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

they approach Seabury. Stella looks at his other hand gripping the steering wheel. She had felt safer in the airplane, before they’d landed in Halifax and rented the car for the long drive to his childhood village.

“Take it in! Almost home.” He says home as if he wants to imprint it upon her. It would be impossible not to notice the incandescence as they drive to the tiny seaside village on this mid-August evening, the blushing sky radiant at the horizon, streaks of colour shooting up into a pale gold, a fantastical shimmering on the ocean, and, high above, a navy sky, darkening as Stella looks north where the deep blue fades into black and stars glimmer overhead.

On the plane from Columbus, Ohio, Stella had tried to read the book left on her mother’s bedside table, the book she had been reading before the car accident. Her mother’s place had been marked with a pressed-flower bookmark. The Violent Bear It Away was upsetting. Stella’s head and eyes hurt, she thought from the quiet violence, but then she remembered the doctor’s orders NOT to read. She kept reading, rubbing her eyes. Then her father finally remembered Stella wasn’t supposed to read and told her to put the book down. They were an unlikely pair, and her father had never expected to be on his own with her. Forever. He couldn’t even pretend he knew what to do.

Stella notices it’s not nearly as warm as back home in Athens, Ohio, where her father, Professor William Sprague, as the plaque on his office door reads, has his cross appointment in the History and Sociology Departments at Athens University. They have lived there for seven years. Had lived, Stella reminds herself. They aren’t going back. Their belongings, including all Stella’s books, will follow in the moving van when the house is packed up by professionals. Her father didn’t have the stomach for it. They both brought suitcases, mostly with clothes. It had been a quick decision, made when Frank, her father’s childhood friend, had called. Frank suggested they start fresh in Seabury. Not that he lived there year-round. He had resided in New York for most of his adult life, where his business was headquartered, but every summer Frank brought his wife and daughter back to Seabury, where Frank’s mother still lived. Frank had invited them before but Stella’s mother had refused to go.

After the Horrible Accident, Frank had invited them again, this time suggesting it be a permanent move. He would use his contacts and get Stella’s father a job at the Lord Bishop University in Bigelow Bay. Frank was on the board of governors. But the true tantalizing lure, Stella understood, was the suggestion that Frank might be able to fund her father’s project, an intentional community where the mentally ill could live, inspired by what her father always described as the much-misunderstood Kirkbride Plan, the nineteenth-century idea of moral treatment developed by Dr. Kirkbride — his idea being that architecture and landscape could heal and restore sanity. Her father had been working with a group back in Ohio for the last few years. Frank had told her father they could discuss the project, and possible funding for it. Stella’s father was hopeful. Frank’s family had always been very generous financially, first with Stella’s grandfather when he almost lost his insurance business to bankruptcy, and then with her father, paying for him to go to boarding school and university. He’s told Stella more than once that the Seaburys have never hesitated to help out the Spragues.

Stella was shocked when her father announced the move, the new beginning — she was still numb from the car crash, disoriented from her concussion, the weeks she had been in a coma, the two months in the hospital. And coming home to the quiet and dirty Sunnyside Drive house without her mother, Catriona, was strangest of all. Stella waited for the delicious smell of muffins and cookies baking in the oven.

Instead, the kitchen smelled sour. In the backyard Stella looked at the empty clothesline. Her father used the dryer. She listened for her mother’s footsteps. Instead, she and her father walked along the river every day. They lunched at cafés. He heated up frozen pizza and opened cans of peas and beans. Stella would wait to hear her mother read to her, to call to her from the kitchen about a poem she was reading. Stella’s mother had always wanted to go to university, she confided to her daughter, to study and write poetry. But she was from the wrong time.

“I knew I wouldn’t need a map, Little Bear.” Stella’s father smiles and glances over at her.

“That’s great, Dad.”

He pushes his straggly hair back from his face and scratches the top of his head, the bald spot. “Hair today and gone tomorrow.”

She manages a groan. This Stella does not want to humour her father. The previous Stella, she recalls, would laugh at things, tease her dad, who would then chuckle and tilt his head to the side, which her mother had once described, during one of their quiet arguments, as his contrived bashfulness.

Since Stella was little, her father had always told her he’d never return to Nova Scotia, but in the aftermath of the accident, he was lost. His childhood home is an anchor in his mind, a place where he has a history, for better or for worse. All Stella knows is that her grandmother died when her father was sixteen and home from boarding school. And only his father, Stella’s grandfather, had been alive, but they had fallen out years ago, when her father was eighteen. He had gone from boarding school to university and never looked back.

Before Ohio, they lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father did his post-doctorate at Harvard, where he had done his Ph.D. Stella’s mother always described his work as an arcane specialty in the history of hospitals. Stella doesn’t remember much of Cambridge or Boston. The library her