Blue Mercy: A Novel. by Orna Ross Read Free Book Online Page B

father was a hoarder. He hadn't smoked for years before he died, but he'd kept all his old pipes in a shoe box. Of footwear, old and new, I counted seventy-eight pairs: wellington boots, walking boots, best shoes and second-best and long, long past their best. Wardrobes and cupboards stuffed with clothes and knick-knacks.   Ornaments and pictures, brass plates and candlesticks, holy water fonts and ancient bedside lamps.
     
    As the shelves and drawers emptied and the bags and boxes filled, I saw how objects separated from their owners become pure junk.   The blue woollen hat he wore when fishing was repellent: greasy at the edges but mostly because it was now redundant.  
     
    It took us over two hours, to clear out everywhere except my bedroom and the parlor. "They've already been sorted," I lied. I knew she wouldn't want to be in those two rooms that Zach and I had made our own.
     
    She took a carriage clock as a momento, along with the photograph of my parents on the cliff. I brought out the last of the bags and, when I came back into the kitchen, I was shocked to find her beside the stove, crying. "Darling?" I crossed the room, put my arms around her shoulders, and she let me, just about, her spine stiff as a tree trunk. And not for long. She shrugged herself away, dabbed each eye dry with the back of her wrist. "Oh, Mom..."
     
    "It's okay, Star. I understand. You have to go."  
     
    I knew what I had to do now was keep talking, fill the space between us with meaningless sound, hums and burbles and fuzzy static that would get us through. "Thanks for helping with the clearing. I needed to get as much of Granddad out of here as I could."
     
    I imagined myself stripping further back, taking up the carpets and polishing up the wooden floors. I fed myself that vision in my head and I liked it. Painting every wall white. Turning this place into a new blank canvas. That was what I would do, when she was gone.
     
    "It's too cold to go down to the gate," I said, knowing that if I did, I'd break . "I'll wave you away from upstairs."
     
    I left her then, so she could get on with it, and went up to the spare bedroom. This was my favorite room in the house, a corner room with a window on three sides. I went to the one that overlooked the drive. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the day was already faded and a soft rain was falling. I could barely make her out below, head bent to the rain, one hand holding her coat together, backpack in her heartbreaking, chubby grip. She threw it onto the back seat and waved up to me once, unseeing. Then she folded herself in behind the steering wheel.
     
    The car lights came on, front and back, and the red vehicle slipped down the laneway. Moran's dog, who hung around every part of the neighborhood, appeared out of somewhere to go running after the back wheels – Bark! Bark! Bark! – until the car sped up and he relinquished it.
     
    I watched on. It turned the corner, out onto the road and I followed its lights as they blurred and faded into the endless Irish rain.
     

     

     
    Beginnings are for beginners. When you get to my age, you know there's no one moment when it "all" began. Why not start the story when Zach came to Ireland to rescue me from my father, and I allowed it, though I knew Star was still sensitive about him? Or on the day I returned to Doolough, after all my years in Santa Paola, to nurse that ungrateful man?
     
    Why not the day I met Zach?  
     
    No. As I harken back now over the long and sorry tale, the moment that seems most significant is the one that saw me sitting on the floor with my father's war-time journal, feeling like that act would save me, would knit past and present together into an answer.
     
    Misguided? Oh yes. Now, so many years on, I can see that I was not quite sane in those days after my father died. For twenty years, I'd carried him around in my head. In coming back to Ireland to nurse him, the picture I held -- a broad, red-faced