The ferry was crammed with tourists; not even standing room was left. Mother clutched the jar that held her finger like a child bringing a goldfish home from the store. I had wrapped it in a paper towel fastened with a rubber band, but she still got a few curious looks from the passengers.
As we got closer, I could see the line of shrimp trawlers already forming on the southeast side of the island, out on the Atlantic. “It’s St. Senara’s Day,” I said to Mother.
“You think I don’t know that?” she snapped.
She had not gone to the festivities since Dad died. As she had with the All-Girls Picnics, she’d simply eradicated them from her life. Her abolishing this one, however, had genuinely puzzled me. Senara was, after all, her saint.
Kat met us at the dock, smelling like the lavender lotion she used. Not Benne, just Kat. She kissed Mother on the cheek.
I hadn’t expected her.
Mother inspected the dock, the boxes of Mermaid Tears, as well as a small table from the monastery with a silver cruet on top—the one used year after year to splash seawater across the mermaid chair. I watched her eyes search for the coral carpet at the dock’s edge. Max was stretched out on it as if the rug had been put there specifically for him.
She stared at the wedge of carpet with something like revulsion in her face, and I imagined she was picturing the mermaid chair sitting on top of it.
“Let’s take a walk,” Kat said, grasping Mother by the arm. “You, too, Jessie.”
She whisked Mother across the dock, down to the sidewalk where I’d left the golf cart. I was about to slide behind the wheel, but Kat guided Mother on past it. I set her suitcase down on the seat and followed.
I remember being aware of a small passing dread and pushing it aside. I didn’t ask where we were going; I think I was under the impression Kat wanted to distract Mother from the moment on the dock when she’d seen the rug. I trailed behind them, along the row of shops, past Caw Caw General and the Island Dog B&B, listening to Kat ply Mother with harmless questions. The smell of fried shrimp coming from Max’s Café was so thick the air felt oily.
I checked my watch. It was five in the afternoon, the light slumping, the clouds veined with red. The day was taking on the first bloodshot look of sunset. The festivities would begin at six, when every monk and islander who could walk would come pouring onto the dock behind the mermaid chair. Leading the parade, the abbot would be decked out in chasuble and stole and carrying his crosier. And somewhere in all that hoopla would be Whit.
Beneath the striped awning of the Mermaid’s Tale, Kat paused and, using her key, opened the door. The sign in the window said CLOSED. Absurd as this sounds, not even then did it cross my mind that our stroll might have some purpose other than diverting Mother from whatever horrible old memory had settled over her back on the dock.
Stepping inside the shop behind them, listening to the sounds on the street seep away, I noticed Hepzibah, Shem, and Father Dominic standing at the rear of the store near the cash register. Back there with the boat-wreck picture I’d painted when I was eleven—the flames beneath the water, all the happy sea creatures. Dominic was not wearing his robe or his hat, but instead a suit with his priest’s collar. Shem, flushed and constrained looking, had his arms folded across his barrel of a chest and his hands stuck under his armpits, as if someone had forced him here at gunpoint.
Apparently catching sight of them at the same moment as I, Mother stopped in the middle of the store. She stood paralyzed, surrounded by Kat’s great convocation of mermaids. They hung over her from the ceiling in the form of aluminum wind chimes and flanked her on all sides in an array of ceramic sculptures, necklaces, soap carvings, candles, and beach towels. I watched her begin to take small steps backward across the floor.
Hepzibah hurried toward her with a funny mixture of determination and reluctance in her face, that look of moving toward what must be done. She lassoed Mother with both her arms, stopping her in her tracks. “It’s going to be all right, Nelle. I promise you. We’re just going to have a talk, okay?”
Even now that image never leaves me—Mother standing in the dark circle of Hepzibah’s arms not moving a muscle, clasping her jar with excruciating stillness.
There were two sharp clicks, and I realized Kat had locked the door behind us. I swung around to her then. “For heaven’s sake. What’s all this about?”
