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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.

My father had died on Ash Wednesday when I was nine years old, and in a convoluted way, a way that made no sense to anyone but me, it had been at least partially my fault.

There had been a fire on his boat, a fuel-tank explosion, they'd said. Pieces of the boat had washed up weeks later, including a portion of the stern with "Jes-Sea" printed on it. He'd named the boat for me, not for my brother, Mike, or even for my mother, whom he'd adored, but for me, Jessie.

I closed my eyes and saw oily flames and roaring orange light. An article in the Charleston newspaper had referred to the explosion as suspicious, and there had been some kind of investigation, though nothing had ever come of it–things Mike and I'd discovered only because we'd sneaked the clipping from Mother's dresser drawer, a strange, secret place filled with fractured rosaries, discarded saint medals, holy cards, and a small statue of Jesus missing his left arm. She had not imagined we would venture into all that broken-down holiness.

I went into that terrible sanctum almost every day for over a year and read the article obsessively, that one particular line: "Police speculate that a spark from his pipe may have ignited a leak in the fuel line."

I'd given him the pipe for Father's Day. Up until then he had never even smoked.

I still could not think of him apart from the word "suspicious," apart from this day, how he'd become ash the very day people everywhere–me, Mike, and my mother–got our foreheads smudged with it at church. Yet another irony in a whole black ensemble of them.

"Yes, of course I remember you," I heard Hugh say into the phone, yanking me back to the call, the bleary morning. He said, "Yes, we're all fine here. And how are things there?"

This didn't sound like a patient. And it wasn't our daughter, Dee, I was sure of that. I could tell by the formality in his voice. I wondered if it was one of Hugh's colleagues. Or a resident at the hospital. They called sometimes to consult about a case, though generally "not" at five in the morning.

I slipped out from the covers and moved with bare feet to the window across the room, wanting to see how likely it was that rain would flood the basement again and wash out the pilot light on the hot-water heater. I stared out at the cold, granular deluge, the bluish fog, the street already swollen with water, and I shivered, wishing the house were easier to warm.

I'd nearly driven Hugh crazy to buy this big, impractical house, and even though we'd been in it seven years now, I still refused to criticize it. I loved the sixteen-foot ceilings and stained-glass transoms. And the turret–God, I loved the turret. How many houses had one of those? You had to climb the spiral stairs inside it to get to my art studio, a transformed third-floor attic space with a sharply slanted ceiling and a skylight–so remote and enchanting that Dee had dubbed it the "Rapunzel tower." She was always teasing me about it. "Hey, Mom, when are you gonna let your hair down?"

That was Dee being playful, being Dee, but we both knew what she meant–that I'd become too stuffy and self-protected. Too conventional. This past Christmas, while she was home, I'd posted a Gary Larson cartoon on the refrigerator with a magnet that proclaimed me WORLD'S GREATEST MOM. In it, two cows stood in their idyllic pasture. One announced to the other, "I don't care what they say, I'm not content." I'd meant it as a little joke, for Dee.

I remembered now how Hugh had laughed at it. Hugh, who read people as if they were human Rorschachs, yet he'd seen nothing suggestive in it. It was Dee who'd stood before it an inordinate amount of time, then given me a funny look. She hadn't laughed at all.

To be honest, I "had" been restless. It had started back in the fall–this feeling of time passing, of being postponed, pent up, not wanting to go up to my studio. The sensation would rise suddenly like freight from the ocean floor–the unexpected discontent of cows in their pasture. The constant chewing of all that cud.

With winter the feeling had deepened. I would see a neighbor running along the sidewalk in front of the house, training, I imagined, for a climb up Kilimanjaro. Or a friend at my book club giving a blow-by-blow of her bungee jump from a bridge in Australia. Or–and this was the worst of all–a TV show about some intrepid woman traveling alone in the blueness of Greece, and I'd be overcome by the little river of sparks that seemed to run beneath all that, the blood/sap/wine, aliveness, whatever it was. It had made me feel bereft over the immensity of the world, the extraordinary things people did with their lives–though, really, I didn't want to do any of those particular things. I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

I felt it that morning standing beside the window, the quick, furtive way it insinuated itself, and I had no idea what to say to myself about it. Hugh seemed to think my little collapse of spirit, or whatever it was I was having, was about Dee's being away at college, the cliched empty nest and all that.

