by Donna Hemans
Plum reached for the knob on the radio.
“Sunday Contact.” The radio host’s voice was a rich baritone, one that made her think of sultry love songs on late night radio. “Find family and friends at home and abroad.”
Plum paused, her body turned to the radio, her heart dancing to its own two-step. One-two. One-two. This wasn’t one of the typical daytime-call-in radio shows, where callers listed their litany of complaints against the government and public servants and underfunded public works departments, or gave their own version of governing that they were sure would solve the country’s ills.
Plum counted each breath, stood up, paced the small verandah, and switched from counting breaths to counting steps. Counting, as simple as it was, calmed her. She waited. A female caller gave simple details. We called him Trevor. He used to work at an auto mechanic shop near the Duncans police station. His brother in England trying to reach him for five years now. Can’t get a hold of him. And another. My mother took me to Jamaica when I was a baby. She thought I would be handicapped and she brought me and left me down here. Just left me in the hospital. Children’s home I grow up in. I have my birth papers, born in Bronx, New York. Want to know my people. And another. I called last week from Hanover looking for my brother, my father’s son. Tuesday he call me, tell me a friend hear the name and thought it was him. I just want to thank you. And another. My name is Rohan Bailey. But she wouldn’t know me by that name. Growing up everybody call me Everton Bailey. Is not till I ready to take CXC that I find out my real name was Rohan. I come to understand that she have a youth for me, and I want to know my flesh and blood. One after another, the callers gave details of the individuals they wanted to find, sometimes giving full names, sometimes aliases, sometimes just a tenuous connection to a place or a rumor of where the person could have gone. Again and again, the host asked for a number listeners should call.
Plum wrote down everything she knew about Lenworth, at least all the details she thought to be true: name, last known whereabouts, occupation, places he may have lived, that he would likely have an eight-year-old girl. In writing, she made note as well of all she didn’t know: the teachers’ college he attended, where exactly he was born and raised and where exactly he had lived before coming to Brown’s Town. She dialed the number and listened too long to the busy signal. She dialed, again and again and again. Each time it was the same. One more time, she told herself. She had stopped counting the number of times she dialed the number, stopped worrying about the cost of the telephone calls. Until at last the baritone voice spoke back to her. Through tears, a nervous Plum told what she knew.
“Ah, so sad, eh.”
The host sounded like he was next to Plum, leaning in to hear the rest of the story. Though she knew the image in her mind was wrong, Plum pictured him the way her doctor sat, elbows on his knees, eyes on her, her story the only thing that mattered in that moment.
“Eight years without knowing,” the host said. “That’s a long time to go on without knowing.”
“Yes.” Plum was close to tears.
“Lenworth Barrett, last known address was Brown’s Town in St. Ann.” The host repeated the details Plum had given. “May have lived in Greenwood and has an eight-year-old girl. The girl’s mother, Plum Valentine, wants to find her daughter.” He paused for a second as if he, too, needed to catch his breath. “Give us a number where callers can reach you.”
Plum gave her own Brooklyn number and waited.
4
A month later, a breathless Plum hurried through the long corridor toward customs and immigration like a surgeon on a life-saving mission, zipping around wheeled bags, slow walkers, and businessmen in suits coming to the island for meetings. Her sandals slapped the tile and her heels, each thwack seeming loud and obnoxious in the cavernous hall. But Plum didn’t slow her pace. Instead, she relocated the duffel bag she carried slung on her shoulder and pressed up under her arm, pushing her arms through the straps so the bag sat on her back like a knapsack. The bag itself was light, for she had packed hurriedly with two days’ notice, rolling up five T-shirts, two pairs of jeans and two summer dresses, and wrapping a pair of sandals in plastic. She didn’t need much—not even a bathing suit or beach wrap or her preferred box of tea.
Like puzzle pieces, the details came together after Plum’s call to Sunday Contact. Some bits were useful, some not, but the most promising had come on a Tuesday morning before Plum left for her afternoon shift, from a woman who said she went to school in Greenwood with a Lenworth Barrett. “Sound like the same person you describe. Light complexion. Brows thick. Average height but he probably didn’t finish growing. We were teenagers, you know.”
“When I knew him, he was already a man,” Plum said. “Thin build. Probably five-foot-ten. Had a scar across his forehead.”
“Don’t remember a scar. But could be him same one. Same habit of disappearing. All these years I couldn’t figure out what happened to him. He sat right beside me in class. Middle of the school year and he just never came back. Desk sat there in the middle of the classroom empty for the rest of the year. We imagined all sorts of things about what happened to him.”
Plum, nervous and breathless, asked, “What school you say that was?”
“William Knibb in Falmouth.”
With that single detail, Plum called the private investigator who in turn called Plum back with something else: the name of the family that had registered Lenworth in school. Not his parents, but the couple with whom he had been living then. Two days later, the detective’s telephone message was simple, “I have some good news. Come as quickly as you can.”
