The Mermaid Chair (9 page)

Out here in the middle of the garden, the statue appeared like a stamen protruding from the center of a huge, winter-blighted flower. It occurred to me that the saint had presided the same way over my childhood, her shadow hovering above the emptiness that had come when I was nine.

The worst punishment Mike and I had ever received had come because we’d dressed the statue in a two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses, and a blond wig. We’d cut the bottom of the suit in half and pinned it together around Senara’s hips. Some monks had thought the getup was funny, but Mother had cried over our disrespect and sentenced us to write the Agnus Dei five hundred times a day for a solid week:
Lamb of God, who takest away the
sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Instead of being contrite, I’d merely felt confused about it all, as if I’d betrayed Senara and liberated her at the same time.

As I stood near the back of the garden, trying to think what
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to do now that Mother plainly wasn’t here, I heard a thin scratching sound drift from the general vicinity of Senara’s statue, like a small bird raking the ground for grubs and insects.

I came up behind the statue, and there was Mother sitting on the ground with the mayonnaise jar, her white hair a neon splotch in the dark.

She wore her practical navy coat over a long chenille bathrobe and sat with her legs splayed out in front her, the way a child might sit in a sandbox. She was digging in the dirt with her left hand, using what looked like a stainless-steel soup ladle. The bandage on her right hand appeared the size of a child’s baseball glove and was speckled with dirt.

She didn’t see me; she was utterly absorbed in what she was doing. I stared at her silhouette for several seconds, my relief at finding her shifting into some fresh new dread. I said, “Mother, it’s me, Jessie.”

She reared back with a sudden jerk, and the ladle fell into her lap.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
she cried. “You scared me to death!

What are you doing here?”

I sank down beside her. “I’m out here looking for you,” I replied, trying to sound natural and unalarmed. I even tried to smile.

“Well, you found me,” she said, then picked up the ladle and resumed work on the mouse hole she’d made at the base of the statue.

“All right, we’ve established what
I’m
doing here. Now, what are
you
doing here?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really concern you.”

When I’d found Dee that day in the shoe store I’d grabbed her by the shoulders, wanting to scream at her for scaring me, t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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and the same irrational anger flared in me now. I wanted to shake my mother till her teeth tumbled out.

“How can you say that?” I demanded. “Hepzibah must’ve told you I was here, and you took off before I could even get into the house.
You
scared
me
to death, too.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just needed to take care of this.”

This.
What was
this?
I turned on the flashlight and directed a beam of light onto the mayonnaise jar. Her dismembered finger lay inside it. It looked very clean, and the nail appeared to have been filed. Lifting the jar level with my nose, I could see the shriveled edge of skin at the severed end with a piece of white bone protruding.

A sick feeling passed through me, similar to my nausea that morning. I closed my eyes and didn’t speak, and Mother went on scraping at the cold ground. At last I said, “I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but you’re not well, and you need to get up and come back to the house with me.”

I felt suddenly bleary with exhaustion.

“What do you mean, I’m not well?” she said. “I’m perfectly well.”

“
Really?
Since when is purposely cutting off your finger considered perfectly well?” I sighed.
“Jesus Christ!”

She whirled toward me then. “Why don’t you call on someone you
know?
” she said in a scalding tone. “Nobody asked you to come back.”

“Kat asked me.”

“Kat needs to mind her own business.”

I snorted. “Well, fat chance of that.”

I heard the beginnings of a laugh down in her throat, a rare
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melting sound I hadn’t heard in so long, and for some reason it knocked my little wall of anger flat.

Sliding over so that our shoulders touched, I laid my hand on top of hers, the one still coiled around the spoon, and I thought maybe she would jerk it away, but she didn’t. I felt the tiny stick bones in her hand, the soft lattice of veins. “I’m sorry. For everything,” I said. “I really am.”

She turned and looked at me, and I saw that her eyes were brimming, reflecting like mirrors. She was the daughter, and I was the mother. We had reversed the natural order of things, and I couldn’t fix it, couldn’t reverse it. The thought was like a stab.

I said, “Tell me. Okay? Tell me why you did this to yourself.”

She said, “Joe—your father,” and then her jaw slumped down as if his name bore too much weight for her mouth. She looked at me and tried again. “Father Dominic . . .” she said, but her voice trailed off.

“What? What about Father Dominic?”

“Nothing,” she said, and refused to go on. I couldn’t imagine what sort of anguish was stoppered inside her, or what Father Dominic had to do with anything.

“I didn’t get my ashes today,” she said, and I realized I hadn’t either. It was the first Ash Wednesday service I had missed since my father died.

Picking up the ladle, she scooped at the ground. “The dirt is too hard.”

“Are you trying to bury your finger?” I asked.

“I just want to put it in a hole and cover it up.”

If your mother says fish fly, just say, Yes, ma’am, fish fly.

I took the digging tool from her. “All right, then.”

I gouged out the opening she’d made at the base of the statue t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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until the hole was about six inches deep. She unscrewed the jar and pulled out her finger. She held it up, and both of us stared at it, Mother with a kind of dark reverence on her face and me subdued, almost numb.

We are burying my mother’s finger,
I told myself.
We are out
here in a garden burying a finger, and it has something to do with
my father. And with Father Dominic.
I think we could have lit the tip of her finger and let it burn like a taper and the moment wouldn’t have seemed any stranger to me.

As Mother laid her finger in the hole, she turned it knuckle up and brushed the fingers on her good hand along the length of it before covering it with the spooned-out dirt. I watched it disappear, an image in my head of a small mouth opening and closing in the earth, swallowing a part of my mother that she could no longer endure.

The ground was spattered with dried rose petals, as if all the red flames had fallen off their candles. I raked up a papery handful. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,”

I said, and pressed a petal onto Mother’s forehead, then one onto mine. “So now you have your ashes.”

