I stood unmoving, startled by the sight of him, a kind of fluttering in my stomach.
My flight had been delayed from Charleston to Atlanta because of thunderstorms, and it was late, close to midnight. I had not told him I was coming. Part of it was pure, cowardly fear, but it was also the hope that I might catch him off guard, and in those one or two moments he would forget what I’d done, and his heart would fill with so much love it would override every justified reason to send me away. That was my foolish, unreasoned hope.
I’d let myself in with the key we kept hidden under the flagstone at the rear of the house, leaving my suitcase in the foyer beside the front door. Noticing the light in the den, I’d thought only that Hugh had forgotten to turn it out when he went to bed. And here he was.
For whole minutes I stood there listening to the puffing noise he made with his mouth when he slept—rhythmic, sonorous, filled with the rush of years.
His arm dangled over the side of the chair. The little bracelet Dee had made was still on his wrist. Outside, there was thunder far away.
Hugh.
I thought of a time long ago, the year before Dee was born. We’d gone hiking in the Pisgah National Forest up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and come upon a waterfall. It dropped twenty or thirty feet from an overhang of rocks, and we’d stood a moment staring up at the plunging water, the way it flashed and held the sun, hundreds of tiny, iridescent rainbows fluttering out of it like a swarm of dragonflies.
We’d yanked off our clothes, tossing them on rocks and lady ferns. It was hot, the deep of August, and the water still had the memory of snow in it. Holding hands, we picked our way over mossy stones until we stood beneath the overhang with the water crashing down in front of us. The spray was like a driving rain, the sound deafening. Hugh smoothed my wet hair behind my ears and kissed my shoulders and breasts. We made love pressed against the cliff face. For weeks I felt the water hitting the earth inside my body.
Watching him sleep now, I wanted to pull him back into that niche of wild rock. I would have been happy just to pull him into the ordinary niche we’d carved out together with little domestic tools for all these years, but I didn’t know how to return to either one of those places. How to make them the same place.
I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over, a million times daily—choosing love, then choosing it again, how loving and being in love could be so different.
Rolling his head to the side, he shifted in the chair. Sometimes I think it was my remembering that woke him, that the waterfall spilled out of my mind and caused him to open his eyes.
He gazed at me with sleep and confusion. “You’re here,” he said. Not to me, I realized, but to himself.
I smiled at him, but I didn’t say anything, unable to scrape my voice up out of my throat.
He stood. He lifted his shoulders. I don’t think he knew what to feel any more than what to say. He stood in his stocking feet and stared at me, a private, unreadable expression on his face. A car went by out on the street, the motor gunning and falling away.
When he spoke, the words sounded curled up and wounded. “What are you doing here?”
I think now of the ten thousand things I could have said to him, whether it would have made any difference if I’d gone down on my knees and canted all my transgressions.
“I…I brought you something,” I answered, and, raising my hand as if motioning him to wait, I went to the foyer for my pocketbook. I returned, digging through it. Unzipping my coin purse, I took out his wedding ring.
“You left this on Egret Island,” I said, and held the ring out to him, grasping it between my right thumb and forefinger, lifting my left hand so he could see I was wearing my ring, too. “Oh, Hugh, I want to come home,” I said. “I want to be here, with you.”
He didn’t move, didn’t reach for the ring.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
He still didn’t move, and it began to feel as if I were holding the ring across a chasm, that if I dropped it, it would fall through the earth. But I couldn’t draw back my hand. It was held by that mysterious quality that appears in cats when they’ve climbed to the top of the tree, to the end of the limb, and then, seeing with horror where they are, simply refuse to come down. I went on holding the ring out to him. Take it, please take it—hoping so hard I pinched the imprint of the ring into the pads of my fingers.
He stepped backward before turning and left the room.
When he’d gone, I set the ring on the table beside his chair. I set it beneath the lamp, which I could not bear to switch off.
I slept in the guest room, or, to be accurate—I lay awake in the guest room. As atonement I kept forcing myself to see him in that moment as he’d turned to leave, his profile against the gleaming windows. The hardness he felt toward me had risen to his face and tensed in his cheek.
Forgiveness was so much harder than being remorseful. I couldn’t imagine the terrible surrender it would take.
It rained much of the night, coming down in great black wheels and shaking the trees. I saw dawn push at the window before I finally fell asleep and woke not long afterward to the aroma of sausage and eggs, to the overwhelming smell of Hugh cooking.
There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.
That was where our marriage had left off, that day back in February—February 17, Ash Wednesday, the day of ashes and endings. Hugh had cooked breakfast, sausage and eggs. It had been the final thing before I’d left. The benediction.
I went downstairs. Hugh stood at the stove, holding a spatula. The frying pan was crackling furiously. He’d set two plates on the breakfast bar.
“Hungry?” he said.
I wasn’t at all, but knowing his abiding faith in the power of such breakfasts, I nodded and smiled at him, sensing the tremor of some quiet new rhythm wanting to establish itself.
I climbed onto the bar chair. He spooned half of a vegetable omelette onto my plate, sausage links, a buttered English muffin. “There you go,” he said.
