The Mermaid Chair Read Online Free PDF Page A

purpose.”

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    s u e m o n k k i d d
    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 t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
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    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.

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    s u e m o n k k i d d
    “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