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

walked into the living room. She went out the front door onto the verandah, zipping up her long yellow raincoat. The wind was gusting and the bay was covered in whitecaps breaking on the steep rocky beach. It was evening now and the light was already dim from the clouds.

A crack of thunder boomed as Mal walked onto the beach. It was rocky and uneven and she had to place her feet carefully, as did the two men she saw up ahead, hopping from rock to rock, their hands held out to their sides for balance. There was another boom followed by a flash of lightning. Far down the beach, Mal could see Stella sitting on the rocks, her head bent down and then thrown back, Stella’s pearly hair whipping through the air. Another crash of thunder, and lightning ripping through the blackening sky. The tide was coming in now, and the rain began to smash down, bouncing off the rocks. A tremendous lip of water curled forward and Mal leapt from rock to rock to the upper beach but the frothy surf swelled around her, up to her waist, pulling her seaward, under water where the roar of the water over the rocks was dimmed, distant, a sound coming through time, coming from her mouth.

Postcards.

The Starlit Sea.

Now

A flock of gulls pass overhead and land on the rocks, cackling and crying, waking Stella. The smell of fresh bread wafts out from the screen door onto the front verandah at Periwinkle Cottage as Stella stirs in the chair. Her appreciation for this home built once as a year-round residence, and then a holiday cottage, and now a year-round home again is immense. Quiet footsteps stop at the screen door.

“Stella, we’ll be eating soon, when Seraphina gets here with Aurora. The dinner rolls are cooling. I just took them out of the oven.”

“Thank you, Grace. I dozed off.”

It’s Friday. Stella is tired from her early-morning shift at the bakery run by the Alzoubi family who have immigrated here and set up a shop in Bigelow Bay. They live in a house in Lupin Cove and four mornings a week they arrive at dawn to pick Stella up. Stella goes to bed early, rising and setting with the sun. She is a natural baker, with her reverence for routine and ritual.

Stella turns and sees Grace through the grey mesh of the door. She smiles at Stella, who laughs and looks back out over the bay where a thin veil of haze hovers over the surface — through it she sees where the skyline and waterline merge in all their shades of blue. Inside, Stella opens the fridge and gets a glass of lemonade. There is a postcard of Elizabeth Bishop’s home in Key West, where Grace went on a two-week poetry residency in February, stuck to the fridge with a magnet. Beside it is a postcard from Colorado sent from Eugene when he was on vacation in the early summer. And next to it, a postcard of Lombard Street in San Francisco. Mal promises to take Stella there if she comes out to California. She’s going to Vancouver to interview Charlotte Pacific for Under the Arbor, her now hugely popular podcast. Mal is also writing a book, a memoir.

Stella remembers when Mal woke up on the upper beach, near the cottage, shivering and cold as the rain came down. Stella is still not sure of just how she’d made her way back — memories of swimming, of singing, of many cold hands pushing her, pushing Mal. And then the rain had stopped — the storm clearing, the sound of ambulances. Later, the bodies of two men washing up on the shore of North Haven Island in Maine, found by a writer out for a walk with her dog in the early morning.

Grace is outside now, bringing in laundry from the clothesline off the back porch. She and Stella will fold it after supper, as they always do, taking the fresh piles to their rooms and the linen cupboards. Stella walks across the creaky wooden floor, past the red sofa, the gemstone fireplace, and sits on the verandah again. The seagulls are gone now. Whitecaps dot the sea as the tide makes its way in.

Stella hears the screen door at the back slam shut. Grace is inside now, back in the kitchen, turning on the old radio. She always listens to the six o’clock news. The familiar jingle-jangle of the opening music, the announcer’s voice. The lead story is about the ongoing trial of an international sex ring dating back well over a century, a story broken by following a lead from a California blogger named Malmuria Grant-Patel. Photographic evidence introduced last year was indisputable, implicating powerful business figures — generational groomers, generations of abuse. Grace turns off the radio.

They’ll eat inside at the kitchen table and then walk on the shore to watch the sunset. When the purple hour comes, Stella’s visitors will leave and she will go to bed. Seraphina will take her daughter home for the weekend. And Stella will look through her window and see the starry sky. She will see Polaris shining, and then, as she closes her eyes, Stella Maris will fall asleep in her room with framed photos of her family on the walls, her bookshelf with the quartz stone from Isaiah on the top, the window facing the bay open a crack and the ocean breeze slipping in — a soft motion on the bed, Kitten jumping up, curling into a ball, purring into sleep beside Stella as she slips into a dream. Dianne is on the beach with her banjo, bowing her head as Stella walks by barefoot, slowly stepping from rock to rock. Stella swims in the starlit sea, all around a chorus of voices on a still summer night.

Not Possible Without

Strange finishing a book in a pandemic, the illusion of certainty turned to dust, each day