The Shape of Mercy (2 page)

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.

S
ometimes 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 anything, 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.

“Can you wait a moment?” the woman asked. She put me on hold before I could answer but was back within a minute.

“Miss Boyles would like to know if you can come for an interview on Thursday. Five o’clock?”

“Uh. Well, yes.”

“Okay. You have a pen? I give you the address.”

I didn’t recognize the street. It sounded like the address of a residence rather than an office. Abigail’s home.

“Just ring the bell at the gate. I will let you in.”

A gated home. Like my parents’.

“Okay?”

“Wait,” I said. “Can I ask what I would be transcribing?”

The woman hesitated. I heard her cover the phone with her hand. She was consulting someone. “A diary. It’s three hundred years old. It belonged to an ancestor of Miss Boyles who lived during the Salem witch trials.”

The connection to Mercy Hayworth was immediate, and I hadn’t even heard her name yet. My interest instantly soared. A diary. Literature of the most intimate kind, amazingly personal and revealing. Penned during the Salem witch trials and kept for three centuries. Somehow I knew it was the diary of a woman, not a man. A woman with secrets. This resonated within me more than anything else: a diary was where secrets were recorded.

I wanted this job. I had secrets of my own.

“Okay?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” I said.
Yes, yes, yes.

“Okay.” She hung up.

I stared at the address in my hand for a moment, then went to my computer and googled it. I studied the map and realized Abigail lived in an older, stately neighborhood where the moneyed families of early Santa Barbara built their mansions.

I wasn’t sure how Dad would react to my taking on a part-time job that had nothing to do with Durough enterprises, but I knew he would approve of this: my prospective employer lived the kind of life he was familiar with and trusted.

I waited until after I knew my parents had eaten dinner to call my dad and tell him he no longer needed to deposit the spending allowance in my checking account. I practiced saying it a couple times before I called so I would sound calm and confident, like it was the most natural thing in the world to earn my own money.

He took the news better than he had taken my other decisions that made no sense to him, like choosing Santa Barbara instead of Stanford and majoring in something other than economics. Dad was slightly amused, a bit perturbed, but subtly proud of me for doing—albeit without grace—what all Duroughs of the past had done: made things happen instead of let things happen.

I wanted to earn my own money. I was making a business decision. He liked it.

My father does not control by domination; he controls by persuasion. There is a huge difference. I have never felt ignorant or inferior around him, only the pull to conform. It’s a very strong pull. My father possesses a keen ability to make people do what he wants them to do. Couple that with his good looks, calm demeanor, and disarming confidence, and it’s no wonder I tremble at the thought of disagreeing with
him. I’d won the battle of where to get my undergraduate degree, but I doubted he would concede anything else.

When I told him about the job, I could almost hear him thinking,
This will be good for Lauren. She’ll come to see success lies on just one road. The Durough road.

He wanted to know the details.

“So it’s hourly?”

“Yes.”

“How much?” he asked, even though we both knew it didn’t matter.

“Eleven,” I said as confidently as I could. I knew his gardener’s assistant made more plucking snails out of the Durough flower beds.

“And you’ll be doing what, exactly?”