The Edge of Mercy (Paperback)

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Swansea, Massachusetts

I slipped the two rings off my finger to cradle them in my palm. Warm and bright beneath sunlight, no one would guess they taunted echoes of a failed marriage.

I stretched out my left hand and glared at my naked fingers. I couldn’t imagine never wearing the rings again, couldn’t imagine who I was without Matt to define me.

Sudden anger made me tremble. I’d been faithful. I’d held up my end of the wedding vows. This was not how things were supposed to be. Fumbling with the rings, I gripped them tight with my right hand, prepared to shove them back on my ring finger with force, but they slipped from my quaking fingers.

Time slowed as I watched my wedding rings tumble downward, bouncing a couple times off the side of the large rock I stood upon. I fell to my knees and a pathetic whimper escaped my mouth as I heard the first clink against the stone.

My blood ran like ice. I caught a glimpse of platinum, then nothing. I’d have to search on my knees for hours if I expected to find them.

I remembered what Dad taught me to do when I dropped something.

Don’t lunge after it. Stop, think. Let your eyes follow what you’ve lost. You’ll see where it’s gone. Then, Sarah, you’ll be able to get it back.

Strange how when I told my parents Matt was leaving me, Dad hadn’t encouraged me to stop and think. He’d told me to fight for my husband. He wanted to know if I planned to live on alimony for the rest of my life.

I sighed heavily and stood to take in the scene I’d come for in the first place. The scent of pine and warm earth wafted through the air. Bright sunshine pooled around me, and the massive boulder stood solid beneath my feet. Like an ancient warrior, it offered majestic security, and I gleaned comfort from it. This rock wouldn’t betray me. It wouldn’t crumble beneath me as my marriage had.

Maybe that’s why I came here whenever problems encroached upon my life, pressing in, squeezing tight. Eleven years ago, my neighbor, Barb, introduced me to these hiking paths, and to Abram’s Rock. She told me stories of this boulder—legends, really—and though I wrote them off as fictional, I found myself returning here in times of need over the past eleven years, bonding with the sensation that another had indeed suffered in this place too.

Much older now, Barb hadn’t been able to make the trip here in years. But that didn’t change my attachment to this place.

I looked down to where jagged rocks and hard earth met, swaying before me until I grew dizzy—though likely more from my circumstances than the incredible height of the rock.

I hadn’t seen it coming. My husband of seventeen years wanted a separation and I couldn’t fathom why.

At least that’s what I told myself. Sure, Matt and I had been distant of late, but I chalked it up to busyness—a mere ebb in the many up-and-down waves of any normal marriage.

Yet even Kyle had noticed, commenting just last night on the fact that his father hadn’t been home for dinner more than twice in the last month. Not one to bare his feelings, I could tell our sixteen-year-old son was bothered by his absence. I wondered how such a separation would affect him.

As I started down the gentle slope of the opposite side of the boulder, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. Its upbeat tone rattled the peaceful quiet of the forest.

My heart ricocheted inside my chest at the thought of hearing Matt’s voice on the other end of the line. Maybe he’d realized his mistake. Maybe—

I fumbled to see the screen and gulped down the bubble lodged in my throat. My sister, Essie.

“Hey.”

“I thought you’d be at the hospital. Where are you?”

I groaned. Calling out of my shift two days in a row wouldn’t put me on the director’s good list, that was for sure.

I picked my way toward the base of the rock, to where I thought the rings had fallen. “I’m in the woods, trying to find the lost symbols of my marriage.”

“I take it you won’t be done in another hour or so, then?”

“Ha. Ha.” My sarcasm fell flat when I told my sister what I’d done with my wedding rings.

“Your marriage can’t be hopeless, Sarah.”

I leaned over a hollow area between two rocks. Dead leaves cradled the middle. No rings.

“What’s Matt’s deal anyway? Did you two talk anymore last night?” Essie’s assertive voice knocked against my eardrum.

I knew what she was thinking. Another woman. I’d already entertained the thought. It was one of the many reasons I found myself seeking the solitude of the woods.

“No, and he left before I got up this morning.” I’d made sure of it.

“Well, maybe you two can work through this. Lots of couples go through slumps.”

Was “taking a break,” as Matt put it, a slump? I grabbed hold of a tree branch and pulled myself up the first part of the steep slope, on top of another rock that created a small cave. “Working through a marriage requires two people. Matt doesn’t want to work. He wants out.”

“Come out with me and the girls tonight. Get your mind off things.”

I scrambled for an excuse. “Kyle has a track meet.”

“Come after.”

“I planned on taking Kyle out. You know, talk things over.”

