New to Mercy? Start here with the first chapter
Previous Chapter: Responsibility
The house was still there. Maybe Danny and Isla’s home had broken up, but the vessel that once tried to hold it was intact.
The three of them had made their way back to Maine. Lacey settled in her back seat nest again, wan and quiet. Dad tucked the box with the rest of the Funny Bones beside her on the floor and kissed her forehead. “Promise to come see me soon, daughter,” he said. She smiled slightly and nodded.
Danny dropped them off at the studio. Dave draped Lacey in all of the blankets while she hugged a pillow. He shouldered their bags and said good-bye and Danny watched them walk slowly to the old mill entrance, Dave’s arm around Lacey’s shoulders.
Then he’d had no choice but to drive home. He tried to think of an alternative, but was tired, too tired to decide on something else. Was Isla there? He believed she wasn’t; the latest intel from Kim was that Isla was staying with her.
How did the house know it was lonely? The key in the lock, the action of the bolt, the creak of the hinges, his step in the hall, all echoed back to him. The kitchen was unchanged. Had Isla been there at all? It was cold; it was rainy outside, so that you couldn’t guess the time by looking out the window. In the one kitchen chair that was still standing, he sat looking at the hole in the wall. He saw the blood from his knuckles on the Sheetrock where he had punched it.
Danny was not usually a reflective man. There was one thing he knew: he could not sit here forever. So, what could he do?
He could stand up the chairs.
One chair’s leg was broken. He could bring it downstairs to the shop and mend it. There was so much that he could not mend, but this he could do.
While the glue dried on the chair, he went back to the kitchen. What was the next step? He could sweep up the mess.
And then what? He could patch up the wall. He went to the hardware store for supplies. He was soothed by the cutting, the trimming, the smoothing of the compound, and he would be further soothed by sanding it down, by painting it over. He was soothed by the building, the mending, the making whole. He was soothed by finding something that needed fixing that he knew how to fix.
When he went upstairs and Isla’s pillow was missing, and her toothbrush and her robe, he was rattled. But not completely, because he would take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, and see if it led him out of this chasm.
____________________________________________________________________________
For once, Isla dragged her feet at the end of the work day. She didn’t want to see a happy family around the supper table at Kim’s. Kim had told her there would be guests, and she didn’t want to see Lacey’s obscure pain and Dave’s worry. She wanted to do whatever was most mind-numbing.
She felt naked, now that she knew who she was, now that she saw how far from righteous all her indignation had been, how far from justice, how detrimental to healing. Surely Doreen, Bill, and Andrea had seen the guilt all over her at work, and if not them, then Kim who saw everything and had even talked to Dave. In a moment of panic, she wondered if they had always recognized who she really was, not a hero but a show-off, not a person of skill and finesse but a demanding, controlling perfectionist. Had she been naked this whole time, and everyone knew except her?
Isla was as cool as stainless steel on the outside, but her heart was pounding as she got into her car at the end of the day. She drove to Kim’s and took a deep breath. To her relief, Kim was alone in the kitchen, and when Isla walked into the room, she set down the potato she was peeling, put Isla’s backpack on a chair, hugged her, and indicated another chair. Wordlessly, she put a cup of coffee in front of her with just the right amount of hazelnut creamer, then finally sat down across from her, potato in hand again. Isla rested her head on her arms. She hadn’t meant to fall apart, hadn’t known that she would. When she looked up with a puffy, red face, she said, “How did it come to this? How did we get here?” She wanted to tell Kim everything, including who she really was, even if meant losing her. She knew this wouldn’t happen—Kim wasn’t that way. But why? Why did a good person like Kim love a person like her?
“It’s always the little things, for all of us. Piles and piles of them, good or bad. But,” Kim patted her arm. “Let’s worry about how we leave here.”
“Will you drive the getaway car?”
“Sure. That’s what friends are for.”
Isla sipped her coffee quietly while Kim peeled potatoes for a while, trying to calm down, unable to think of small talk. Finally, she said, “Where are the kids?”
“Phil took them out.”
“It seems like a lot of potatoes? Who’s coming?”
Kim noticed the twelfth potato in her hand in surprise and then shook her head, “Just Lacey and Dave. I hope you’re hungry.”
Just then the doorknob jangled and, with a push, Lacey and Dave came in. She looked rough, Isla thought, and her heavy heart felt heavier. Lacey, too, was a good person, one who saw only the flaws in herself. She’d had every reason to be cynical yet she’d always seen Isla as a friend, when really Isla was mostly just a critic. Kim was wise and insightful and Lacey wasn’t . . . but dammit, did she know how to love unconditionally. It would probably be her undoing.
Lacey smiled and addressed Kim, “Does she know yet?”
“Oh no,” Isla groaned, though she wasn’t sure why.
