It was adolescent to be thinking about him this way. But I was unable sometimes to think of anything else. I would imagine our bodies pressed together, me lifting out of myself into something timeless and large, where I could do anything, feel everything, where there would be no empty spaces inside to fill.
“Are you going to tell us why Hugh left?” asked Kat, slumped against the counter. I hadn’t even heard her come back into the room.
“He hadn’t really planned on staying,” I answered.
“Not even one night?” She looked at my left hand. “Yesterday you were wearing your wedding rings. Today you’re not.”
Benne stared at my hand from across the table, then at my face. It was that same look she’d given me in the Mermaid’s Tale when she’d informed me that I was in love with one of the monks. The realization that she’d also informed her mother of this fact left me with an irrational need to confess everything.
As Hepzibah wandered over and stood next to Kat, it occurred to me that this was probably the reason I’d come here in the first place. Because I desperately needed confidantes. Because underneath I felt terrified. Because the weight of what I was carrying around was at least ten times heavier than I was, and I had come to the end of my ability to hold it. I wanted suddenly to kneel down in front of Kat and Hepzibah, lay my head in their respective laps, and feel their hands rest on my shoulders.
“Something awful has happened,” I said, directing my attention to the bowl, then the tabletop. “Hugh and I have—I think we’ve separated.” Shifting my eyes a little, I saw the hem of Hepzibah’s dress, Kat’s pointy shoes, a trellis of shadows falling from the window. The faucet was dripping over in the sink. Coffee smells drifted around like ground fog. I went on. “I’ve fallen in love with…with someone else.”
I didn’t look up. I wondered if their expressions had flattened out with shock. I hadn’t felt ridiculous saying it to them, as I’d imagined I would. I did feel shame, but, I told myself, at least I was a woman having a real experience, unwilling to pretend about it, ready to take myself, my feelings, seriously.
Kat said, “Benne told us.”
It was generally true that Benne was never wrong, but it astonished me how easily they’d accepted her word on this.
“She told us this ‘someone else’ is one of the monks,” Kat added.
“Yes,” I said. “Brother Thomas.”
“He’s the newest one, isn’t he?” Hepzibah asked.
I nodded. “His real name is Whit O’Conner.”
“Did you tell Hugh?” Kat wanted to know.
“No, I…I couldn’t.”
“Good,” said Kat, and she let out a breath. “Sometimes being honest is really just being stupid.”
My hands, I noticed, rested in front of me as if I were praying, my fingers laced so tightly they were actually hurting. The tips of them were pulpy and red.
Kat sat on one side of me, while Hepzibah plopped down on the other and draped her brown hand over both of mine.
“When I think of Hugh, I feel terrible,” I said. “But I can’t get over the feeling that Whit is someone I’m supposed to be with. We went out in his boat a few days ago, to a place out in the rookery, and talked. He had a wife, who died.” I stopped. “I’m not making sense.”
“First of all, you don’t have sense when you fall in love,” said Kat. “And no one here’s judging you. Not in this house anyway. Lord knows you won’t see me throwing stones. I’ve been exactly where you are.”
I looked at her and blinked. The arches of her eyebrows had traveled up on her forehead, and her mouth had taken on a bitter amusement. “Now, the man wasn’t a monk. God—bless her heart—spared me that bit of humor. He was a harbor pilot in Charleston who used to come over here to fish and buy cast nets. God, I loved that man—despite the inconvenient fact I was married to Henry Bowers. I was just about your age, too, just old enough for the bottom to start falling out of things, you know? You look around and think, So this is it? I’d been married twenty years. Twenty. Which is about when the marriage glue gets so old it starts to harden and crack.”
I felt my throat tighten a little. Hepzibah began to rub her thumb back and forth across mine. The friction, the rhythm of it, was soothing. My fingers unknotted, drooping toward my palms.
