The Mermaid Chair Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought her home with me last night. Right now she’s in Benne’s bed, sleeping off the painkillers, but the minute she wakes up, she’s gonna want to go home.”
    Hugh opened the bathroom door, and a gust of steam surged into the bedroom. “You okay?” he mouthed, and I nodded. He closed the door, and I heard him tap his razor on the sink. Three times like always.
    â€œThe thing is—” Kat stopped and took a breath. “Look, I’m just going to say it straight out. It wasn’t an accident. Your mother went over to the monastery kitchen and cut off her finger. On purpose.”
    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.
    â€œBut why? Why would she do that?” I felt the beginnings of nausea.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œIt’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 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.”
    â€œDon’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?”
    â€œYes, as a matter of fact, I do.”
    â€œWell, 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.
    â€œAnd 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