The Mermaid Chair (16 page)

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As I held the phone, I wanted to tell Hugh about it, the dormer and the china, but I wasn’t sure it made any sense.

“Jessie,” Hugh was saying, “did you hear me? When are you coming home?”

“I can’t possibly know when I’ll come home. Not yet. I could be here—I don’t know—a long time.”

“I see.”

I think he did see, too. He saw that my being on the island was about more than taking care of Mother; it was about the dis-quiet I’d felt all winter. It was about me, about us.

But he didn’t say that. He said, “Jessie, I love you.”

This will come out sounding terrible, but I felt he said it to test me, to see if I would say it back to him.

“I’ll call you in a few days,” I said.

When we hung up, I watched the window silver over with water, then walked back to the living room, to Mother and the TV and the bobsled race.

About four o’clock every afternoon, I would smell night coming. It would curl under the doors and windows—a wet, black smell. Wanting Thomas was worse at night.

I began to take long, involved baths at the first graying shade of darkness. I pilfered one of the emergency candles from Mother’s old hurricane box and set it on the ledge of the tub. I lit it, then made the water as hot as I could stand, until the room swirled with steam. I often sprinkled cedar leaves from the backyard onto the water, or a handful of salt, or spoonfuls of Mother’s lavender oil, as if I were creating a brew. The fragrance was sometimes overpowering.

I would slide down into it with only my nostrils sticking out.

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You would think I’d only now discovered water, its hot, silky feel.

Submerged, I would go off into a dreamy state. I had always loved Chagall’s
Lovers in the Red Sky,
his painting of an entwined couple soaring above rooftops, above the moon. The image would come to me each time I sank into the water, the couple sometimes flying through a red sky but more often swimming in searing blue water.

Other times I would think of the mermaid Chagall had painted, suspended above the water, above the trees, a flying mermaid, but without wings, and I would think of Thomas saying he envied mermaids who belonged equally to the sea and to the sky.

One night I sat up in bed. Something was different. It was, I realized, the silence on the roof. I looked toward the window and saw that the clouds had parted. Moonlight was falling into the room like bits of mica.

I got up and went plundering through the house for something, anything, to draw with. I found a decrepit box of colored pencils in Mike’s desk, where he must have left them two decades before. I stood at the kitchen table and sharpened them with a fish knife.

Unable to locate anything but notebook paper, I took down the large, framed picture of the Morris Island Lighthouse from over the mantel, wrestled out the print, and began to sketch im-patiently on the back side of it, with a ravenous kind of movement that was commanding and completely foreign to me.

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I covered the canvas with sweeping flows of blue water. In each corner I drew a nautilus shell with an orange light cracking out of it, and along the bottom turtle skulls, heaps of them rising in columns like a sunken civilization, the lost Atlantis. In the very center, I sketched the lovers. Their torsos were pressed together, their limbs braided. The woman’s hair wound around them both like May ribbons. They were flying. Waterborne.

The work was exhilarating—and a little scary. Like driving a car and having a blowout. When I finished, I returned the lighthouse print to its frame and hung it back over the mantel, the lovers facing the wall.

It was impossible to go back to sleep. I was wildly keyed up. I went into the kitchen to make tea. I was sitting at the table, sipping chamomile from a chipped mug, when I heard scratching at the door, a pronounced, deliberate sound. Flipping on the porch light, I peered out the kitchen window. Max sat on the porch, his black coat bedraggled and sodden.

I opened the door. “Oh, Max, look at you.” He peered up at me with questioning eyes. “All right, come on in.”

He was known to sleep at different homes on the island on a rotating basis, the schedule known only to him. Mother once said he showed up here every couple of months wanting a bed, but I doubted he arrived in the middle of the night. I wondered if his current landlord had turned him out. Had he seen the light on here?

I pulled out the old bedspread Mother kept for him in the pantry. As he curled up on it, I sat on the floor and dried him with a dish towel.

“What are you doing roaming around in the middle of the t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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night?” I said. He pricked up his ears a little, then laid his head across my thigh.

I stroked his ears, remembering what Thomas had said about Max going out in the boat with him when he did his rookery duties.