“I’m just saying I know what it’s like to love somebody you think you shouldn’t be loving,” Kat went on. “There probably isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t know what that’s like. Half of them fall for their gynecologists and the other half for their priests. You can’t stop your heart from loving, really—it’s like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.
“But you’ve got to hear this, too,” Kat added. “I wish now I hadn’t acted on those feelings. There was a lot of hurt caused, Jessie. To be honest, I’m not sure I could’ve done anything else but what I did, given how I felt and all, and how little I knew. I’m only saying I know what you’re feeling and that you should think this through.”
I sank back in my chair, hearing the croak and tick of wood in the seat. I turned and looked at Hepzibah. Her eyes were partly closed.
She said, “When I was forty, back before I started studying Gullah ways, I fell in love with a man in Beaufort who could quote you entire slave narratives passed down by word of mouth for a hundred years. I never knew anybody who cared so much about preserving their roots, and of course what I was loving was mostly my own hunger to do the same thing.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was already divorced by then and wouldn’t have minded remarrying, but he had a wife already. Kat is right, that didn’t stop me from feeling what I was feeling. I decided, though, to love him without…you know, physically loving him, and it was hard, about the hardest thing I ever did, but I lived to be glad about it. The thing is, he got me exploring my roots, and so much came out of that.”
Benne was leaning up on both elbows listening to these revelations with her lips parted and the bangs of her plain brown hair falling a half inch below her eyebrows. “I loved somebody,” she announced with glowing eyes, and we all turned and stared at her.
“Well, do tell,” said Kat. She seemed genuinely shocked by the declaration. “Who was this lucky man—your gynecologist or your priest?”
“Mike,” she said. “And I couldn’t get myself to stop feeling love either.” She sat up straight and smiled, pleased to be one of us. “I told him the day he left for college. Everybody was on the dock, saying good-bye to him, remember? And I said, ‘I love you,’ and he said, ‘I love you, too, Benne,’ and then he got on the ferry.” Kat patted her arm.
The room grew quiet. I realized what Kat and Hepzibah were doing, worrying about my getting hurt, trying to give me a big picture, some perspective I hadn’t considered. I could understand in a way the point they were making, but I couldn’t let it in. Maybe it’s human nature to think one’s own situation is the unique and incomparable one, the transcendent exception. Maybe the impulse I felt inside was wiser than all their opinions. I realized I was shaking my head and feeling slightly petulant.
“What if I’m really meant to be with him and I let this slip away?” I said.
“You are meant to be with him,” said Benne.
A Benne truth? Or was it an outburst of romantic, wishful thinking by an adult who was mostly a child?
“Nobody can tell you what to do,” Kat said. “This is your life. Your decision.”
“E come a time when eby tub haffa res pon e won bottom,” said Hepzibah, then translated: “At some point in life, you have to stand on your own two feet.”
Kat stepped closer to me, her forehead rippled with little furrows. “Just be careful,” she said.
I stood up. The paint tubes, the palette, the brushes were piled around the fruit bowl as if they’d fallen out of a cornucopia. I gathered them back into the shopping bag.
“I have been careful my whole life,” I said.
I smiled at them, feeling li
ke I was standing there on my own two feet.
“I saw your canoe on the dock in the rookery,” I said to Hepzibah. “Do you mind if I borrow it?”
“Help yourself,” she said.
She didn’t ask why I wanted it. Neither did Kat. They knew already.
CHAPTER Twenty-three
The day I paddled Hepzibah’s once-red canoe through the winding creeks, I heard an alligator roar. It was mid-March, four days till spring, but warm enough that a few bulls had begun bellowing for mates out on the marsh banks. It sounded like distant thunder. By April there would be enough roaring to shake the creek water. Mike and I used to row the bateau through the hairpin turns when the ruckus was at full tilt, shouting at throngs of sunning turtles to head for the mud holes before they were all eaten.
