaged in a childhood car accident). Layers of trauma blended with time; her memories shifted and faded and reappeared again, popping back to the surface from the deep currents below, her brain living by its own seasons. The brain was fat and water, with salt, Stella remembered the neurologist saying, the specialist who also said that really, they had very, very little comprehension of the brain, the last great biological mystery, the realm of memory a mystical