The Mermaid Chair

  During Easter week I saw Whit only once. His work in the rookery was suspended while he assisted Brother Bede with Passiontide, all the high and holy preparations that had to be carried out between Palm Sunday and the Easter vigil. The matter of Easter lilies, holy oil, Paschal candles, the basin and pitcher for the foot washing, black vestments, white vestments. He did not get there until Thursday, Maundy Thursday, or as Mother had said that morning, reverting to her Catholic Latin, “Feria Quinta in Coena Domini,” the Thursday of the Lord’s Supper.

  Wearing the aqua shirt he loved, I met him at the edge of the water and waited while he anchored the johnboat. I’d fixed a picnic on a red-and-white floral tablecloth that I’d spread nearby: Mother’s Wadmalaw tomato pie, strawberries, Market Street pralines, a bottle of red wine. Clusters of wild white azaleas that I’d picked in Kat’s front yard filled the center of the cloth.

  When Whit saw what I’d done, he bent over and kissed my forehead. “This is a surprise. What’s the occasion?”

  “Well, let me see.” I pretended to be racking my brain. “It is Maundy Thursday. Plus, it happens to be our six-week-and-one-day anniversary.”

  “We have an anniversary?”

  “Of course we do. February seventeenth, the day we met. It was Ash Wednesday. Remember? It hasn’t always been the most cheerful day of the year for me, so I thought I’d turn it into an anniversary.”

  “I see.”

  We sat down on the tablecloth, and he reached for the wine. I’d forgotten cups, so we each took a swig straight from the bottle, laughing when it dribbled down my chin. As I sliced the tomato pie and placed the thick wedges on paper plates, I went on talking, caught up in my delirious chatter. “The first year we’ll celebrate our anniversary monthly on the seventeenth, and then we’ll mark it annually. Every Ash Wednesday.”

  When I looked up, he was no longer smiling. I set the plate down. I had the terrible feeling he was going to tell me we would not be having annual anniversaries, that he’d decided to stay at the abbey. What if Easter had gotten to him? God resurrecting. I went cold.

  He reached for me, holding me almost painfully close. “We could live near Asheville,” he said. “At the end of some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. And hike on weekends. Or go to Malaprop’s Bookstore and sit in the café.” I realized then that he was simply affected by the thought of having a life in which there would be small domestic details and a flow of days, of anniversaries. It was as if it had all somehow just become real to him.

  “I would love that,” I told him. But in truth it made me uncomfortable. Hiking is what Hugh and I had done. Weekends in the mountains north of Atlanta, in a little place called Mineral Bluff.

  Later, after we’d eaten, bees flitted in the azalea blossoms, and Whit told an outlandish story about a three-foot alligator that had gotten into the church the second year he was at the monastery and how, upon seeing it, the abbot had leaped up onto the altar.

  I leaned back on my elbows and placed my bare feet in his lap. I fed myself the last of the strawberries while he rubbed my feet. He said something about brides having their feet washed before the wedding, that it was an old custom. I don’t remember now if he said it was biblical or Asian, just that it was the kind of obscure, antediluvian trivia only Whit would know.

  He slid closer to the edge of the water, tugging me with him. Scooping handfuls of water from the creek, he poured it over my feet, sliding his hands across my wet skin. He moved them slowly over my ankles, stroked the arches of my feet with his thumbs, then let his fingers slide in and out between my toes. I watched him without speaking. I didn’t know what covenant we were making, but I felt it in his hands and saw it in his face.

  I closed my eyes and felt myself going down with the diving woman. Somewhere in my paintings, there was a place of no return.

  CHAPTER Twenty-nine

  On the evening of the All-Girls Picnic, Mother balked. She stood on the front porch holding a bag of benne wafers, wearing a navy cotton shirt with the collar all wrinkled and baggy beige pants stretched out at the elastic waist, and informed Kat, Hepzibah, Benne, and me that she would not be going. She had washed her hair earlier and let it dry naturally, which had caused a wild white wave to rise straight up from her forehead and splash down on top of her head, flipping out erratically.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” said Kat. “How pigheaded can one woman be? Am I going to have to go get the damn hibiscus scarf again?”

