The Mermaid Chair (13 page)

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.

O
n 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.

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, embossed 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 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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

They stared at it without speaking, their empty ice-cream bowls sitting crooked in their laps. Their faces were completely expressionless.

Finally Kat asked, “What did Nelle say about it?”

“I haven't mentioned the pipe to her yet. I'm afraid seeing it might send her over the edge again.”

Kat held out her hand for the pipe, and I gave it to her. She turned it over several times, as if she might divine some answer from it. “The police were just speculating when they said it was the pipe that started the fire. So it was something else—what difference does it make now?” She handed the pipe back to me.

“But why would she let the police and everyone else believe that it was the pipe when she had it all along? Why would she lie about it?” I asked.

Sunlight poured through the storefront window from a little spout between the clouds, and all three of them turned their faces toward the dusty brightness.

“I went to see Father Dominic,” I said. “I sort of accused him of knowing something about Mother cutting off her finger.”

“You
didn't,
” said Kat.

“I did. And you know what he told me? To leave matters alone. He said that if I didn't, it could hurt Mother.”

“He said
that?
” Kat stood up and walked to the counter. “This doesn't make any sense.” She glanced at Hepzibah, who seemed just as mystified as Kat was.

“He's hiding something,” I insisted.

Kat walked behind my chair. Her hands floated down onto the tops of my shoulders and rested there. When she spoke, the acerbic edge that slipped so easily into her voice was gone. “We'll figure this out, Jessie, okay? I'll talk with Dominic.”

I smiled up at her appreciatively. I could see the line along her jaw where her makeup ended. Her throat lifted as she swallowed, exposing a whole continent of tenderness in her.

The moment must have grown too dear for her, because she abruptly moved her hands and changed the subject. “In exchange, you're going to have to paint some mermaid pictures for me to sell in the store.”

“What?”

She came around and stood in front of me. “You heard me. You said you were going to paint, so paint mermaids. They would sell like crazy in here. You can do it on consignment. We'll put a big price on them.”

I stared at her, openmouthed. In my head I saw a canvas of lapis sky filled with winged mermaids flying around like angels and diving from great heights into the sea. I tried to remember what Thomas had said about mermaids with wings. Something about sea muses bringing messages from below. Living in two realms.

Kat said, “Well? What about it?”

“I might try it. We'll see.”

The tourists I'd noticed earlier wandered in now, and Kat went to greet them while Hepzibah stood, saying she had to get home. I needed to go, too, but I went on sitting there with Benne, still thinking of Thomas.

During the last twelve days, caged up in Mother's house, I'd told myself so many contradictory things. That I was in love, and not only that, but it was a Great Love, and to walk away from it would be a denial of my life. And then alternately, that I was having an insane infatuation, that it was a heart-twisting moment in time that would eventually pass, and I had to be stoic.

I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart.

Benne straightened up and looked at me, squinting, the tip of her tongue resting on her bottom lip. “Jessie?” she said.

“What is it, Benne?”

She scooted her chair close to mine and pushed her lips against my ear the way children do when imparting secrets. “You love one of the monks,” she whispered.

I reared back and blinked at her. “Where did you get such an idea?”

“I just know.”

Refuting it to her would be pointless. Benne, of course, was never wrong.

I wanted to be angry with her, to swat her for snooping around in my heart, but she rose up on her seat smiling at me, a woman my age with the sweet mind of a child and a prodigious psychic ability. She didn't even know how dangerous truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.

“Benne,” I said, taking her hand, “listen carefully. You mustn't say anything about this to anyone. Promise me.”

“But I already did.”

I turned loose her hand and closed my eyes for a moment before asking her. “Who?” I said. “Who did you tell?”

“Mama,” she answered.