I took the pipe to my room. I doubted she would go through the drawer and miss it. As I tucked it inside my purse, the relief I felt became full-blooded anger. I began to pace. I had an overwhelming impulse to shake Mother awake and ask why she’d let me grow up believing that my pipe had been the cause of everything.
Mine had been a private blame, a heaviness no one sees, the kind that comes over you in dreams when you try to run but can barely move. I’d carried it like a weight in the shafts of my bones, and she’d let me. She had let me.
Wait. That wasn’t completely fair. Maybe Mother had thought I didn’t know about the pipe. She’d tried to protect me from knowing—never speaking about it, hiding the clipping—and yet it didn’t excuse her. It didn’t. She would have to think in some small corner of her head that Mike and I would find out. The whole island had known about the pipe, for Christ’s sake. How could she think we didn’t?
I could hear her breathing, an accordion rhythm that moved through the house. I didn’t want to be there when she woke up. I scribbled a message and propped it on the kitchen table, saying I needed exercise, some air.
Hepzibah’s house was less than a mile away, down a crook of road that wound past the slave cemetery, toward the egret rookery, and then around to the beach. I could see it as I came around a curve, surrounded by wild tufts of evening primrose and seaside spurge. I knocked on her iridescent blue front door and waited.
She didn’t answer.
I followed the path to the back of the house. The little screen porch was unlocked, so I stepped inside and rapped on the door to the kitchen, which was the same shiny indigo as the door in front. The blue was supposed to scare away the Booga Hag—a haunting spirit said to suck the soul out of you during the night. I doubted that Hepzibah believed in the Booga Hag, but she loved the old Gullah ways. And just in case the blue doors didn’t deter the Hag, Hepzibah had planted a row of conch shells in her garden.
On the side of the porch she had the so-called show-and-tell table set up as always, heaped with the ragged island treasures she’d spent most of her life collecting.
I walked over to it, besieged by a sudden, potent nostalgia. Mike and I had spent hours huddled over this table. It was piled with stalks of coral, crab claws, sea sponges, lightning whelks, shark eyes, augers, jackknife clams. Every lowly shell was remembered here, even broken ones. I picked up several chipped sand dollars, a starfish with two arms. Egret, heron, and ibis feathers were wedged among the objects, some standing straight up as if they’d sprouted there.
In the center of the table, elevated on a wooden box, was the elongated jawbone of an alligator. Naturally this had been Mike’s favorite object. Mine had been the chalk-white skull of a loggerhead turtle. In my imagination I’d swum with that turtle through boundless water, down to the floor of the ocean and back.
I poked around and discovered it stuffed among a pile of cockles.
The night Hepzibah had found the skull, we were having the All-Girls Picnic on the beach. At least that was how those occasions came to be known. I sat down now in an old rocker, holding the turtle skull in my hands, feeling the jolt of nostalgia again. I hadn’t thought about the All-Girls Picnics in so long. Since I was a girl.
Kat had started them way back when both she and Mother were new brides, and Benne was only a toddler. Every May Day eve without fail, they’d gathered on Bone Yard Beach. If it was raining, they’d hold the picnic the first clear night after that, though I recall that one year Kat got tired of waiting and set up a tarp.
After Hepzibah hooked up with Mother and Kat, she joined the All-Girls Picnics, too, and then I got to come as soon as I could walk. They had stopped abruptly after Dad died.
I remembered the big feasts they made: Kat’s crab cakes, Hepzibah’s fine hoppin’ John, lots of wine. Mother usually brought her raisin-bread pudding and a bag of benne wafers in honor of Benne, who’d been named for the sesame cracker, because Kat had eaten so many of them when she was pregnant. Everyone got May Day presents—usually bubble bath and Revlon nail polish—only flaming red allowed. But that wasn’t what made me love those times. It was because on that one night of the year, Mother, Kat, and Hepzibah metamorphosed into completely different creatures.
After we ate, they made a bonfire out of beach wood and danced while Benne and I sat on the sand over in the shadows and watched. Hepzibah beat her Gullah drum, making a sound so old that after a while it seemed to be swelling up out of the earth and rolling in from the ocean, and Kat shook an old tambourine, filling the air with silver vibrations. At a certain point, something took them over, and they moved faster and faster, their shadows making inky smears in the firelight.
The last year they held the picnic, the three of them waded into the water fully clothed, each holding a piece of thread that they’d yanked out of Mother’s embroidered sweater. Benne and I stood with our toes touching the edge of the ocean and begged to come, too, and Kat said, “No, this is just for us. Y’all stay back there.”
They walked out until the cold water creased their waists, and then they tied the three threads together. “Hurry up,” they kept saying to one another, squealing when the waves lapped against them.
I’d believed then, and I still believed now, that it was some ritual of friendship they’d concocted on the spot, thanks to the wine and the dizziness brought on by their dancing. And Mother’s conveniently unraveling sweater.
Kat flung their tied threads into the darkness, onto the waves, and they laughed. It was a voluptuous laughter, and mischievous, like children laughing.
As they scampered back, Hepzibah found the turtle skull. She practically tripped over it coming out of the water. She stood above it with the waves foaming around her feet, Mother and Kat still giggling and carrying on. “Tie yuh mout’,” Hepzibah said, switching into Gullah, and everyone fell instantly silent.
“Look what the ocean has sent,” she said, and raised the skull out of the water, the ivory bone smooth and dripping, immaculate against the black night.
I believe they all thought it was a sign of some kind. They had bound their lives together out there in the water, and suddenly a turtle skull miraculously washed up at their feet.
For a long time after that—years and years—they’d passed the skull back and forth among them. I remembered it perched on our mantel for a while before it would resurface on Kat’s bookshelf or here on Hepzibah’s table. It must have reminded them of those nights, of the knots in their threads.
Now, sitting in the porch rocker, I rubbed the porous bone with my thumb and looked back at the blue door. Hepzibah obviously wasn’t home.
I got up and put the skull back on the table, and for a moment the table seemed like more than a distant slab of childhood memory. It felt like a living part of me.
I’d known since I was ten that I would leave the island. On the first Ash Wednesday after Dad’s death, the moment the priest touched my forehead, I’d felt myself rise up out of that little smudge of ash with the determination of a phoenix. I will leave here, I told myself. I will fly away. After college, I’d rarely come back, and when I had, it’d been with a dissociating arrogance. I hadn’t even gotten married to Hugh here. The wedding had been in somebody’s generic backyard garden in Atlanta, somebody we didn’t even know that well. I thought about Kat teasing me, saying I’d forgotten the pluff mud whence I’d come, and she’d been right. I’d done everything in my power to erase this place.
The last thing I’d expected was to stand on Hepzibah’s porch and feel a seizure of love for Egret Island. And not just for the island but for the woman my mother had been, dancing around a fire.
Something struck me then: I’d never done any of those things my mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to theirs.