“Oh no, it’s good!” Lacey said. “Can we tell her?”
“Soon.” Dave smiled.
Isla looked at Lacey warily and rose to set the table. “So just four?” Kim nodded.
The mashed potatoes were good, buttery, and salty. Kim served some scrambled hamburger alongside of them. No one was very talkative, although Lacey was sneaking looks at Dave, who always smiled in return. It was good to see them happy. Confusing, but good.
After a long sigh, Isla said, “I’ve left a message at Mum and Dad’s. I’m going to stay over there for now.”
“You don’t want to go home?” Lacey seemed a little crestfallen.
“I guess I kinda feel like that is home.”
“Oh. So not to your house?”
“That house . . . that house has a lot of sadness associated with it.”
Glances went all around the table at that. Lacey still looked disappointed, but said softly, “I understand,” and Isla was certain that she did.
“Do you need anything there before you go to your parents’?” Dave asked, furtively glancing at Lacey.
“There are some things it would be nice to have, but I’ll live.”
“You’ll have to go back sometime. The first time will be hardest. Why not just get it over with? Lacey and I will go over with you so you’re not alone,” Dave urged.
“Well . . . I suppose it would make sense. I’ll drive,” Isla said, rising and grabbing her keys and bags. “Thanks for letting me stay here for a while.” She squeezed Kim’s shoulders and wondered to herself how long she would be on the run, unable to stay in one place with people who might see her for what she really was.
“Of course!” Kim said. “Anytime.”
It was a quiet drive to the house she and Danny had shared. Isla sat in the driveway with her headlights on for a few moments, staring at the peeling white paint. Then she flicked the lights off, straightened her shoulders and got out, Dave and Lacey following.
The porch door creaked behind them; they wiped their feet on a small worn braided rug and walked past the pile of boxes that Isla and Danny had never gotten around to unpacking.
When they went into the kitchen, Isla surveyed it with her hands on her hips. It was perfectly clean, as good as or better than before the fight, wall patched and everything.
“Do you like it?” Lacey said softly when they’d barely entered the room. Isla hadn’t seen her so happy for a long time.
“You did this,” she said accusingly at Dave. “Is that why you wanted me to come over here?”
“Danny did most of it. He asked me to tell you that you could come home and not worry about seeing him and told me where the hide-a-key was to make sure it was ready.”
Isla shrugged. “I don’t know what to do with that information.”
Dave shrugged back. “Save it in case you need it someday. There may be a time for mercy.” And he looked at her again in a way that pierced her. He saw her naked soul, she was sure of it, and he had seen who harmed who that night.
“Ok, I don’t know what you guys are talking about but do you like it? I swept up and did this.” Lacey broke the spell, pointing to a vase of daffodils on the kitchen table.
For once, Isla didn’t respond to Lacey’s girlish enthusiasm with an eyeroll. “Thank you, Lacey. Really. It means a lot to me.” Lacey squeezed Dave’s hand, smiling up into his eyes. He kissed her on the nose. Isla had to look away.
Isla busied herself to the task at hand, grabbing things she needed for work, clothes, a few things from the bathroom. While she was packing, her phone started vibrating.
“You want me to get it? It’s your mom.” Dave picked the phone up from the counter.
“Just put it on speaker.”
“You sure?”
Isla nodded, sticking her head out of the bathroom, “Hey, ma?”
“Hi, Isla! I got your message. Of course, you can stay here for a few days. Is Danny going somewhere? We’re going to Aunt Dot’s for supper Saturday night. Maybe you can beat her at Scrabble again!”
Isla bit her lip. Mum’s unsuspecting voice sounded like the voice of a different era, a voice out of last week or last year, before things fell apart, before Danny lost his shop, before Isla married him. Mum’s good cheer and loving hospitality hurt Isla, shredded bits of herself that she hadn’t known were still whole.
“Ah, ok, Mum . . . yeah, Danny’s uh . . . away.” She couldn’t go on. Dave’s eyes urged her not to lie, though she did her best to avoid looking at him. “I’ll tell you about it when I get there.”
“Everything ok?”
Isla winced. “I’m ok,” Isla evasively reassured her. “Is it too late to come over tonight? I’m grabbing a few things now.”
“No, it’s fine. Dad’s asleep on the couch with the ballgame on. I’m about to switch it to Miss Marple. How long will you be? You know what, it doesn’t matter. You have a key. Just let yourself in.”
“Thanks, Mum. I’ll see you soon.”
“Ok, see you!”
Dave put the phone down and waited for Isla to speak. Finally, she did.
“They’re always so good to me. Always so happy to see me. I don’t understand it. And then they frustrate me and I get mad or I lecture them, and the next time I see them . . . they’re still so happy to see me. I don’t understand it, Dave. I don’t deserve it.”
