Free The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

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.
    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 onto the seat of the mermaid chair, for some reason that being the most honored spot. It was my funeral game, a solemn play I’d indulged in after my father died. The petals were his ashes, and I’d thought what I was doing was saying good-bye, but it may have been just the opposite—that I was trying to hold on to him, tuck him in private places only I knew. I would find the petals weeks later, lumps of brown, dried rose chips.
    The night seemed paler now, as if the wind had blown some of the darkness out of it. I stood still, letting my eyes roam across the tops of the rosebushes, along the paths plowed with moonlight. There was no sign of my mother.
    I wished then I’d called Hepzibah and Kat instead of dashing over here, wasting all this time. I’d just been so sure she would be here, much surer than I’d been about Dee and the shoe store. Mother had made herself the Keeper of the Statue about the same time she’d started to work in the kitchen. She often trudged out here with a bucket of soapy water to wash the bird shit off it, and four times a year she waxed it with a paste that smelled like orange peel and limes. She came here to pour out the various and sundry torments of her life instead of going into the church and telling them to God. Senara was practically a nobody in the hierarchical world of saints, but Mother believed in her.
    She loved to recount the story of my birth as proof of Senara’s potency, how I was turned backward in her womb and became stuck during the delivery. She’d prayed to Senara, who’d promptly flipped me upside down, and I’d wriggled headfirst into the world.
    Out here in the middle of the garden, the statue appeared like a stamen protruding from the center of a huge, winter-blighted flower. It occurred to me that the saint had presided the same way over my childhood, her shadow hovering above the emptiness that had come when I was nine.
    The worst punishment Mike and I had ever received had come because we’d dressed the statue in a two-piece swimsuit, sunglasses, and a blond wig. We’d cut the bottom of the suit in half and pinned it together around Senara’s hips. Some monks had thought the getup was funny, but Mother had cried over our disrespect and sentenced us to write the Agnus Dei five hundred times a day for a solid week: Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Instead of being contrite, I’d merely felt confused about it all, as if I’d betrayed