The Mermaid Chair (20 page)

“How are you, Nelle?”

“Perfectly fine,” she said, and his eyes moved to examine her hand, the outlandish boxing-glove scarf-bandage.

He greeted Kat and Hepzibah.

“God, if you aren’t the most handsome man I’ve ever seen,”

said Kat, and Hugh blushed, a thing you didn’t see that much.

I was the one who suggested the two of us leave Max’s Café and take a walk. I don’t think I could’ve endured sitting there with him making small talk while Kat, Hepzibah, Benne, and Mother looked on.

We walked toward the center of the island along Slave Road, so named because it wound past the cemetery where the slaves had been buried. We talked with polite restraint, a kind of catch-up talk about what had been going on back home, how things were with Mother. My stomach felt alternately knotted and quivery.

When we came to the graveyard, we stopped automatically and stared at the cedar crosses Hepzibah had erected on each
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grave. They all faced east, so the dead could rise easier, or so she said. The island had been home to a small community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Eventually they all left or died off, but they’d been a presence here for a long time.

As we looked up at the massive live oak whose branches spread over the graves, I remembered what Dee had said on the phone about Mother’s becoming upset here, carrying on about a dead person’s finger.

Hugh sat on one of the limbs that had grown tired over the centuries of holding itself up and rested now on the earth. I followed, sitting beside him. We were quiet, Hugh looking at sky and air, at the twigs trembling on the ends of branches, while I studied tiny lime ferns and white, stubby mushrooms pushing through the dirt.

“This tree must be ancient,” Hugh said.

“Eight hundred years old,” I told him. A questionable “fact”

everyone on the island loved to quote. “Or at least that’s what people say. I guess there’s really no way to verify it. Hepzibah says they can’t take core samples, because apparently the tree has heart rot.”

He let his eyes drift toward mine. They had that sudden look of psychiatric wisdom, the look he got when he was sure he’d seen through the camouflage of someone’s words to an unin-tended meaning. I tried to read his face. What was he suggesting? That I’d said the poor tree had heart rot when really I was talking about myself ?

“What?”
I demanded, aggravated.

“What’s going on, Jessie?”

“You know what’s going on. I’m trying to deal with this t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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situation with Mother. And I told you I wanted to handle it by myself, so of course here you are—Hugh to the rescue.”

“Look, it’s true that I don’t think you should be trying to deal with this by yourself, but I didn’t come all this way because of that.”

“Why
are
you here, then? You snuck onto the island without even telling me you were coming.”

He didn’t respond. We sat for a minute with our shoulders taut and stared at the crosses. Little birds twitched in the moss over our heads.

I heard him sigh. He placed his hand on top of mine. “I didn’t mean to start a fight. I came because . . . because I made reserva-tions for us in Charleston, at the Omni. We’ll take the afternoon ferry and check in at the hotel. We can have dinner at Magno-lia’s. It’ll be an evening just for us, and I’ll bring you back to the ferry in the morning.”

I didn’t look at him. I wanted to feel for him what I felt for Whit. I wanted to conjure it out of the air. I had a sudden pan-icked moment as I realized I could not get back to the place I’d been before.

“I can’t,” I said.

“What do you mean? Of course you can.”

“How could you make all these plans without consulting me?”

“It’s called a surprise.”

“I don’t want any surprises.”

“What is wrong with you? You’ve been distant for months, Jessie. Then you come here and don’t call, and when I call you, you start a fight. Now this.”

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I slid my hand away and felt my heart let go. Like fingers turning loose of the side of a boat. Dropping through layers of water.

I’d never felt more terrified.

“I want some time apart,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say this, and I looked at him, trying to see by his reaction if I really had.

His head jerked backward sharply. It reminded me of a flag snapping in the wind. I’d shocked him. I’d shocked myself.

He reddened, and I realized it was not shock coursing through him but anger. The most awful, hurt-drenched anger.

“ ‘Apart’? What the hell are you talking about?” he bellowed.

I stood and took a step back from him. I thought he might shake me, and honest to God I almost wanted him to. “Apart from
me?
Is that what you mean? You want a goddamn separation?”