Last fall, after we'd gotten her settled at Vanderbilt, Hugh and I'd rushed home so he could play in the Waverly Harris Cancer Classic, a tennis tournament he'd been worked up about all summer. He'd gone out in the Georgia heat for three months and practiced twice a week with a fancy Prince graphite racket. Then I'd ended up crying all the way home from Nashville. I kept picturing Dee standing in front of her dorm waving goodbye as we pulled away. She touched her eye, her chest, then pointed at us–a thing she'd done since she was a little girl. Eye. Heart. You. It did me in. When we got home, despite my protests, Hugh called his doubles partner, Scott, to take his place in the tournament, and stayed home and watched a movie with me. "An Officer and a Gentleman." He pretended very hard to like it.

The deep sadness I felt in the car that day had lingered for a couple of weeks, but it had finally lifted. "I did" miss Dee–of course I did–but I couldn't believe that was the real heart of the matter.

Lately Hugh had pushed me to see Dr. Ilg, one of the psychiatrists in his practice. I'd refused on the grounds that she had a parrot in her office.

I knew that would drive him crazy. This wasn't the real reason, of course–I have nothing against people's having parrots, except that they keep them in little cages. But I used it as a way of letting him know I wasn't taking the suggestion seriously. It was one of the rare times I didn't acquiesce to him.

"So she's got a parrot, so what?" he'd said. "You'd like her." Probably I would, but I couldn't quite bring myself to go that far–all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

I did occasionally, though, play out imaginary sessions with Dr. Ilg in my head. I would tell her about my father, and, grunting, she would write it down on a little pad–which is all she ever seemed to do. I pictured her bird as a dazzling white cockatoo perched on the back of her chair, belting out all sorts of flagrant opinions, repeating itself like a Greek chorus: "You blame yourself, you blame yourself, you blame yourself."

Not long ago–I don't know what possessed me to do it–I'd told Hugh about these make-believe sessions with Dr. Ilg, even about the bird, and he'd smiled. "Maybe you should just see the bird," he said. "Your Dr. Ilg sounds like an idiot."

Now, across the room, Hugh was listening to the person on the phone, muttering, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." His face had clamped down into what Dee called "the Big Frown," that pinched expression of grave and intense listening in which you could almost see the various pistons in his brain–Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Winnicott–bobbing up and down.

Wind lapped over the roof, and I heard the house begin to sing–as it routinely did–with an operatic voice that was very Beverly "Shrill," as we liked to say. There were also doors that refused to close, ancient toilets that would suddenly decline to flush ("The toilets have gone anal-retentive again!" Dee would shout), and I had to keep constant vigilance to prevent Hugh from exterminating the flying squirrels that lived in the fireplace in his study. If we ever got a divorce, he loved to joke, it would be about squirrels.

But I loved all of this; I truly did. It was only the basement floods and the winter drafts that I hated. And now, with Dee in her first year at Vanderbilt, the emptiness–I hated that.

Hugh was hunched on his side of the bed, his elbows balanced on his knees and the top two knobs of his spine visible through his pajamas. He said, "You realize this is a serious situation, don't you? She needs to see someone–I mean, an actual psychiatrist."

I felt sure then it was a resident at the hospital, though it did seem Hugh was talking down to him, and that was not like Hugh.

Through the window the neighborhood looked drowned, as if the houses–some as big as arks–might lift off their foundations and float down the street. I hated the thought of slogging out into this mess, but of course I would. I would drive to Sacred Heart of Mary over on Peachtree and get my forehead swiped with ashes. When Dee was small, she'd mistakenly called the church the "Scared" Heart of Mary." The two of us still referred to it that way sometimes, and it occurred to me now how apt the name really was. I mean, if Mary was still around, like so many people thought, including my insatiably Catholic mother, maybe her heart "was" scared. Maybe it was because she was on such a high and impossible pedestal–Consummate Mother, Good Wife, All-Around Paragon of Perfect Womanhood. She was probably up there peering over the side, wishing for a ladder, a parachute, something to get her down from there.

