As Hugh crossed the parking lot in front of East Cooper Hospital, I watched him from a window in the third-floor waiting room where Kat and I had been ensconced since dawn. Even from up here, I could see that his face was tanned, and I knew he’d been tilling up the backyard again. When confronted with loss, Hugh got out the old hand tiller that had belonged to his father and exhausted himself with physical labor, plowing up huge stretches of the yard. Sometimes he wouldn’t even get around to planting anything; the point seemed to be just ripping up the ground. After his father died, I’d watched him plow with such sorrow and drivenness, stoically propelling himself into the early-summer darkness, that I could not bear to watch. He had rendered much of the two acres around the house a bare, exposed ground of fresh wounds. I’d once seen him pick up a handful of the upturned dirt and, closing his eyes, smell it.
I’d called him at six this morning. It had been dawn by then, but the forbidding darkness and quiet that had floated through the hospital all night had not yet lifted. Dialing the number, I’d felt overwhelmed by the shrouded, deft way Mother had been laying siege to herself. I was defeated, to tell the truth. I knew that Hugh would understand how I felt, the exact contours of every feeling. I would not have to explain anything. When I heard his voice, I started to cry—the tears I squashed on the ferry.
“I have to commit her,” I’d said, struggling for composure. The surgeon on call, who’d repaired Mother’s hand, had made that clear enough. “I suggest this time you get a psychiatrist in to see her and start commitment papers,” he’d said, kindly enough, but with emphasis on “this time.”
“Do you want me to come?” Hugh asked.
“I can’t do this alone,” I told him. “Kat’s here, but—yes, please, could you come?”
He’d gotten there in record time. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was just past 1:00 P.M.
He was wearing a knit sport shirt, the terra-cotta one I liked so much, and crisp khaki pants with his tasseled loafers. He looked well, the same handsome, golden look about him, and his hair was cut shorter than I’d seen it in years. I, on the other hand, looked like one of those people you see on the television news who shuffle around in the aftermath of some natural disaster.
My hair needed washing, my teeth needed brushing, and my eyes had puffy, bruised-looking smudges underneath from lack of sleep. I wore the gray warm-up pants and white T-shirt I’d slept in. I’d had to scrub Mother’s blood off them in the visitors’ bathroom. Most embarrassing of all, I had no shoes. How could I have left without shoes? I’d been startled on the ferry when I saw that my feet were bare. One of the nurses had given me a cheap pair of terry-cloth slippers sealed in a plastic bag.
The worst part of the night had been waiting to hear if Mother would be okay—physically, I should say; at that point I don’t think either Kat or I had a lot of hope for her mentally. They’d let us in to see her while she was still in the recovery room. We’d held on to the bed rail, staring down at her face, which was the color of oatmeal. A pale green oxygen tube had gurgled under her nose and blood was dripping, thick as resin, into her arm from a plastic bag over her head. Reaching down under the sheet, I’d picked up her good hand and squeezed it. “It’s me, Mother. It’s Jessie.”
After several attempts she’d cracked open her eyes and tried to focus on me, parting and closing her lips repeatedly without making a sound, priming the words from what I imagined to be a contaminated well deep inside her.
“Don’t throw it away,” she mumbled, her tone barely audible.
I bent over her. “What are you saying? Throw what away?”
A nurse making marks on a clipboard nearby looked up. “She’s been saying that since she started waking.”
I bent down where I could smell the noxious odor of the anesthetic from her mouth. “Throw what away?” I repeated.
“My finger,” she said, and the nurse stopped writing and stared at me with her mouth formed into a small, pinched circle.
“Where is your finger?” I asked. “I looked for it.”
“In a bowl, in the refrigerator,” she said, her eyes already closed.
I’d called Mike at 10:00 A.M.—7:00 in California. Waiting for him to pick up, I’d felt like his little sister again, needing him, needing him to come and take care of things. Once, as children, we’d run the bateau aground on a mudflat and, trying to help push us off, I’d fallen over the side, up to my waist in mud. In places the mud could suck you down like jungle quicksand, and I’d flailed around hysterically as he’d hauled me out. That’s what I wanted now. Mike to reach down and lift me out of this.