“A separation?” I stood there blinking, my heart gone eerily still. “I don’t know. I . . . I just want to be on my own awhile.”

“That’s what a separation
is!
” he shouted.

He walked off into the gray shadows of the tree and stopped, his back to me. His shoulders moved up and down as though he was breathing hard. He was shaking his head as if bewildered.

I took a step toward him at the same moment he began to walk away, along the road the way we’d come. He did not look back. He did not say good-bye. He walked with his hands in his pockets.

I watched with the feeling of life draining away, everything leaving, ending. An impulse to chase after him rose up. Part of me wanted to catch him in my arms, say,
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m
so horribly sorry,
but I didn’t move. A strange, Novocained feeling was settling into my limbs.

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He grew smaller and smaller, a moth fluttering away. When I could no longer see him, I went and sat back down on the tree.

The numbing weight filled me up. I stared at dimes of light moving on the ground and imagined Hugh at the ferry dock. I pictured him sitting on a bench waiting for the boat. Max was there, pushing his head onto Hugh’s knee, trying to comfort him. I wanted Max to be there—someone to go and make things better.

Long ago, when I was nine, Mike and I had come pedaling by the cemetery and found Hepzibah pulling weeds between the graves. I thought of that now. It had been a day in winter, but warm like this day, and the sky had condensed into those brash purples that came so often here.

We’d stopped and laid our bikes on the ground. She looked at us and said, “Did I ever tell you about the two suns?”

Hepzibah was always telling me and Mike one of her folktales from Africa, which we devoured. We shook our heads and plopped down on the ground beside her, ready for another one.

“Over in Africa the Sonjo used to say one day two suns will rise,” she told us. “One sun would come from the east, and one sun would come from the west. And when they met at the top of the sky, that would be the end.”

I looked at Mike, and he looked at me. She didn’t usually tell stories like this. I waited for more, for the rest of the tale, but, remarkably, she was finished.

“You mean the end of the
world?
” Mike said.

“I just mean that everything ends eventually. The two suns are always rising somewhere. That’s part of life. Something ends, and then something else will begin. You understand?”

She was scaring me a little. I backed out of the cemetery
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without answering her and rode home as fast as I could. My father died a week later. I didn’t go around Hepzibah for a long time. It was almost as if she’d known it was coming, though I realized later that was impossible.

As I sat here now, my body began to shake, trembling like the air after a cannonade. I imagined the ferry pulling up to the dock, Hugh stepping onto it, seagulls circling his head. I saw the boat pull away and the stretch of water become wide. Overhead, the two suns were crashing.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-two

pq

Iturned the golf cart into Kat’s driveway the next morning, angling past the MERMAID XING sign, feeling unaccountably lighthearted, unclouded, emancipated, something border-ing on frivolous. This after twisting around half the night in the sheets in guilt and alarm at what I’d done.

After Hugh had left yesterday, I’d sat beside the slave cemetery for an hour or more, until the paralysis wore off and the paroxysms of terror began.
What have I done?

I’d called him last night, twice. He hadn’t answered even though he’d had plenty of time to get back home. I hadn’t known why I was calling, or what I would say if he answered.

Probably I would have repeated a long litany of
I’m sorry, I’m
sorry.
What I’d done seemed impossible to me, completely disorienting. Like I’d amputated something—not a mere digit on my hand but my marriage, the symbiosis that had sustained me.

My life had been beautifully contained within Hugh’s, like one of those Russian nesting dolls, encompassed in wifeness, in a cocoon of domesticity. And I’d demolished it. For what?

I’d sat on the edge of the bed remembering odd bits and pieces of things. The time when Dee was small and Hugh had sung the Humpty Dumpty song to her while balancing an egg
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on the edge of the table, how he’d let it go, demonstrating Humpty’s great fall. She’d loved it so much that he’d killed off the entire carton, then afterward gotten down on the floor and cleaned up the whole mess. I’d thought of the silly game he played every Christmas—I Bet I Can Wear Every Present I Open.

