Page 25 of This is Why We Lied

Strangulation was a giant red flag. At least that was what Mercy had read online. When a man put his hands around a woman’s neck, that woman was six times more likely to suffer serious violence or die by homicide.

The first time he’d strangled her was the first time Mercy had asked him for a divorce. Asked him, not told him, like she needed his permission. Dave had exploded. Squeezed her neck so hard she’d felt the cartilage move. She’d passed out cold in their trailer, woken up covered in her own piss.

The second time was when she’d told him she’d found a little apartment for her and Jon in town. Mercy couldn’t remember what happened next, other than that she’d really thought she was going to die. Time had been lost. She didn’t know where she was. How she’d gotten there. Then she’d realized she was in the tiny apartment. Jon was sobbing in the next room. Mercy had rushed to his crib. He was red-faced, covered in snot. His diaper was full. He was terrified.

Sometimes, Mercy could still feel his little arms desperately clinging to her. His tiny body shaking as he wailed. Mercy had soothed him, held him all night, made everything okay. Jon’s helplessness had motivated her to finally break away from Dave. She had filed for divorce the next morning. Left the apartment and moved back into the lodge. She hadn’t done it for herself. She hadn’t snapped because of Dave’s constant humiliations or the fear of broken bones or even death, but because she finally understood that if she died, Jon would have no one.

Mercy had to break the pattern for real this time. She would block the sale. She would do whatever it took to keep Dave from wearing down her son. Papa would die eventually. Bitty hopefully didn’t have much longer. Mercy would not doom Jon to a lifetime of drowning in quicksand.

As if on cue, Mercy heard Jon’s loping walk around the Loop. His arms were out, hands floating along the tops of bushes like an airplane’s wings. She watched him in silence. He used to walk the same way when he was little. Mercy could remember how excited he used to get seeing her on the path. He would run into her arms and she would lift him into the air, and now she was lucky if he acknowledged her existence.

He dropped his arms to his sides when she stepped onto the path. He said, “I went down to the shed to help Fish with the canoes, but he told me he’s got it. Cottage ten is checked in.”

Mercy’s brain immediately went to another task she could assign him, but she stopped herself. “What’re they like?”

“The woman’s nice,” Jon said. “The guy’s kind of scary.”

“Maybe don’t flirt with his wife.”

Jon flashed a sheepish smile. “She had a lot of questions about the property.”

“You answered them all?”

“Yep.” Jon crossed his arms. “I told her to look for Bitty at supper if she wanted to know more.”

Mercy felt herself nodding. There were a lot of things she had changed from Papa’s time, but no son of hers was going to sound ignorant about the land they were standing on.

He asked, “Anything else?”

Mercy thought about Dave again. He had a pattern after their fights. He’d go to the bar, drink up his anger. It was tomorrow she had to worry about. There was no way he wouldn’t find Jon and tell him about the investors. No doubt Mercy would be the villain of his story.

She said, “Let’s go down to the lookout bench. I want you to sit down with me for a minute.”

“Don’t you got work to do?”

“We both do,” she told him, but she walked down the trail toward the lookout bench anyway. Jon followed from a distance. Mercy touched her fingers to her neck. She hoped that he couldn’t see any marks. She hated the look Jon gave her when Dave snapped. Part recrimination, part pity. Any concern had left long ago. She guessed it was like watching someone run head-first into a wall, get up, then run head-first into the wall again.

He wasn’t wrong.

“Okay.” Mercy sat on the bench. She patted the space beside her. “Let’s do this.”

Jon slumped down at the opposite end, his hands deep in the pockets of his shorts. He’d turned sixteen last month, and almost overnight, puberty had finally caught up with him. The sudden hit of hormones acted like a pendulum. One minute he was full of swagger and flirting with a guest’s wife, the next minute he looked like a lost little boy. He reminded Mercy so much of Dave that she was momentarily at a loss for words.

Then the surly teenager reared his head. “Why are you looking at me all weird?”

Mercy opened her mouth, then closed it. She wanted more time. There was an uneasy peace between them right now. Instead of ruining it by lecturing Jon about vaping or not cleaning his room or all the usual stuff she nagged him about, she looked out at the view. The parade of greens, the surface of the Shallows gently rippling from the wind. In the fall, you could sit in this same spot and watch the leaves turn, all the color draining down from the peaks. She had to save this place for Jon. It wasn’t just his future that would be secured here. It was his life.

She said, “I forget sometimes how pretty it all is.”

Jon didn’t offer an opinion. They both knew he would be perfectly happy living in a windowless box in town. He had Dave’s habit of blaming other people for his sense of isolation. Both of them could be in a room full of people and still feel alone. Being honest, Mercy often felt the same way.

She told Jon, “Aunt Delilah is at the house.”

He looked at her, but he didn’t say anything.

“I want you to remember, no matter what happened when you were a baby, Delilah loves you. That’s why she went to court. She wanted to keep you for herself.”

Jon stared into the distance. Mercy had never spoken a bad word about Delilah. The only good lesson she had learned from Dave was that the person yapping all the time and being an asshole rarely got sympathy. Which was why Dave only showed his monster side to Mercy.