The Mermaid Chair (17 page)

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.

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“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 t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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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.

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“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.

C H A P T E R

Nineteen

pq

Anote had been slipped under the back door in the kitchen, folded inside a sealed, white envelope with a single word on the front:
Jessie.

I found it after I got back from Kat’s shop. Picking it up, I studied the writing—a bold, slanted script, but oddly filled with hesitation, as if the writer had stopped and started several times.

Some things you just know. Like Benne does.

I slid it into the pocket of my khakis at the same moment Mother walked into the room. “What’s that?” she said.

“Nothing,” I told her. “I dropped something.”

I did not open it right away. I let it rest in the dark pouch along my thigh, pressing like a hand. I told myself,
First I will call
my daughter. Then make tea. I will be sure Mother is situated, and
then I will sit on the bed and sip the tea and open the envelope.

I was an accomplished practitioner of delayed gratification.

Hugh once said people who could delay gratification were highly mature. I could put off happiness for days, months, years. That’s how “mature” I was. I learned it from eating Tootsie Roll Pops as a child. Mike would crunch through the candy shell immediately to get to the chocolate in the middle, while I licked and licked, wearing it down in an agonizingly slow process.

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I dialed Dee’s number in her dorm at Vanderbilt and listened to her chatter about her latest escapade. Her sorority had spon-sored “the world’s largest pillow fight,” 312 people on a softball field, feathers everywhere. Apparently the event was witnessed by a so-called scrutineer from the
Guinness Book of World Records
.

“It was all my idea,” she said proudly.

“I’m sure it was,” I said. “My daughter—a world-record holder. I’m very proud.”

“How’s Gran?” she asked.

“She’s okay,” I said.

“Did you find out why she did it?”

“She won’t talk to me yet, at least not about that. There’s something she’s hiding. The whole thing is complicated.”

“Mom? I was remembering— I don’t know, it’s probably nothing.”

“What? Tell me.”

“It’s just that one time when I visited her, a really long time ago, we were walking by that place where the slaves are buried, that cemetery, you know? And Gran totally freaked.”

“What do you mean, ‘freaked’?”

“She started crying and saying stuff.”

“Do you remember what she was saying?”

“Not really. Just something about seeing a dead person’s hand or fingers. I guess she was talking about the bodies in the cemetery, but she was real upset, and it kinda scared me.”

“You never mentioned it.”

“But she did crazy things like that. It was just Gran.” Dee paused, and I could hear her U2 tape playing in the background.

“I should have told you. Oh, Mom, you think if I’d said something, this wouldn’t have happened?”

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“Listen to me: It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference in what she did. Believe me. Okay? Your Gran is sick, Dee.”

“Okay,” she said.

After we hung up, I made peppermint tea and took a cup to the living room. There was Mother, the television, the Rubik’s Cube. The Russians had won an ice-skating medal, and their na-tional anthem was like a funeral dirge weighing down the room.

I set the cup on the table beside her and patted her shoulder. The episode Dee had described had only confused me more.

“Are you all right? How’s your hand?”

“Fine. But I don’t like peppermint tea,” she said. “It tastes like toothpaste.”

I closed the door to my room and turned the lock, then pulled the envelope out of my pocket. I placed it in the middle of the bed and sat down beside it. I sipped my tea and stared at it.

There was never any question I would open it. I was not trying to preserve those last moments of high and aggravated anticipation either—the slow, excruciating pleasure of wearing down to get to the chocolate. No, I was merely terrified. I was holding Pandora’s envelope.

I tore it open and pulled out a lined white paper, ragged along one edge, as if it had been torn from a journal.

Jessie,

I hope I’m not being too presumptuous in writing, but I wonder
if you would like to go for a ride in the johnboat. The egrets aren’t
plentiful now, but I’ve spotted a colony of white pelicans, which is
very rare. I’ll be at the dock in the rookery tomorrow at 2:00 P.M.,
and I would be happy if you joined me.

