“You were right, Mercy; you seem to know better than your mother about Lee.”
“We’re twins,” little Mercy said. “We share everything. Even our brain.”
Her mother laughed and called out to her sister. “Lee, come over here, sweetie. I need to look inside your and your sister’s heads.”
Lee appeared in the picture in Mercy’s mind. Tough, little hands almost always balled in fists, itching for a fight with anyone. But when Lee saw Mercy and Mercy smiled, the hands uncurled, and Lee smiled back and laughed in the way she always did that made Mercy happier still.
“In our heads?” said Lee. She bent down so her mother could pretend to open up her head and peer inside.
“Now let me do your sister.”
Giggling, Mercy lowered her head, too. Their mother dutifully performed an examination and proclaimed that the girls did indeed share a brain.
“What does it look like, Momma?” said Lee.
“One side has a pretty dress and one side has dirty dungarees,” she replied and then commenced to tickle Lee until she screamed, before Mercy joined in and started tickling her mother. Then both girls went after their mom with the tickle bug, and they all ended up on the ground rolling around and shrieking with laughter.
Mercy turned from the window as the tears streamed down her face.
This memory had just come back to her fully after reading the letter. Bits and pieces had been with her for many years, but not all of it, not the most important parts.
All those years, I could have been with her and my sister, having all that fun, all that . . . love. And, instead, I was with the Atkinses.
But as she picked up the letter and read through it again, her mother’s words—where she had blamed herself for all that had gone bad—made Mercy feel a sudden burst of anger. Was her mother just trying to get sympathy and money from Jack Lineberry? Mercy thought there was an “oh woe is me” tone to the words.
But perhaps she was being unfair. Being that young and working against the mob had to have taken great courage. And then to have her family attacked, one daughter taken, the other left for dead? Then the man she loved nearly killed, too?
Mercy never liked other people judging her, although they too often did based on her ratty clothes or her old car, or the way she looked, her limited education, the clumsy indelicacy of her manner. To be fair, she had no right to judge others, including her mother.
Yet it was now obvious to Mercy that her mother didn’t want to be found. She didn’t want to be part of her daughters’ lives. That was her choice, Mercy supposed, though she believed it to be a selfish one. Even after reading the letter, Mercy couldn’t understand why her sister would want to find the woman. There was clearly nothing there. The woman with the piled-up hair and the tickle-bug playfulness was long gone. She had made her choice, and that did not include being there for her daughters. They all needed to move on.
She looked up when the door opened and Pine appeared there. Pine sat on the bed next to Mercy and glanced at the letter in her hand.
“Well?”
Mercy shrugged. “It’s a letter. Full of regrets, sort of like a sob story. I don’t know what you get out of it. She doesn’t want to be found, that’s clear enough. Okay, fine. Move on. There’s nothing there for you, Lee.”
Pine’s face paled and her features turned troubled. “And what she wrote made you feel . . . nothing?”
“Why would it?”
“Then why are your eyes red and your cheeks wet?”
Mercy dropped the letter on the bed, stood, and looked away. “I don’t need this shit, Lee, okay? I came here to deal with Desiree. I said my piece to the witch. I’m off the hook for a murder I didn’t do. Now I just want to go back to my simple little life.”