I reached for the robe draped on the bedpost. Pulling it around my shoulders, I took the phone while Hugh stood there, hovering, unsure whether to leave. I covered the mouthpiece. “No one died, did they?”
He shook his head.
“Go get dressed. Or go back to bed,” I told him.
“No, wait—” he said, but I was already saying hello into the phone, and he turned then and walked into the bathroom.
“You poor thing, I’ve gotten you up at daybreak,” a woman’s voice said. “But so you know, it wasn’t deliberate. I’ve been up so long, I simply forgot how early it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Lord, I’m such a blooming optimist, I thought you’d recognize me. It’s Kat. Egret Island Kat. Your godmother Kat. The Kat who changed your damn diapers.”
My eyes closed automatically. She’d been my mother’s best friend since forever—a petite woman in her sixties who wore folded-down, lace-trimmed socks with her high heels, suggesting a dainty, eccentric old lady whose formidability had thinned along with her bones. It was a great and dangerous deception.
I lowered myself to the bed, knowing there was only one reason she would call. It would have to do with my mother, the famously crazy Nelle Dubois, and judging from Hugh’s reaction, it would not be good.
Mother lived on Egret Island, where once we’d all been a family—I would say an “ordinary” family, except we’d lived next door to a Benedictine monastery. You cannot have thirty or forty monks for next-door neighbors and claim it’s ordinary.
The debris from my father’s exploded boat had washed up onto their property. Several monks had brought the board with Jes-Sea on it and presented it to Mother like a military flag. She’d quietly made a fire in the fireplace, then called Kat and Hepzibah, the other member of their trinity. They’d come and stood there along with the monks, while Mother had ceremoniously tossed the board onto the flames. I’d watched as the letters blackened, as the board was consumed. I remembered it sometimes when I woke in the night, had even thought about it in the middle of my wedding ceremony. There had been no funeral, no memorial, only that moment to call back.
It was after that that Mother began going over to cook the monks’ midday meal, something she’d now done for the last thirty-three years. She was more or less obsessed with them.
“I do believe our little island could sink into the sea, and it wouldn’t faze you,” Kat said. “What’s it been? Five years, six months, and one week since you set foot here?”
“That sounds right,” I said. My last visit, on the occasion of my mother’s seventieth birthday, had been a disaster of biblical proportions.
I’d taken Dee, who was twelve, and we’d presented Mother with a pair of gorgeous red silk pajamas from Saks, very Oriental, with a Chinese dragon embroidered on the top. She’d refused to accept them. And for the dumbest reason. It was because of the dragon, which she referred to alternately as “a beast,” “a demon,” and “a figure of moral turpitude.” St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, she said. Did I really expect her to sleep in such a thing?
When she got like that, no one could reason with her. She’d hurled the pajamas into the trash can, and I’d packed our bags.
The last time I’d seen my mother, she was standing on the porch, shouting, “If you leave, don’t come back!” And Dee, poor Dee, who only wanted a seminormal grandmother, crying.
Kat had driven us to the ferry that day in her golf cart—the one she drove maniacally around the island’s dirt roads. She’d blown the air horn on it incessantly during the ride to distract Dee from crying.
Now, on the other end of the phone, Kat went on playfully scolding me about my absence from the island, an absence I’d come to love and protect.
I heard the shower in the bathroom come on. Heard it over the rain driving hard against the windows.
“How’s Benne?” I asked. I was stalling, trying to ignore the feeling that something was perched over my head, about to fall.
“Fine,” Kat said. “Still translating Max’s every thought.”
In spite of my growing anxiety, I laughed. Kat’s daughter, who had to be forty by now, had been “not quite right” since birth, as Kat put it. The correct expression was “mentally challenged,” but Benne was also peculiarly gifted, given to premonitions of uncanny exactitude. She simply knew things, extracting them out of the air through mysterious antennae the rest of us didn’t possess. She was said to be particularly adept at deciphering the thoughts of Max, the island dog who belonged to no one and everyone.
“So what’s Max saying these days?”
“The usual things—‘My ears need scratching. My balls need licking. Why do you assume I want to fetch your idiotic stick?’”
I pictured Kat in her house perched high on stilts as all the island houses were. It was the color of lemons. I could see her sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen where over the years she, Hepzibah, and my mother had cracked and picked ten thousand blue crabs. “The Three Egreteers,” my father had called them.
“Look, I called about your mother.” She cleared her throat. “You need to come home and see about her, Jessie. No excuses.”
I lay back on the bed; I felt like a tent collapsing, the center pole yanked out, followed by the billowy floating.
“My excuse,” I said, “is that she doesn’t want me there. She’s—”
“Impossible. I know. But you can’t pretend you don’t have a mother.”
I almost laughed. I could no more pretend I didn’t have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.
I said, “I invited Mother here this past Christmas. Did she come? Of course she didn’t. I send her things for her birthday, for Mother’s Day—things without dragons on them, I hasten to say—and I never hear a word back.”
I was glad Hugh was still in the shower so he couldn’t hear. I was sure I’d just shouted.
“She doesn’t need your gifts and your phone calls—she needs you.”
Me.
