by Donna Hemans
Plum roamed, looked on at a mother and a toddler on the floor paging through a picture book. The child turned the pages quickly, stopping briefly at random pages and pointing, and the mother, unable to read the actual words, made up a story to match the pictures. Plum soaked up the child’s quick and easy smile, her dimples, the dark ringlets brushing her forehead, how quick she was to reach for another book, how she commanded her mother to read, how easily she laughed when her mother quacked like a duck and mooed like a cow. And on to another book, which the child read by pointing to the pictures and telling the story she had heard before. Plum soaked up the child’s voice, the way she mispronounced wolf as “woof,” how her eyes lit up when she said “huff and puff.”
“Your turn,” the child said, and flipped to the front of the book, her eyes moving from the pages to her mother’s face. In that moment, no one but her mother mattered.
Tears welled up in Plum’s eyes, threatening to spill over at any moment. That moment should have been in her future. Instead of her, it would be Lenworth or perhaps another woman he got to take her place, who would matter, who the baby girl would look at with adoration. It was unbearable. She blinked away the tears and left that room and the building entirely without looking for career and self-development books as she should have. And walked again, up Eastern Parkway this time, past the museum and the Botanic Garden, aware of little except for the emptiness inside, and the everpresent, unbearable thought: Your daughter is gone.
Back at home, her body chilled, Plum sat in the window seat with her toes curled in socks and hands wrapped around a mug of hot chocolate. She sniffed at the steam, the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg and cocoa tickling her nose, and tried to ignore her mother and father, looking on at her, the troubled daughter they did not understand and could not reach. Neither stepped forward to hug or to hold, as if afraid their touch could break her. At the moment, that was all Plum wanted: warmth, not pitying looks, and arms around to contain and keep her from falling apart, keep her from feeling that she had abandoned her baby girl. Instead of leaving, she should have stayed in Jamaica and continued to search. She shouldn’t have accepted Mrs. Murray’s offer so quickly, shouldn’t have left the island entirely, shouldn’t be in Brooklyn attempting to rebuild her suspended life without her daughter, who was by then a cooing, babbling being, holding her head up, grasping at things—his goatee, his bushy brows, his fingers—and smiling.
“Tell me,” her mother said. “What did we do wrong?” She pointed to a chair, and Plum’s father brought it forward from the dining room.
“Nothing,” Plum said.
“We want to help you. You know that, right?”
Plum nodded, but kept her eyes down on the small bubbles and froth swirling in the mug, seeing the conversation for what it was—a planned intervention.
“You can’t go on so. You should try and get into Brooklyn College or Kingsborough next semester. You have to do something, get your mind off things.”
So simple, Plum thought. Just do something and she would forget. But she said yes.
“Everything passes,” Plum’s mother said. “No matter how unbearable it seems, you will move past it. You will.”
That was also Lenworth’s line. “Everything passes.” Including, his love and his promise and Plum.
And it angered her, even then, how easily he had left her behind. Plum conflated the two defining events of her life—her being sent away as a teenager and Lenworth walking away with their child. They were one and the same: she had been abandoned, twice by her parents at the first sign of trouble and once by her lover. At that moment, her mother’s attempt to intervene felt hollow, a little bit too late.
“I have some books,” her mother was saying. “Jobs in healthcare, nursing.”
“I don’t want to be like you. Don’t want to be a nurse.”
“Maybe not nursing. Accounting. Banking.” She put the books down, one at a time, a shallow thump rising up as she lowered each book. “You used to like to draw. No money in art. But if that’s what you want to do . . .”
“I haven’t drawn since I was probably ten years old.”
Undaunted and looking away from Plum’s sneer, her mother continued. “Anyway, you need to find a job. Do something with your life.”
“You can’t fix this, Mom. Working like you night and day, day and night, won’t make me forget. Working, always working. Two shifts, and a second job. No. Not for me.” Plum’s voice was harsher than she wanted, dismissive.
“So that’s what you have against us? We were working to feed you and keep this house. You think it’s easy for an immigrant coming to this country?”
“What I remember is this: You on the couch sleeping, Dad at work, and me in the corner playing by myself or watching TV. Or it was the other way around, Dad upstairs sleeping, you at work. Either way, it was work and sleep. You know how many birthday parties I missed because you were too tired to take me?”
Plum remembered her childhood more by her mother’s absence than her presence, the weekend dance and sports programs she hadn’t participated in because her mother and father were too tired—one parent sleeping in the daytime and the other at night—and Plum, it seemed, parenting herself. Even then, she felt like she didn’t matter, like her parents’ world would not have fallen off its axis without her in it. Indeed, their life had gone on without her in it. They had sent her away and left her there when she found trouble.
“Birthday parties? That’s what you upset about missing?”
“You know what else I remember? My pink leotards and tights that I never got to wear to a dance class. Not even one class because you could never fit it in. I found the leotards. They’re still upstairs in my drawer.”
“You know how hard we had to work to give you a good life? Never mind that you threw it away.”
“You don’t understand. All that time you had with me and you weren’t there. And me? I have nothing. No time with my child at all.”
