Long ago, when my brother and I used to row his small bateau through the tangle of salt creeks on the island, back when I was still wild and went around with Spanish moss braided into my hair, creating those long and alarming coiffures, my father used to tell me that mermaids lived in the waters around the island. He claimed he’d seen them once from his boat—in the pink hours of the morning when the sun sat like a bobbing raspberry out on the water. The mermaids swam to his boat like dolphins, he said, leaping through the waves and diving.
I believed any and every outlandish thing he said. “Do they sit on rocks and comb their hair?” I asked him. Never mind that we didn’t have rocks around the island, just the marsh grass turning with the wheel of the year—green to brown to yellow back to green—the everlasting cycle of the island, the one that also turned inside my body.
“Yes, mermaids sit around on rocks and primp,” my father answered. “But their main job is saving humans. That’s why they came to my boat—to be there in case I fell over.”
In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved me. I know this much: The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.
They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself. They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up.
As the ferry approaches the island dock, the air hits me, laden with so many things: the smell of fish, the disturbance of birds, the green breath of palmetto palms, and already I feel the story loom like some strange creature surfacing from the water below. Perhaps I will be finished with it now. Perhaps I will forgive myself, and the story will hold me like a pair of arms for as long as I live.
The captain blows his horn, announcing our arrival, and I think, Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.
CHAPTER One
February 17, 1988, I opened my eyes and heard a procession of sounds: first the phone going off on the opposite side of the bed, rousing us at 5:04 A.M. to what could only be a calamity, then rain pummeling the roof of our old Victorian house, sluicing its sneaky way to the basement, and finally small puffs of air coming from Hugh’s lower lip, each one perfectly timed, like a metronome.
Twenty years of this puffing. I’d heard it when he wasn’t even asleep, when he sat in his leather wing chair after dinner, reading through the column of psychiatric journals rising from the floor, and it would seem like the cadence against which my entire life was set.
The phone rang again, and I lay there, waiting for Hugh to pick up, certain it was one of his patients, probably the paranoid schizophrenic who’d phoned last night convinced the CIA had him cornered in a federal building in downtown Atlanta.
A third ring, and Hugh fumbled for the receiver. “Yes, hello,” he said, and his voice came out coarse, a hangover from sleep.
I rolled away from him then and stared across the room at the faint, watery light on the window, remembering that today was Ash Wednesday, feeling the inevitable rush of guilt.
My father had died on Ash Wednesday when I was nine years old, and in a convoluted way, a way that made no sense to anyone but me, it had been at least partially my fault.
There had been a fire on his boat, a fuel-tank explosion, they’d said. Pieces of the boat had washed up weeks later, including a portion of the stern with Jes-Sea printed on it. He’d named the boat for me, not for my brother, Mike, or even for my mother, whom he’d adored, but for me, Jessie.
I closed my eyes and saw oily flames and roaring orange light. An article in the Charleston newspaper had referred to the explosion as suspicious, and there had been some kind of investigation, though nothing had ever come of it—things Mike and I’d discovered only because we’d sneaked the clipping from Mother’s dresser drawer, a strange, secret place filled with fractured rosaries, discarded saint medals, holy cards, and a small statue of Jesus missing his left arm. She had not imagined we would venture into all that broken-down holiness.
I went into that terrible sanctum almost every day for over a year and read the article obsessively, that one particular line: “Police speculate that a spark from his pipe may have ignited a leak in the fuel line.”
I’d given him the pipe for Father’s Day. Up until then he had never even smoked.
I still could not think of him apart from the word “suspicious,” apart from this day, how he’d become ash the very day people everywhere—me, Mike, and my mother—got our foreheads smudged with it at church. Yet another irony in a whole black ensemble of them.
“Yes, of course I remember you,” I heard Hugh say into the phone, yanking me back to the call, the bleary morning. He said, “Yes, we’re all fine here. And how are things there?”
This didn’t sound like a patient. And it wasn’t our daughter, Dee, I was sure of that. I could tell by the formality in his voice. I wondered if it was one of Hugh’s colleagues. Or a resident at the hospital. They called sometimes to consult about a case, though generally not at five in the morning.
I slipped out from the covers and moved with bare feet to the window across the room, wanting to see how likely it was that rain would flood the basement again and wash out the pilot light on the hot-water heater. I stared out at the cold, granular deluge, the bluish fog, the street already swollen with water, and I shivered, wishing the house were easier to warm.
I’d nearly driven Hugh crazy to buy this big, impractical house, and even though we’d been in it seven years now, I still refused to criticize it. I loved the sixteen-foot ceilings and stained-glass transoms. And the turret—God, I loved the turret. How many houses had one of those? You had to climb the spiral stairs inside it to get to my art studio, a transformed third-floor attic space with a sharply slanted ceiling and a skylight—so remote and enchanting that Dee had dubbed it the “Rapunzel tower.” She was always teasing me about it. “Hey, Mom, when are you gonna let your hair down?”
