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(back to page 4)
I pictured Kat in her house perched high on stilts as all the island houses were. It was the color of lemons. I could see her sitting at the long oak table in the kitchen where over the years she, Hepzibah, and my mother had cracked and picked ten thousand blue crabs. "The Three Egreteers," my father had called them.
"Look, I called about your mother." She cleared her throat. "You need to come home and see about her, Jessie. No excuses."
I lay back on the bed; I felt like a tent collapsing, the center pole yanked out, followed by the billowy floating.
"My excuse," I said, "is that she doesn't want me there. She's–"
"'Impossible.' I know. But you can't pretend you don't have a mother."
I almost laughed. I could no more pretend I didn't have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.
I said, "I invited Mother here this past Christmas. Did she come? Of course she didn't. I send her things for her birthday, for Mother's Day–things without dragons on them, I hasten to say–and I never hear a word back."
I was glad Hugh was still in the shower so he couldn't hear. I was sure I'd just shouted.
"She doesn't need your gifts and your phone calls–she needs you.
"Me."
Why did it always come to this, to "me," to the daughter? Why didn't she call Mike out in California and harangue him? The last time I'd spoken to him, he said he'd become a Buddhist. Surely as a Buddhist he would have more patience for her.
Silence fell between us. I heard the shower go off, the pipes bang.
"Jessie," she said. "The reason I called...Yesterday your mother cut off her finger with a meat cleaver. Her right index finger."
Bad news registers belatedly with me; the words come, but not the meaning. They hover in the corner of the room for a while, up near the ceiling, while my body makes the necessary preparation. I said, "Is she okay?"
"She's going to be fine, but they had to operate on her hand at the hospital over in Mount Pleasant. Of course she pitched one of her famous fits and refused to spend the night there, so I 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.
"The 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.
"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 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."
(continued on the next page)
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