“You don’t deserve something so good or . . .?” He couldn’t tell from the look on her face.
“I don’t deserve someone to treat me so well, but I wish I was the nice one at least some of the time.”
Dave smiled. “They’ve had more time to practice.”
“They were never like me.”
“How do you know?”
“I just can’t imagine.”
“We all have things we need to work on. Your parents, too. And we all have something good to offer the world.”
“He’s always like this,” Lacey said, rolling her eyes over his shoulder, smiling big. “Isn’t he crazy?”
“Crazy about you,” he said, turning to kiss her cheek.
Isla winced slightly. She no longer thought their love foolish, but it felt more unbelievable than ever. “I guess I’m ready to go.”
Isla sat with her hands on the steering wheel for a few minutes when they got in the car.
Finally, Dave interrupted. “Not ready to go yet?”
“I’m ready to leave here,” Isla said, “I’m not sure I’m ready to go to my parents’ yet. Maybe I’ll take a drive.”
“Want company?”
Isla’s face said no but for some reason her mouth said, “Ok.”
“I promised the kids a bedtime story,” Lacey said.
“Ok, I’ll drop you off.” Lacey thanked her.
Isla started to pull out of Kim’s driveway as Lacey climbed the steps to the kitchen door. Dave put up a hand. “Wait,” he whispered, “wait until she goes in.” His eyes were sad. After the door had closed, Isla finished pulling out and headed towards the beach.
“Can I ask you something personal?” Dave said after a long silence. The darkness of the car and Isla’s preoccupation with driving made him bold.
After a pause, Isla said, heart pounding, “I guess. Do I get to ask something personal later?”
“Um, sure. Ask first if you want.”
“Nah, I haven’t thought of a question yet.” She tried to sound casual and jokey. Dave humored her.
“Haha, ok. Well, uh . . . so I was just wondering . . . why did you marry Danny?”
Dave thought she wasn’t going to answer and was startled when she finally did. “Do people know the answer to things like that?”
“Fair point. I’m not sure people necessarily ever think it through, but when they do, I think they find an answer a lot of times.”
“It wasn’t for his money, that’s for sure.” Dave didn’t take the bait. He waited. “Freud would say it was purely sexual, I guess. That’s all anything ever is.”
“Is that what you say?” The vast dark ocean extended endlessly behind Dave’s silhouette in the passenger side window.
Habit made Isla want to say something cruel about Danny’s appearance or performance, an insult that would give her power, but she pushed the urge aside. Those jokes weren’t right or true; somehow, she saw that now. So she said simply, “No.” After another thoughtful pause, she said, “He’s not particularly funny or smart.”
“He’s run a successful business for years.”
“Ok . . . I’m sorry. He’s smart. I used to think he was kind. He’s a hard worker. Still, that’s true of a lot of guys I didn’t marry . . . Sometimes I’m afraid I just felt bad for him, honestly. What a stupid reason to get married. The only thing I’ve ever needed from him was for him to need me. I suppose he sensed that eventually. But even that . . . I don’t know if that’s it. Maybe I should have known the answer to this before I got married. There’s something about him that grabs me by the heart.” She shook her head.
“Is there still?”
She moved restlessly. “Yeah . . . still. Of course. He wanted to fix things right away at the house—I know that was for me, and I’m not making excuses for some of what he said to me, but . . .” Her glance caught Dave’s sad, knowing expression, but she was a coward. “Well, it wasn’t all his fault.” She wanted to tell him everything and she wanted to know what he knew.
Dave declined to save her from the silence, so finally she said, “Why did you marry Lacey?”
“I love her,” he said right away. “She’s funny and brave and thoughtful and beautiful. Loyal. I like how she sees the world and how she helps me to see it. I like how she doesn’t overcomplicate things. She’s honest. In fact, that’s one of the biggest things the drugs steal from her. She’s one of the most honest people I know, and the drugs make her untrue to her own nature.”
“Show off,” Isla said.
“It’s not that different from your answer.”
“Then why are you happy and we’re not?” Dave looked away. “Ok, I know there is always the threat of sadness, but why do you love each other and we . . . don’t?”
“I’m not sure if that’s true, or if I can answer that for you.”
The road home was dark and empty. “Where am I taking you?” Isla finally asked.
“We’re moving back into the apartment at Kim’s. I can’t . . . I can’t leave Lacey alone. She’s asked me not to. It’s helpful to have Kim and Phil around, too. But also . . . Danny’s at the studio.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“He can go back to the house. I’m not there now.”
“Well, I . . . I’ll let him know. I’m not sure what he wants to do, to be honest. He’s still figuring stuff out.”