Earlier, when I’d arrived on the rookery dock and flipped over the canoe, I’d discovered the turtle skull from the table on Hepzibah’s porch propped beside the paddle. She’d obviously left it there for me. I remembered how she, Kat, and Mother had passed it back and forth all those years, a reminder of the way they’d knotted their lives together. The skull sat now on the fraying wicker seat at the bow, looking quite ancient, staring levelly ahead as if guiding the boat.
The mint green tint was climbing back into the blades of spartina grass, and around each curve an egret or heron stood like yard sculpture in the shallows. Their patience was unnerving. Just when I would give up on their ever moving again, they would spring to life, spearing a mud minnow.
I snaked along with the tail end of the ebb tide, making two wrong turns before I located the dead-end tributary where Whit had taken us the day we’d come out here together. When the corridor of grass opened into the cove of water where we’d sat in the johnboat and talked, I pulled the paddle across my lap and gave myself over to the breeze. It washed me up onto the tiny marsh island where Whit had built his hermitage on a hillock beneath a sole palmetto palm.
I wore the pair of old bogging boots Mother used to wear to harvest oysters on the shell reefs, going out with Kat and Hepzibah, picking bushels for their New Year’s Eve roast. Stepping out of the canoe, I sank over my ankles into mud. It was the exact consistency of cake batter, and it emitted a rotten stew of smells that I had grown up loving.
I dragged the canoe up into the grass. Sweltering, I peeled off my sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, then stood in my black T-shirt listening for the whir of Whit’s johnboat. It had been at the dock when I’d left. I looked at my watch. I’d come at the same time we’d come before—when I thought he would be making his rookery rounds.
As I regarded the enclosure of water, the nearly perfect, hidden circle it made, I thought I heard the boat engine, and I froze a moment, watching the black skimmers swoop down and the surface churn silver with mullet, but the sound died and a moat of quiet surrounded me.
I’d brought a floppy basket filled with art supplies, thinking I would try to paint a little if Whit didn’t show up. Honestly, I needed some actual reason for being out here, other than wanting to see him, something to fall back on. I came out here to paint, I could say.
As I retrieved the basket from the canoe, I impulsively picked up the turtle skull. It was silly to lug it around, but I didn’t want to leave it behind. I picked my way through the needlegrass and palm scrub. When I arrived at Whit’s lean-to, I laughed out loud. He’d stolen the design from depictions of the Bethlehem stable.
When I stepped under the sloping roof, I had to stoop slightly. A wire crab trap sat in the shadows near the back like a small table, with a cast net folded up beside it. He’d braided a cross out of palmetto leaf and nailed it up on a board, but other than that it could have been a hideout built by almost anyone.
Standing there, I knew why he loved this place. It was a different sort of cloister—secluded by water and marsh, a place untamed, without abbots and creeds, only instinct and the natural rhythms that had always existed here.
I placed the turtle skull on top of the crab trap, admiring the bleached-ivory look of it. I told myself it had belonged to a female, a three-hundred-pound loggerhead who’d dragged herself onto Bone Yard Beach year after year to fill the sand with eggs. Dad had taken Mike and me there one summer night when the beach was crawling with hatchlings. We’d watched them rushing toward the sea, toward a swatch of moonlight out on the water.
I laid my hand on the turtle skull and felt the backwash of Hepzibah’s presence. Of Kat’s. Even my mother’s and Benne’s.
I set up the tabletop easel I’d found at Caw Caw General, positioning it on the ground, arranging the watercolor tablet on it. I spread out my palette, charcoal sketching pencils, brushes, and a jar of water, and then, removing the boots, sat cross-legged in front of the paper and stared at the white space.
I’d already painted a dozen or more mermaids for Kat, staying up sometimes until after midnight to finish one. I’d started out doing the typical thing—mermaids on rocks, mermaids under the water, mermaids on top of the water—until I’d grown bored and begun to paint them in ordinary but unlikely places: driving a station wagon along I-85 in Atlanta with a baby mermaid strapped in a car seat in back; balancing on her tail fin before a stove, clad in a “Kiss the Cook” apron, frying fish in a skillet; and my favorite—sitting in a chair at a hair salon getting her long, silken tresses cut into a short, angular style with bangs.