When he answered, I told him everything, and that I was going to have to commit Mother. He responded that I should keep him informed. Not “I’ll get the next plane,” the way Hugh had said, only that impotent token of concern.
I felt for a moment like I was going under. “Oh,” I said.
“I’m sorry I’m not there to help, Jess. I’ll come when I can, it’s just that now is not good.”
“When is it ever good?”
“Not ever,” he responded. “I wish I were more like you, able to face…things better. You always dealt with it better than I did.”
We never talked about the bedroom drawer we’d rummaged through as children, reading the clipping about our father’s death, the strange, sad spiral Mother’s life had taken, the mounting religious obsessions we’d witnessed with confusion. We both knew he’d run away from the island the same as I had, but he’d gone farther, and not just in miles. He’d washed his hands of it.
“I found his pipe,” I said abruptly, feeling furious at his desertion.
He was silent. I pictured the news poised over his head, guillotine style, waiting to drop the way it had with me—the sudden slice of recognition that a crucial piece of one’s past has been a lie.
“But…” he said, and, bogging down, started again. “But that’s what caused the fire.”
“Apparently not.” I was suddenly fatigued in the tiniest creases of my body—between my fingers, behind my ears, in the corners of my mouth.
“God, it never ends, does it?”
He sounded so damaged saying it that my anger began to dissolve. I knew then he would never come back and face all of this. He wasn’t able.
“Do you remember Father Dominic?” I asked. “The monk who always wore the straw hat?”
“How could I forget?”
“Do you think there could’ve been something between him and Mother?”
He actually laughed. “You can’t be serious! You mean, an affair? You think that’s the reason she’s cut off her fingers? To pay her pound of flesh for it?”
“I don’t know, but there’s some kind of history between them.”
“Jess, come on.”
“Don’t laugh at this, Mike. I don’t think I can take that right now.” My voice rose. “You’re not here, you don’t see what I see. Believe me, there are more outrageous things than that in her life.”
“You’re right, sorry,” he said. He let go of his breath, let it melt into the phone. “I only saw them together once. I went over to the monastery to ask Mom if she’d let me go out with Shem on the trawler—I was around fifteen, I think—and I found her and Father Dominic in the kitchen, fighting.”
“About what, you remember?”
“It was about the mermaid chair. Father Dominic was trying to get her to go sit in it, and she was furious for some reason. He told her twice, ‘You have to make your peace with it.’ It didn’t make sense to me. But for a long time after that, I wondered about it. All I can tell you is that if the two of them had an affair, which honestly I can’t begin to conceive, they didn’t seem remotely amicable at that point.”
When we hung up, I felt more confused than when I’d called, but at least he knew now about Mother. And I knew about him—that part of him would always be lost to me. I felt comforted, though, that we were at least linked the way we’d been as children—not partners in conquering the island, which had been our carefree alliance before Father died, but partners in survival. Surviving Mother.
Outside in the parking lot, Hugh was approaching the hospital entrance. I watched him pause on the sidewalk, looking down as if studying the spidery cracks in the cement. He seemed to be preparing himself. For me, no doubt. It was a moment of such private vulnerability that I stepped back from the window.
I darted a glance toward Kat, who sat across the room squeezing the bridge of her nose. Mother’s behavior seemed to have had a sobering effect on her; I’d never seen her so quiet. Earlier, beside the bed in the recovery room, I’d watched Kat close her eyes and tighten both her fists, as if swearing a private oath to herself, or at least that’s how I read it.
“He’s here,” I said to her, trying to sound casual. I had a skittish feeling in my stomach.
This would be the first time I’d seen him since making love with Whit. I had the irrational feeling that the knowledge was somehow posted all over me for him to read, little scarlet A’s popping out like freckles in the sun. Crossing the bay last night, jerked out of my illusory storm tent and acutely aware of my ability to twist things to my liking, I’d kept my shock confined to Mother. But now, seeing Hugh, it was like coming upon my world of deceit, seeing it diagrammed like a map with a pointing arrow: YOU ARE HERE. Here. A place where the heart and its cravings obliterate everything: conscience, the will of the mind, the careful plaiting together of lives.
