Mercy.
He gunned the engine up a steep grade that went on forever. As he crested the hill he saw—too late and too close—red taillights in front of him.
The world went white.
Spring
23
Long past the point when such a thing seemed inevitable, the thaw came.
In the last week of April, the final storm of the season gathered moisture over the Caribbean. Here we go again, said the NECN weatherman, looking tired. But this time the predictions were wrong. A high-pressure system pushed the frigid air northward—regifted, like an unwanted Christmas present, from New England to Canada, the land of moose and Tim Hortons and mild good manners. The final monster nor’easter of that godforsaken winter hit Greater Boston as driving rain.
A furious rain, fine as needles. The snow towers cringed and shrank; they softened into hillocks. The hillocks were pounded into oblivion, death by a thousand punctures. The accumulated grit of a wretched season washed into storm drains: road salt, motor oil, antifreeze, the tears of a hundred MBTA drivers. In Kenmore Square the roar was audible, a rushing underground river. Which direction it flowed, where or whether it emptied, no one cared to know.
On the North Shore, the South Shore, the storm surge was epic. Fish-smelling streets ran with salt water. A leveling wind whittled the dunes.
For three days and three nights, the rain kept coming. MBTA trains arrived on time. Parking spaces reappeared as if by magic. Boston returned to its regularly scheduled programming: fierce traffic and workaday surliness. The chip on the shoulder, F-bombs exploding. The crooked grimace, the harangue and complaint.
A hundred and ten inches of snowfall. After plowing 295,000 miles of city streets—twelve times the circumference of the earth—Boston road crews called it a wrap.
The thaw was good news for everyone. Good news for the new governor, sworn into office just before the first nor’easter; good news for mayors and city councilors and selectmen, who’d spent their entire snow removal budgets, and part of next year’s, before the second one hit. Good news for bus drivers, for all drivers. For harried parents who’d burned an entire year’s worth of vacation sitting home with restless kids, who had, in some half-forgotten past life, spent their days in school.
In late May, on the same weekend, the Globe and the Herald ran a photo of the very same snow pile, located at the back corner of a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Billerica—a pile so encrusted with soot and garbage, so many times melted and refrozen, that it had been rendered indestructible.
It’s probably still there.
AT THE WELLWAYS QUARTERLY BOARD MEETING IN CHICAGO, security measures were debated, a substantial investment in the Boston operation. At the clinic on Mercy Street, a new system was installed.
The new system was cumbersome. The exam rooms and surgical suite were reinforced with steel doors, each controlled by a thumbprint reader. The readers were highly sensitive. Hand lotion confused them. After Florine circulated a memo to this effect, the staff came to work unmoisturized.
Extra cameras were placed in the waiting room, the call center. An additional guard was hired to watch the monitors, while Luis manned the metal detector and looked inside backpacks and wanded the patients before waving them through.
Despite these measures, certain questions went unanswered. For months, Claudia and Mary monitored the Hall of Shame, but no new photos were posted. The guy in the Sox cap （my photographer friend, Luis called him） was not seen again. As far as anyone could tell, he had never returned to Mercy Street.
As far as anyone could tell.
In the meantime, other things happened. The city turned its attention to politics, the upcoming presidential campaign. In New York, a B-list TV star descended an escalator, mugging for paparazzi. The world continued to turn.
That summer, without warning, the Hall of Shame went dark.