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PROLOGUE
In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk.
It happened during the winter and spring of 1988, though I'm only now, a year later, ready to speak of it. They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.
My name is Jessie Sullivan. I stand at the bow of a ferry, looking across Bull's Bay toward Egret Island, a tiny barrier island off the coast of South Carolina where I grew up. I see it almost a mile out in the water, a small curve of russet and green. The wind is spiked with the smell of my childhood, and the water is ultramarine blue, shining like taffeta. Looking toward the northwest tip of the island, I can't yet see the spire from the monastery church, but I know it's there, pricking the white afternoon.
I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem–my chronic inability to astonish myself.
I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall–I dove.
Long ago, when my brother and I used to row his small bateau through the tangle of salt creeks on the island, back when I was still wild and went around with Spanish moss braided into my hair, creating those long and alarming coiffures, my father used to tell me that mermaids lived in the waters around the island. He claimed he'd seen them once from his boat–in the pink hours of the morning when the sun sat like a bobbing raspberry out on the water. The mermaids swam to his boat like dolphins, he said, leaping through the waves and diving.
I believed any and every outlandish thing he said. "Do they sit on rocks and comb their hair?" I asked him. Never mind that we didn't have rocks around the island, just the marsh grass turning with the wheel of the year–green to brown to yellow back to green–the everlasting cycle of the island, the one that also turned inside my body.
"Yes, mermaids sit around on rocks and primp," my father answered. "But their main job is saving humans. That's why they came to my boat–to be there in case I fell over."
In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved "me." I know this much: The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.
They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself. They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up.
As the ferry approaches the island dock, the air hits me, laden with so many things: the smell of fish, the disturbance of birds, the green breath of palmetto palms, and already I feel the story loom like some strange creature surfacing from the water below. Perhaps I will be finished with it now. Perhaps I will forgive myself, and the story will hold me like a pair of arms for as long as I live.
The captain blows his horn, announcing our arrival, and I think, "Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself."
CHAPTER ONE
February 17, 1988, I opened my eyes and heard a procession of sounds: first the phone going off on the opposite side of the bed, rousing us at 5:04 A.M. to what could only be a calamity, then rain pummeling the roof of our old Victorian house, sluicing its sneaky way to the basement, and finally small puffs of air coming from Hugh's lower lip, each one perfectly timed, like a metronome.
Twenty years of this puffing. I'd heard it when he wasn't even asleep, when he sat in his leather wing chair after dinner, reading through the column of psychiatric journals rising from the floor, and it would seem like the cadence against which my entire life was set.
The phone rang again, and I lay there, waiting for Hugh to pick up, certain it was one of his patients, probably the paranoid schizophrenic who'd phoned last night convinced the CIA had him cornered in a federal building in downtown Atlanta.
A third ring, and Hugh fumbled for the receiver. "Yes, hello," he said, and his voice came out coarse, a hangover from sleep.
I rolled away from him then and stared across the room at the faint, watery light on the window, remembering that today was Ash Wednesday, feeling the inevitable rush of guilt.
(continued on the next page)
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