The ache in my stomach was the knot of blame, I know that. Hugh had staked his life on me and lost. But there was defiance coiled in the feeling as well. What I’d felt, what I’d done—it wasn’t only some unstoppable erotic urge pent up too long, not just lust and libido and overactive sex organs. That wouldn’t be fair. The heart was an organ, too, wasn’t it? It had been so easy to dismiss the heart before. A little feeling factory you could shut down if necessary. How unfair. The feelings that ripped through it had power and force, perhaps at times the consent of the soul. I’d felt it myself, the way my soul had raised its hand to consecrate what was happening to me.
“Do you have a comb?” I asked Kat. “And lipstick?” I’d not brought a purse either.
She handed me a tube and a small brush, lifting her eyebrows.
“I look like shit,” I told her. “I don’t want him to think I’m so lost without him I’ve gone to pot.”
“Good luck with that,” she said, but smiling at me.
When he stepped into the waiting room, he looked at me, then away. I thought suddenly of Whit and felt my stomach turn over, the need to breathe, to paddle to the island in the marsh, a million miles from the world, and go down into the cool, dark water.
All three of us, even Kat, struggled as we waded through the initial greetings, the how-have-you-beens. Part of me didn’t want to know how he’d been, for fear my knees would buckle, and part of me felt that if he described every ounce of pain and trauma I’d inflicted on him, it was the least I deserved.
For a good three or four minutes, Hugh and I seemed to be calibrating an emotional thermostat. Tapping it up and down, acting too friendly, then too reserved. It wasn’t until the focus turned to Mother that we began to get comfortable in the room together, which is saying a lot, considering how wretched that situation was.
We sat in padded wooden chairs near the window, around a coffee table covered in old magazines, some going back to 1982. I was freshly knowledgeable about everything from Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment to the Supreme Court to Michael Jackson’s glove.
Hugh was wearing a thin bracelet of what looked like braided embroidery thread around his right wrist—blue, tan, and black—which floored me because Hugh hated to wear any sort of jewelry except his wedding ring. That, I noticed, was still on his left hand.
He saw me staring at the bracelet. “It’s from Dee,” he said. “She made it herself. I believe she called it a friendship bracelet.” He lifted it up with abashed amusement, shrugging at the oddity of such a thing’s being there, his daughter’s wanting to seal their friendship. “I’m under orders not to take it off. I’m told there will be terrible consequences if—”
The absurdity of worrying about terrible consequences, given the fact they’d already happened, caused him to stop midsentence and lower his arm.
What he didn’t know was that Dee had made one of these bracelets for her high-school friend Heather Morgan, as a way to comfort her after she’d been dumped. It had been an act of sisterly solidarity. Dee would never have made one of these for Hugh unless she knew about us. Had he told her?
“How nice that she made it for you,” I said. “What was the occasion?”
He looked uncomfortable. “April tenth.”
His birthday. I’d forgotten. But even if I’d remembered, I doubted I would’ve called. Considering. “Happy birthday,” I offered.
“I missed our Follies this year,” he said. “Maybe next year.” He settled the full force of his gaze on me. It was laden with the unspoken question of “next year.”
“Follies?” Kat said. “Now, that sounds fascinating.”
“We need to talk about Mother,” I said with obvious discomfort, such a transparent evasion tactic that he smiled slightly.
I glanced at the blank commitment papers lying in the empty chair next to mine. They carried the presence of a full-blooded person sitting there, a dismal, menacing person needing attention.
Hugh reached over and picked them up. There were small Band-Aids on the insides of both his thumbs. Tiller blisters. Proof he’d been trying to plow through. I watched as he skimmed the pages, staring at his hands. For a strange second, it seemed my whole marriage was visible in them. In the tufts of hair near his wrists, the lines on his palms, his fingers filled with memories of touching me. The mystery of what held people together was right there.
