Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

thought for a while he might get into trouble over the baseball card that he used to mark pages in his prayer book, but apparently no one, including the abbot, seemed to care. It surprised Thomas how much he missed simple things like baseball.
    Once in a while he got to watch a game on television, but it wasn’t the same. Dale Murphy had hit forty-four home runs last year, and he’d seen only one of them.
    Linda had given him the baseball card their last Christmas together. Eddie Matthews, 1953—there was no telling what she’d paid for it.
    He envied Dominic, who had to be eighty at least and went about in a tattered straw hat everywhere except choir. He’d been the one who’d convinced the abbot to put a television in the music-listening room. Once Dominic had tapped on Thomas’s door after the Great Silence and tried to convince him to sneak 56
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    over and watch a special program about shooting the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Thomas had not gone. He regretted it to this day.
    He was nearly at his cottage when he stopped abruptly, thinking he heard a voice, a woman’s voice calling in the distance. He looked east toward the rookery, his robe beating around his legs.
    A whip-poor-will sang out. The Gullah woman on the island, Hepzibah Postell, the one who kept up the slave cemetery, had told him once that whip-poor-wills were the departed spirits of loved ones. Of course he didn’t believe this, and he was pretty sure she didn’t either, but he liked to think it was Linda out there singing. That it was her voice calling in the distance.
    Thomas pictured his wife—or was it merely the generic woman?—posing in a swimsuit. He imagined the place inside her thigh, just above her knees, the softness there. He thought about kissing that place.
    He stood beneath a bent tree in the Great Silence, and he thought about falling into life and then about flying far above it.
    Then he heard it again—a woman’s voice calling out. Not a bird singing or the wind moaning but a woman.

    C H A P T E R
    Seven
    pq
    The smell of gumbo hung inside the house in thick green ropes, like something you could swing on to get across the kitchen. I set my suitcase on the beige rug and walked down the hallway to Mother’s bedroom. I called out,
    “Mother? It’s me, Jessie,” and my voice sounded grainy and tired.
    She was not in her bed. The blanket was thrown back, and the white sheets were wadded up in a mess, as if children had gone berserk jumping up and down on them.
    The bathroom door was shut, and fluorescent light leaked out from the bottom edge. As I waited for her to come out, I stretched my achy shoulders and neck. A pair of worn-out terry-cloth slippers had been tossed upside down on the rug, which was beige like its sibling in the living room. Mother did not believe in unbeige rugs. Or in walls or curtains in any color other than white, cream, and ivory. She did believe in green paint outside, but inside, things had to be more or less the color of tap water. The color of a life bled completely out.
    I regarded the old-fashioned dressing table with the gathered skirt—was it beige or was it white with a case of old age? In the center of the dresser, Mother’s ceramic Madonna had a chubby Jesus hoisted onto her hip and a look of postpartum depression 58
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    about her. Beside it was a photograph of my father on his boat.
    The water was navy blue and traveled behind him forever.
    I was not thinking about how noiseless Mother was behind the bathroom door; I was preoccupied with the sense of wading back into her life, into this room, swimming in the contradictions she always stirred in me, the tangle of love and loathing. I scanned the bedside table: her old red-beaded rosary, two prescription bottles, a roll of gauze, tape, scissors, a digital clock. I realized I was looking for the mayonnaise jar. It was nowhere in the room.
    “Mother?”
    I tapped on the bathroom door. Silence