Mercy by Sarah L. Thomson

for terminal patients, spending her days with dying people—how was this a cheerful job?
    Maia was checking Jake’s medications, seeing if he needed refills. “You taking these new ones?” She waved a tiny brown bottle at Jake.
    â€œSometimes.”
    â€œThey don’t do you any good in the bottle, you know.”
    â€œI take them when I need them. Don’t fuss.”
    â€œWell, fussing. Lord forbid I should fuss. Haley, you gorgeous thing, how’s school treating you? Beating those boys off with a stick?”
    Haley used to blush and squirm when Maia teased. Now she hung up her jacket and shrugged. “A great big one. With nails in it.”
    â€œI’m getting her karate lessons for her birthday,” Jake added. “That’s the only thing that will keep the guys at bay.”
    While Maia laughed some more, Haley wandered around the room. She took a mug stained with coffee dregs to the kitchen and rinsed it out. She picked up a book, a fat paperback mystery, lying facedown on the arm of Jake’s chair, and dogeared the page, closing it neatly, smoothing the creased spine.
    â€œYou have another nosebleed last night?” Maia asked. Haley, glancing up, saw Maia frowning at the rusty brown stains on Jake’s pillowcase.
    Jake’s voice was uninterested. “Apparently.”
    A sketchbook was lying on the table. Jake had been drawing something. A crumbling stone wall with a wide arched opening. The shadows inside the arch were thick and black. He’d pressed hard enough on the pencil to dent the paper and scatter little grains of carbon across the page. Haley blew them gently away. In the corner of the page, Jake had scrawled,
Macbeth
.
    Haley stacked the sketchbook and the mystery novel on the table, lining up the edges precisely. She collected two pencils and a stick of charcoal and laid them neatly alongside. All this let her keep her head down as Maia checked Jake’s bloodpressure. She didn’t like to see her cousin’s arm as Maia wrapped the cuff around it, to notice how thin it had gotten, the bicep no thicker than his forearm.
    Maia let out her breath in a
hmmph
sound as she looked at the numbers on her dial and whipped the cuff off Jake’s arm. “Let’s get you on a scale, then. Come on, I haven’t got all day.”
    â€œOh, you’re the one with the hot date tonight?” Jake got to his feet. Out of the corner of her eye, Haley saw him wobble a little. Maia’s hand moved quickly to his elbow to steady him.
    The scale creaked a little as Jake stepped onto it. Maia went
hmmph
again.
    â€œYou drinking those milkshakes I brought?”
    A bright thread glinted on the floor, near a leg of Jake’s chair. Haley bent down for it.
    â€œThe ones that taste like cardboard? Yes.” Jake’s voice sounded as if he’d been running hard rather than walking a few feet.
    The thread came up in Haley’s fingers. It was actually a chain of small silver links. The clasp on one end was broken.
    Slow footsteps, dragging a little, and Sunny’s claws clicking on the wooden floor. Jake sank into his chair beside Haley. Sunny laid her head on his lap, and the hand he lifted to stroke her ears trembled very slightly.
    Shifting her eyes quickly from his face, Haley held the chain out to Maia, glad for the excuse to talk about something that wasn’t Jake’s health. “Is this yours?”
    â€œWhy would I wear a thing like that?” Maia shook her head a little so that her earrings—dangling confections of jade and ivory and something purple—swung and chimed quietly. “That’s something my grandmother would wear.”
    â€œWell, then, whose is it?”
    â€œMaybe it’s Elaine’s.” Jake glanced briefly at the necklace. “She and your dad were here a couple of days ago. Maybe she dropped it.”
    â€œElaine doesn’t wear jewelry. She says you can have jewelry