“You like Brother Thomas?” I said. He thumped his tail, I imagine because of the syrup that had taken over my voice—the tone used for newborn babies, puppies, kittens. “I know, I like him, too.”

Rubbing Max’s head worked better than the tea. The wired feeling started to ebb.

“Max, what am I going to do?” I said. “I’m falling in love.”

I’d come to this truth while sitting in the mermaid chair, but I hadn’t said it aloud. It surprised me what a relief it was to make the confession, even to a dog.

Max let out a breath and closed his eyes. I didn’t know how to stop feeling what I felt. To shake the idea that here was a person I was meant to find. It was not just the man who excited me—it was the sky in him, things in him that I did not know, had never tasted, might never taste perhaps. Right then it seemed almost easier to live with the devastation of my marriage than the regret of living my life without ever knowing him for sure, without flying through a red sky or a blue sea.

“My husband’s name is Hugh,” I said to Max, who was by now sound asleep. “Hugh,” I said again, then went on saying it in my head as a way to rescue myself.

Hugh. Hugh. Hugh.

C H A P T E R

Eighteen

pq

On March 2, I rolled the golf cart out of the garage and drove over the muddy roads to the cluster of shops near the ferry. The sun had returned with the indifferent look of winter, a hard, small fire lodged high and bright. As I bumped along through the oaks, I felt like a creature emerging from underground.

I wanted to pick up a few groceries at Caw Caw General Store and see, too, if they sold paints—I needed something besides Mike’s colored pencils. Mostly, though, I wanted to talk to Kat about Brother Dominic.

The ferry was docked, and a few tourists meandered along the sidewalk with their windbreakers zipped to their necks. I parked in front of Kat’s gift shop, where Max sat beneath the blue-and-white-striped awning.

Kat had nailed a small mirror beside the shop door, an old Gullah custom meant to scare away the Booga Hag.

As I opened the door, Max darted into the store ahead of me.

Kat, Benne, and Hepzibah sat behind the counter, eating ice cream from plastic bowls. They were the only ones in the store.

“Jessie!” Benne cried.

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Kat smiled at me. “Welcome to the world of living, breathing people. You want some ice cream?”

I shook my head.

Hepzibah was wearing an ebony shift with white lightning bolts on it and her signature matching head wrap. She looked like a beautiful thundercloud.

Max plopped at Benne’s feet, and she patted him, cutting her eyes at me. “Mama said you’ve been acting rude.”

“Oh, for Lord’s sake, Benne, do you have to repeat every damn thing I say?”

“You think I’ve been rude?” I asked, wanting to tease her, but a little miffed, too.

She grinned. “Well, what do you call it when a person phones you every single day saying, ‘Can I come visit? Can I bring you dinner? Can I come over and kiss your feet?’ And all this person gets back is, ‘We’re fine, thank you. Go away now’?”

“I didn’t say ‘Go away now,’ and I don’t recall you asking to kiss my feet. If you’d like, though, you can do that now.”

For some reason, whenever I got around Kat, I started behaving like her.

“Aren’t we testy?” she said. “Of course, if
I’d
been cooped up with Nelle Dubois for two weeks, I’d be lobbing grenades at people.”

I glanced around the shop for the first time. Tables and wall shelves brimmed with a bewildering array of items with mermaids on them: key chains, beach towels, greeting cards, em-bossed soaps, bottle openers, paperweights, night-lights. There were mermaid dolls, mermaid comb-and-mirror sets, even mermaids to hang on the Christmas tree. The mermaid xing signs
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were stuck in an umbrella stand in the corner, and a dozen mermaid wind chimes dangled from the ceiling. In the center of the store was a table arranged with a pile of Father Dominic’s booklets,
The Mermaid’s Tale,
with a sign declaring them special autographed copies.

“Pick something out,” said Kat. “A gift—some earrings or something.”

“Thanks, but I couldn’t.”

“You’re being rude again,” she said.

I picked up a box of Mermaid Tears. “Okay, then, I’ll take this.”

Benne got a folding chair for me from a closet, and I sat.

“What brings you to town?” asked Hepzibah.

