Mercy Read online

  Graham loved it. He absolutely loved it. He turned to Jamie, then looked surreptitiously at the members of the jury, who kept glancing at his client's shirt and letting their eyes slide away. "Jamie," he said, "since a lot of people are wondering, could you tell us why your shirt is on inside out?"

  Jamie cleared his throat and flushed. "My uncle Angus told me it's an old Scottish custom: if you put on a piece of clothing inside out, you're not supposed to turn it around because your luck will turn with it. I wasn't taking any chances today."

  The juror with the Mickey Mouse tie laughed out loud. A couple of spectators tittered. Graham walked up to the witness stand. "Jamie, on behalf of the court, let me offer my condolences on the loss of your uncle."

  "Thank you," Jamie murmured.

  "Can you tell the court what your occupation is?"

  Jamie cleared his throat. As much as he'd practiced with Graham, he was still nervous. "I run my own computer company," he said. "A conceptual design firm. We create virtual worlds."

  "Virtual worlds? As in virtual reality? Sci-fi gloves and headsets and all that?"

  "Pretty much."

  Graham whistled. "Sounds awfully high-tech. Could you define virtual reality, Jamie?"

  Jamie shifted a little. He wondered, not for the first time, why Graham was bothering with questions like these. No one in the jury had a problem with Jamie's business contract with Nintendo. "Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief," he said. "It can take the form of a dream, a book, a movie. The reason people associate the term with computers is because computer technology exists to actually place someone in willing suspension."

  "What does that mean?"

  "That there are no distractions--the real world isn't visible anymore. The artificial world becomes all you can see, or hear, or feel." He paused, pulled by the implications and ironies of his own definition. Jamie MacDonald, who had been on the cutting edge of virtual reality theme parks and toys, who had designed the Mega-Stick for Sega, and who had reconstructed reality on a ten-inch monitor screen, had never been able to truly dismiss the real world. Not for his wife, and now, not for himself. Whatever he and Maggie had chosen to believe about their actions, it was not enough. Like a conceptually designed toy, once the HMD came off, once the glove and bodysuit were removed, once you shut off the computer, you were only back where you'd started.

  Jamie covered his face with his hands. Alarmed, Graham stepped forward, anxious to recapture his client's focus. "I'd like to talk a little about Maggie," Graham said, letting the light that came into Jamie's eyes stand for itself before he pressed on with a question. "How long were you married?"

  "Eleven years."

  "How did you meet her?"

  Jamie smiled. "She was cleaning out a man-made duck pond at the park near my house with a mop. I couldn't take my eyes off her, and I didn't really know what to say, so I picked up one of the scrub brushes lying on the grass and pitched in."

  "Why was she cleaning out a duck pond?"

  "She said nobody else did it, and she was thinking of the ducks. That was the kind of person she was."

  On a yellow pad in front of her, Audra Campbell scrawled, Saint Maggie.

  "Did you have a happy marriage?"

  "I think so. I think she thought so. I mean, we fought about things--how much money we had, whose turn it was to clean the bathroom--but I guess every couple does that." He glanced at Pauline Cioffi, sitting in the gallery with the other spectators. "She was my best friend, too. After I married Maggie, I didn't understand how I'd lasted twenty-five years without her."

  Graham leaned casually against the jury box. "What were your plans for the future?"

  Jamie's eyes clouded. "It became fairly clear about a year ago that we didn't have a lot of future left," he said. "But before Maggie got sick, we talked a lot about moving to a bigger house, maybe out of Cummington. Our goal was to have more than one bathroom. And we wanted kids. God, did we want them. We were trying; we had been trying for five years. But Maggie lost one baby, and she couldn't conceive, and then we found out that probably had something to do with the cancer too."

  Allie shifted uncomfortably. She remembered the stack of ovulation-predictor tests in the linen closet of Jamie's house. With a child in the picture, Jamie might never have agreed to Maggie's request. With a child, all sorts of outcomes might have been changed. Ducking her head a little, she peered at Cam. If she and Cam had had a baby, would he still have betrayed her?

  "Jamie, how did you find out about Maggie's illness?"

  For a moment, Jamie didn't speak. Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the witness chair and let words fall from his mouth. They were spoken slowly and without emotion, but his hands were clenched on the wooden railing so tightly that the fingers and knuckles were white. He was telling a story, and even juror number 11, who seemed to have been nodding off, was alert and listening. Jamie created before everyone's eyes a skating pond, a snapped bone, a doctor's solemn conference.

  Cam thought of Braebury, of the double skating oval, of Mia. He remembered the ice sculpture. By the time they left the pond, it had grown so warm outside that when he glanced at the melting phoenix before slinging his skates over his shoulder, it did not look at all the way he had remembered.

  Graham waited a moment after Jamie fell silent. "When Dr. Wharton told you Maggie's bone lesions were a sign of cancer, how did you feel?"

  Jamie shook his head. "I told him he was wrong. I mean, you've seen X-rays, right? How could they possibly pick out a lesion? I suppose it was the word 'cancer' that scared me to death. You hear it, and all of a sudden you aren't breathing anymore." He looked up at Graham. "It didn't much matter that the doctor was telling me it was in Maggie's body, and not mine. It would have hit me the same, either way."

  "Did you get a second opinion?"

  "Yes, from a doctor in Boston. He said that Maggie's bone lesions were the secondary site of a tumor too." Jamie looked down at his lap.

  "How did the news affect Maggie?"

  "She was afraid. She drew into a shell for a couple of days and didn't say anything, didn't really let me inside. But then she bounced back, and said she wanted to schedule an operation as quickly as possible. She said she wanted that thing out of her body."

  Graham nodded. "What did you decide to do then?"

  "She had a mastectomy. That terrified her too--you know, she was still so young, and she thought I would consider her deformed in some way. I kept telling her that it didn't matter, that she could have reconstructive surgery in a year, or whatever, but I think part of the reason that she kept talking about how she would look afterward was because it kept her from facing the fact that even getting rid of a breast wasn't going to take care of a cancer that had already spread."

  "Can you describe the treatments Maggie underwent?"

  Tenderly, as if they were layers of blankets he was peeling off to reveal his wife, Jamie began to outline the course of Maggie's cancer. He described her lying on the living room couch, doing reaching exercises to build up the muscles beneath her arm and in her chest wall that the mastectomy had severed. He listed the names of the drugs she'd had during chemotherapy as if they were old friends. He talked of driving Maggie home from these treatments, and pulling over to the curb so that she could push open the door and vomit. He described the waiting room of the radiology lab, with bald smiling children and sallow women who wrapped their heads with scarves. He described watching the laser of light, a red knife, spearing the center of Maggie's eye.

  "Was there ever a time when your wife was in remission?"

  "No," Jamie said. "It got to the point where the cancer became both of our jobs. We couldn't concentrate on anything else, and we didn't have room for anything else. We worked as a team to get rid of what was hurting her. We learned all the back roads to the hospital. The goal for each day was just to get through it."

  "When did Maggie know she was going to die?"

  Jamie glanced away from Gra