Why did it always come to this, to me, to the daughter? Why didn’t she call Mike out in California and harangue him? The last time I’d spoken to him, he said he’d become a Buddhist. Surely as a Buddhist he would have more patience for her.
Silence fell between us. I heard the shower go off, the pipes bang.
“Jessie,” she said. “The reason I called…Yesterday your mother cut off her finger with a meat cleaver. Her right index finger.”
Bad news registers belatedly with me; the words come, but not the meaning. They hover in the corner of the room for a while, up near the ceiling, while my body makes the necessary preparation. I said, “Is she okay?”
“She’s going to be fine, but they had to operate on her hand at the hospital over in Mount Pleasant. Of course she pitched one of her famous fits and refused to spend the night there, so I brought her home with me last night. Right now she’s in Benne’s bed, sleeping off the painkillers, but the minute she wakes up, she’s gonna want to go home.”
Hugh opened the bathroom door, and a gust of steam surged into the bedroom. “You okay?” he mouthed, and I nodded. He closed the door, and I heard him tap his razor on the sink. Three times like always.
“The thing is—” Kat stopped and took a breath. “Look, I’m just going to say it straight out. It wasn’t an accident. Your mother went over to the monastery kitchen and cut off her finger. On purpose.”
It hit me then—the full weight, the gruesomeness. I realized that part of me had been waiting for her to go and do something crazy for years. But not this.
“But why? Why would she do that?” I felt the beginnings of nausea.
“It’s complicated, I guess, but the doctor who operated on her said it might be related to sleep deprivation. Nelle hadn’t slept much for days, maybe weeks.”
My abdomen contracted violently, and I dropped the phone onto the bed, rushing past Hugh, who was standing at the sink with a towel around his waist. Sweat ran down my ribs, and, throwing off the robe, I leaned over the toilet. After I emptied myself of what little there was to throw up, I went on retching plain air.
Hugh handed me a cold washcloth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wanted to tell you myself, but she insisted on doing it. I shouldn’t have let her.”
I pointed through the doorway to the bed. “I need a moment, that’s all. I left her on the phone.”
He went over and picked up the receiver while I dabbed the cloth to the back of my neck. I sank onto the cane-bottomed chair in the bedroom, waiting for the cascading in my abdomen to stop.
“It’s a hard thing for her to take in,” I heard him say.
Mother had always been what you’d call fervent, making me and Mike drop pennies into empty milk jars for “pagan babies” and every Friday lighting the Sacred Heart of Jesus candles in the tall glasses and going to her knees on the floor in her bedroom, where she said all five decades of the rosary, kissing the crucifix on which Jesus had been rubbed down to a stick man from all the devotion. But people did that. It didn’t mean they were crazy.
It was after the boat fire that Mother had turned into Joan of Arc—but without an army or a war, just the queer religious compulsions. Even then, though, I’d thought of her as normal-crazy, just a couple of degrees beyond fervent. When she wore so many saints’ medals pinned to her bra that she clinked, when she started cooking at the monastery, behaving as if she owned the place, I’d told myself she was just an overextended Catholic obsessed with her salvation.
I walked over and held out my hand for the phone, and Hugh gave it to me. “This is hardly a bad case of insomnia,” I said to Kat, interrupting whatever she’d been saying to Hugh. “She has finally gone insane.”
“Don’t you ever say that again!” Kat snapped. “Your mother is not insane. She’s tormented. There’s a difference. Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear—do you think he was insane?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
“Well, a lot of very informed people think he was tormented,” she said.
Hugh was still standing there. I waved him away, unable to concentrate with him hovering over me like that. Shaking his head, he wandered into the walk-in closet across the room.
“And what is Mother tormented about?” I demanded. “Please don’t tell me it’s my father’s death. That was thirty-three years ago.”
I’d always felt that Kat harbored some knowledge about Mother that was off-limits to me, a wall with a concealed room behind it. Kat didn’t answer immediately, and I wondered if this time she might really tell me.
“You’re looking for a reason,” she said. “And that doesn’t help. It doesn’t change the present.”
I sighed at the same moment Hugh stepped out of the closet wearing a long-sleeved blue oxford shirt buttoned all the way to his neck, a pair of white boxer shorts, and navy socks. He stood there fastening his watch onto his wrist, making the sound—the puffing sound with his mouth.
The scene felt almost circadian to me—methodical, daily, abiding—one I’d witnessed a thousand times without a trace of insurrection, yet now, in this most unlikely moment, just as this crisis with Mother had been dropped into my lap like a wailing infant, I felt the familiar discontent that had been growing in me all winter. It rose with such force it felt as if someone had physically struck me.
“So,” Kat said. “Are you coming or not?”
“Yes, I’m coming. Of course I’m coming.”
As I said the words, I was filled with relief. Not that I would be going home to Egret Island and dealing with this grotesque situation—there was no relief in that, only a great amount of trepidation. No, this remarkable sense of relief was coming, I realized, from the fact I would be going away period.
I sat on the bed holding the phone, surprised at myself, and ashamed. Because as awful as this situation with Mother was, I was almost glad for it. It was affording me something I hadn’t known until this moment that I desperately wanted: a reason to leave. A good, proper, even noble reason to leave my beautiful pasture.