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

music station. There was no way they could have biked, let alone walked around these switchbacks. She and Aurora screeched as if they were on stage at an opera house. Stella put her hands over her ears as they kept belting it out. They both seem to know Latin. O Fortuna. Velut luna, statu variabilis, semper crescis, aut decrescis — Seraphina singing the Latin and her daughter in English. O Fortune, like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing, ever waning.

Stella observed how this was the first time Seraphina and her daughter seemed happy together.

Seraphina snapped the radio off. “That’s all about fate and gods. Enough of that.”

“That was awesome, Mom. Super-awesome.” Aurora smiled at her mother, who lit two cigarettes and handed one to Dianne. Stella’s stomach lurched from the smell. They drove by an old boarded-up house surrounded by outhouses.

“My father collected those old shithouses. That’s where I grew up,” Seraphina said, glancing at Stella but not at the house, and then crossing herself as they passed by, slowing down. Stella watched Seraphina’s lips move but no more words came out. Then Seraphina pressed on the gas and her childhood was left behind them.

Stella watched the teenaged girl with her cellphone and its shiny screen. Aurora was tapping away on it, missing the view. “I lost the signal. For fuck’s sake. This stupid place. Why did I ever get in the truck with you, Mom? Fuck. What kind of fucking place doesn’t have fucking-cell-fucking-phone reception?”

Seraphina cackled and sucked back a mouthful of spit, swallowing it as she spoke her garbled words: “Well, the North-Fucking-Mountain. That’s the kind of place. The land we speed across now, in my holy pickup. This place resists change. It adapts slowly, and there are some things it never relinquishes. Amen.” Seraphina was ascending to her pulpit.

How many years was it since Stella had been up here? She couldn’t remember the years but she recalled beach barbeques and seagulls and looking out over the bay at sunrise and sunset, walking on the beach, Isaiah building a fire. She knew the fireplace, a room upstairs that looked out over the bay. The mantel where Isaiah put a scented candle in the evening. The Bay of Fundy crashing on the shore at night. The cry of the gulls in the purple hour. The salt water loon in the morning.

“Are you from around here?” A finger poked Stella in the rib. She pulled away from Aurora. The bay was ahead, frosted with heaving whitecaps. The tide was coming in, a cool breeze with it. Stella’s heart quickened, thudding. She put her hand on it. Stella refused to look at this young girl. Stella wasn’t in charge of her. She was hardly in charge of herself, had never been in charge of herself. This quiet truth seemed to perch on the top of Stella’s head, miniature but heavy, weighing down on her skull, on her neck, drilling into her core.

“Stella doesn’t talk, Aurora,” Seraphina said.

“Oh.” The girl’s voice quivered. Stella felt sorry for this teenager stuck in the truck with this strange sisterhood of mentally ill old women. Aurora seemed to think Stella was the sanest of the lot. But it wasn’t her job to provide this Aurora girl with comfort. That was Seraphina’s responsibility. Stella’s singular responsibility was getting to Periwinkle Cottage, disappearing into the grey beach and the fog.

Dianne looked at her cigarette. Stella wondered if she found it more comfortable to talk to it than crazy Seraphina and her daughter. “It’s God’s truth. Stella don’t say a word. Never does. Some people says they remember her talking, but I’ve known her for years and she’s not said a word in all that time.”

Seraphina pushed in a CD. Startling piano music, then a woman’s voice singing about being a mermaid in jeans. Seraphina turned it up loud, singing along again, Aurora singing with her as they flew over the road towards the silver-blue bay, the mighty Bay of Fundy.

Stella looked straight ahead at the sea. The highest tides in the world. A body of water that was sometimes soothing and calm, sometimes deadly and raging. Always wild and untamed. Waters that can smash you against the cliffs and suck you far away. There was a slight ache behind her eyes, a pain she hadn’t had in years. It seemed a rigid starfish was lodged at the centre of her head, wiggling its arms, poking at her eyes, now jabbing the little seahorses in the side of her head. Her plan was to go to the cottage. No one would think to look there. No one would even think they had the ability to get there. They would look in the woods. In the river. In ditches. But not at the shore. Stella could get them to the cottage, and she and Dianne would be safe. She wouldn’t need to remember, if they could just get out of the Valley, away from that place closed in by mountain and shadow. Stella could see the island far offshore, the island her people had lived on.

“I’m hungry,” Aurora complained. “We didn’t even eat dinner, Mom. You never eat when you’re crazy. But I need to eat. So do you. I’m literally starving. How come I have to be the grown-up here?”

By the time they drove down the hill into Lupin Cove, Seraphina and Aurora were arguing in earnest. Aurora talked about her father, about how it wasn’t fair she never knew him, or even who he was, why did Seraphina have a baby when she was forty anyway, she had no money, no family to help, that it was all her fault. It seemed to Stella that Aurora, stuck in this truck with a bunch of crazy old ladies, was thinking maybe the foster home was the better option. Or a group home, which was where they would put her next. Stella understood having Seraphina for a mother wasn’t the same as having a regular mother. Aurora was crying.