I hadn't missed going to church on Ash Wednesday since my father had died–not once. Not even when Dee was a baby and I had to take her with me, stuffing her into a thick papoose of blankets, armored with pacifiers and bottles of pumped breast milk. I wondered why I'd kept subjecting myself to it–year after year at the Scared Heart of Mary. The priest with his dreary incantation: "Remember you are dust, to dust you shall return." The blotch of ash on my forehead.

I only knew I had carried my father this way my whole life.

Hugh was standing now. He said, "Do you want me to tell her?" He looked at me, and I felt the gathering of dread. I imagined a bright wave of water coming down the street, rounding the corner where old Mrs. Vandiver had erected a gazebo too close to her driveway; the wave, not mountainous like a tsunami but a shimmering hillside sweeping toward me, carrying off the ridiculous gazebo, mailboxes, doghouses, utility poles, azalea bushes. A clean, ruinous sweep.

"It's for you," Hugh said. I didn't move at first, and he called my name. ""Jessie." The call–it's for you."

He held the receiver out to me, sitting there with his thick hair sticking up on the back of his head like a child's, looking grave and uneasy, and the window copious with water, a trillion pewter droplets coming down on the roof.

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?' "

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."

"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.

"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 infant, I felt the familiar discontent that had been growing in me all winter. It rose with such force it felt as if someone had physically struck me.

"So," Kat said. "Are you coming or not?"

"Yes, I'm coming. Of course I'm coming."

As I said the words, I was filled with relief. Not that I would be going home to Egret Island and dealing with this grotesque situation–there was no relief in that, only a great amount of trepidation. No, this remarkable sense of relief was coming, I realized, from the fact I would be going away "period."

I sat on the bed holding the phone, surprised at myself, and ashamed. Because as awful as this situation with Mother was, I was almost glad for it. It was affording me something I hadn't known until this moment that I desperately wanted: a reason to leave. A good, proper, even noble reason to leave my beautiful pasture.

CHAPTER THREE

When I came downstairs, Hugh was making breakfast. I heard the hiss of Jimmy Dean sausage before I got to the kitchen.

"I'm not hungry," I told him.

"But you need to eat," he said. "You're not going to throw up again. Trust me."

Whenever a crisis of any kind appeared, Hugh made these great big breakfasts. He seemed to believe in their power to revive us.

Before coming downstairs, he'd booked me a one-way ticket to Charleston and arranged to cancel his early-afternoon patients so he could drive me to the airport.

I sat down at the breakfast bar, pushing certain images out of my head: the meat cleaver, my mother's finger.

The refrigerator opened with a soft sucking noise, then closed. I watched Hugh crack four eggs. He stood at the stove with a spatula and shuffled them around in a pan. A row of damp brown curls skimmed the top of his collar. I started to say something about his needing a haircut, that he looked like an aging hippie, but I checked myself, or rather the impulse simply died on my tongue.

Instead I found myself staring at him. People were always staring at Hugh–in restaurants, theater lines, bookstore aisles. I would catch them stealing glimpses, mostly women. His hair and eyes had that rich autumn coloring that reminds you of cornucopias and Indian corn, and he had a beautiful cleft in the center of his chin.

Once I'd teased him that when we walked into a room together, no one noticed me because he was so much prettier, and he'd felt compelled to tell me that I was beautiful. But the truth was, I couldn't hold a candle to Hugh. Lately the skin on either side of my eyes had become etched with a fine weave of criss-crossing lines, and I sometimes found myself at the mirror pulling my temples back with my fingers. My hair had been an incredible nutmeg color for as long as I could remember, but it was twined now with a few strands of gray. For the first time, I could feel a hand at the small of my back nudging me toward the mysterious dwelling place of menopausal women. Already my friend Rae had disappeared in there, and she was just forty-five.

Hugh's aging seemed more benign, his handsomeness turning ripe, but it wasn't that so much as the combination of intelligence and kindness in his face that drew people. It had captured me back in the beginning.

I leaned forward onto the bar, the speckled granite cold on the bones of my elbows, remembering how we'd met, "needing" to remember how it once was. How "we" were.