“Groceries. And I thought I’d see if I could find—” I stopped, hesitant to say it out loud. The old inclination, I suppose, to keep my art confined and safe, like a potentially fractious child restricted to her room. I looked down at my hands.

My palms pushed together and held in the vise of my knees.

“Art supplies,” I said with an effort I hoped no one noticed.

“Watercolors, brushes, some cold-press paper . . .”

“Caw Caw sells electric hot-dog cookers and Chia Pets, but I doubt they have art supplies,” Kat said. She reached for a pencil and paper on the counter. “Here, write down what you want, and I’ll have Shem buy it for you next time he takes the ferry over.”

I jotted down the basics while their spoons scraped around for the last of the ice cream.

“I take it you’re planning to stay awhile, then?” said Hepzibah.

“Mother needs me, so yeah, I thought I would.”

Kat lifted her eyebrows. “How long is ‘awhile’?”

“I guess indefinitely,” I said, wanting to get off the subject.

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“What about Hugh?” she asked.

I thrust the list at her. “When you first called me, you accused me of neglecting Mother—I believe your exact words were, ‘You can’t go around like you don’t have a mother.’ And now you’re accusing me of neglecting Hugh?” My voice hit a high, bleating note on the word “Hugh.”

Kat acted like I’d smacked her in the face. “Good grief, Jessie, I don’t care whether you’re there taking care of Hugh. The man can take care of himself. Since when did I worry about men being taken care of by their wives? I was only wondering if everything’s okay with you two.”

“As if that’s any of your business,” Hepzibah said to her. I couldn’t imagine what Kat was picking up on. “So tell us—how’s Nelle?” Hepzibah asked.

I shrugged. “To be honest, I think Mother is depressed. All she does is sit in a chair, stare at the television, and work her Rubik’s Cube.”

“Lunch at Max’s!” Kat blurted. The dog had been snoring gently with his head on Benne’s shoe, but he slitted open his eyes at the mention of his name. “We’ll all have lunch at the café this Saturday.”

Over the years Mother had tried to tug her thread from the knot the three of them had made and thrown into the sea that night, the one that had held them together over the years. But Kat had refused to let her isolate herself. Her loyalty—and Hepzibah’s, too—had never wavered, not once.

“That’s a nice idea,” I said, realizing I couldn’t stay mad at Kat for more than three minutes. I don’t know why that was—

she was the most provoking woman I’d ever met. “But I doubt she’ll come,” I added.

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“Tell her the pope will be having lunch at Max’s this Saturday. That ought to do it.”

Hepzibah turned to me. “Just tell her we’ve been missing her and need to see her face.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “But don’t expect much.”

Glancing past them, I noticed the boat-wreck picture I’d painted when I was eleven, framed and hung over the cash register. “Oh, look, there’s my picture.”

A fiery white boat was lodged on the bottom of the ocean along with a smiling octopus, a giant clam with peeping eyes, and a herd of rocking sea horses. It looked like a happy page from a children’s book—except for the boat burning in the middle of it all.

Fire beneath the water—was that how I’d seen his death as a child? An inferno nothing could extinguish? On the serrated surface of the water, gray ashes floated like plankton, but above it the sun smiled and the world was a becalmed, cloudless place. I’d never noticed how much ache was inside the picture until now—

a child’s wish for the world to return to its perfect self.

When I looked around, Hepzibah was studying me. “I remember when you made that picture. You were one sad little girl.”

Kat scowled at her. “How festive of you to bring that up.”

Hepzibah said, “Jessie
was
sad. She knows it, and we know it.

So why not say it?” She’d never taken any kind of guff from Kat, which was probably why they got along so well.

“Why is it you never want to talk about that time?” I asked Kat. “I
want
to talk about it. I need to. I want to know, for instance, why everyone, including Mother, said it was a spark from my father’s pipe that caused the fire.”

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“Because it
was
a spark from the pipe that caused the fire,”

Kat said, and I saw Hepzibah nod.

“Well, I found this in a drawer in Mother’s bedroom,” I said, digging the pipe from my purse. I cupped it in my palms like a communion wafer or a butterfly with a torn wing. A smell of tobacco mixed with licorice drifted from the pipe bowl.