The Shape of Mercy Read online

  Praise for

  The Shape of Mercy

  “As raindrops become mighty rivers, Susan Meissner’s words seem simple in the beginning, but one thought builds naturally upon another, phrases and sentences flow together with effortless fluidity, and before you know it, you are totally engrossed by the powerful undercurrents of her story. To read Ms. Meissner is to put yourself into the hands of that rarest kind of author: an artist working in the medium of words.”

  —ATHOL DICKSON, Christy Award-winning author

  of The Cure and Winter Haven

  “I loved The Shape of Mercy from beginning to end. Ms. Meissner’s prose sings, and her characters captured my interest from the start. As the story unfolded, those same characters captured my heart. I won’t soon forget Mercy, Lauren, or Abigail.”

  —ROBIN LEE HATCHER, award-winning author

  of Wagered Heart and When Love Blooms

  “The Shape of Mercy is vintage Susan Meissner: tender storytelling that keeps you hooked; living, breathing characters that capture your heart and madden you too; and a message of redemption that sticks with you. Meissner deftly weaves the stories of three women of vastly different generations, connecting them perfectly and crafting a winsome, interesting, powerful read.”

  —MARY E. DEMUTH, author of Watching the Tree Limbs

  and Daisy Chain

  “A compelling tale that will resonate long after you turn the last page. A haunting story, deftly woven, full of layers and textures that will quickly pull you out of the present and into the long forgotten past. Meissner recalls a tale that must not be forgotten, about the tragedies and senseless cruelties that happen when we abandon grace and turn our backs on mercy.”

  —SIRI MITCHELL, author of A Constant Heart

  “The Shape of Mercy is a truly lovely story, one to savor again and again. In a fantastic blend of old and new, this modern-day novel has the scope and feel of a historical. The characters and their journeys will touch your heart.”

  —MINDY STARNS CLARK, author of Whispers of the Bayou

  “A bit of mystery, fascinating history, and the biggest question of all: what would you do for love? I can’t stop thinking about The Shape of Mercy.”

  —ROXANNE HENKE, author of After Anne

  and Learning to Fly

  “With a deft hand, Meissner blends an intriguing storyline, artful writing, and memorable characters for a truly delicious read. This ones a keeper!”

  —DENISE HUNTER, author of The Convenient Groom

  OTHER BOOKS

  BY SUSAN MEISSNER

  Blue Heart Blessed

  Rachael Flynn Mysteries

  Widows and Orphans

  Sticks and Stones

  Days and Hours

  A Seahorse in the Thames

  In All Deep Places

  Remedy for Regret

  Window to the World

  Why the Sky Is Blue

  In memory of Connie Dorough,

  who loved without hesitation.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  Resources

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Fear is the enemy of love.

  —ST AUGUSTINE

  One

  I’ve heard the story countless times, how I grasped the delivering doctor’s scrubs as he guided me into the Durough family universe of opportunity and duty. My father likes to say I came out of my mother’s body insistent on being taken seriously, declaring to the doctor who held my slippery limbs that I was no helpless female unable to forge her way through the world of men.

  I’ve seen the video. My father had the camcorder rolling when my mother pushed me into waiting hands. Dad’s aim was discreet, thank goodness, because he’ll sometimes show that video when he tells the story. He’s even downloaded it onto his iPod. I’ve seen my open, squalling mouth, heard my mother’s throaty cries and a nearby nurse’s words: “It’s a girl.” My infant body is a glistening, angry shade of pink, and I am indeed grappling for the doctor’s clothes as if prepared to wrestle him to the floor. My father loves that.

  Whispered conversations over the years—which I wasn’t meant to hear—have suggested my father enjoys retelling this story because he needs to reassure himself it’s not the end of the world that God didn’t bless him with a son. Neither was I supposed to hear that my clutching at the doctor’s clothes could just as easily have been a cry of, “Help! I’m falling!” rather than, “Stand aside! I’ve arrived!”

  I’ve long wondered if the whispering people are right. About both.

  Imagine you are six, and you’re hiding under the dining room table, hidden by the damask cloth that covers it, and all you can see are the shiny, pointed toes of women in stilettos, clicking their way from room to room. Their skirts swish. Their porcelain coffee cups make delicate scraping sounds as they lift and lower them onto saucers. They’ve just heard Bryant Durough tell the story of how his daughter, Lauren, was born.

  His only daughter. His only child.

  Born grappling for power.

  One of them titters. “So like a man to see it that way.”

  “I heard Bryant and Julia have tried everything to have another child,” another says.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, that’s so sad. They’re such wonderful parents.”