He had showed up at my first so-called art exhibit, which had taken place in a ratty booth I'd rented at the Decatur Flea Market. I'd just graduated from Agnes Scott with a degree in art and inflated ideas about selling my work, becoming a bona fide artist. No one, however, had really looked at my art boxes all day, except for a woman who kept referring to them as "shadow-boxes."

Hugh, in the second year of his psychiatric residency at Emory, came to the flea market that day for vegetables. As he wandered by my booth, his eyes lit on my "Kissing Geese" box. It was an odd creation, but in a way it was my favorite.

I'd painted the inside with a Victorian living-room scene–English rose wallpaper and fringed floor lamps–then placed a velvet dollhouse sofa in the box with two plastic geese glued onto the cushions, positioned so they appeared to be in the midst of a beak-to-beak kiss.

I'd been inspired by a newspaper story about a wild goose that had dropped out of the flock during migration to stay with his mate, who'd been injured in a mall parking lot. A store clerk had taken the hurt bird to a refuge, but her mate had wandered around the parking lot for over a week, honking forlornly, until the clerk took him to the refuge, too. The article said they'd been given a "room" together.

The news clipping was decoupaged around the outside of the box, and I'd attached a bicycle horn to the top, the kind with the red ball that sounds like a honking goose. Only about half the people who'd seen the box had actually squeezed the horn. I'd imagined that this said something about them. That they were more playful than the average person, less reserved.

Hugh bent over the box and read the article while I waited to see what he would do. He honked the horn twice.

"How much do you want for it?" he asked.

I paused, working up the courage to say twenty-five dollars.

"Would forty be enough?" he said, reaching for his wallet.

I hesitated again, bowled over that anyone would pay that much for kissing geese.

"Fifty?" he said.

I kept my face straight. "Okay, fifty."

We went out that same night. Four months later we were married. For years he kept the "Kissing Geese" box on his dresser, then moved it to a bookshelf in his study. A couple of years ago, I found him at his desk meticulously regluing all the pieces.

He confessed once that he paid all that money just to get me to go out with him, but the truth was, he loved the box, and his honking the horn really "had" said something about him, hinting at a side of Hugh few people saw. They always thought about his prodigious intellect, the ability he had to dissect and anatomize, but he loved to have fun and often instigated the most unexpected things: "We could go out and celebrate Mexican Independence Day, or would you prefer to go to the Mattress Races?" We'd spent a Saturday afternoon at a contest in which people attached wheels onto beds and raced through downtown Atlanta.

People also rarely noticed how deeply and thoroughly he felt things. He still cried whenever a patient took his own life, and he grew sad at times over the dark, excruciating corners people backed themselves into.

Last fall, while putting away the laundry, I came upon Hugh's jewelry case in the back of his underwear drawer. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I sat on the bed and went through it. It held all of Dee's baby teeth, tiny and yellowed like popcorn kernels, and several drawings she'd done on his prescription pad. There was his father's Pearl Harbor pin, his grandfather's pocket-watch, the four pairs of cuff links I'd bought him for various anniversaries. I slipped the rubber band off a small bundle of papers and found a creased photograph of me on our honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains, posing in front of the cabin we'd rented. The rest were cards and little love notes I'd sent him over the years. He'd kept them all.

"He" was the first one of us to say I love you. Two weeks after we met, before we'd even made love. We were in a diner near the Emory campus, eating breakfast in a booth by the window. He said, "I hardly know anything about you, but I love you," and from that moment his commitment had been unyielding. Even now he rarely went a day without telling me.

In the beginning I'd felt so hungry for him, a ravenous kind of wanting that remained until Dee was born. Only then did it start to subside and grow domesticated. Like animals taken from the wild and put in nice, simulated habitats where they turned complacent, knowing exactly where their next meal would come from. All the hunt and surprise drained out of it.

Hugh set the plate of eggs and sausage in front of me. "There you go," he said.

We ate, side by side, the windows still varnished with early-morning dark. Rain rattled down the gutters, and I heard what sounded like a shutter banging in the distance.

I put down my fork and listened.

"On the island when the storms came, our hurricane shutters used to slam against the house like that," I said, and my eyes began to fill.

Hugh stopped chewing and looked at me.

"Mother would drape a sheet over the kitchen table and crawl under it with me and Mike and read to us by flashlight.

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