Groping for my hands, Kat held them tightly in front of her. “I’m sorry, Jessie,” she said. “I haven’t been honest with you. I’m an obstinate, know-it-all, damn idiot of a woman who thought I was doing the right thing, and I guess what I’ve done is to make it worse.”
I drew my head back slightly, taking in her face. It had the look of ice about to break. Her eyes were tightened, her mouth hitched to the side to keep from crying, and I knew what it must’ve taken for her to say these words. I felt myself bracing for what lay behind them.
“It’s just…I swear to you, I didn’t think Nelle was as bad off as she was.”
“But why are we here?”
“The day we were up there in the hospital waiting room, I realized if I didn’t at least try to get everything out in the open, Nelle was going to end up bleeding to death one night. If re-membering is what she needs, like you and Hugh said, then okay, by God, we’re going to sit here and remember.”
My mind spun. It was slowly dawning on me: Kat, Hepzibah, Dominic, Shem—all of them knew. They knew the reason Mother had mutilated herself, why my father’s death had more or less ended my mother’s life, too. Even why his pipe was buried in her drawer and not in the ocean. These things had been like hibernating cicadas that live in the ground for seventeen years and then one day, when the circadian wheel turns, all come crawling up into the light of day.
I glanced back at Dominic, who met my gaze, lifting the sides of his mouth in a tempered smile, trying to reassure me.
They’d known for thirty-three years. When I was a little girl and had painted the boat wreck, when I’d gathered roses in the monastery garden and scattered them like my father’s ashes across the island. Every time I’d come back to visit, they had known.
Hepzibah had settled Mother into one of the folding chairs near the counter. The jar, I noticed, had been tugged away from her and stood between the cash register and a display of sugarless gum. Mother sat with what struck me as remarkable resignation.
Hepzibah had not worn any kind of headdress today, but had done her hair in cornrows. I stared at her a moment as she worked a finger along the little hedges, her other hand patting Mother’s arm. The last time I’d sat over there, Kat, Hepzibah, and Benne had been eating butter pecan ice cream.
Standing at the door next to Kat, I considered for the first time that what they were doing—this so-called remembering, as Kat had put it—might not be good for Mother. I couldn’t believe that I, of all people, was thinking this, after everything I’d had to say, but what if the truth overwhelmed her, caused her to break down again, to curl up in a ball on the floor?
I leaned over to Kat, keeping my voice low. “I want Mother to confront things as much as anyone does, but is this the right way to go about it? I mean, she just got out of the hospital.”
“I called Hugh this morning,” Kat said.
“Hugh?” I said his name and felt it magnify in the room, the way it sucked up the air.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if he hadn’t said it was okay,” she assured me. “Actually, he seemed to think it was a fairly brilliant idea.”
“Really?” I acted surprised, but I could easily see how he would rally behind this: loving friends gathering around Mother, helping her confront the thing that was slowly destroying her.
Kat said, “Hugh suggested we just talk with her like friends, not push her too much. She has to be the one to say it.”
It. “And did you explain to him what ‘it’ was?” I asked.
She looked away from me. “I told him everything.”
“Oh. But you couldn’t tell m
e?” My voice was filled with exasperation and anger. “You have to ambush me along with Mother?”
She shook her head, making the wisps of her hair float around her face. I could hear the others across the room murmuring in the quiet.
“I don’t blame you for being angry,” Kat said, her testiness back. “Okay, I deserve it. I do believe we’ve settled that. But do me a favor and do not call this an ambush. Whether you want to believe it or not, it comes out of love for Nelle and nothing else.” She stood there gesticulating, small and tough, and I did not doubt she loved my mother, that she had carried around my mother’s misery these last thirty-three years as if it somehow belonged to her, too.
“It was you who convinced me we all needed to talk about this,” she railed. “Plus Nelle up there in a hospital bed with one more finger chopped off. I would’ve told you about it sooner, but it took me until last night to work it all out in my head. I didn’t know if I could go through with it till this morning.”