Brother Thomas (Whit)

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Whit
. I touched the word with my finger, then said it out loud, sensing the intimacy that had gone into the act of disclosing his real name. It felt as though he’d offered a hidden part of himself to me, one the monastery did not own. And yet the note had a certain formality about it.
I would be happy if you joined me.

I read it several times. I didn’t realize that the teacup had turned over on the bed until I felt the wetness seep against my leg. I soaked up what I could with a towel, then lay down beside the dampness, breathing the smell of peppermint, the sweet cleanness of it drifting from the sheets like a fresh new beginning.

A half-dozen seagulls squatted behind me on the dock in the rookery in perfect formation, like a small squadron of planes waiting to take off. I had come early, too early. More out of cau-tion than eagerness. I’d reasoned that if I arrived early and felt I couldn’t go through with meeting him, I could simply leave.

Unseen.

For almost an hour, I sat cross-legged at the edge of the dock beneath the gleaming, cloudless ceiling of light and studied the water. It looked tawny, the color of mangoes and cantaloupes, and the tide was flooding in, splashing against the pilings as if the creek had lost all patience.

A faded red canoe, almost pink now, lay upside down on one end of the dock, the bottom encrusted with barnacles. I recognized it as Hepzibah’s. I’d been a passenger in it at least thirty years ago. On the other end, a spruce green johnboat, practically new, bobbed on the water, sunlight running in hypnotic wave patterns along the side.

I heard a board creak behind me, and the gulls lifted. Turn-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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ing, I saw him standing on the dock, gazing at me. He wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. His shoulders were broader, more muscular than I’d thought they would be, and his arms had the leathery look of someone who worked in the sun. A wooden pectoral cross hung around his neck, oddly discordant with the rest of him.

It was as if he’d been residing in an obscure place in my heart and suddenly stepped out of it. A real man, but not quite real either.

“You came,” he said. “I didn’t know if you would.”

I got to my feet. “You promised white pelicans.”

He laughed. “I said I’d
spotted
white pelicans. I can’t promise we’ll see them.”

He climbed into the boat and, taking my hand, helped me step down into it. For a moment his face was close to mine. I could smell soap on his skin, starting to mingle with a slight muskiness from the warmth of the day.

I sat down on the front bench—Max’s seat, I imagined—

facing backward and watched as Thomas started the small out-board motor. He sat beside it as it churned the golden brown water, holding the rudder, easing us into the middle of the creek.

“Should I call you Thomas or Whit?” I asked.

“I haven’t been called Whit in years. I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

“I assume your mother named you that. As opposed to the abbot.”

“She named me John Whitney O’Conner and called me Whit.”

“Okay, then, Whit,” I said, trying it out.

We plied through the ebb-tide delta on the back side of the
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island at an idle. We threaded coils in the creek so narrow and lush in places I could almost stretch out my arms and touch the grasses on either side. We didn’t try to converse anymore over the engine. I think we were both trying to get comfortable with the strangeness of what was happening, of being together in a little boat disappearing into the aloneness of the marsh.

He pointed to a flash of mullet, to several wood storks lifting out of the grass, to an osprey nest perched atop a dead pine.

We wound through the loops in the creek for a while before Whit sharply veered the boat into a tributary that eventually dead-ended in a circle of water surrounded by a wall of tall grass six or seven feet high. He cut the engine, and the silence and seclusion of the place welled up. I felt as though we’d passed through the eye of a tiny needle into a place that was out of time.

He slid the anchor over the side. “This is where I saw the white pelicans. I believe they’re feeding near here, so if we’re lucky, they’ll fly over.” He glanced at the sky, and I forced myself to do the same, to look away from his face. It was mottled with sunlight and a hint of beard stubble.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a wooden structure protruding above the brush on a tiny island some twenty or thirty yards behind him.

“Oh, that’s my unofficial hermitage,” he said. “It’s basically nothing but a lean-to. I use it to read or just sit and meditate.

I’ve been known to take naps in it, too. To be perfectly honest, I’ve probably napped in it more than I’ve meditated.”