Packing and going to Jamaica with so little notice also meant her parents had little time to object. Plum didn’t mind at all. Having more time would have meant a prolonged argument, her spilling the excuse she gave at work for the sudden trip: her mother badly injured in a serious car accident and her condition grave. Plum had taken a week of vacation she hadn’t yet earned, leaving open the possibility that her stay may be prolonged if her mother’s condition didn’t improve. She didn’t want to tell her parents any of that, but when they asked how she would pay for it, she allowed them one secret: she had saved $50 from every paycheck she’d earned since her return to Brooklyn for this very scenario. And nothing they said would prevent her going to Jamaica to follow on a lead, even if she didn’t have the full details.
Outside, Kingston greeted Plum with a whiff of hot air and sunshine so intense she shaded her eyes with a flat palm. She allowed herself a brief moment to suck in the air and wait for a breeze to come in off the nearby sea. But Plum felt nothing like the breeze she remembered coming off the coast in Discovery Bay. Here the air was still, stifling; in Discovery Bay the breeze was a balm even on hot summer days.
Ahead, the rental car agent’s ponytail bobbed—the length of hair that dipped up and down her back unnaturally shiny and unnaturally long for a dark complected woman. Plum quickened her strides and caught up with the agent, matching the woman’s efficiency. They looked around the car, Plum shadowing the agent, double checking for visible scratches and dents.
“Enjoy your stay,” the agent said, with a little wave of her hand.
With a toot of the horn, Plum was off, heading to an office in New Kingston where the private investigator waited. What exactly he had to say, she didn’t know. She had missed his calls and he hers. Three missed calls later—two of which Plum made to the detective—Plum simply left a message that she would come to hear the details of the life Lenworth had gone on to build without her.
Kingston wasn’t familiar to Plum. She had spent her time on the north coast, weekdays at a boarding school for girls and every third weekend and longer holidays at her aunt’s home in Discovery Bay. The city across the harbor was a dull blur, a place she was interested in only for the information it would yield. Later, she wouldn’t remember much of Kingston, with its mix of high-rise buildings and tenements and mansions threatening to topple from the hillsides
and ringing the flat city. But she would congratulate herself for following the directions she had written out with diligence and care, making her way through a crowded foreign city and finding the office in New Kingston.
David Murray wasn’t what Plum had expected. He was thin, wiry, unlike his mother’s squat frame, with eyes that bored into her as if he could read her thoughts.
“Pleasure to meet you after all this time,” he said.
His hand was rough in Plum’s and stronger than Plum imagined for a man so thin.
“I’m so grateful for all that you’re doing. You don’t know how much it means.”
“Trust me, I understand. I can’t imagine how much this hurt, but I understand. All right, down to business.”
He alternated between perfect English and patois in a way that Plum couldn’t. In her head, she sometimes spoke in patois, but when she opened her mouth and tried, she mostly sounded exactly like she didn’t want to sound—like a foreigner trying on a foreign language or dialect, and failing.
David laid out a photo. “His mother.” He tapped the picture. “This is where he grew up.”
He pushed a second photo across the table. Plum leaned forward for a closer look, then lifted the pictures, her hands sweaty with nervous energy, her body still feeling the movement of the car. It was just a house set back in a yard with scattered tufts of grass and a gravel walkway, a small verandah with what looked like red tile on the floor. A single chicken pecking at the dirt was the only living thing in sight.
“Where?” Plum asked.
“Woodhall,” David said, then added the parish, “Clarendon. A constable out there took these photos.”
“Clarendon?” Plum closed her eyes, muttered “Clarendon” again. “No sah.” She too sprinkled in the patois. “He never mentioned Woodhall at all. Not even one time. He talked about Lluidas Vale and Greenwood. But never Woodhall.”
“I’m betting his mother knows where he is.”
Plum allowed herself a smile. She nodded. “She must know, yes.” The way she said it, angling her head with her brow knitted, Plum sounded and felt like her mother. Each nod of her head punctuated what she thought: Finding his mother and the family home meant finding Lenworth and her daughter.
“We can leave early in the morning, about six,” he said.
“No, no. I want to go now.”
He clucked his teeth. “Have a client I have to meet this afternoon. So not before tomorrow morning.”
Plum looked up from the photo at him, the bemused look on his face, the giddy satisfaction of unearthing a clue and putting a puzzle together. “No, I want to go alone.”
“Plum, you don’t know these country roads. Nothing like the smooth highways you used to in the States. You not going to find street signs and house numbers. I mean, out in the deep country what we call a road you might think is just a donkey path. So better you wait till morning when we have all day.”
“I know,” she said, thinking of her teenage years traversing the countryside with an aunt who thought it her duty to remind Plum that her life was fortunate compared to others. “I have to go alone. It’s . . . I want to talk to her mother to mother. Just me and her.”