  Mother jabbed her fists onto her hips. “I’m not worried about my hand, Kat Bowers.”

  “Well, what is it? It is because of your hair?”

  “What’s wrong with my hair?” Mother practically shouted.

  “Catfight,” said Benne.

  Hepzibah stepped between them. “What is wrong with you two? Lord.”

  “Mother, look, I understand your reluctance,” I said. “But we’ve fixed all this food. The golf carts are loaded, and Hepzibah has already gathered the wood for a fire down on the beach. We’ve got our hearts set on this.”

  “Then by all means, go without me.”

  “We’re not going without you,” said Kat. “It’s all of us or none of us—that’s the deal.”

  There was the reason my father had called them the Three Egreteers. The unspoken deal, that tiny, cemented knot they’d tied in their threads and tossed into the ocean.

  We went on coaxing, making good use of guilt, ignoring her excuses until she finally climbed into one of the carts.

  I wish now I’d listened to her, that one of us had had the decent foresight to listen. Not even Benne caught the quiet, dire quality echoing inside her resistance.

  It was the first Saturday after Easter, April 16, 6:00 P.M. We’d decided not to wait until May Day eve, when the All-Girls Picnics had traditionally been held in the past. Mother needed this now, we’d reasoned.

  The day was warm, with bright, sparkly afternoon light gleaming off the edges of things. I drove behind Kat, following her through the dunes and sea oats right down onto Bone Yard Beach. The wind was hitting the waves and breaking open the tops of them, releasing sudden belches of spray. Max, who’d ridden over in the backseat of my cart, jumped out while we were still moving, tearing for the water.

  Hepzibah had piled the driftwood in a heap far up on the beach, anticipating high tide. “Watch where you park,” I heard her tell Kat as we braked—a loaded comment referring to the time Kat had left her golf cart on the beach and the tide took it. She’d come back hours later to see it bobbing off toward England.

  We spread out a blanket on the sand, and Mother sat down, huddling on the corner farthest from the water, gathering an old alpaca sweater around her shoulders. She positioned her back to the water and stared at the dunes. There was a weirdness about that, like someone on an elevator facing the back wall instead of the doors. I could feel her retreating, being sucked back into the old darkness.

  Two weeks ago, when I’d taken her to Mount Pleasant for her follow-up appointment with the doctor, she’d sat inside the ferry and stared carefully at the floor, as if she didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened out on the water thirty-three years ago. Her behavior now reminded me of that. Had she had this aversion to the island waters ever since Dad died, and somehow I’d just not noticed? It struck me as the same unaccountable antagonism she’d harbored for the mermaid chair. That, too, had started after he died. I had seen her leave the room at the mere mention of it.

  I kept on observing her as I unpacked the food. We’d gone out of our way to bring the same dishes as before: crab cakes, hoppin’ John, pimento cheese, raisin-bread pudding, wine—Chianti for Kat, Chardonnay for the rest of us. Looking at the spread, I thought of Whit and the picnic I’d made for us a little over a week before on the opposite side of the island, the way he’d bathed my feet, the unspoken ceremony it had become, full of faint connubial undertones.

  Max had settled into his favorite sport—catching sand crabs, trotting up to us with legs and claw
s hanging out of his mouth. I watched him bring one to Mother, dropping it proudly at her feet, and the limp, distracted way she placed her hand on his head. She had not said three words. Kat handed her the Saran wrap, asking her to find the end of it, and Mother simply laid it down on the sand without trying. If the point was to cheer Mother up, it wasn’t working. Something was deeply wrong.

  Kat, however, would not relent. Her attempts to draw Mother into the evening, to consummate the vision we all had of her reverting miraculously to her All-Girls Picnic self, became increasingly forced. “Nelle, who do you think should be our first female president—Geraldine Ferraro or Patricia Schroeder?” Kat asked.

  This barely got a shrug out of her.

  “Come on, you have to answer. Jessie and Hepzibah say Patricia; I say Geraldine.”

