Mercy. David Kessler

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       10:39 PDT

      It had been most kind of Chuck to lay on a limo, Esther Olsen thought.

      The overpass drifted away behind them. But Esther was past the stage of admiring the view. On the way there it had been a distraction from her worries. She didn’t drive and illness had left her pretty nearly housebound. So any journey like this was an escape, both mental and physical. But the novelty soon wore off.

      The same was true of the limousine. The luxury of its leather upholstery and lacquered wooden paneling raised her pleasure level by a microscopic degree. But such petty pleasures were short-lived when ranged against the quantum of suffering that had borne down upon her in recent years. First a murderer’s unbridled malice had claimed her daughter. Then the ravages of disease had selected her at random and struck her down with a death sentence of her own.

      She had had her fair share of life and although it hadn’t always been a smooth ride, it was at least a fair crack of the whip. She could accept being singled out by the Grim Reaper. But it was the loss of her daughter that had been unforgivable: for that was the work of human agency. And she blamed not only Burrow but also her husband.

      Yet it was precisely from this anger that she wanted to escape. That was why she had approached Dusenbury and persuaded him to offer clemency to Burrow. As her own fate loomed up ahead, she needed closure more than revenge. And that was also why, as she closed her eyes, she now felt herself drifting back to a happier time.

      She couldn’t understand why, but of all the memories that flashed through her mind, the one that lodged itself and lingered at the forefront was the one-night stand.

      They were both students: he celebrating the end of his tentative first year at law school; she celebrating completion of her finals for her bachelor’s degree in literature. It was one of those drunken frat parties where everyone knows someone but no one knows everyone. Even now she didn’t remember how they had ended up in the sack together. Yes, the drinks had been flowing freely. Yes, he was handsome. Yes, they had both been sitting in the corner, trying to withdraw from the rowdy celebrating and wild carousing that had long since lost its appeal for both of them. She wasn’t cerebral like him, more the free-spirited romantic type. But she was the quiet type. That much they had in common.

      She was also engaged, to a decent if somewhat boring—not to say cold—man whose family was ‘well to do’ and who had ‘prospects’ according to her pushy mother. Was it an attempt to escape from an engagement that she never really wanted? Or a final celebration before she lost her freedom forever?

      Whatever the reason, the memory of that night of passion reminded her of a phrase from the end of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge about happiness being an occasional incident in a general drama of pain. It was a line that Dorothy had talked to her about for many hours, after reading the book in happier days when mother and daughter could still talk to one another. Esther had thought that Dorothy was too young to read such a book. But Dorothy had lapped it up with her unquenchable thirst for literature that she had inherited from her mother.

      But the line lingered with Esther now. Had there been any truly happy moments in her life after that? Her marriage to Edgar certainly hadn’t been happy. She wondered if the blame had been hers…if the marriage had been tainted by that one fleeting indiscretion before they had even solemnized their union.

      And yet she felt no guilt, not even when her thoughts rolled on through the years and settled on that image forever frozen in her mind—the image of her husband lying there with a bullet hole in his head.