“Okay,” he said, lowering the papers to his lap. “Let’s talk about her.”
I started at the beginning. “The night I arrived on the island, I found Mother burying her finger beside St. Senara’s statue—you remember me telling you about that.”
Hugh nodded.
“I asked her why she’d cut it off, and she started to tell me—you know, the way you say something before you remember it’s a secret. She mentioned Dad’s name and Father Dominic’s and then, realizing what she’d said, stopped and wouldn’t go on. So obviously Dominic is involved somehow.” I glanced at Kat. “Of course, Kat disagrees with me.”
She didn’t defend herself; in part I’d said it just to see if she might. She merely stared back at me, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
“Did you ask this Father Dominic about it?” Hugh said.
“Yes, and he suggested to me that some things are better off left secret.”
Hugh was leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Okay, forget Dominic for the moment. Why do you think she’s cutting off her fingers? You’ve been with her for over two months. What’s your gut say?”
My gut? I was momentarily speechless. Hugh was asking me for a gut feeling, and on something about which he was the expert. Before, he’d always brusquely given me his clinical opinion—very textbook, right out of the DSM III—and dismissed what I’d thought.
“I have a feeling it goes back to something she thinks she’s done,” I said, measuring my words, wanting so much to say it right. “Something having to do with my father, and it’s so awful it has driven her crazy, literally. I believe that her insane need to butcher herself is a way of doing penance. She’s trying to atone.”
I remember how Kat looked away and shook her head slightly, like people do when they’re disbelieving.
I was determined to convince her, as much as Hugh. I quoted the Scripture that says if your right hand offends you, it’s better to cut it off than to have your whole body cast into hell.
“Do you have any idea what sin Nelle is trying to expunge?” Hugh asked.
Kat brought her hand to her forehead and rubbed a patch of redness into her skin. I saw that her eyes looked wide and, yes, scared.
I started to answer that it had occurred to me more than once that Mother and Dominic might have had an affair, but I caught myself. There was no way I could say that. It was too close to my own truth. And what evidence did I have anyway? How Dominic had asked my mother if she would ever forgive them? That he’d written an unmonklike paragraph in his little booklet, suggesting that erotic love was every bit as spiritual as divine love? That St. Eudoria, whom Mother may have been emulating, was a prostitute?
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But penance is only part of it. I think she believes she can bring about some kind of redemption by doing this.”
“What do you mean, ‘redemption’?” Kat asked.
I told them about the two books Mother had gotten out of the monastery library. The stories of St. Eudoria, who cut off her finger and planted it in a field, and Sedna, whose ten severed fingers fell into the ocean and turned into the first sea creatures.
As I talked, I kept looking at Hugh to see if he was taking what I said with a grain of salt or whether he thought it really had merit. I didn’t want to care what he thought, but I did. I wanted him to say, Yes, yes, you have seen through to the truth. You have done this for your mother.
“That’s what I mean about redemption,” I said. “I think all this dismembering she’s doing is really about her need to grow something, or make a new world, to re-member herself back in a new way.”
Dismembering and re-membering. The idea had only just occurred to me that moment.
“Interesting,” Hugh said, and when I rolled my eyes, thinking he’d dismissed me, he shook his head. “No, I mean it is interesting, more than interesting.”
He offered me a sad, disappointed smile. “I used to say that, didn’t I, as a way of glossing over what you said?”
Kat got up and wandered to the other side of the room, where she rummaged purposelessly through her purse.
“We both did things,” I told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. He wanted me to reach out to him, to say, Yes, next year we’ll have the Follies…. I’ve made a vast mistake. I want to come home. And I couldn’t.
I had thought our life together was vouchsafed. It was one of those unpremeditated facts I’d lived with every single day. Like the sun going through its motions—coming and going, an automaton. Like the stars fixed in the Milky Way. Who questions these things? They just are. I’d thought we would be buried together. Side by side in a nice cemetery in Atlanta. Or that our cremated remains would sit in matching urns in Dee’s house until she found it in herself to go out and scatter them. Once I’d imagined her hauling the urns all the way to Egret Island and tossing handfuls of us in the air on Bone Yard Beach. I’d pictured the wind whipping us together in a blizzard of indistinguishable particles—Hugh and me flying to the sky, returning to the earth, together. And Dee walking away with bits of us in her hair. What was the mysterious and enduring thing that had made me so certain of us for so long? Where had it gone?
