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(back to page 3)
CHAPTER TWO
I reached for the robe draped on the bedpost. Pulling it around my shoulders, I took the phone while Hugh stood there, hovering, unsure whether to leave. I covered the mouthpiece. "No one died, did they?"
He shook his head.
"Go get dressed. Or go back to bed," I told him.
"No, wait–" he said, but I was already saying hello into the phone, and he turned then and walked into the bathroom.
"You poor thing, I've gotten you up at daybreak," a woman's voice said. "But so you know, it wasn't deliberate. I've been up so long, I simply forgot how early it is."
"I'm sorry," I said. "Who is this?"
"Lord, I'm such a blooming optimist, I thought you'd recognize me. It's Kat. Egret Island Kat. Your godmother Kat. The Kat who changed your d amn diapers."
My eyes closed automatically. She'd been my mother's best friend since forever–a petite woman in her sixties who wore folded-down, lace-trimmed socks with her high heels, suggesting a dainty, eccentric old lady whose formidability had thinned along with her bones. It was a great and dangerous deception.
I lowered myself to the bed, knowing there was only one reason she would call. It would have to do with my mother, the famously crazy Nelle Dubois, and judging from Hugh's reaction, it would not be good.
Mother lived on Egret Island, where once we'd all been a family–I would say an "ordinary" family, except we'd lived next door to a Benedictine monastery. You cannot have thirty or forty monks for next-door neighbors and claim it's ordinary.
The debris from my father's exploded boat had washed up onto their property. Several monks had brought the board with "Jes-Sea" on it and presented it to Mother like a military flag. She'd quietly made a fire in the fireplace, then called Kat and Hepzibah, the other member of their trinity. They'd come and stood there along with the monks, while Mother had ceremoniously tossed the board onto the flames. I'd watched as the letters blackened, as the board was consumed. I remembered it sometimes when I woke in the night, had even thought about it in the middle of my wedding ceremony. There had been no funeral, no memorial, only that moment to call back.
It was after that that Mother began going over to cook the monks' midday meal, something she'd now done for the last thirty-three years. She was more or less obsessed with them.
"I do believe our little island could sink into the sea, and it wouldn't faze you," Kat said. "What's it been? Five years, six months, and one week since you set foot here?"
"That sounds right," I said. My last visit, on the occasion of my mother's seventieth birthday, had been a disaster of biblical proportions.
I'd taken Dee, who was twelve, and we'd presented Mother with a pair of gorgeous red silk pajamas from Saks, very Oriental, with a Chinese dragon embroidered on the top. She'd refused to accept them. And for the dumbest reason. It was because of the dragon, which she referred to alternately as "a beast," "a demon," and "a figure of moral turpitude." St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon, she said. Did I really expect her to sleep in such a thing?
When she got like that, no one could reason with her. She'd hurled the pajamas into the trash can, and I'd packed our bags.
The last time I'd seen my mother, she was standing on the porch, shouting, "If you leave, don't come back!" And Dee, poor Dee, who only wanted a seminormal grandmother, crying.
Kat had driven us to the ferry that day in her golf cart–the one she drove maniacally around the island's dirt roads. She'd blown the air horn on it incessantly during the ride to distract Dee from crying.
Now, on the other end of the phone, Kat went on playfully scolding me about my absence from the island, an absence I'd come to love and protect.
I heard the shower in the bathroom come on. Heard it over the rain driving hard against the windows.
"How's Benne?" I asked. I was stalling, trying to ignore the feeling that something was perched over my head, about to fall.
"Fine," Kat said. "Still translating Max's every thought."
In spite of my growing anxiety, I laughed. Kat's daughter, who had to be forty by now, had been "not quite right" since birth, as Kat put it. The correct expression was "mentally challenged," but Benne was also peculiarly gifted, given to premonitions of uncanny exactitude. She simply knew things, extracting them out of the air through mysterious antennae the rest of us didn't possess. She was said to be particularly adept at deciphering the thoughts of Max, the island dog who belonged to no one and everyone.
"So what's Max saying these days?"
"The usual things–'My ears need scratching. My balls need licking. Why do you assume I want to fetch your idiotic stick?' "
(continued on the next page)
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