Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

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 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.
    â€œMother?”
    I tapped on the bathroom door. Silence 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 minuscule 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 canisters 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 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