by Isla Morley
She starts to giggle, then laughs and puts her hand on her belly. I smile wanly and finally get up.
“Abbe!” she shouts, and grabs my hand. “The baby just moved!” In one shattering moment, with my hand pasted to the warm hill of her stomach, I feel the gentle nudge in the heel of my hand. My grief parts like the Red Sea, long enough for me first to feel the leap of new life, and then the thundering hoofbeats of despair gaining ground.
Solly barks suddenly and we both jump. The doorbell chimes and I move to answer it, leaving Petal with her hand on her belly and peering into the space between the atoms. I open the door and there stands Jenny, holding a very pink cake. “Happy Birthday, old lady,” she says, and gives me a kiss, then quickly sees the brimming tears and says, “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head as though to say, Tell you later, and take the cake. She follows me in and I say, “You remember Petal, Jen. We’ve just felt the baby move.”
“How wonderful,” Jenny says.
“I think it’s a girl, but Jeff thinks it’s a boy because it moves so much,” says Petal.
“Do you have names picked out?” asks Jenny, putting her hand in the vacancy that mine just left.
“We’re not telling everyone, but I’ll tell you if you promise to keep it a secret.” She waits for us both to nod our vows of silence. “It’s going to be Blossom if it’s a girl, and Budd if it’s a boy. In honor of Mum. Aren’t those the best names?” she asks.
Jenny lights the lone candle and insists I blow it out. “Make a wish,” she says. “A good one.” Petal picks up her bucket and mop and heads for the stairs. “Aren’t you going to have cake?” Jenny offers.
“No thanks, I don’t eat anything with food coloring.”
Jenny slices the cake and we eat standing at the sink.
“Is it that she is just young, or have I turned into my mother?” I ask.
“Having never met your mother, I cannot answer that, but I can say with relative confidence that you have turned into mine!”
“Were we ever that age?” I sigh.
“The good Lord knows I wasn’t,” she snorts, and I remember why Jenny is my friend. “I was raising two babies and a good-for-nothing husband at that age, and working two jobs to pay for his good-for-nothing ass! What were you doing?”
“Oh, nothing as risky as getting my navel pierced or boycotting cake icing,” I say. “I guess I was falling in love with Greg. Probably was risky, if I knew then what I would eventually have to give up.”
“You mean, losing Cleo?” she asks.
“No, I mean losing me.”
Jenny shakes her head. “You’ve always seemed ‘all there’ to me. And he’s always struck me as a good man.”
“He is,” I agree. “I knew the first time I met Greg he was a safe bet. He was going to be everything my father wasn’t—he was going to love me and stick by me and never leave me. He was going to wake up every morning and be exactly the same man I went to sleep with the night before.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Unless you don’t mind dying of boredom.”
“You think that’s fair?” Jenny asks.
“I don’t know. It’s just that Greg has spent a decade hoping and praying I would be the perfect preacher’s wife, who doesn’t get her back up so easily. That I would turn out to be the superwife and the supermom. And every time I’m not, I swear Greg leaves me just an inch. You add up all those inches over time and see the miles you come up with.” I can’t say I have given this theory a lot of thought, but as I say it I know it is at least one version of the truth.
“But he loves you, girl,” Jenny adds, insisting on a happily-everafter.
“He loves me most when I’m least me,” I counter. “When I don’t ‘take things personally,’ when I’m not out fighting lost causes or fighting back.” Or giving up. Greg is equally uncomfortable with this side of me, but for the same reason—because it is driven by the same tip-thescales passion.