That was Dee being playful, being Dee, but we both knew what she meant—that I’d become too stuffy and self-protected. Too conventional. This past Christmas, while she was home, I’d posted a Gary Larson cartoon on the refrigerator with a magnet that proclaimed me WORLD’S GREATEST MOM. In it, two cows stood in their idyllic pasture. One announced to the other, “I don’t care what they say, I’m not content.” I’d meant it as a little joke, for Dee.
I remembered now how Hugh had laughed at it. Hugh, who read people as if they were human Rorschachs, yet he’d seen nothing suggestive in it. It was Dee who’d stood before it an inordinate amount of time, then given me a funny look. She hadn’t laughed at all.
To be honest, I had been restless. It had started back in the fall—this feeling of time passing, of being postponed, pent up, not wanting to go up to my studio. The sensation would rise suddenly like freight from the ocean floor—the unexpected discontent of cows in their pasture. The constant chewing of all that cud.
With winter the feeling had deepened. I would see a neighbor running along the sidewalk in front of the house, training, I imagined, for a climb up Kilimanjaro. Or a friend at my book club giving a blow-by-blow of her bungee jump from a bridge in Australia. Or—and this was the worst of all—a TV show about some intrepid woman traveling alone in the blueness of Greece, and I’d be overcome by the little river of sparks that seemed to run beneath all that, the blood/sap/wine, aliveness, whatever it was. It had made me feel bereft over the immensity of the world, the extraordinary things people did with their lives—though, really, I didn’t want to do any of those particular things. I didn’t know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.
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I felt it that morning standing beside the window, the quick, furtive way it insinuated itself, and I had no idea what to say to myself about it. Hugh seemed to think my little collapse of spirit, or whatever it was I was having, was about Dee’s being away at college, the clichéd empty nest and all that.
Last fall, after we’d gotten her settled at Vanderbilt, Hugh and I’d rushed home so he could play in the Waverley Harris Cancer Classic, a tennis tournament he’d been worked up about all summer. He’d gone out in the Georgia heat for three months and practiced twice a week with a fancy Prince graphite racket. Then I’d ended up crying all the way home from Nashville. I kept picturing Dee standing in front of her dorm waving good-bye as we pulled away. She touched her eye, her chest, then pointed at us—a thing she’d done since she was a little girl. Eye. Heart. You. It did me in. When we got home, despite my protests, Hugh called his doubles partner, Scott, to take his place in the tournament, and stayed home and watched a movie with me. An Officer and a Gentleman. He pretended very hard to like it.
The deep sadness I felt in the car that day had lingered for a couple of weeks, but it had finally lifted. I did miss Dee—of course I did—but I couldn’t believe that was the real heart of the matter.
Lately Hugh had pushed me to see Dr. Ilg, one of the psychiatrists in his practice. I’d refused on the grounds that she had a parrot in her office.
I knew that would drive him crazy. This wasn’t the real reason, of course—I have nothing against people’s having parrots, except that they keep them in little cages. But I used it as a way of letting him know I wasn’t taking the suggestion seriously. It was one of the rare times I didn’t acquiesce to him.
“So she’s got a parrot, so what?” he’d said. “You’d like her.” Probably I would, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to go that far—all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one’s childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.
I did occasionally, though, play out imaginary sessions with Dr. Ilg in my head. I would tell her about my father, and, grunting, she would write it down on a little pad—which is all she ever seemed to do. I pictured her bird as a dazzling white cockatoo perched on the back of her chair, belting out all sorts of flagrant opinions, repeating itself like a Greek chorus: “You blame yourself, you blame yourself, you blame yourself.”
Not long ago—I don’t know what possessed me to do it—I’d told Hugh about these make-believe sessions with Dr. Ilg, even about the bird, and he’d smiled. “Maybe you should just see the bird,” he said. “Your Dr. Ilg sounds like an idiot.”
Now, across the room, Hugh was listening to the person on the phone, muttering, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” His face had clamped down into what Dee called “the Big Frown,” that pinched expression of grave and intense listening in which you could almost see the various pistons in his brain—Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Winnicott—bobbing up and down.
Wind lapped over the roof, and I heard the house begin to sing—as it routinely did—with an operatic voice that was very Beverly “Shrill,” as we liked to say. There were also doors that refused to close, ancient toilets that would suddenly decline to flush (“The toilets have gone anal-retentive again!” Dee would shout), and I had to keep constant vigilance to prevent Hugh from exterminating the flying squirrels that lived in the fireplace in his study. If we ever got a divorce, he loved to joke, it would be about squirrels.
But I loved all of this; I truly did. It was only the basement floods and the winter drafts that I hated. And now, with Dee in her first year at Vanderbilt, the emptiness—I hated that.
Hugh was hunched on his side of the bed, his elbows balanced on his knees and the top two knobs of his spine visible through his pajamas. He said, “You realize this is a serious situation, don’t you? She needs to see someone—I mean, an actual psychiatrist.”
I felt sure then it was a resident at the hospital, though it did seem Hugh was talking down to him, and that was not like Hugh.