He paused, and I felt him just behind me, breathing in an uneven way. I stared into my plate, wanting to look around at him but afraid I would ruin whatever was about to happen.
The moment seemed to hang in the air, revolving, deliberate, like a bit of glass lifted to the sun and turned slowly to refract the light.
Suddenly he laid his hand on my arm. I sat still as he slid it slowly up to my shoulder and back down.
“I missed you,” he said, leaning close to my ear.
I clutched his hand almost fiercely, pulling his fingers to my face, touching them with my lips. After a moment he gently pulled them away and put the other half of the omelette on his plate.
We sat in our kitchen and ate. Through the windows I could see the washed world, the trees and the grass and the shrubs silvered with raindrops.
There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meted out in these precious sips. It would well up from Hugh’s heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.
Epilogue
As the ferry nudges against the dock on Egret Island, the captain blows his horn a second time, and I go out to the railing. I remember the flowers spilling into the water as the boat pulled away last May. The sad little bon voyage party. It seems now like a piece of history starting to sift into dust and, at the same time, as if I have only just been here. As if the petals will still be floating on the water.
It is February now. The marshlands are floods of golden yellow. The color settles on me like the heat and light of the sun. The island will always be the fixed point of the migrating world.
Out there on the dock, Max is barking. I think of the mermaids hanging from the ceiling in Kat’s shop, the egrets flying above Caw Caw Creek, the bare rosebushes in the monastery garden. I picture the mermaid chair al
one in the chapel. The whole island rises up to me, and I have a moment when I honestly don’t know if I can step off the boat. I stand there and let it pass, knowing it will pass. All things do.
When I told Hugh I needed to come and see Mother, to be here on Ash Wednesday, he said, “Of course.” Then a moment later, “Is it just your mother you’re going to see?”
Not that often, but once in a while, the sorrow and mistrust will form across his eyes. His face will close in. And he will be gone. His mind and body will still be there, of course, but his heart—his spirit, even—will go to the outer banks of our marriage and camp. A day or two later, he will be back. I will find him cooking breakfast, whistling, bearing more forgiveness.
Each day we pick our way through unfamiliar terrain. Hugh and I did not resume our old marriage—that was never what I wanted, and it was not what Hugh wanted either—rather we laid it aside and began a whole new one. Our love is not the same. It feels both young and old to me. It feels wise, as an old woman is wise after a long life, but also fresh and tender, something we must cradle and protect. We have become closer in some ways, the pain we experienced weaving tenacious knots of intimacy, but there is a separateness as well, the necessary distances.
I have not told him yet about the knot I tied in my thread that day in the ocean. I talk to him instead about the mermaids. They belong to themselves, I told him once, and he frowned in that way he does when weighing something he’s unsure of. I know at times he’s afraid of the separateness, my independence, this abiding new loyalty I have to myself now, but I believe he will come to love this part of me, just as I do.
I tell him, smiling, that it was the mermaids who brought me home. I mean, to the water and the mud and the pull of the tides in my own body. To the solitary island submerged so long in myself, which I desperately needed to find. But I also try to explain they brought me home to him. I’m not sure he understands any more than I do how belonging to myself allows me to belong more truly to him. I just know it’s true.
“No, no, I’m not planning to see him,” I said to Hugh that day. “You can come with me if you want. We’ll both go.”
“It’s okay. You should go by yourself,” he said. “You need to go back and face the island and be done with it.”
Now, stepping onto the island, I feel myself bracing, feel my need to gather everything up so I can finally lay it down.
Mother’s house has been repainted cobalt blue. It is practically radiating when I arrive, chauffeured by Kat in the golf cart. She lays on the air horn in the front yard, and the rest of them come out onto the porch. Mother, Hepzibah, Benne.
Inside, sitting at the kitchen table, I look at them and see how everything continues and equally how it changes.
Mother tells me how Kat takes her across the bay every month to see the doctor, that she is on much less medication now. Her finger is still in the jar of alcohol on her dresser. Last August she went back to her passion for feeding the monks, abandoning Julia Child for James Beard. “The monks miss Julia’s food,” she tells me. “But they’ll get over it.”
When I ask Hepzibah about the Grand Gullah Tour, she sits straighter in her African print dress and tells me it’s listed these days in all the tourist magazines in Charleston, that she may have to offer it every single day by the time summer comes around.
Kat surprises me most. She has written up her own booklet to sell along with Dominic’s in the Mermaid’s Tale. Called Island Dog, it’s the legendary story of Max meeting the ferry every day with unfailing precision. Shaking her head and causing her precarious hairdo to slide out of its combs, she announces that she and Max will be on the television news next week.
Benne adds that Max is excited and not at all nervous.
They want to talk about my paintings, so I let them. I’ve lost my shyness about all that. Kat chirps about my “Diving Women” show at the Phoebe Pember Gallery in Charleston last October. I had her to thank for it. She was the one who packed all the paintings I’d left behind and took them to the gallery owner herself. “I knew she would want them,” she said.
