I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I took that away. If I tried to relate to more than his fatherly side. Let him be Hugh. Just Hugh.
On Mother’s Day, Dee called. I stood in the kitchen holding the wall phone, leaning against the refrigerator. At first the conversation was all about happy Mother’s Day and summer plans. She told me she would not be taking classes but going home to be with her father.
At the mention of Hugh, there was a pause, and then her voice rushed at me, full of anger and incomprehension. “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” It was such a stupid thing to say.
“You know what I mean!” she shouted. “You left him. And you didn’t even tell me.” I could hear her crying, these horrible muffled sounds far away.
“Oh, Dee, I’m sorry.” It became one of those songs you sing in rounds. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
“Why?” she pleaded. “Why?”
“I don’t know how to explain any of this to you.”
In my head I could hear Whit in the boat that day, the precise words he’d used. I never could make them understand that what I needed was somehow to be alone with myself. In a spiritual way, I mean. He’d called that aloneness a solitude of being.
“Try,” she said.
There was only so much I could say to her. I drew a breath. “This will sound ridiculous, I guess, but my life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played. I had loved doing them, Dee, I really had, but they were drying up, and they weren’t really me. Do you understand? I felt there had to be some other life beneath the one I had, like an underground river or something, and that I would die if I didn’t dig down to it.”
Her silence after I’d spoken was a relief to me. I let myself slide down the refrigerator until I was sitting on the floor.
Back there, somewhere, I’d lost the solitude of being that told me who I was. The whole mystery of myself. I’d been incapable of wearing the earth on my arms and legs, of diving and surfacing in my own erotic depths.
“Don’t you love Dad anymore?” Dee asked.
“Of course I do. Of course. How could I not love him?” I didn’t know why I was saying this to her. How much of it was placation, how much true.
Hugh and I had gone through our days with such good intentions, but with the imagination leaking out of our togetherness. We’d become exceptionally functional partners in the business of making a life. Even in the hidden business of being what the other one needed: good father, good daughter, little girl in a box. All those ghosts that hide in the cracks of a relationship.
It seemed right to have destroyed all that. Not to have hurt Hugh; I would always be sorry for that.
“Are you staying there all summer?” Dee asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I just know that I—” I didn’t know whether to say it, whether she wanted to hear it.
“That you love me,” she said, which was exactly the thing I was going to say.
I showed up at the monastery in the middle of May. The heat had descended in typical fashion—all at once, an oppressive, woolen canopy pitched across the island overnight. It would not be lifted until October.
Approaching the