  “In vitro, too?”

  “Yes. They tried in vitro three times. Three times it didn’t take.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Think they’ll adopt?”

  “Goodness, no.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I imagine it’s hard for Bryant to be unable to pass along his side of the Durough name.”

  “There have always been sons born to Duroughs. He’s the first not to have one.”

  “And to think his brother has four sons. Four!”

  “Bryant puts up a good front, but I bet it drives him nuts.”

  “Well, at least they have Lauren.”

  “Mmm. But you know, for a man like Bryant Durough, it’s not the same.”

  You hear this, and you haven’t a clue what in vitro means, and you don’t know who didn’t take what they should have taken and why that is so oh-dear sad.

  You do know who Bryant and Julia are.

&
nbsp; And you know what the words “have another child” mean.

  And the words “at least they have Lauren.”

  You crawl away unseen and ponder the idea of another child, another child, another child for hours.

  You wonder if having another child means someone wants to buy a new one. You wonder what happens with the old one.

  What do they do with the old one?

  Throughout the day you consider this, but you don’t say anything. You just let it tumble around in your six-year-old head. You stare at the picture in your bedroom of Jesus watching over a boy and a girl as they walk a dark forest path, and you wonder if the boy and girl are brother and sister and if Jesus loves them both the same.

  When your mother tucks you in later that night and she leans down to kiss you and the scent of sweet apples is all around her, you look into her face and see nothing there but loveliness. The worry begins to fall away into the darkness, and you reach out your hand to touch her tummy, the place where babies grow. It is flat and smooth. She looks down at your hand and then back up. Her eyes are wide.

  You pull your hand away.

  She stays a moment longer, caressing you on the forehead where a damp curl rests, and whispers, “Sweet dreams.”

  She moves away from the canopied bed with its matching French provincial armoire and dresser. A seashell night-light glows at her ankles as she stands at your half-open door and blows you one last kiss.

  It will be another six months before you hear again the story of how you were born.

  It will be years before you find out what in vitro means.

  And you will never be sure why you grabbed the doctor’s clothes.

  When I met Abigail Boyles, the woman who hired me to transcribe the diary of a girl who died too young, she said to me, “You’re an only child, aren’t you?”

  I asked her how she knew.

  She said, “I’m one too.”

  As if that were answer enough.

  I’m not the person my father thinks I am.

  I am not the determined daughter out to prove she is all the unborn son would have been.

  My recent acts of defiance—choosing a state school instead of Stanford and living in a dorm with a shared bathroom instead of a gated condo—are not evidence of my determined, lapel-grabbing nature. I’m not out to prove anything. I grew up believing I was supposed to be what all Duroughs have been: industrious, entrepreneurial, and shrewd—an amasser of wealth, not for the joy of spending it but for the prestige in having it. How could I be anything else?

  This is what Dad is, what his father was, his grandfather before him, and his great-grandfather before him. It is what my Uncle Loring and his sons are.

  But that’s not what I am.

  Being a woman isn’t what makes me different from all the Durough heirs before me. There are plenty of women in the family who gracefully embraced a life of privilege. My mother, for one, didn’t have to stretch out her arms very far; she married into a life she already knew. My grandmother—another Durough by marriage—was tutored in the ways of wealth by her mother-in-law, a woman whose own wealth significantly outmatched the Durough fortune. You don’t have to be a man to appreciate the muscle of affluence.

  You don’t have to be a man to inherit a destiny.

  The thing is, I don’t want my destiny handed to me. I want to choose it.

  This is the treasure the impoverished forget they have: the ability to choose a new road. They may struggle all their lives to stay on it, but at least they chose it for themselves.

  This is why I went looking for a job to earn a paycheck I didn’t need. Not because I wanted to prove I could earn my own money, but because no one expected me to do it. When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would’ve done had you chosen for yourself.

  Think of it this way. Suppose you have before you two choices: wealth or poverty. Suppose there is no middle ground. Which do you choose?

  I’m young, but I have spent my two decades as an only child in the cloistered huddle of affluent adults. I’ve watched them, learned their language, and observed them scrutinizing the world around them, noting the disparity in the masses. And I have found that the rich and the poor have a hugely significant characteristic in common. As do the accuser and the condemned, the loved and the unloved, the free and the bound. We each think we understand the other.

  We don’t.

  I see the truth of this in Abigail Boyles’s wasted life and in a young woman’s needless death.

  And I see it in me, every time I look in the mirror and see the rich girl who stares back.

  We understand what we want to understand. That’s how it is. How it’s always been.