I took a breath, feeling myself give way, annoyed she had turned to Hugh, but relieved at the same time.
Kat began to unruffle herself. “Hugh said Nelle was stabilized on medicine now and that even her doctor thinks she’s ready to go back and look at what started everything.”
So, I thought, Hugh had stayed in touch with Nelle’s doctor.
Kat and I went over and sat down—me next to Mother, while Shem and Dominic took the last two chairs.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” I told Mother.
“If you don’t hate me already, you will,” she responded.
“Nobody is going to hate anybody,” Kat said. “I realize getting you here wasn’t the most straightforward thing in the world, but the fact is, we need to do this.”
Mother stared into her palms, cupped like small basins on each of her knees.
“Look. I stopped at your house and got your rosary,” Kat said. She reached in her pocket, drew out the red beads, and coiled them into Mother’s good hand.
She closed her fingers around them. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just try to put what happened with Joe into words,” Dominic told her.
We waited.
My heart began to beat convulsively. I didn’t want to know. I’d more or less pushed everyone into this, and now I felt undone at the thought of what “it” might be.
If you don’t hate me already, you will.
Mother turned her head and looked at me, and it was like staring into a dark hatchway, so much black sorrow below.
“I’m not going to hate you,” I said. “You need to talk about it. Whatever it is.”
I could see the chinks in her resistance. We all could. We sat there avoiding one another’s eyes. The silence turned oceanic. Outside, the St. Senara crowd that had come over on the ferry was beginning to line the sidewalk to wait for the mermaid chair. I could see a cluster of them through the plate-glass window at the front. Imagining them out there doing the ordinary things people did—window-shopping, licking snow cones, lifting their children onto their shoulders, these acts of daily grace—filled me with the ache one has for such seeming insignificance only when it goes missing. I wanted everything to be ordinary again. To walk around with the glorious nonchalance reserved for oblivious people.
“Your father, he was ill,” Mother said, the words spit into the middle of us like the hard bitter pit of some fruit she’d been eating.
She paused and looked toward the door.
“Nelle,” Dominic said. “Go ahead and say it. We’ll all be the better for it. Do it for yourself. And for Jessie. Do it for our blessed St. Senara.”
Immediately the room filled with brilliance. It was only the sun dropping through fathoms of sky, hitting the window and bombarding us with light beams, but in that way of magical thinking, it seemed as if Senara had lifted her hand to bless Dominic’s words, causing light to rise and scatter. Mother crossed herself.
“It was the same disease his father had,” she said. She was resolved now; it was hardened in her eyes. “It’s called Pick’s disease.”
She stared at the hardwood planks on the floor as if directing her story to them, but clearly she was talking to me. “When he was a little boy, Joe watched his own father—your grandfather—grow senile and die with it. Back then, though, they just called it dementia. It wasn’t till Joe got diagnosed with it that they realized what kind of dementia his father probably had.”
I shut my eyes. Pick’s disease. I’d never even heard of it. I could feel the groundswell, the whirling up of grief. In my mind I saw Bone Yard Beach with gale winds surging off the water and ripping into the dunes, knowing that it would rearrange the island into new contours.
“When we first met, Joe told me about his father, how the disease destroyed his brain.” She spoke in a halting, heavy way, each word laid down like a brick she was trying to lift and place just right. “But I don’t think it ever entered his mind that he could get it; there’s just the smallest tendency for it to run in families. He just talked about how there wasn’t a cure, that kind of thing.”
She crossed herself again. Tears were beading up in the gray floss of her lashes. She said, “One time his father got him mixed up with a boy he’d known growing up. It nearly killed Joe. Later his father couldn’t place him at all. The disease completely ate his memory. That’s how Joe always put it, like it was devouring his father from the inside out. It got where he couldn’t talk right, and the spit would run out of his mouth. At the end Joe’s mother was always mopping his chin, and finally she put a bib on him.”