Essie snorted. “The person you need to talk to is Matt.”

“I—I’m not ready.” This could be worse than a simple “break.” There could be another woman. Matt could insist on divorce. My chest began to quake. “I have to go.”

“Call if you change your mind.”

I hung up the phone, shoved it in the pocket of my jeans, and resumed searching for my wedding rings with newfound exuberance. For what must have been an hour I pushed aside leaves, scraped crevices with my fingernails, stepped back to search for a glint of platinum beneath the sun’s rays. Nothing. I sat at the base of the rock and let the tears come.

In the aftermath of my quaking sobs, a numbing quiet overtook my soul.

This place seemed ageless, as though the channels of time sometimes overflowed their banks. It reminded me that many other women had walked these very trails, and I felt certain some of them must have known a pain similar to mine.

* * *

I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Matthew James Rodrigues. Not according to my parents, anyway.

The first time Matt showed up on my doorstep, Dad took one look at his rumpled hair, his Elvis tattoo, and his idling jalopy and told him he could take a long hike off a short pier if he thought he’d get anywhere near his daughter.

Back then, Matt had been nothing more than a teenager with a lawnmower, a shovel, and a good tan. But he had something else—business smarts. He knew how to work people.

He knew how to work me.

He used to visit me at the high school lunch table while all my friends tittered not-so-conspicuously. I still didn’t know why he approached me that first time to introduce himself. I wasn’t anything to look at. Matt smelled like fresh wood shavings from the vocational shop. His rugged dark looks and persistence caught me off guard.

Before long, I was begging Daddy to change his mind about Matt. He didn’t budge.

“Do you think I worked hard all these years to have my oldest daughter marry some trailer trash? And a Catholic at that?”

He said Catholic as if the devil himself had spawned the religion. As if half the boys I went to school with weren’t Catholic.

“I don’t want to marry him, Daddy. I just want to get to know him.”

“No. End of conversation.” He went away mumbling about how he should have never taken the pastorate position in New England all those years ago.

I snuck off to meet Matt that night. It was the first time I’d disobeyed my parents.

Matt had a Volkswagen with a tape deck. That first night we drove to Newport, listening to Elvis tapes. Matt wasn’t like other boys I knew, listening to Pearl Jam or Billy Joel. He liked what he liked, whether it was popular or not.

He liked me.

I’d never known such attention before and I fell. Hard. Every night I snuck out my bedroom window to the end of the long drive where Matt’s car waited. We went everywhere the water was, but that summer our favorite place was Newport. We shared our dreams beneath a vast sky. Matt told me about his fatherless childhood, how he avoided his trailer park home—and his mother—whenever he could. He hated being poor and vowed that someday he’d be successful.

My dreams seemed less important beside his. More than anything, I wanted him to succeed. And I wanted to be by his side when he did.

I lost my virginity in a fold of earth alongside the flat rocks of Newport one warm August night. I still remember the crash of the waves, the spray of the surf, Matt’s arms around me, his heart beating heavy against mine.

The night I told my parents I was pregnant was the worst night of my seventeen years.

Mom cried. Daddy got so red in the face I thought he’d split open and burst like one of the overripe tomatoes in Mom’s garden. He said God would curse me for my sin and if I didn’t repent I was on the road to hell. Then he left the house—Mom, in tears, calling out after him.

I felt sure my father went to find Matt and kill him. Instead, he dragged him back to our house, and inside for the first time. I could scarcely look at him from my petrified spot on the bottom of the red-carpet steps.

“You will marry my daughter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you will provide for her if it takes every ounce of your strength. Is that understood?”

I felt Matt’s gaze on me and I looked at him, telling him with my eyes I was sorry. I knew he wished it wasn’t this way.

“Yes, sir.”

And that was as close to a proposal as I’d ever gotten.

Matt quit school to mow lawns and landscape yards full time. Three months later we’d both turned eighteen. I graduated and Matt saved up enough money to rent us a room at the Holiday Inn on the night of our wedding. It was a simple affair, with only my parents and Essie and Lorna, Matt’s mother, at the ceremony.

When I lay with him that night, Kyle already grew strong within my womb. I nestled my head in the crook of Matt’s shoulder, felt a tear on his cheek.

“Are you sorry you married me, Matthew Rodrigues?” I asked, scared to death of the answer.

He grabbed my wrists and pulled me on top of him. Shook me slightly. “I never want to hear you say that again, you understand me Sarah Rodrigues? I love you. I will always love you.” He crushed me to his chest. “You saved me, Sarah. You saved me.”

I never asked what exactly it was I saved him from. Now I wonder—if I’d saved him so good back then, why was he so eager to get rid of me now?