John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

‘Because the law says it’s wrong. But sometimes things that are against the law aren’t really wrong. They’re just against the law.’ He heard himself uttering these words and wondered if he really believed them. When he’d been a prosecutor, the distinction wouldn’t have mattered a fig to him. He wondered if he was beginning to even think like a defense attorney, and, for the millionth time, wasn’t sure if he was comfortable with it.

But Rebecca, her face betraying every nuance of the quandary, hadn’t lost the thread. ‘Like what? What isn’t wrong but is against the law?’

He searched his brain. ‘Well, you know those places we passed coming here, with all those posters of naked women?’

‘Yeah. That was gross.’

‘It might be gross or whatever, but it’s not against the law. It might not be the way you’d want to choose to live, to do that kind of stuff. You might even think it’s wrong , but it’s still not against the law.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Are you sure you want to talk about this? Is this a little… serious?’

A frown. ‘ Dad-dee . I’m nine, you know. I think about a lot of things.’

‘I know. I know you do.’ He smiled at her, this justice-freak daughter of his with a passion for knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the example he’d just given her was backwards – something perhaps morally suspect but within the law. He wanted the opposite to make the point. ‘Okay, let’s start over. Maybe I used the wrong word, like wrong , for instance. There’s the law, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Okay. So the law is just a bunch of rules. That’s all it is. Some good rules and some rules where it doesn’t make too much sense that they even have the rule. The point is, though, good or bad, if you break one of the rules, you’re going to get punished. That’s another one of the rules.’

‘Right.’

‘But sometimes you break a rule – a law – because you think there’s no reason for it, or it’s just plain wrong. Now you’re still going to get punished, because you can’t allow people to just go breaking the rules, but maybe when you go to trial to get punished, people will realize that the law is dumb, and they’ll change it.’

‘Like what?’

Hardy thought a moment for a clean example. ‘Well, like it used to be against the law for black people to sit on buses with white people.’

‘I know, but that was just stupid.’

‘Of course, but it was a law nevertheless, until this lady named Rosa Parks-’

‘Oh, I know all about that. We learned that in school. She sat on the bus and they went on strike-’

‘Yeah, well, and then they changed the law, and then it wasn’t against the law for black people to sit on buses. It was the same thing - in this case a right thing – but one day it was against the law, and the next day it was okay. It wasn’t the thing itself, it was the rule. Is this making any sense?’

‘Sure. I get it completely.’

‘Okay, I bet you do. Anyway, this thing with Graham – my client – it’s a little like that example, but not exactly. I’m not sure the law about letting you kill your father or mother ought to be changed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because then how do you decide for sure whether or not it’s a good reason? If the person who’s sick really wants it? Or even knows what’s happening?’ Hardy decided to test his martini, buy another few seconds to think. ‘Or sometimes sick people are really hard to take care of, and maybe the people taking care of them get tired of it and just want the person to go away.’

‘That would be horrible!’

‘Well, yes, it would. But if there wasn’t some law preventing it, it might happen. There’s just all kinds of problems. It’s really really complicated. But in this case what Graham did might not have been wrong. I think. I hope.’

She met his eyes. ‘I know, Daddy, if you’re helping him, he didn’t do the wrong thing.’

Hardy had to laugh. ‘You know that, huh?’

‘Cross my heart.’

Graham and his father didn’t only have Hallmark moments.

‘ Who do you think you are, telling your old man what to do?’ Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, Sal had been drinking. He took a feeble swing at his son, as though he were going to cuff him. ‘I’m the dad here. You are just my little snot-nosed kid and you do what I tell you, not the other way round .’

Graham easily ducked away from the roundhouse, but that was the only thing that was going to be easy about this morning.

‘We got an appointment, Sal. The doctor, you remember?’

‘I ain’t going to no doctor. I told you. They take my driver’s license, what am I supposed to do for a living ?’

Graham tried to remain patient. ‘This is Dr Cutler, Sal, my friend. Not the other one – what’s his name? – Finer.’

‘They’re all the same. Finer, Cutler. I don’t care. I’m not going. He had settled himself onto his couch, arms crossed, the picture of resistance. There was a flask on its side on the table in front of him and he grabbed it and swigged from it. ’You know how tired I am of getting poked at?‘

‘Yeah, I do, Dad.’ Almost as tired as I am of all this, Graham thought. And Russ Cutler had told him the AD was only going to get worse unless this brain tumor turned out to be inoperable. Which – the good news – looked like the diagnosis.

Graham didn’t think it was funny, but the irony didn’t escape him. He’d brought Sal down to Russ Cutler for the Alzheimer’s. Sal’s eccentricity had suddenly become far less manageable. Graham had wanted an opinion whether his father should be left to live alone, or should be placed in the dreaded home. Would he even know it if he was?

Alzheimer’s wasn’t Cutler’s specialty, but he knew enough. The disease began almost imperceptibly, with smaller losses of short-term memory gradually becoming larger, more all encompassing. The distant past began to assume a more immediate reality than the present.

For Graham the most heart-rending aspect of the situation was its apparently random appearance. Forgetfulness, then a reversion to normalcy, or near normalcy. You kept wanting to deny that it had reached a point of no return. You kept hoping.

Up until a couple of months ago he had spent lots of time with his father, making his fish rounds, playing cards, going to meals, taking walks – Graham trying to get his own reality into focus. What he was going to do with his life. Where, if anywhere, he fit in. And Sal had been great. His best friend. A wise, albeit vulgar, counselor, playmate, drinking buddy.

But then, all at once, Sal wouldn’t be there in an almost literal sense. He wouldn’t know who Graham was. ‘Son, my ass! I haven’t seen either of my sons in fifteen years. Who the hell are you trying to fool? What do you want out of me? You think you’re going to get my money, you got another think coming.’

The hours Graham had spent camped in the stinking hallway of the Lions Arms, making sure Sal didn’t go out when he was this way. It was killing Graham, never mind Sal.

So he ‘d gone to Russ and learned that this randomness was part of the progress of the disease, until finally the brain didn’t appear to process anymore. Whether or not it did was impossible to say.

‘And even then,’ Russ had told him, ‘you’ll go into the nursing home to visit your dad one day. He hasn’t said a meaningful word in six months and he’ll look up and know you and say hi like it was yesterday, and maybe for him it was.’