  Two

  Sometimes I think I didn’t find Abigail Boyles at all; she found me. I have this crazy idea that if I asked her how long she’d been searching for a writer to breathe new life into the story of a young colonial woman wrongfully accused of witchcraft and sentenced to die, her answer would be, “All my life.”

  Abigail had been waiting for me, for someone to tell Mercy Hayworth’s story. It was a story meant to be told.

  I met Abigail after I returned to UC Santa Barbara from a long summer at my parents’ home in Pacific Palisades, fresh from the lap of luxury and itching to be like the other sophomores in my dorm. Abigail’s job posting, skewered to the English department bulletin board along with half a dozen other openings, was the only handwritten notice. The fontlike precision of her script caught my eye. The personal touch drew me.

  I had just decided that day to end my dependence on Dad’s monthly stipend for my living expenses, though it was something that had gnawed at me all through my freshman year. I had a vat of money I could dip my hand into any time I wanted. I’d always had it. My roommate Clarissa worked in the college bookstore and at a coffee shop, sneaking in study time whenever she could. I hardly ever saw her. I don’t know that she resented my unlimited debit card, as she never said anything about it. Maybe that’s what bugged me the most. That she never said anything.

  Abigail had written her notice on lavender stationery using a black, felt-tipped pen. The W in her Wanted—Literary Assistant was perfectly formed, just the right amount of arc and sweep. Abigail’s posting had a slightly faded patina, and it wasn’t dated—that should have been a clue. It was surrounded by job postings printed on ink jet printers and bearing informational tabs torn off here and there by hurried hands.

  Hers was the only notice that bore the unseen fingerprints of human touch: lavender paper meant for a personal note and words penned with a steady hand. There was no mention of Mercy’s diary, just these lines and a phone number: Wanted—Literary Assistant for transcription project. Ten hours a week for four months. Eleven dollars per hour. Prefer someone with knowledge of seventeenth-century literature.

  It was the word literature that made me write down Abigail’s phone number. The other postings were for research assistants, copyeditors, proofers, and writing mentors. That, and the humanity of the posting itself: the artistic W and the unspoken knowledge that this technologically bereft employer had a project different from everyone else’s.

  A classmate, Lira, walked by as I was writing down Abigail’s phone number on a Starbucks receipt I’d found in my backpack.

  “You looking for a job?”

  There was nothing unkind in the way she said it, but I felt my cheeks grow warm nonetheless. I’d had enough short conversations with Lira to know she was paying her own way through college. And she knew what most of my college acquaintances had been able to pick up, though I had made no conscious effort to convey it: my parents were wealthy.

  “Urn. Yeah.”

  Lira, a journalism major, leaned in to look at Abigail’s lavender paper. My guess is she wanted to see what kind of job appealed to someone who didn’t need one.

  “Hmm,” she said. “What do you suppose that’s about?” It was clear Lira had no interest at all in a posting like Abigail’s. If anythi
ng, she distrusted it.

  I feigned casual curiosity. “Could be interesting.” I shrugged and clicked my pen closed.

  “This one looks good.” Lira pointed to a mauve-and-taupe-colored flier for a copywriting internship at an ad agency. Half its phone tabs had been yanked off.

  I could tell Lira meant well. I know now that it was a joke among the students in the English department how long the handwritten ad had been posted, and that many English majors had in desperation called Abigail and either declined her strange job offer or failed to impress her.

  But I didn’t know this yet.

  “I’m going to give this one a try.” I nodded toward Abigail’s posting. “Can’t hurt.”

  Lira readjusted her book bag on her shoulder and smiled. “Well, I hope it works out.” Her eyes, kind but discerning, told me that if someone needed a job for income and résumé-building, they would’ve torn off one of the ad agency’s tabs. But if a rich girl just wanted a little diversion for a few hours a week and the money itself didn’t matter, well, here was the perfect match.

  We said good-bye and she walked away.

  I wondered all that afternoon if she was right: that I wasn’t looking for a job because I needed the satisfaction of earning my own money. I needed something else.

  Back in my dorm room, I called the number. A woman with a gentle Spanish accent answered the phone and told me she needed to ask me a few questions before setting up an interview with Miss Boyles. In the background I heard her fiddling with papers.

  “What is your major?” she asked.

  “English with a concentration in Literature and Cultures of Information.”

  I had to repeat that.

  “And your year in college?”

  I figured this was a sly way to guess my age. I answered anyway. “Sophomore.”

  “And where did you earn your high school diploma?”

  This, I learned later, was to see where I was from, where I grew up, where I had learned how unfair the world can be.

  “Palisades Point Academy.” I had to repeat that, too.