Through the window the neighborhood looked drowned, as if the houses—some as big as arks—might lift off their foundations and float down the street. I hated the thought of slogging out into this mess, but of course I would. I would drive to Sacred Heart of Mary over on Peachtree and get my forehead swiped with ashes. When Dee was small, she’d mistakenly called the church the “Scared Heart of Mary.” The two of us still referred to it that way sometimes, and it occurred to me now how apt the name really was. I mean, if Mary was still around, like so many people thought, including my insatiably Catholic mother, maybe her heart was scared. Maybe it was because she was on such a high and impossible pedestal—Consummate Mother, Good Wife, All-Around Paragon of Perfect Womanhood. She was probably up there peering over the side, wishing for a ladder, a parachute, something to get her down from there.
I hadn’t missed going to church on Ash Wednesday since my father had died—not once. Not even when Dee was a baby and I had to take her with me, stuffing her into a thick papoose of blankets, armored with pacifiers and bottles of pumped breast milk. I wondered why I’d kept subjecting myself to it—year after year at the Scared Heart of Mary. The priest with his dreary incantation: “Remember you are dust, to dust you shall return.” The blotch of ash on my forehead.
I only knew I had carried my father this way my whole life.
Hugh was standing now. He said, “Do you want me to tell her?” He looked at me, and I felt the gathering of dread. I imagined a bright wave of water coming down the street, rounding the corner where old Mrs. Vandiver had erected a gazebo too close to her driveway; the wave, not mountainous like a tsunami but a shimmering hillside sweeping toward me, carrying off the ridiculous gazebo, mailboxes, doghouses, utility poles, azalea bushes. A clean, ruinous sweep.
“It’s for you,” Hugh said. I didn’t move at first, and he called my name. “Jessie. The call—it’s for you.”
He held the receiver out to me, sitting there with his thick hair sticking up on the back of his head like a child’s, looking grave and uneasy, and the window copious with water, a trillion pewter droplets coming down on the roof.
CHAPTER Two
I reached for the robe draped on the bedpost. Pulling it around my shoulders, I took the phone while Hugh stood there, hovering, unsure whether to leave. I covered the mouthpiece. “No one died, did they?”
He shook his head.
“Go get dressed. Or go back to bed,” I told him.
“No, wait—” he said, but I was already saying hello into the phone, and he turned then and walked into the bathroom.
“You poor thing, I’ve gotten you up at daybreak,” a woman’s voice said. “But so you know, it wasn’t deliberate. I’ve been up so long, I simply forgot how early it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Lord, I’m such a blooming optimist, I thought you’d recognize me. It’s Kat. Egret Island Kat. Your godmother Kat. The Kat who changed your damn diapers.”
My eyes closed automatically. She’d been my mother’s best friend since forever—a petite woman in her sixties who wore folded-down, lace-trimmed socks with her high heels, suggesting a dainty, eccentric old lady whose formidability had thinned along with her bones. It was a great and dangerous deception.
I lowered myself to the bed, knowing there was only one reason she would call. It would have to do with my mother, the famously crazy Nelle Dubois, and judging from Hugh’s reaction, it would not be good.
Mother lived on Egret Island, where once we’d all been a family—I would say an “ordinary” family, except we’d lived next door to a Benedictine monastery. You cannot have thirty or forty monks for next-door neighbors and claim it’s ordinary.
The debris from my father’s exploded boat had washed up onto their property. Several monks had brought the board with Jes-Sea on it and presented it to Mother like a military flag. She’d quie
tly made a fire in the fireplace, then called Kat and Hepzibah, the other member of their trinity. They’d come and stood there along with the monks, while Mother had ceremoniously tossed the board onto the flames. I’d watched as the letters blackened, as the board was consumed. I remembered it sometimes when I woke in the night, had even thought about it in the middle of my wedding ceremony. There had been no funeral, no memorial, only that moment to call back.
It was after that that Mother began going over to cook the monks’ midday meal, something she’d now done for the last thirty-three years. She was more or less obsessed with them.
“I do believe our little island could sink into the sea, and it wouldn’t faze you,” Kat said. “What’s it been? Five years, six months, and one week since you set foot here?”
“That sounds right,” I said. My last visit, on the occasion of my mother’s seventieth birthday, had been a disaster of biblical proportions.
I’d taken Dee, who was twelve, and we’d presented Mother with a pair of gorgeous red silk pajamas from Saks, very Oriental, with a Chinese dragon embroidered on the top. She’d refused to accept them. And for the dumbest reason. It was because of the dragon, which she referred to alternately as “a beast,” “a demon,” and “a figure of moral turpitude.” St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, she said. Did I really expect her to sleep in such a thing?
When she got like that, no one could reason with her. She’d hurled the pajamas into the trash can, and I’d packed our bags.
The last time I’d seen my mother, she was standing on the porch, shouting, “If you leave, don’t come back!” And Dee, poor Dee, who only wanted a seminormal grandmother, crying.
Kat had driven us to the ferry that day in her golf cart—the one she drove maniacally around the island’s dirt roads. She’d blown the air horn on it incessantly during the ride to distract Dee from crying.