I looked at his hands. The silence was terrible.
He ended it himself.
“If you’re right about Nelle, Jessie—and you really could be—then maybe the key is simply remembering, recalling the past in a way that allows her to face it. That can be very healing sometimes.”
He placed the commitment papers back on the empty chair. “Are you going to sign?”
When I scrawled my name, Kat held her head in her hands and didn’t look at me.
Hugh came back to Egret Island with me that evening, taking his suitcase into Mike’s old room while I went straight to the bathroom and filled the tub with steaming water. Kat had insisted on staying overnight at the hospital, that I be the one to go home. Tomorrow Mother would be transported to the psychiatric unit at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Hugh had agreed to be there when I checked her in and met with the psychiatrist. I felt grateful to him.
I slid down into the water, going all the way under, and lay as still as I could, so motionless I began to hear my heart resounding through the water. I held my breath and thought of those World War II movies where the submarine hides on the bottom of the ocean, shut down except for the ping, ping of the sonar, everyone holding his breath, waiting to see if the Japanese would hear it. I felt like that, as if my heart might give me away.
Maybe next year, Hugh had said. The words made my chest start to hurt.
The Follies—the “Psychiatric Follies,” as we facetiously called them—were Hugh’s favorite birthday present. In some ways I think they were the highlight of his year.
I’d overheard Dee trying to describe the Follies once to Heather: “See, Mom and I put on a show for my dad. We make up a song about his work, about hypnotizing somebody and not being able to wake them up, or having an Oedipus complex, something like that.”
Heather had screwed up her nose. “Your family is weird.”
“I know,” Dee had said, as if this were a great big compliment.
Surfacing, I lay in the tub with the water just under my nostrils and felt the wrench of knowing that even though Dee was away at college this year, she’d probably remembered the Follies but hadn’t mentioned them to me when we’d talked, for reasons I was afraid to know. Hugh had told her about us, I was sure of it. And yet she’d said nothing.
Dee had been the one who’d started the Follies, though I’d been her inspiration, I guess you’d say. It began when I’d gotten my hair cut at a salon over in Buckhead. There had been a bowl of Godiva chocolates at the entrance, and, standing beside it, I’d fidgeted with my watch, an inexpensive Timex with an expandable band. I did that sometimes, sliding it on and off my wrist the way someone twirls her hair or taps a pencil. Later, when I left, I’d reached for a chocolate, and there it was: My watch was in the candy bowl.
“Isn’t that odd?” I’d said at dinner that night, relating the incident to Hugh and Dee, only making conversation, but Hugh had perked right up.
“It’s a Freudian slip,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Dee, only thirteen then.
“It’s when you say or do something without being aware of it,” Hugh told her. “Something that’s got a hidden meaning.”
He leaned forward, and I saw it coming—the god-awful Freudian-slip joke. “Like when you say one thing and mean a-mother,” he said.
“That’s funny,” Dee said. “But what did it mean when Mom took off her watch like that?”
He looked at me, and I felt momentarily like a lab rat. Pointing his fork in my direction, he said, “She wanted to remove herself from the constraints of time. It’s a classic fear of death.”
“Oh, please,” I said.
“You know what I think?” said Dee, and Hugh and I sat up, expecting something precocious. “I think Mom just left her watch in the candy bowl.”
Dee and I burst into conspiratorial laughter.
It had escalated from there. Fear of Death became FOD, and we teased him without mercy. That year Dee wrote a farcical song about FOD and enlisted me to sing it with her on his birthday, to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and so began the Psychiatric Follies. No one loved them more than Hugh.
Around March he would start bugging the hell out of us to reveal the theme. Last year Dee had written an opus to her own original tune, called “Penis Envy: The Musical.”