“I can’t change what he did to you. And you can’t change it either. But you can do something about you.”
“Who says I want to?”
“You have to.”
Indeed, she did. Plum had a deal with Mrs. Murray: college or repayment of a loan. Plum swung her legs down and faced her mother.
“I’m not that girl you sent away. I’m not even the girl whose graduation you didn’t bother coming to. I’m not that girl anymore. This is who I am, sad and angry and bitter. This is me, not a robot working every waking hour to hide from my life.”
“Robot, hmmm. Hear this.” She turned from Plum to her husband sitting at the dining table with his back to it. “All the work to put this girl through school and she calling me a robot.”
“Give her time,” he said, his voice a whisper.
“This is what I have to put up with in my own house?”
Plum got up and didn’t look back. Upstairs, she stood by her bedroom door, her back pressed into it and the mug of hot chocolate that didn’t soothe still in her hand. Up there, away from her parents, it occurred to her that what bothered her more was the weight her parents—and even Lenworth—placed on ambition over personhood, attaining wealth or power or status no matter the cost to themselves or others. It was ingrained in the immigrant dream. Work three jobs if you have to. Double your shifts. Send money home. If necessary, create the illusion of success, especially for family back home. Work, and work some more, whether you love the job or not. That was Plum’s perception of the immigrant dream.
Perhaps it was also a woman’s lot in life—get up and carry on, no matter what. Plum had suffered, was still suffering. Yet, her mother’s only focus was that Plum make something of herself, be someone who mattered.
Indeed, in that room, there were still remnants of the assured teen, the girl who felt she could step out on a limb, balance herself, turn a cartwheel or two without slipping or breaking the branch. There were remnants of the girl who had a dream and a goal and a belief that she matte
red. Plum stood there with her back against the door, looking for that girl who found her own way when her parents were too tired and too busy to take her to weekend dance classes. That girl joined her school’s drama club and art club. She found a way to be seen and to matter.
She understood now that sometimes that desire to be seen as successful, to matter, was all a person had or could control. That really was all Plum had. So she shifted, found a target and homed in on it as if with a laser. She focused on mattering, on not being a person so easily discarded and left behind.
Outside, clouds thickened and filled the sky like sprayed foam. Plum stood for a moment on the red brick steps and sucked in the cold air. As she breathed out, she watched the vapor trail from her mouth. No, she hadn’t missed winter at all, not the bundling up in layers of wool or flannel or down, not the cold that bit into her skin as she walked, not the way winter weather and the wind transformed the street into a tunnel with cold air rushing in. She didn’t miss the dry skin and cracked lips, the tiny cracks on the back of her hands, the way the cold numbed her toes and fingers, the way the wool scarf simultaneously scratched and warmed her skin.
Plum walked with purpose this time, past the now-quiet brownstones behind the leafless trees. Back to the library, and again a purposeful walk toward the reference desk and a librarian. And another purposeful walk to the careers section. Plum pulled random books on allied health and database management, unsure of what she wanted to do.
There was a time when she was sure of the trajectory of her life after she finished up with the boarding school to which she had been exiled. Back to Brooklyn for sure and college in Manhattan or Boston or Washington, DC, a major city instead of a sleepy college town. Once, on a beach, Lenworth had pointed in the direction of a three-hundred-year-old fort and talked about the engineer he wanted to become. And Plum had pointed west, in the general direction of an old plantation house that had been kept up to show off its glory, the wood floors and furniture polished to a shine, the expansive verandah with its view of the sea, the spacious bedrooms with massive four-poster beds and large windows that seemed to capture and release the breeze. “One out of two things,” Plum said then. “I want to be the historian or the archaeologist finding out about other people’s lives. Or I want to restore old houses so they look like that. Houses tell stories, you know? All those things that people collect say something about them. Where they’ve been. Who they love. You can walk into a room and find out so much about a person’s life.”
So grand, Plum thought now. Not even a full year had passed since that day on the beach. But that dream, that goal was a lifetime away. She didn’t care anymore about other people’s stories or past lives. She had her own stories, past and present, and now she had a firm conviction that despite her parents’ claim, the fairytale endings—the scripted Hollywood kind—weren’t really available to her. Hollywood’s movies had told her that fairytale endings weren’t available to a dark-skinned girl, or an immigrant at that. Plum believed it now, wholeheartedly. She tamped her dreams of glory down, and settled for a simple, ordinary dream, her immigrant parents’ dream—a job that paid for food and shelter. There was no need to love the work; she simply had to be efficient at it.
Plum thumbed through the books piled on the table. She had no interest in her mother’s career, nursing, or her father’s, accounting. Any career in finance or business was out. Dealing with customers and their myriad problems and attitudes wasn’t something she imagined doing.
She picked up another on careers in allied health, closed her eyes, cracked the book open, fanned the pages, then looked down at where her thumb had stopped. Laboratory technologist. Typing blood and testing body fluids in a lab. There were no complete stories there. Perhaps an indication from a virus or a parasite of where a person had been, whether a farm or forest or remote tropical village. Perhaps an indication of a diet of sugary foods or fatty meats or undercooked seafood or pork. But the samples offered no nuances of love or loss, no expectations or hope, just normal or abnormal ranges, normal or abnormal tissue and cell samples—the cold hard facts of sickness or good health.
