Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

loomed back, and then a thin, sticky anxiety seeped from behind the door. I turned the knob and stepped inside. There was nothing but the minus-cule bathroom. Empty.
    I walked into the kitchen—a room so changeless it seemed magically frozen in place; entering it was like strolling back into the 1950s. The same can opener attached to the wall, the canis-ters with the rooster motif, copper teakettle, tin bread box, dingy teaspoons mounted on a wooden rack. The wall clock beside the refrigerator was a black cat with a swinging tail pendulum. The immortal Felix. I expected to see Mother sitting at the Formica table eating gumbo, but this room, too, was empty.
    I hurried through the dining room, checked the two extra bedrooms—Mike’s and my old rooms. She had to have been here while Hepzibah was in the house—what, ten minutes ago? I returned to the kitchen and looked up Hepzibah’s number, but as I reached for the phone, I noticed the back door ajar.
    Grabbing a flashlight, I stepped onto the back stairs, swinging the beam across the yard. The sash to Mother’s blue bathrobe t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
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    lay in a coil on the bottom step. I went down and retrieved it.
    The wind had picked up. It took the sash right out of my hand.
    I watched it jerk and flail into the darkness.
    Where would she go?
    I remembered the time Dee, five years old, had slipped away from me in Northlake Mall, the seizure of panic I’d felt, followed by an almost preternatural calm, by some voice inside telling me the only way to find Dee was to think like her. I’d sat on a bench and thought like Dee, then walked straight to the children’s shoe store, where I’d found her among the Sesame Street tennis shoes, trying to lace Bert and Ernie onto her small feet. I knew only one thing Mother loved the way Dee had loved Bert and Ernie.
    I found the path that led to the monastery at the back of the yard. It wasn’t a long path, but it twisted through overarching wax myrtle and sweet bay and snags of dewberry vines. The monks had cut a crude opening for Mother in the monastery wall so she wouldn’t have to go all the way around to the entrance when she came to cook for them. They called it “Nelle’s Gate.” Mother, of course, ate that up. She’d told me about it at least fifty times.
    As I stepped through it, I shouted her name. I heard an animal of some sort rustle in the brush, then a whip-poor-will, and when the wind died momentarily, the distant pitch and tumble of the ocean, that endless percussion it makes.
    Mother had worn a foot trail to the main path that ran between the cloister and the monks’ cottages. I followed it, pausing once or twice to call out to her, but the wind seemed to bat my voice right back at me. The moon had risen. It hung low out over the marsh, a startling orb of glassy light.

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    When I saw the back of the cloister enclave, I cut off the flashlight and began to run. Everything flowed past me—the little markers with the stations of the cross, the plumes of mist, the sea wind, and the knotty ground. I swept past the stucco house where the monks made their nets, the sign over its door reading fortuna, maria, retia nostra—Bless, Mary, Our Nets.
    The statue of St. Senara was in an enclosed garden beside the church. I stepped through the gate into a dense haven of rosebushes, their limbs bare and reaching, forming candelabra shadows against the far wall. The monks had designed the garden with St. Senara’s statue in the center and six evenly spaced paths leading in to her. She looked like the hub of a magnificent floral wheel.
    I’d played here as a child. While Mother slaved in the monastery kitchen, I would come out here and pull dozens of rose heads off their stems, filling a sweetgrass basket with petals—a whole mishmash of colors—which I disposed of in secret ceremonies, tossing them into the marsh behind the church, around the trunks of certain venerable bearded oaks, and