Dear Dr. Freud,
We are overjoyed
To declare null and void
Your penis envy fraud.
Do you really think we peg
Our hope between your legs?
Must your beloved male part
Be the desire of our heart?
A penis—are you serious?
A woman would be delirious.
Just between us—
There’s more to life than a penis.
I say with no trace of mirth
Has Dr. Freud given birth?
Could we just assume
You’re pining for a womb?
We performed it in the living room, pregnant with sofa pillows that were stuffed under our shirts, doing choreographed steps and gestures worthy of the Supremes. An hour later Hugh was still laughing. I’d felt then there was so much glue between us that nothing could splinter it.
Now, in the little bathroom, I rubbed the bar of soap over my arms and studied the square pink tiles on the wall. Mike had hated sharing what he’d called “the girly bathroom.” The same pale pink organdy curtains hung in the small window, dingy now to the point of appearing orange. I shampooed my hair, scrubbed my skin.
When I’d signed the commitment papers, I’d had to write the date. April 17. It had made me think of Whit. The first year we’ll celebrate our anniversary monthly on the seventeenth, I’d told him.
I wished I could call him. I knew that earlier today, even though it was Sunday, he would’ve been at the rookery. I pictured him arriving at the dock, spotting the red canoe, and glancing around for me. I wondered if he’d waited awhile for me to show up before setting out, whether he’d sat on the bank where he’d washed my feet and listened for the quiet sound of my paddle. Perhaps by vespers, before the rule had folded them all back into wordless silence till the morning, the news about Nelle had spread across the island and spilled over the brick abbey wall. Maybe he knew why I hadn’t come to him.
I heard Hugh’s footsteps pacing the hallway, back and forth. When they stopped, I could tell he was just outside the door. I looked around to see if I’d locked it, though I was sure Hugh would never come in without knocking. The latch, an old-fashioned hook and eye, was unfastened. I waited. Held my breath. Ping, ping, ping. Finally he moved away.
What had caused him to tread up and down the hallway like that?
When I came out of the bathroom, I wore Mother’s blue bathrobe, my hair wet, combed back and slicked down like enamel. It was when the cool air hit my face that I remembered. I’d propped my canvases across the bed, the dresser, and the floor in Mike’s room, ostensibly for storage, but I would go in there at times and stare at my work. It was like standing in a gallery inside myself, gazing at the deep, dark marvels. My thirteen diving women, their wild, sensual bodies grandly nude.
I thought of Hugh in there studying them, examining the cast-off pieces of their lives that I’d painted floating to the surface. The kitchen spatulas, the apple peels, the wedding rings, the geese…oh, God, the kissing geese. Our kissing geese.
Frozen in place outside the bathroom door, I realized that even the colored-pencil sketch I’d made back in February was in there, the one I’d hidden for weeks behind the lighthouse picture over the mantel. He would see my enraptured couple clinging to each other’s bodies, encircled by the woman’s exceedingly long hair. Sometimes when I’d looked at the picture, all I could see was her hair, and I’d remembered Dee teasing me, calling my attic studio Rapunzel’s tower, wanting to know when I was going to let my hair down.
Hugh had always grimaced at that, even defended me to her, sometimes snappishly. “Your mother isn’t locked in a tower, Dee,” he said. “Now, stop it.” Maybe he’d thought it was a reflection on him, or maybe somewhere inside he’d known it was true and was afraid of it. None of us ever mentioned the rest of the tale—how Rapunzel did finally let down her hair for the prince and escaped.
Hugh Sullivan was the most astute man on earth. I began to feel a dilating pressure in my chest. I walked to Mike’s room and paused in the doorway. Inside, it was dim, lit by one small table lamp with a low-wattage bulb.
Hugh was staring at my underwater couple—Lovers in the Blue Sea, I called them, after Chagall’s Lovers in the Red Sky. His back was to me. His hands were in his pockets. He turned around, parting this night from all other nights, letting his eyes, bruised and disbelieving, come slowly to my face, and I could feel the air around us blaze up with the terrible thing that was about to happen.
“Who is he?” he asked.