It was weird to have someone else know more about what Danny was doing than she did. But Isla just said, “Yeah. Me too.”
Isla let herself in at her parents’ house. She paused in the kitchen out of habit to ponder the stack of mail on the table. St. Jude’s asking for a donation. The AARP wanting a membership. Reader’s Digest had sent a large print edition. She was killing time. She looked up and saw her parents’ two gray heads over the top of the couch, close together. Then the Miss Marple theme song started and Mum was stirring.
“Nice nap?” Isla joked as she took a seat on the loveseat as the credits rolled and Mum searched for the remote. Her casual manner was part habit and part cover-up for her hammering heart.
“Oh, haha, sorry you missed it. So did we! I guess you can watch it with us again tomorrow!”
Isla smiled, but she felt like a little girl in trouble, like she was confessing a sin for which penance could never be paid, not in her parents’ eyes, anyway. Her marriage had failed.
Mum found the remote and clicked off the TV. “So what’s Danny off to this weekend? Car show?”
Isla took a deep breath. “Ah, no . . . nope. To tell you the truth, I think we’re splitting up.” Mum elbowed Dad to wake him up.
“Wha . . . what?!” Mum looked to Isla.
“I think Danny and I are splitting up. We’ve had problems for a long time and,” she put her palms out and said, “I just don’t think we’re going to make it.” Her parents exchanged significant but perhaps not surprised glances and waited for her to go on. “I don’t actually know if we will ever live together again or not.” This, she thought, was a bold-faced lie; she knew perfectly well that they would never be together again. But she couldn’t bear to tell them too much bad news at once.
It was bad enough. They now knew that one of their great hopes for her, a happy and fulfilling home life, was gone. She had her job, she thought—hadn’t it always been enough? Hadn’t it been enough living here with them? Why had she ever felt the need to change that?
She thought they’d look stricken, but they didn’t. They seemed placid, and she groaned within herself because she knew what it meant—they were holding out hope. Isla disliked this because she was sure that it meant having this conversation over and over until they accepted it as fact, and that would be torture, opening the wound again and again.
She wanted to be a little girl and cry, “I’m sorry for failing at marriage.” Despite everything she’d realized about her role in their problems, Isla suddenly wanted to say that it was Danny’s fault, mostly. She wanted to tell them how he’d been mean to her, hear her fragile Daddy make the impossible boast that he’d beat the villain senseless. But it wasn’t the truth, was it? And she could never tell them the truth. Dave, maybe. Kim, maybe. Her parents, never. She couldn’t bear to have them know who she really was, couldn’t bear to think they might not think well of her, despite a lifetime of receiving their forgiveness.
“I just need to get some rest,” she said. “I love you. Thanks for letting me stay.” She headed for her old room. Mum had filled it up with racks of drying laundry. Isla listened to her parents murmuring downstairs as she folded it. She knew it was probably about her, might even be praying, might have included tears, but the sound was comforting, as was the sound of the stairs creaking as they came up to bed, the water in the pipes as they brushed their teeth.
Isla lay in her bed and thought about Danny and about Dave’s question. She remembered the first time she had visited his garage, old but well-cared for, and how she had immediately become his champion at City Hall. He was the perfect mascot for her cause, proof that working-class people could be happy, could have fulfilling lives and families. Proof that people without degrees could be smart and competent. She had never wanted to stop people from getting ahead, she’d just wanted an admission first that shinier or easier lives weren’t innately superior ones. And she’d built the perfect model home to prove it when she’d married him.
But here was Danny now—the poster child for all that the city council members claimed was true about people like him, broke, a failure, unable to understand how to work the system. Here was she—tearing down her life with her own hands, proof that you couldn’t rise above your station.
Still, she sighed—all of that was true, but it wasn’t really why she had married Danny, just to make him her ultimate cause to champion.
She thought about him at Kim’s dinner party, and how he’d made her uncomfortable by being frank and lacking social niceties, even as part of her admired his frankness. But that wasn’t why she married him.
She thought about meeting him at the pub, and noticing the tension that always seemed to run through him. He’d seemed on edge to her, like he was afraid all the time of misstepping, of going out of a character he’d deliberately put on. Perhaps his vulnerability made her think he was precious, something to protect and treasure. His eyes had been so grateful when she and Dave sat with him. Had it only been his neediness that had drawn her?
Yet, it all fell short of the mark. It wasn’t any of these things, or any of the other things people usually said. Trying to dissect and label and quantify love seemed stupid and useless all of a sudden.
She texted Dave at 1:21 a.m. <<I think I just decided to love him. That’s why I married him.>>
<<Will you ever decide that again?>> he responded immediately.
<<You know it’s more complicated than that.>>
It was as close to admitting the unspeakable as she had been able to do so far.
Copyright 2025 Jennie Robertson