“Now you’re cooking,” Kat had said. The paintings had sold immediately, and she’d begged me to bring her more.
Earlier I’d been struck with the idea of painting a mermaid paddling a canoe, wearing a life jacket, but now, as I held the pencil, I found myself making a line drawing of a woman’s forehead and eyes, sketching it along the bottom edge of the paper as if she were peering over a wall. I drew her arms stretched over her head, her elbows pressed against her ears, giving the impression she was reaching with both hands for something over her head. I didn’t know where the peculiar image was coming from.
I dampened the paper, laying on overlapping washes of blue, decreasing the pigment as I moved down the paper, creating lighter shades at the bottom around the woman’s head. I painted in her head and arms, using sienna and umber. Her eyes were wide open, apprehensive, peering upward across the empty blue spaces that filled most of the paper. As a last touch, I shook the brush, gave it two quick snaps, creating a purposeful spatter along each of her arms.
When I put the brush down, the image appeared silly to me. But as I leaned back and looked again at what I’d done, the spatter beading her arms struck me as air bubbles and the variegated blues as levels of water. The painting, I decided, was upside down.
It was not a woman peering over a ledge with arms reaching up but a woman diving. I turned the picture 180 degrees and saw that it captured the moment when her arms and head first pierced the water, cutting cleanly into the emptiness below.
I kept staring at it. The moment I’d seen it reversed, I’d known—it was right this way.
I heard the droning of a boat engine far away, and my hand moved to my throat, lingering there as the sound grew closer. I pictured Whit approaching the island, catching sight of Hepzibah’s canoe, wondering who was here. The noise dissolved as he cut the engine. A dog began to bark. Max.
Anticipation rose in my chest, the strange, euphoric energy that had made me increasingly unable to sleep or eat, filling me with endless renditions of the two of us together. It had made me bold and reckless. Had turned me into someone else. What would happen would happen.
I saw Max first. He loped up with his tongue dangling from the side of his mouth. I bent to pet him and, glancing up, saw Whit stepping over a rotting palmetto log. When he spotted me, he stopped.
I went on rubbing Max’s head, my breath moving rapidly in and out of my nostrils. I said, “So this is the hermitage the abbot knows nothing about.”
Still he didn’t move, didn’t speak. He wore the same denim shirt with the cross around his neck and held a tan canvas sack in one hand. I had the
feeling it contained books. The light made brush marks on his face, obscuring it just enough that I couldn’t read his expression. I didn’t know if he was paralyzed with happiness or surprise. It could have been trepidation. He clearly knew what I was doing here. His entire body gave off the knowledge of it.
He slid one hand into his pocket and began walking toward me. I could see bits of gray shining in his black hair.
When he got to the easel, he dropped the sack and squatted beside my painting, relieved, I think, to have something to do.
“It’s good,” he said. “Very unusual.”
I moved my thumb around the base of my finger, the place where my wedding rings had been. The skin felt bare and newly grown. Tender. He pretended to study the painting.
“I hope you don’t mind me coming here to paint,” I said. “I would’ve asked your permission, but…well, it’s not like I could pick up the phone and call you.”
“You don’t have to ask my permission,” he said. “This place belongs to everybody.” He stood up but continued to look down at the picture with his back to me.
Around us the grasses rippled and swayed as though underwater. I wanted to go and slide my arms around him, press my face against his back, say, It’s okay, it is. We were meant for this, but I couldn’t be the one who said it. He had to hear it some other way, from inside himself. He had to believe in the rightness of it, as I did.
He looked painfully stiff standing there, and I wondered if he was struggling to hear the voice that would tell him what to do, the voice that would not be wrong, or if he was only barricading himself.
I told myself I would stand there in my bare feet one more minute, when it would be plain that the only dignified thing to do was put on my boots, gather up my art, and leave. I would paddle back and never speak of this again.