I don’t mean sport shirts and slippers but fishing rods and steak knives. My part in this was to challenge him by buying one thing a human being seemingly could not wear. Last year it had been a cappuccino machine. Within two minutes he’d strapped it onto himself like a backpack using a couple of bungee cords.

“Voilà,” he’d said.

What if there were no more Hugh in my life? No more of these small antics, the moments we’d pieced together to form a history?

But were these habits of love—or love itself ?

I forced myself to consider how irritating he could be: the way he dried the insides of his ears with the hem of his undershirt, that maddening puffing sound he made, the toothbrush tapping, the walking around in nothing but socks and oxford shirts buttoned to his neck, the pulling open of drawers and cabinets and never closing them. Worse, the tiresome overanalyzing, the incessant rightness, the entitlement he felt when it came to us—that tendency of his to be the benevolent puppeteer.

People move on, I’d told myself. They create new histories.

Still, the panic had kept roiling until I’d fallen asleep.

This morning I’d wakened to a soft light folding in through the window, and my apprehension was gone, replaced by this strange buoyancy. I’d lain in bed, realizing I’d been dreaming.

The dream had faded, except for one rapturous fragment still spinning at the edge of my awareness. A man and woman travel-t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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ing beneath the ocean in a path of air bubbles and faint blue streams of light. They were breathing under the water. Holding hands.

The moment I’d opened my eyes, I’d felt their weightlessness in my arms and legs, the mysterious rush of the world below—

opaque, free, dangerous, and utterly foreign. I’d wanted to go throw myself into its arms.

Standing at the window in my old bedroom, where the whirly girls used to hang, I’d watched the early-morning light creaming through the dark sky and twisted my wedding rings over my knuckle. I’d held them a little while before dropping them onto an embroidery needle stuck like a horseshoe nail in an old velvet pincushion on the dresser.

Now, pulling up in front of Kat’s yellow house, I was a separated woman, and I didn’t know if I was possessed by a state of extreme denial or extreme relief.

I parked the cart beside the steps. When Kat swung open the door, Hepzibah and Benne stood behind her in the hallway.

I’d come uninvited, leaving Mother riffling through a pile of recipe books. “I didn’t know if you’d be here or at the Mermaid’s Tale,” I said to Kat.

“Today I open the shop after lunch,” she said, motioning me inside.

Hepzibah asked what they were all thinking. “How’s Hugh this morning?”

“He left yesterday.”

“I told you he did,” said Benne, crossing her arms over her chest.

Benne could be annoyingly smug and sometimes, like now, downright irksome.

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Kat ignored her. “What happened? The man just got here yesterday.”

“You know, you really ought to learn when to shut up,” Hepzibah told her. Taking my hand, she led me to the kitchen, into a warm, garlicky smell and the
hum-slosh
of the dishwasher. The room was painted the color of pluff mud—a rich, fermenting brown—and there were mermaid doodads everywhere. “I stopped by to have a cup of coffee. We were just about to pour it,” she said.

She filled four mugs while we sat around the long oak table.

An earthenware bowl in the center spilled over with plums, navel oranges, green bell peppers, and gigantic lemons.

“Mother is like a new woman this morning,” I said, wanting to steer the conversation away from Hugh. “I think the lunch did her a world of good. She’s talking about going back to the monastery and cooking again. She’s at home working on her menus.”

“Well, make sure they hide the meat cleavers,” Kat said.

“Kat!”
cried Hepzibah.

I set down my cup. “You don’t think she’d do it again?”

“No, actually I don’t,” Kat said. “But tell them to hide the cleavers anyway. You can’t be too careful.” She got up and placed a shopping bag beside my chair. “Shem dropped off your art supplies yesterday afternoon.”

I rummaged through the bag, spreading the contents onto the table. There was a one-and-a-half-inch sable wash brush and a number four for small line work, a John Pike palette, and an eighteen-by-twenty-four tablet filled with 140-pound cold-press paper. The size of the paper unnerved me—it was much larger than I’d requested. And the paints were not student grade, as I’d t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r