I hadn’t come for the opening—I wasn’t ready to come back then—but the Egreteers had gone and stood in for me. I am working now on a series of island landscapes. Once in a while, though, I stop and paint one of my quirky mermaids for Kat, just to make her happy. The last one was of a real mermaid, working as a saleswoman inside Kat’s own shop. She stands behind the counter selling mermaid trinkets to the tourists, wearing a T-shirt that says THE MERMAID’S TALE.
When Mother asks about Dee, I don’t know how much to say. The truth is that Dee was shaken by what happened between Hugh and me. There was a brief period at the end of last summer when she talked about withdrawing from school, taking a semester off. I think she only wanted to be near us, to protect us somehow, as if she bore some responsibility in it all. We had to sit her down and tell her we would be okay, better than okay, that our problems had had nothing to do with her, only with ourselves. In the end she’d gone back to Vanderbilt, more serious, more grown up. Despite that, she called before I left home to say she was writing Hugh’s birthday song: “If Sofas Could Talk.”
What I tell Mother is that Dee has switched her major from English to premed, that she has decided to be a psychiatrist like Hugh. Mother wants to know if Dee’s decision has anything to do with what she did to her fingers. “No,” I say. “I think it has more to do with what I did.” I laugh, but there’s truth in it.
The five of us talk all afternoon. Till the sky darkens and the palmettos make pronged shadows at the window.
As they are leaving, Kat tugs me aside, over to a private place in the yard beside the bathtub Mary. She hands me a tan canvas bag, which I recognize instantly. It is the one Whit carried in the johnboat on rookery rounds.
“Dominic brought this to the shop a couple of weeks ago,” she says. “He asked me to give it to you.”
I do not open it then, but wait until Mother is asleep and I am alone in my room.
I take everything out and lay it across the bed. Four dried brown apple peels tucked inside a plastic bag. A battered box of Mermaid Tears. White egret feathers. The turtle skull. My father’s pipe.
All the things I’d left inside the crab trap in Whit’s hermitage are here. During the past year, not a week had gone by that I didn’t think about them, wishing I could’ve managed to go back for them.
Whit’s letter is at the bottom of the bag.
Dear Jessie,
I am returning your things. I have kept them all this time in my cottage, thinking I would give them to you myself when you returned to the island. I didn’t want to intrude on your life in Atlanta by sending them in the mail. I felt when you were ready, you would return for them.
I am not here, however, to give them to you in person. I will leave the monastery February 1. I took solemn vows last August, but, ironically enough, decided at Christmas that I would not stay after all.
I want to be in the world again. I understand now that a large part of me is not so much hidden here with God but hiding. I have decided to take back the hazard of life. I came here wanting God, but truthfully I was also looking for some kind of immunity from life. There is none.
And, of course, I may find that God is out there, too. Dominic reminded me that “God is the one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” I’ll go see if he’s right.
At first it was difficult for me to go back to the hermitage, to remember you there, to realize I would know you only as a memory or a longing. But finally I’m able to think of our time together without regret. You brought me deeper into life—how could I regret that?
I want you to be well. Please be happy.
Your Whit
I sit in my Mother’s blue house and cry into my hands. When that is done, I close the long year of my life, knowing it will stay with me like the turtle skull worn down by the sea, shining and white-boned.
The last thing Hugh said to me when I left
was this: “You are coming back this time, right?” He was smiling, teasing, wanting to lighten the tension we both felt at my returning.
I look toward the window. I want to tell him, Yes, I’m coming back, Hugh. When I die, it will be your face I see hovering over me, whether in flesh or in memory. Don’t you know? What I want is you. What I want is the enduring. The beautiful enduring.
Author’s Note
The Mermaid Chair is a work of fiction. The story, the characters, and the setting come purely from my imagination.
I’ve imagined Egret Island as part of the beautiful necklace of barrier islands along the coast of South Carolina, but you will not find the island on a map. It’s not a real place. Nevertheless, it’s similar to existing South Carolina islands when it comes to its beach, maritime forest, tidal marshes, estuaries, creeks, birds, and animals. I drew on numerous natural history and nature guidebooks; Todd Ballantine’s Tideland Treasure was particularly useful. All the plants, trees, and flora referred to in the book are real, though I took the liberty of inventing one fictitious plant that you will be able to distinguish in retrospect.
I’ve explored numerous barrier islands in South Carolina, but it was Bull Island—an uninhabited and pristine place—that was often in the back of my mind as I wrote. Not only did I position Egret Island geographically where Bull Island is located on South Carolina’s coastline, I also borrowed the name of Bull Island’s magnificent beach: Bone Yard.
St. Eudoria is not a real saint in the Catholic Church, as far as I know, though I based her story on accounts of saints who mutilated their bodies in the pursuit of holiness.
The legend of Sedna is a genuine Native American tale from the Inuit people, which has several variations. In recounting the story in the novel, I’ve attempted to be true to its source.
The monastery of St. Senara is nonexistent. In writing about it I’ve relied on a list of books too long to enumerate and on my years of study of contemplative spirituality and the monastic life.