When Jenny says, “I don’t know, honey,” I don’t argue; I change the subject. “I feel old today. Older than Mrs. Worthington,” I say. Althea Worthington, whose age no one knows for sure, has outlived a husband, both her children, and the doctor who all but signed her death certificate fifteen years ago when they found the first lump. Althea, who appears always to address your navel because she does not have the spinal agility to stand fully erect, whose root-bound fingers clasp around her great-grandson’s arm each Sunday as he helps her make the circuitous route from the car to the sanctuary to the communion rail to the cookie table and back to the car. Althea, whose remaining obligation—which some say keeps her alive—is to water the sanctuary’s potted plants, has more fight in her than me. “When I’m dead and buried,” she once instructed me, “hire someone who knows how to take care of plants; don’t leave it to that bunch who work in the church office.” “I think you are going to outlive us all, Mrs. Worthington,” I told her, to which she smiled with obvious pleasure.
“That reminds me,” Jenny says, and digs around in her handbag. “There’s a card from the women in the auxiliary. And last Sunday Mrs. Scribner gave me this to give to you.” She hands me a little box wrapped in last year’s recycled Christmas paper. Inside is a key ring with a polished nut suspended from it and a note that says, I don’t need this anymore. Happy Birthday.
“What is it?” Jenny asks.
“An acorn.” I smile. “My grandmother used to stash them all over her house. They’re for luck and longevity.”
“Did it work?”
“She did live a long time, but I would have to say her luck ran out before she did. Right around the time my mom died.”
We finish our cake, and Jenny rinses the dishes.
“I don’t know how the world works anymore,” I say. “Life was easier to bear when I thought there was meaning to it, when there seemed to be reasons for why things happened or didn’t happen. When life was one great algorithm. But it’s not. Bad things happen, good things happen, then more bad things happen. There’s no logic to it.”
“Honey,” Jenny says, and holds me tight. There is only the humming of the fridge, which gets empty and filled without any effort on my behalf, the ticking of my mother’s clock, and the everydayness of my quiet house. The nagging thought that every fourteen or fifteen days Petal will use my spare house key to let herself in and remind me that there are barbecues on the beach and budding fetuses in the wombs of other women. That the world is filled with people who aren’t dying, like Mrs. Worthington, or who want to die, like Mrs. Scribner; people who walk straight up, and dance around bonfires, and have babies and name them after rose parts.
After a while, I pull away and Jenny and I nibble at our cake crumbs.
“Can I fire her for being cheery?”
“Why, sure, honey, but then that just leaves Carolyn Higa to gossip about.”
GREG COMES HOME exactly at five o’clock, just as Petal has folded the last of the towels fresh from the line. I put down the stack of mail and greet his hesitant smile with a tepid “Hello.”
“Brought you a present. Well, two actually,” he says, and from behind his back produces two wrapped gifts, each tied with a bow.
“I want lots of presents for my birthday,” says Petal.
“I’ll remember that.”
“Oh, Reverend Deighton, I didn’t mean it like that.” She blushes. “But you are coming to my party, right?”
“Sure,” he says as I unwrap the presents—one a book of collected poems by Emily Dickinson, the other an anthology of South African liberation music.
“Thank you,” I say, and turn my cheek so he can pester it with a kiss.
“You’re welcome.” And then to Petal, “Are you ready?”
She says goodbye to me and lifts her box of cleaning supplies. “Let me get that,” says Greg. And he turns to look over his shoulder. “I made reservations at the Bamboo Lanai—we’ll head out as soon as I get back so we can catch the sunset.”
That gives me an hour, long enough for a poem and a bath. I open the book at random:
Mine enemy is growing old,—
I have at last revenge.
The palate of the hate departs;
If any would avenge,—
Let him be quick, the viand flits,
It is a faded meat.
Anger as soon as fed is dead;
’Tis starving makes it fat.
“SHE HAS an inexhaustible supply of cheeriness,” says Greg, putting down his menu and glancing around for the waiter.
“It’s a front,” I say without looking up, debating between the oriental chicken salad and the linguini.
“Covering her grief for her mother, you mean?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’s hiding something.”
“Oh, come on, Abbe, the girl’s as transparent as glass.”
The waiter comes over, apologizes for the long wait, and takes our order.
“I don’t think so. It’s almost as though she’s trying too hard.”
