The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson

Some students, some of the boys, called her the Dead Girl and would laugh. Other students said she had no memory of anything from when she went to sleep until she woke up in the hospital. Wandered from the funeral home like some risen mummy and went straight to the hospital. It was like an angel had guided her there, some of the pious girls said. But if it was an angel, Parnell said to himself, it was a fallen one, awakened now to see the darkness of the world all around him.

Finus Connubialis
    S EVEN YEARS FINUS and Avis Crossweatherly spent in a desultory dance with one another, a rutting seven years in which they scratched whenever possible at an itch neither seemed able to truly satisfy for the other, yet they tried. In the seventh year Avis conceived and they married quickly in a ceremony at his parents’ beach house on the Alabama coast. They bought a small home in north Mercury and set about what would later seem to Finus the time-honored practice of slow connubial dissolution.
    At a barbeque Earl Urquhart put on for several couples at his lake house one year, Finus and Avis lounged about on the patio of the little concrete block cabin sipping beer while the children ran in and out of the water, romping on the bank until they got hot again and then running back and jumping in. Only Finus and Avis’s little boy, Eric, did not join them. They’d forgotten his swimsuit, and he stood on the lawn looking awkward in the sailor boy outfit Avis had purchased for him the day before at Marx Rothenberg and which she’d forbade him to get dirty or wet. Finus watched as Eric stood in the sun there—a seven-year-old boy slightly pigeon-toed in his meekness, little hands by his sides, his pale straight hair almost glowing in the sunlight, looking more like a fragile gathering of light in the shape of a child than a real, a corporeal, child—as the other children shrieked and flopped onto the grass beside him and ran crying chasing one another back to the water, where they splashed around and screamed in delight. Every now and then Finus would see him glance back at the adults up on the patio in the shade of the loblolly pines.
    In that moment Finus felt all his own failings as a father well up inside him and he lost his appetite for even the cold can of Falstaff in his hand, which he’d so relished just a couple of seconds before. He judged that his paternal failings emerged from his seemingly terminal distraction, his tendency to daydream his way through the days and to resent insistent intrusions along those wayward paths. He was moody, melancholy, and took a kind of joy in solitude, a well of this inside him that must be filled at regular intervals. And if it was not, if the demands upon his attention caused this well not to fill each day or week or month or season, he felt edgy and irritable—and, ironically though with perfect logic, somewhat empty inside.
    He stole occasional looks at Birdie, who seemed entirely self-possessed and content sitting in her green metal patio chair and sipping a glass of lemonade, bouncing one leg over the other and talking to Cicero Sparrow’s wife, Cornelia, who took slugs of her third or fourth Falstaff and wore a ridiculously wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, to hide the wreckage of her alcoholic, insomniac eyes. Avis stood beside Earl, wearing her cream-colored summer dress and her new canvas summer shoes from Earl’s store, her short light brown hair swept back behind her ears, her so-often-suspicious or angry green eyes alight with good humor and eager attention. She was still a handsome woman. Finus had at some point in their past let himself let go, stopped comparing her to Birdie in appearance and attitude, and resolved to love Avis for who and what she was, to open his heart to her own clenched one, to open his longing to her long and harder-edged beauty, for he knew it was something to appreciate. Avis tossed her head back at some joke Earl