  “Nancy Reagan,” Mother muttered. We all perked up, thinking she was going to join in, the salvation of Nelle Dubois at hand.

  “Well, if Nancy runs, I for one will…just say no!” Kat said. It was the kind of goading usually guaranteed to get Mother going, but there was no comeback, nothing but the sinking of her shoulders into their former slump.

  She ate only a little—half a crab cake and a spoonful of bread pudding. The rest of us loaded our plates, still determined.

  As darkness materialized out over the ocean, Hepzibah lit the fire. The wind-dried wood flamed up quickly. Within moments it was raging, spattering the air with sparks that trailed off into the blackness. We sat in a globe of light, the smell of burning everywhere, and no one considered how a fire blazing right there beside the water might affect a woman for whom fire and water meant nothing but tragedy and death, a woman who could not look seawater in the face, who’d boarded up her fireplace. We were blinded by nostalgia for the woman she’d been before all of that. It makes me weep now to think how hard Mother must have been trying that night. How she came only to please us and went on sitting there as her agony grew.

  Throughout the evening she remained at the edge of the blanket, back where the light didn’t reach. Hepzibah beat her Gullah drum. The sound came out lamenting and slow. Benne laid her head in Kat’s lap, and Max fell asleep with the gloss of firelight on his back. The wood crackled. The ocean heaved, slamming down on the beach. No one talked. We had given up.

  Sometime around 3:00 A.M., hours after our bonfire had turned to embers and we’d packed up our failed experiment and left the beach, I was wakened in my bed by someone calling my name. I recall it as a shrill, urgent whisper.

  “Jessie!”

  I sat up. Confused, surfacing, my head gummed with sleep. I could see a shape, a person, shadowed in the doorway. My heart began a wild, adrenaline-soaked pounding. I fumbled for the lamp switch beside the bed, tipping over a glass of water that spilled across the table, onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry. I had to,” a voice said.

  “Mother?”

  The shock of lamplight cut through the room, blinding me for a moment. Squinting, I swept my hand through the air as if I could wipe the glare out of it. Her face appeared dazed. Her hand lifted as if she were a student asking permission to speak. Blood was everywhere. Soaked across the front of her pale nylon gown. Winding in streams down her forearm. Pelting the floor.

  “I had to,” she said again, repeating it I don’t know how many times—a hysterical whisper that seemed to incapacitate me.

  For several seconds I didn’t move, speak, blink. I stared hypnotically at the blood coursing from her hand, the dazzling brightness of it, the way it flowed in small, measured spurts. I was blunted with awe—floating in the moment of blessed disconnection that comes before panic, before the full tonnage of the moment drops.

  But even then I did not leap from bed in a frenzy. I rose slowly and moved toward her as if weightless, one foot and then the other, transfixed with horror.

  The little finger on her right hand was missing.

  I lashed Mother’s forearm with a belt, creating a tourniquet. She lay on the floor while I compressed a towel tightly against the gaping place where her little finger had been, aware all of a sudden that she could die. My mother could bleed to death on the floor of my bedroom, on the spot near the window where I’d strung whirly girls.

  There was no emergency service on the island, no doctor. When the towel ran red, I got another. Mother became still. The color was sliding out of her face.

  As the hemorrhage finally began to stop, I dialed Kat’s number with one hand, bearing down on her wound with the other one.

  Kat arrived with Shem, who despite his age grasped Mother in his burly arms and carried her outside to the golf cart. I walked beside them, keeping steady pressure on Mother’s hand. At the ferry dock, he lifted her once again and bore her onto the pontoon. He was breathing hard but talking to her the whole way: “Stay with us, now, Nelle. Stay with us.”

  Inside the boat he laid her on the passenger bench, instructing us to keep her feet elevated. Kat held them aloft for the entire trip. And Mother, still conscious but drifting somewhere far away from us, gazed at the roof of the boat for a while before finally closing her eyes.

  Kat and I did not exchange a word. We crossed the rolling black water while the wind moved like smoke and the blood on Mother’s gown dried, turning to a stiff, brown crust.