“Maybe to get over her mother dying,” he repeats.
“Possibly.”
The restaurant overlooking the harbor is busy at this hour. Several teams of paddlers are slicing through the turquoise water in their outriggers. The yachts dawdle at the harbor mouth like reluctant children called in for supper. Along the boardwalk, tourists are out with their cameras, waiting for a yacht to sail in front of the dipping sun, while behind them flows a stream of runners, rollerbladers, and cyclists. Nobody pays any attention to the person with the wobbly shopping cart making a marathon of his own, each trash can a rest station.
It is a long time before the pupus come, accompanied again with the waiter’s apologetic shrug. I am already tired and ready to leave, the heat from the day lingering on the evening’s damp breeze. The spot just above my left eye begins to vibrate, and then the flare goes off somewhere to my right. In the flashbulb instant that I feel the vibration of the oncoming migraine, I see a man at the table closest to the kitchen looking not in the direction of the setting sun but directly at us. Or rather at Greg.
“Do you know that man?”
“Who?” Greg turns.
“No, over there—by the kitchen. The old man sitting by himself.” It’s his stoop rather than his face that makes him appear old.
Greg flushes and half raises his hand in salutation.
“Someone from church?” I ask.
“No one you know,” he says, too quickly.
“He keeps looking at us,” I say, digging my finger into the corner of my eye, blinking against the flashbulbs. “Why is he staring at you? Who is he?”
“Shall we go?”
“What? Our order hasn’t arrived yet.”
“Let’s go, Abbe; you don’t look well.” He folds his napkin and puts it on the table, careful not to glance in the direction of the lone diner.
“No, Greg, you don’t look well. Who is that man?”
Greg lifts his hand and flags the waiter, who rushes over. “The bill, please. We have to leave.”
“Your entrees will be out shortly, sir, sorry for the wait,” the waiter apologizes.
“Who—is—that—man, Gregory?”
“Sorry, it’s not you,” my husband explains to the waiter, ignoring me. “Emergency.”
“What the hell are you going on about? What emergency?” The waiter rushes off, but Greg stands and comes around to my seat.
“Who, Greg? Who is he?” I demand. Both the man’s eyes and hands flicker and fidget. But for the patch of dyed black hair, he lacks color, as though he had been put through a strainer. Where his lips ought to be there is only a thin line, like an old scar, a mouth that has been stitched closed. His hands keep fidgeting and when I focus on what they are doing I see that he is making origami from a stack of cocktail napkins. They are red, and at first glance it appears as though the man has sat down to a pool of blood.
Suddenly I know the answer before Greg gives it.
“Mr. Nguyen, Abbe. That’s Mr. Nguyen,” whispers Greg, steering me toward the register where the waiter hands him the bill and Greg’s wallet opens, credit card ready. The hammer in my head now keeps time with my heart and all the chatter of the waiting area ceases. The candles on the tables suddenly are acutely bright and I can hear the fans whir overhead like choppers.
Greg is bending over the receipt, glasses on so he can sign it, when I feel, for the first time since before Cleo died, the undeniable gravitational pull of will. Each step is deliberate, measured, and quick, quick enough to bring me to the table of the man before anyone can stop me.
He looks up at me and around the wrinkles is the smallest of smiles, the dawning of a greeting or an apology, but before his lips part even wide enough to form a word, I say, “You should be locked up, you know! Locked up!”
Suddenly Greg clutches at my arm. “Abbe, please!”
“You’re a murderer, do you understand?” I snarl.
“Madam, we must ask you—” the maître d’ says.
“Murderer!”
And before they each take an arm, I reach out and strike his face with one backward swing of my hand. The electrical current that has been bothering my eye and setting off the flashbulbs rushes out of my arm, leaving it limp and hot.
“Jesus!” someone says. “She’s crazy!” another voice says. Someone else comes to assist the man, who has laid down his head among his crumpled creations, while I am jostled to the exit amid Greg’s flapping apologies.
