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

Sure enough, in the graveyard by her mother’s tombstone, one of red granite, Isaiah’s. Beloved brother to Catriona Settles Sprague, uncle to Stella Maris Settles Sprague. Stella had a memory of coming here with Isaiah when they buried her mother’s ashes, after Stella had gone to live with him. But she had no memory of coming here to put Isaiah to rest. Not a postcard memory, not a movie memory, not a set of mind slides. Nothing.

The grass was sparse and thin on his grave, planted in the spring. Lavender and rosemary grown all around the other gravestones. They heard a lawn mower, maybe at the other end of the graveyard. It was hard to tell. The graveyard was just before the town line. There was a row of high shrubs, lilacs, Stella guessed, blooms over, just bushy now, with a single black crow on the top. It looked at her and then glided down and landed on the ground at her feet. It leaned forward and cawed, flying off.

Stella dropped to her knees at Isaiah’s grave, a dull pain in her knees as tears trickled from the corners of her eyes. He wouldn’t be coming to get her. Dianne scuffled up behind her.

“Oh dear, Stella, dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. He was some old. Why, look how old he was! He had a good life. At least Isaiah had you. That’s the problem — you left behind. You should rest, Stella. You’re looking so sallow, all parched and dried up.”

Stella’s hands were red from the dust, bits of pine needles stuck to her palms, sweat mixing with the dust, making a paste in the fate lines, tidal rivers on her hands. Nurse Calvin was right. Isaiah had died. Stella just didn’t remember.

“Stellie, my girl, even if you didn’t know he was dead, you knew he wasn’t coming ’round. You missed him. You figured it out now. That’s different than before, Stella. That’s a good sign. That’s a good omen.”

Stella didn’t share Dianne’s strange optimism. Her mind was sore, if that was possible, a soreness spreading in ferny tendrils, a noxious, filmy seaweed in a tidal pool. Each undulation a sting. And her body, her aching body. Perhaps, Stella thought, memory had gotten lodged in her body. Bad memory. Rancid memory. Maybe this was why she felt so raw, her pain puffed and gaseous, a swamp of sorrow in this stiff body, her flesh and bone nothing more than a vessel carrying a spoiled life.

Dianne’s knees didn’t bend much even when she moved her legs quickly. She strode up and down between the rows of graves, jerking her legs out, to and fro, her ponytail bouncing on her spine, the silver locket trembling on her breasts.

“Time to go back, Stella. Stay safe.”

Stella saw another grave marker, newer, behind all the rest, off to the side by a flowering orange bush. It was shiny grey granite. Stella crawled towards it and ran her fingers over the etchings in the smooth stone, feeling the chiselled hard grooves that form the words written here in the Bigelow Bay Cemetery. She stroked the stone wave carved underneath the inscription:

Cynthia Aoife Seabury

1967 New York, New York

2010 New Smyrna Beach, Florida

Seaward

Stella remembered something Isaiah used to say, that you could feel a story by just touching a stone. If you closed your eyes the stone became a face and your fingertips could feel the past in the grooves and ridges, or in the smoothness, the sleekness of a pebble tossed by the sea. Stella rubbed her palms over the granite — it was speaking but not telling a story. It was warning Stella. She was in peril. She had to hide.

A Liar and a Thief.

Lures.

Then

It’s very warm and Stella finds it hard to believe summer is almost over. Or to even remember when it began. There are a few leaves already tinged in yellow and red. The flowers in the garden have begun their die down, Granny Scotia had explained, except for the asters and the goldenrod, the kind in the vase on the kitchen table, these flowers that span seasons, flowers that adapt to change. As Stella stands in the kitchen she wishes she was one of those sturdy flowers.

Stella quietly pads down the hall in her running shoes and into her father’s study, which reeks of smoke. There are empty beer bottles lined up on the windowsill, and the wastepaper basket is overflowing with crumpled balls of paper and crinkled potato chip bags and candy bar wrappers. The sun is brilliant outside but you would never know it in here where the venetian blinds are still closed, the walls sallow from the dim desk lamp her father has forgotten to turn off.

He’s just left, for a walk around town to clear his head. He was up for most of the night typing. Stella doesn’t think he’s even going to bed anymore. He is typing non-stop, always shooing Stella out of the house, telling her to go see Cynthia, to entertain herself, to enjoy the splendour of the countryside. He finds it annoying, this typing business, as he calls it. Stella’s mother always typed his papers because he can only peck with two fingers. There’s a history conference at the university in November and he’s doing a keynote, as he reminds Stella every day. The theme is medical architecture. It’s his grand entrance, he says — and he wants it to be an unforgettable entrance. The dawning of a new sun in his field of expertise. Those are the words he uses. Splendid. Dawning. He’s also been promising they’d go on a day trip as soon as he finishes. And this morning when Stella slips into his study, she sees that he has typed “the end” on the paper in the typewriter. The end!!! Not that he bothered to tell her.

She wishes her father could buy a house in