  A waning three-quarter moon loomed over us. I watched its light, soft as mohair, collect around Mother’s head and wondered if she’d used a meat cleaver. Had there been one hidden somewhere in the kitchen that I’d missed? After Kat had arrived, I’d looked for Mother’s finger, thinking the doctor might be able to reattach it. I’d expected to find it lying on the cutting board like a discarded vegetable peel, but it had been nowhere in sight. Just puddles of blood everywhere.

  That trip across the bay was like being jerked out of the sea on a barbed hook and hauled back into reality. Back to where you know all over again there is no immunity, no storm tent, no illusion. Mother’s ruthless, mutilating compulsion had been there all along, consuming her like cancer, and I…I had been engrossed elsewhere.

  Until tonight I’d actually thought we were making progress—that three-steps-forward, two-steps-backward kind of advance—slow and frustrating but still progress. The mind is so good at revising reality to suit our needs. I had seen what I wanted. I had reinvented the objectionable, the most indigestible pieces of my life into something just palatable enough to bear. I had taken Mother’s craziness and normalized it.

  How do I describe how flattened I felt by the depth of her madness? By my own passivity and denial and guilt?

  I turned my face to the plastic window on the boat. Behind us the island was swallowed in darkness. The water seemed immense, glowing as if lit from underneath. I stared at a short beam of light coming from the bow of the boat, sliding needlelike in and out of the waves, and thought suddenly of the sea goddess, the mermaid Sedna whom Mother had read about in Dominic’s library book. She had ten severed fingers. Ten.

  The whole horrible thing fell into place then.

  My mother was not going to stop until she’d cut every single finger from her hands.

  She had emulated Eudoria, the prostitute-turned-saint, by cutting off one finger and planting it, and then, getting no relief, she had moved on to Sedna, whose fingers had turned into sea creatures—frolicking dolphins and seals, singing whales—forming the entire harmonic ocean world out of her pain and sacrifice. Ten fingers to create a new world. Ten. The day Whit had shown me the book on Sedna, I’d read about the number, the same words Mother must have read: “Ten was considered the holiest number. Pythagoreans deemed it the number of regeneration and fulfillment. Everything sprang from ten.”

  How had I not seen it? The way Mother had taken a simple story, a myth, a number, things meant to be symbolic, and contorted it into something dangerous and literal? How had I underestimated the desperation in her to grow the world back the way it had been before my father died? That singing world in which we had lived by the sea.

  CHAPTER Th
irty

  As Hugh crossed the parking lot in front of East Cooper Hospital, I watched him from a window in the third-floor waiting room where Kat and I had been ensconced since dawn. Even from up here, I could see that his face was tanned, and I knew he’d been tilling up the backyard again. When confronted with loss, Hugh got out the old hand tiller that had belonged to his father and exhausted himself with physical labor, plowing up huge stretches of the yard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even get around to planting anything; the point seemed to be just ripping up the ground. After his father died, I’d watched him plow with such sorrow and drivenness, stoically propelling himself into the early-summer darkness, that I could not bear to watch. He had rendered much of the two acres around the house a bare, exposed ground of fresh wounds. I’d once seen him pick up a handful of the upturned dirt and, closing his eyes, smell it.

  I’d called him at six this morning. It had been dawn by then, but the forbidding darkness and quiet that had floated through the hospital all night had not yet lifted. Dialing the number, I’d felt overwhelmed by the shrouded, deft way Mother had been laying siege to herself. I was defeated, to tell the truth. I knew that Hugh would understand how I felt, the exact contours of every feeling. I would not have to explain anything. When I heard his voice, I started to cry—the tears I squashed on the ferry.

  “I have to commit her,” I’d said, struggling for composure. The surgeon on call, who’d repaired Mother’s hand, had made that clear enough. “I suggest this time you get a psychiatrist in to see her and start commitment papers,” he’d said, kindly enough, but with emphasis on “this time.”

  “Do you want me to come?” Hugh asked.

  “I can’t do this alone,” I told him. “Kat’s here, but—yes, please, could you come?”

  He’d gotten there in record time. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past 1:00 P.M.