A Matter of Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page B

subject once, and he was risking the implicit rejection were she to shut him down again. She hesitated, an honest answer on one side of the balance scale in her mind, a joke on the other. She looked across at him, weighing her response. The darkness erased the squint and sun lines around his eyes and the sanded tan of his skin. He had a light growth of beard on his square jaw, and in this light, he looked young, like a memory of himself years ago.
    “You must know about it. It was in the papers. The accident.”
    He swung his head no. “What accident? Was this while I was in prison?”
    Caroline realized he was reminding her of his history. “It was such a big story, I mean, I assumed you’d know.”
    “What happened?” Again, the forthright question. She’d never seen before how asking a question left you unguarded, sometimes as much as giving an answer.
    But still, she couldn’t say it headlong, give it out straight. “There was an accident,” she said. “A fatal accident. Actually, a lot of lives were lost. Including but not especially mine. And that’s why I got divorced, too. Or, more accurately, I should say was divorced.” Her little laugh was almost a giggle, the scalloped edge of drunkenness.
    “How so?”
    Pleased that she’d been clever, leading him to a branch off the main path he’d been following, she tipped her head back onto the headrest and exhaled. “I was the divorced, not the divorcee. I mean, the divorcee wasn’t actually the divorcer. She was the divorced.”
    “Huh?”
    Giggles, like bubbles through the wand of her mouth. “A divorce was enacted upon me, I was not the enactor.”
    He wasn’t as far gone as she. Maybe he’d had a late lunch. He didn’t laugh. “You mean you didn’t want the divorce? That’s rough. Did he have someone else?”
    “Not then, but now. And a baby.”
    “Why’d he want a divorce?”
    Was there no end to these naked questions? They weren’t so bothersome now, though. She felt almost nothing when she answered, “He wanted children. I couldn’t bear—get it, bear? —to have them. A plus B equals C. Oh, sorry. I forgot about you and math.” She was short-changing him with her flippancy, and she suddenly felt cheap, a too-bright portrait of herself. “The couldn’t was a wouldn’t turned to stone. There’s just too much bad that can go down. I couldn’t give it a chance to happen again,” she said quietly.
    It was more than she’d said to anyone about it almost ever. Rid gave an empathetic yeah , that he got it, how things could turn out that way. Caroline shook her head, and he started to say something else when his stomach made a feral growl. He slapped a hand against his belly and laughed.
    “You want something to eat?” she said, glad to divert him.
    Rid peered through the windshield, squinting as if he could discern something, but the darkness was exceptional, elemental and mysterious. To their left, Caroline could make out stutters of white surf lines that broke like arguments, the incoming tide hard and its own answer.
    “Drive between lightning strikes, huh? Where do you want to go? Couple places in Eastham got generators, might be open. Road might be closed, though. Prob’ly trees down.” Rid leaned forward and grasped the key, dangling from the ignition as it had been when they got in.
    “My house,” she said, reaching to stop him. She wasn’t so far gone that she’d think about letting that truck move, not with someone who’d been drinking at the wheel. She’d put her body in front of it first. And not entirely because of her history, reason enough, but she wanted his company, a small bonfire by which to warm herself. He had a good laugh, chest-deep and unreserved.
    “That wind is dangerous. Debris flyin’. And we’ll get wet,” he said. It was several hundred yards across open beach just to the dirt lane in front of Caroline’s path, another hundred feet to her house.
    “A big problem, that one, since I’m so