She was leaning forward in her chair, her words suddenly pouring out in a turbulent stream. It seemed that finding a crack, the force of the story had thrown the door wide open.
“In the beginning he said it was mostly his father’s personality that started changing. He did things, real odd things. He’d shout at people on the street for no good reason or blurt out something crazy. A lot of times, it would be something lewd. Like he’d lost all his inhibitions. But the part that got stuck the worst in Joe’s head was the day his father knocked him onto the floor. When he saw what he’d done, he started crying, ‘I’m sorry, little boy, I’m sorry.’ Like he didn’t know who he was. Joe broke down every time he remembered it. I think it was a relief when his father finally died. He was ten years old. And his father just forty-eight.”
Her eyes looked shrunken, tiny almonds in her face. The big crucifix on the end of the rosary hung off the edge of her lap, swaying slightly as she worked the beads with her fingers in the accomplished way of old nuns.
Hepzibah reached over and patted her arm, her hands, the lumps and dough of her skin, wanting, it seemed, to mold her back together. “Go on, tell the rest, Nelle.”
Mother wiped at her eyes. “Joe came to me one day and said he was sure he had his father’s disease. He’d been out in the boat, and when he’d tried to throw out the anchor line, he couldn’t remember where he kept it or even how to say the words anchor line in his head. He was so confused he came straight back to the dock afraid he’d forget where that was. I can still see his face when he walked through the kitchen door, how pale and scared it was. He said, ‘God help me, Nelle, I have the disease.’ He knew it, and I think I did, too. There’d been other signs—little things slipping his mind, plus he’d been losing his temper over nothing and just not thinking straight. A few months later the doctors in Charleston told us what we already knew.”
She did not look at us. She made a little altar of the floor, of the light shafts, of the granules of dust illuminated inside them, and concentrated her eyes upon it.
“Your father did not want to forget your name,” she said, and I could hear the desperation in her voice, the ragged way it sounded in her throat. “He did not want to forget Mike’s name either, but it was your name, Jessie, that he would wake up shouting. Sometimes he would bolt out of his sleep crying, ‘I’m sorry, little girl! I’m sorry!’” She rocked her body back and forth, and I knew
in my bones that’s what she must’ve done when he woke like that—taken him in her arms and rocked back and forth with him.
I couldn’t bear watching her. My mind went to the time I found my mother and father in the kitchen dancing without music. They had poured so much love on each other.
“I told him a thousand times, ‘You won’t forget your children’s names; I won’t let you. God will cure you.’” She had begun twisting the rosary in her hands. I slid forward and reached out to touch her. I wanted my mother. I wanted to bend over and kiss her the way a mother kisses her injured child. My love for her was such a rubble.
The rosary fell onto the floor. She began talking to my father as if he were sitting in the room with us. “Don’t ask me to do this, Joe. Please, don’t ask me. I’ll walk on my knees across the island if I have to. I won’t eat. I’ll sleep on the floor, on the dirty ground. I’ll make God hear me. Jesus and Mary. Don’t ask me to do this. It would be damnation for us.”
Her face was blazing.
The light on the floor had disappeared as if it had boiled away. Mother stared at the darkness rising around our feet, the quiet way the shadows pooled out from under the chairs.
Kat reached down and picked up the rosary. None of us said a word. I had the blurred, disoriented feeling of floating, waving like an eel in the ocean. I could grasp nothing. What was she trying to say?
I believe, though, part of me knew. I began pulling air down the chute of my throat, into my lungs, like stuffing cotton batting into a pillow that would soon absorb an unthinkable blow.
Mother turned slowly to face me. “He wouldn’t listen to me. Every time I refused to do it, he smiled and said, ‘Nelle, it’ll be okay. God won’t blame you. Why, it’s God’s tender mercy you’ll be dispensing. Let me have my dignity. Let me go the way I need to.’”
I understood then.
I think I must have made a sound, a moan. It caused them all to turn and stare at me. Even Mother. I felt awe at the sight of her.
“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” Mother said. “Why did I listen to him?”