Mother smiled at me.

The garden became absolutely still and quiet, yet neither of us heard him approaching until he was almost beside us. Mother and I both looked up at the same moment and saw him step from behind the statue, materializing out of the shadows in his long robe, very tall, his face shining in the bright-lit night.

C H A P T E R

Eight

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Iscrambled to my feet, while Mother continued to sit on the ground. The monk looked down at her. He had to be at least six-one or -two and had the lean, possessed look of an athlete, a swimmer perhaps, or a long-distance runner.

“Nelle?” he said. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t ask what we were doing sitting on the ground in the dark with a soup ladle, an empty Hellmann’s jar, and a fresh mound of dirt.

“I’m fine,” Mother told him. “I came to see the saint, that’s all.”

He pushed back the cowl from his head, smiling at her, such an easy, infectious smile, and I saw that his hair was dark and impeccably short.

He glanced at Mother’s bandaged hand. “I’m sorry about your injury. We prayed for you at mass.”

He turned toward me, and we stared at each other for several seconds. In the sharp light of the moon, I noticed that his eyes were pale blue and his face deeply tanned. There was an irresistible look of boyishness about him, but something else, too, that struck me as serious, intense.

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“Brother Thomas,” he said, smiling again, and I felt an odd catch in my chest.

“I’m Nelle’s daughter,” I replied. “Jessie Sullivan.”

Later I would revisit that encounter again and again. I would tell myself that when I met him, all the dark little wicks in the cells of my body lifted up in the knowledge that here he was—

the one you wait for, but I don’t know if that was really true, or if I only came to believe that it was. I’m sure I’ve burdened our first meeting with too much imagining. But I
did
feel that catch in my chest; I saw him, and something happened.

Mother struggled to get to her feet, and he offered her his hand, tugging her up, and didn’t let go until she had her balance.

“Who’s cooking your meals?” she asked him.

“Brother Timothy.”

“Oh, not him!” she exclaimed. “I think he’s a very good refectorian—he does a good job setting out the dishes and filling the milk pitchers—but he can’t cook.”

“Of course he can’t,” said Thomas. “That’s why the abbot chose him. He made a very mysterious casserole today. We’ve all been forced into a Lenten fast.”

Mother gave him a playful shove with her good hand, and I caught a glimpse of the affection the monks had for her. It surprised me. I’d thought of her as the nettlesome monastery mas-cot, but perhaps she was more to them than that.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll be back in the kitchen in a few days.”

“No, you won’t,” I said, too abruptly. “It could take weeks for your hand to heal.” Her eyes flared at me.

Thomas said, “Weeks! We’ll all be starved by then. We’ll be
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sanctified and purified from fasting, but we’ll be completely emaciated.”

“I’ll bring Jessie with me,” Mother said. “She’ll help me do the cooking.”

“No, no, you take your time getting well,” he said to her.

“I’m only teasing you.”

“We need to get back,” I muttered.

I followed them through the wrought-iron gate, down the path toward the house, Thomas holding Mother’s elbow, guiding her along. She was chattering to him. I held the jar and ladle in one hand and aimed the flashlight with the other.

He walked with us all the way to Nelle’s Gate. Mother paused before slipping through it. “Give me a blessing,” she said.

He looked unnerved by the request, and I thought,
What an
uncomfortable monk he is.
He raised his right hand over her head and traced a clumsy cross in the air. It seemed to satisfy her, and she strode off across her yard toward the house.

I stepped through the gate and looked at him from the other side of the wall. It was made of brick and came to my waist.

“Thanks for walking back with us,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”

He smiled again, and the lines on either side of his mouth deepened. “It was no trouble. I was glad to.”

“You must be wondering what Mother and I were doing out there.” I set the jar and the dirt-crusted ladle on top of the wall, then put the flashlight down, too, pointing the stream of light off into the trees. I don’t know why I suddenly felt compelled to explain things, probably out of embarrassment.

“She wasn’t just visiting St. Senara. I found her on her knees t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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beside the statue, trying to bury her finger in the dirt. She was so bent on doing it that I ended up digging the hole for her myself.

I have no idea whether that was a good idea or not, whether I was helping her or making things worse.”

He shook his head a little. “I probably would’ve done the same thing if I’d found her there,” he said. “Do you think she was offering her finger to St. Senara?”

“To be honest, I don’t know
anything
anymore when it comes to my mother.”

He let his gaze settle on me, the same absorbing stare as before. “You know, a lot of us at the monastery feel like we should’ve seen what was coming. We’re with Nelle every single day, and not one of us had a clue she was so . . .”

I thought he was going to say crazy. Or demented.

“Desperate,” he said.

“ ‘Desperate’ is putting it mildly,” I told him.

“You’re right, I suppose it is. At any rate, we feel bad about it.”

There was a moment of silence when the chilled air rose up around us. I looked back for Mother. Yellow light poured out of the windows, drenching the air around the house. She had already climbed the back stairs and disappeared into the kitchen.

I realized I didn’t want to go inside. Arching my neck, I looked up at the sky, at the milky smear of stars, feeling a momentary sensation of floating, of becoming unmoored from my life. When I looked back down, I saw his strong, browned hands resting on the bricks inches from my own and wondered what it would feel like to touch them.

“Look, if you need anything, if we can help somehow, call us,” he said.

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“You’re only a wall away,” I responded, and patted the bricks, trying to make a little joke, to ease how self-conscious I suddenly felt.

He laughed and pulled his cowl up over his head. His face disappeared into the dark pocket.

I gathered up the objects on the wall, turned quickly, and crossed the lawn, hurrying. Not looking back.

C H A P T E R

Nine

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The next morning when I woke in my old room, I realized I’d dreamed about Brother Thomas.