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

back at Periwinkle, listening to the surf pounding on the rocky beach, with the light falling in the window, listening to Dianne snore on the sofa across the room. I would settle for the graveyard, listening to the crows call, or the museum bench by the rebuilt Maud Lewis house with Charlotte Pacific telling me that sometimes the blank pages say the most. But I’m down here now, away from the ocean, in the Valley. Dianne was my last key to the past. My tears can’t keep sleep from approaching and I fall into its warm, tangled fingers.

When I wake up there is a woman by my bed, a woman who looks familiar, but I can’t place her. She has frizzy black hair and she wears a lovely green dress and running shoes.

“Stella. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. My name’s Mal Grant-Patel. We met once before, on the lawn at the Jericho Centre?”

There are no visiting hours after lunch, when it’s quiet time. Mal must have snuck in. I point at the Visitor Hours sign taped to the wall.

“Can you talk now?”

I nod.

She waits.

I say nothing. Mal looks confused. It’s understandable. I am too. Silence stands up and extends her arms. She’s so beautiful as she dances in the room while I look at this visitor. Yes, I know her. The woman in the yellow dress. Except it’s a stylish green dress now. And a black cashmere sweater. Does it matter what colour her dress is? It’s early autumn — I can tell from the maple outside the window.

Silence is waving, blurry, disappearing.

I clear my throat.

“Can you talk to me, please, Stella?” Mal speaks quickly, quietly. “Cynthia’s mother talked to me. Sarah Windsor. The painter. You knew her as Sally Seabury. I went to Florida. She said that Cynthia had given you the evidence against Sodality, against Cineris, when she came in 2005. Do you remember? Do you know where it is? Do you even know what it is?”

Just then a nurse breezes into the room and looks at Mal. “No visitors — Stella needs to sleep.” She points to the visitor sign.

The woman in the green dress looks at me and I say nothing. Not because I can’t speak but because there is nothing to say. Nurse Calvin is wrong. A sea of change has come, and being able to speak for myself has done nothing to prevent it. There is no mercy for me, or if there is, it is a mercy that comes too late. This eerily insightful young woman is trying to help but there’s nothing I can do to assist her. There is only danger.

I’ve been in the hospital for two weeks, Eugene said yesterday. This I remember. They hope I will be discharged soon. Eugene says he thinks the group home will grow on me. He was worried if I kept sobbing that they might send me to the psychiatric wing — or worse, they’ll send me to the NS, where my father was all those years ago. I don’t know how my father died, or when. And no one has told me. It’s been many years. Will I remember?

I read the get-well-soon cards on the window ledge beside the box Nurse Calvin brought. There is a card from Eugene, and a card from everyone on the Willow Unit. One from Charlotte Pacific in the mail from Vancouver. She writes that she was terribly worried, that she looks forward to coming out next summer and drawing with me. There is a card from some other social workers, from Karen, our yoga teacher, a card from Grace. And a card from Seraphina in an envelope that has been duct-taped shut, top secret, from her paranoid mind. I must destroy it after opening it, she has written. She’s put her name and her phone number on the card with a vintage image of a blue wave.

Eugene’s been with me for many years and has never given up on me. But this just reminds me of how many people I have let down, Eugene now one of them. I can’t tell him about Frank Seabury or Tommy Jessome, about Seabury. If I tell him even he’ll think I’m crazy and then I will get sent away. I will be medicated right into outer space.

After supper a man stands outside my room in the hallway. He doesn’t seem to know I’m there. He’s looking at the other side of the hall. It takes me a moment to remember him. It’s David Jessome from Mountain Top. He’s not wearing casual clothes though. He’s dressed in a dark suit, looking official. Every pore in my body releases drops of sweat. Part of me has wanted to believe I’m crazy, or that Seraphina’s crazy has infected me — that Dianne was just a senile old woman and that the woman in the green dress with all the questions about “evidence” is also deluded. And Cynthia, when she came to visit, was delusional from her cancer, that maybe it was in her brain, that what had happened in 1980 died in 1980, in Mercy Lake that early September night.

A young nurse approaches him. “Excuse me, can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m looking for Stella Sprague. I’m a friend of her father’s. From years ago. I can’t remember her room number.”

“Well, you’re standing right by it.” She points at my open door and David Jessome turns his head and looks into my eyes. He means me harm — there is no doubt, even as he smiles. This young nurse can’t see his face but she must not appreciate his tone. “Well, sir, visiting hours are ending soon and the doctor has limited Stella’s visitors. We’re very strict about this. Stella’s very tired, and while people think visits are helpful, they really do wear the patient right out, so you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

I roll over on my side and pretend I’m asleep. All is truly lost now. It’s just me, the