7
A year on, September 16: the baby girl’s first birthday. Plum pictured her daughter like this: hair parted in four distinct sections, each section a mini afro puff; pudgy cheeks; a smile that opened up dimples; skin as richly pigmented as hers; pudgy arms and legs in a frilly yellow dress. Except the baby wasn’t hers. Just a stranger on the train, a baby who smiled openly at anyone who caught her eye. The child’s mother, soothed by the monotonous clacking of metal against metal and the rhythm of the rumbling train, drifted off to sleep, her head drooping forward.
In a second the baby girl could be gone, snatched from her stroller, Plum thought. Any one of these strangers on the train could take the baby girl who smiled so easily at people, slip through the closing doors onto a crowded platform and away, disappearing into the darkened tunnel or up the stairs and into the throng outside. Improbable, but not impossible. Plum had lived it.
Plum wanted to wake the mother. And yet, how could she without alarming her? Who among the misfits and career types and students and tourists would snatch a child from a crowded train? She took stock of the passengers. Beside her, a man snored and another read a newspaper, his arms brushing up against Plum each time he turned the page and flattened the creases of the paper. Another man standing near the door looked continuously at his watch as if that alone would speed the slow train. Two girls sitting next to the door whispered and giggled. A woman—white, older—hid behind a book and played peek-a-boo with the baby girl. There was nothing extraordinary about a woman playing peek-a-boo with a child she didn’t know, but Plum, already on edge, took note of everything as if capturing all the details that would matter in the end. Everyone was caught up in something.
The passengers’ preoccupation eased Plum’s anxiety, and she turned away from the child and her sleeping mother, tucked her head down and opened a textbook, flipping to a chapter on critical thinking. The words lost their shape and the sentences lost their structure. Everything—the anniversary of Plum’s greatest loss, the smiling baby girl with her afro puffs, an exhausted and sleeping mother, that feeling of isolation even in a crowded train—led Plum back to that single night in St. Ann’s Bay Hospital, waking with an awareness that something had changed.
The commotion around her had ceased and in its place was a quiet like death. Except, of course, she wasn’t dead but achingly awake, the pain in her pelvis brightening with each passing second. She looked for Lenworth, and around for a bassinet or crib, some sign of the baby girl she planned to name Marissa, Spanish for “of the sea.” Plum liked the promise of the sea, the flat unending body of water with its own will. It could take her anywhere or even nowhere, which was exactly what she wanted for her baby—promise and freedom.
Again, Plum looked around at the beige walls and curtains, listened for the sounds of life, footsteps on tile, voices behind the adjoining curtains, a newborn’s robust cry.
The nurse, when she came, was cheerful. “My baby,” Plum said.
“Sleeping,” the nurse answered. “Careful now.”
The nurse—an older woman, gentle—stood by Plum as she maneuvered her legs to the floor.
“Dizzy,” Plum said, and stood still for a minute while the feeling passed.
They shuffled down the hallway, Plum slow, the nurse patient, until at last they stood by the nursery looking through the glass for the Barrett baby girl. But there was no girl, just a name tag and sheets.
“The Barrett baby?” Plum’s nurse asked.
“With her father,” another nurse said, smiling as she spoke. “He had her. Proud man.”
“Where is he?”
“He took the baby back to the ward.”
“No.”
The nurses looked at each other, each struggling to hold their emotions together, to move without indicating panic.
“He here somewhere,” Plum’s nurse said,
turning to her again and taking her hand. “We’ll find him, tell him you awake and ready to nurse.”
Plum didn’t panic immediately. As instructed, she waited in the ward, her legs dangling from the side of the bed. Five minutes, then ten, then thirty. The hospital buzzed with adrenaline and panic, and the nurses, once friendly and talkative, wouldn’t catch her eye. Before she knew it with absolute certainty, before she heard officially that Lenworth had taken the baby girl and left, Plum cried. Her body slumped forward from the side of the bed, pain shooting through her pelvis, and her heart pattering so strongly in her chest that she brought her hand up as if it could slow the beats.
Plum imagined alternate possibilities: the nurse confused or unaware of written discharge orders; her baby in another part of the hospital undergoing tests or treatment; Lenworth at home preparing the cottage for her return; her child mistakenly given to a stranger. Nothing in Plum and Lenworth’s history suggested he would have taken their child. They had planned for a life together, at least for the months immediately after the baby came home. He was making plans to find a new job teaching, at least for another year or two before heading to university in Kingston. “Town will suit you,” he said to Plum, an indication that he planned for her to be with him. Even then, Plum didn’t pare back her dream to study history or anthropology or archaeology. And neither did Lenworth. “Me, the engineer, making these big buildings, and you digging up the dirt. We make a good pair.” Plum had smiled and tapped his arm, softly, playfully, gently.
We make a good pair, was Plum’s last thought before Plum’s nurse, the head nurse, a doctor, and security guards had come to say definitively that neither Lenworth nor the baby could be found.