MY MOTHER did not know she had watered her beautiful rosebushes for the last time when she came in one Sunday afternoon, happily complaining of a sore back. Placing the yellow roses in a vase for the dining room table that I had been told to set, she had been humming. I remember she was humming because it was I rather than she who heard my father’s car gear down before it turned into the driveway. She’d been humming since the previous day when the tobacco-scented journal arrived in the mail from America with a note from Rhiaan marking the page upon which his new poem was printed.
My father had seen it despite her attempts to conceal it, but who was to know whether he actually read it? If he did, then surely he would have thrown a few dishes or slammed a door, because Swartland was “Commie bullshit” of the first order. But there had been no rampage, and we were off the hook. Or so we thought.
It was the squealing tires that cut short my mother’s humming, that made us both run to the living room window in time to see my father’s pickup flatten her rosebushes one after the other before skidding to a stop two feet away from where we stood. And it seemed that we had been glued in place then, hearts plastered on our faces, the last bars of the hum floating above us, while the variegated petals settled on the lawn. My mother’s face was a bald stump from which the petals had been plucked. But it was my father’s face that surprised me most, for in all the months I could remember I had not seen him laugh with such malcontent abandon.
She should have slapped him; I should have slapped him instead of watching him kick the dismembered blossoms on the ground. Should have slapped him when he came inside, petals still stuck to his work boots, and said, “Christ, Louise, your roses have fucked up my fender!”
I SIT AT THE DINING ROOM TABLE, gleaming from homemade wax, and pluck the petals of each long-stemmed dethorned rose. The ice pick has removed itself from my left eye, but something is still worrying the corner of my peripheral vision. The old man’s face keeps getting in the way, and the feeling of his face on the back of my hand. It is only when I come to the last rose, when the table is overlaid with fragrant petals, that it comes fully and forcefully into focus, as clearly as the deliberateness of my father’s rampage: Gregory knew Mr. Nguyen.
TEN
By the time Greg comes down to the kitchen for his monastic breakfast, I am waiting for him at the table. Before he can express his surprise that I am up before the city lights have turned off, I hand him his morning paper. Instead of reading the headlines, he scans my face.
<
br /> “At what point did you and the man who killed our daughter become friends?” I demand.
“At what point did you start having an affair with someone else?”
“Jesus, Greg. The man killed Cleo. He drove his car into her body and ended her life. He ended our lives,” I say, ignoring his question but feeling the panic beginning to well.
“This is something you need to understand, okay? It was an accident. He didn’t intend to do it; he didn’t wake up one day and plan to hit a pedestrian. He didn’t plan to hurt Cleo or destroy our lives. If anyone’s been doing any planning around here, it’s you!” Blame, for Greg, is new and he tries it on like the latest clergy stole he ordered from a catalog.
“Accident, yes, accident. It’s what everybody says. But an accident means it wasn’t anyone’s fault, and Cleo’s death was someone’s fault, Gregory. It was that bastard’s fault. And it was Theresa’s fault. And God knows it was my fault too. Intent does not matter. What matters is that we pay. And he has to pay. Except you want to get him off the hook. You want to be his buddy and his priest and his savior! So that you can feel good, and you can say your prayers at night and tell God what an almighty good deed you did today!”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Abbe.”
“Oh, ‘Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they say’ . . . You think you can wrap yourself up in your religion so you don’t have to be real.”
“Don’t lecture me on being real! You think you are real because you sit in this house, day after day, week after week, winding clocks and staring at photos? You think you’re being real because you won’t leave the house, or come to church, or go back to work, that you can’t do one nice thing for someone else, say one nice thing to Petal. But listening to the man who has killed my child, watching him weep and beg, that’s not real, right? It’s not real trying to forgive the man who least deserves my forgiveness? What I know is real, Abbe, is that that man’s debt is so big we can never collect on it; all we have a chance of doing is to forgive it.”