“Then let me call up to Chapelton, get a constable friend to escort you to the house.”
“No police. No uniforms. I don’t want to threaten her. Just want an easy conversation with just me and her.”
“All right then.”
He wrote directions, his hand moving across the sheet slowly, rounding letters and perfecting slants. “When you get off the main road you going to have to ask for directions. And leave before nightfall. I wouldn’t want you trying to find your way in the dark on roads you don’t know.”
Plum wasted no time heading out of Kingston, following turn after turn, until she was on the highway to Spanish Town, driving past acres of cane plants, the thin green leaves waving in the breeze, the rich red dirt vibrantly colorful in the tropical sun. How she missed the island, the countryside especially, the stillness of an afternoon, the sea breeze lapping at her face through an open car window, winding down a hillside road, looking out and still being surprised at what she knew was there: the deep blue sea in the distance with its limitless possibilities, a perfect view. How she missed her aunt’s house, the expansive almond tree whose branches had grown out instead of up, spreading so wide the tree resembled an oversized mushroom sheltering the lawn between the gate and the verandah. At fifteen years old, it was where she sat afternoon into evening, pining for Brooklyn, the city from which she had been expelled and to which she had reluctantly returned. But now, nothing of her life in Brooklyn measured up to her memories of wasted afternoons under the almond tree.
That afternoon, the windows down, warm air swirling around the car, familiar scents wafting in and out, Plum felt hopeful, as vibrant and alive as the bougainvillea and hibiscus blooms in the sun, as colorful as the croton plants in just about every yard. She wanted fruit but didn’t stop for the roadside vendors, just drove on as if maneuvering around the ruts on the road and the deep corners was part of her everyday life.
Plum was lucky to find the house from the hand-drawn map and question after question to passing strangers. Plum looked down at the photo and up at the house, at the yellow paint on the outer walls, the blue on the verandah, and the red floor. A woman was on the verandah, Lenworth’s mother—finally a connection to him.
The old lady stood up, set aside a sieve on which she rubbed dried pimento berries to remove the stems. “Good afternoon. You look like you lost. You looking for somebody?”
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Yes, it’s you I’m looking for.”
“Me?”
“Well, really your son.”
“Which one?”
“Lenworth.”
“Who looking for him?”
“My name is Plum Valentine. I knew him a long time ago.”
The old lady looked her up and down, leaned around to look at the late-model car, a compact Toyota, and back again at Plum, her hair, her face, her clothes. “Years now I don’t set eyes on him. Don’t know where him gone. If he dead or alive, I couldn’t tell you.”
Defeated, deflated, Plum covered her face in her hands, and pressed her fingers into her eyes to stanch the tears. “No, no, no.” Plum hadn’t imagined this outcome at all, wouldn’t have conceived of Lenworth abandoning his mother as he had abandoned Plum.
“Come, come.” His mother grasped her arm. “Come out of the sun. You look like you ’bout to fall down and me too ol’ to lift you up.”
Plum moved, her legs like anchors, her body limp. In the yard behind the house, a child chased a chicken with a stick. The chicken, squawking, tried to fly.
“Boy, leave the fowl alone and find something to do.” Turning to Plum, she said, “Them children setting to give me pressure.”
Out of the sun, Plum looked the old lady over, picking out the features that Lenworth had got from her—the nose for sure, and the eyebrows. Not the body frame. Where he was squat, his mother was tall and thin, like an aged ballerina, Plum thought.
“Eight years now I looking for him,” Plum said.
“’Bout that time since I last see or hear from him. Last time I see him he come and tell me he 'bout to give me grandbaby. Never did meet the mother or the grandbaby.”
“Granddaughter,” Plum said. “We had a girl.”
“Oh, you the mother?”
“Yes.”
His mother looked at her as if she expected more, perhaps bad news or Plum turning around to call the girl from the car.
“It’s the only grandpickney I don’t know. You have a picture?”
“No, no picture.”
“Who she favor? You or him?”
Plum hesitated, looked his mother over. Tears welled up again, floating on the rim of her lids. “I don’t know.” Then Plum told her exactly how Lenworth had left her in the hospital and taken her daughter with him, a story no mother wanted to hear about her son.
“Not a word. All these years, I’ve been looking for him. This is the closest I’ve come to finding him.”
“Me can’t believe it. All this time I thinking he turn big man and just shame o’ his family, shame o’ where him come from. But you telling me something different. He just shame o’ what he do. Never think I would raise a son as worthless as that. He turn criminal.”
“If ever you hear from him, I beg you, let me know.”
“Mi dear, you nuh have to ask.” His mother leaned forward a little and patted Plum’s knee, the pungent scent of pimento wafting toward Plum’s nose. “But if I see him, I’d probably beat him first. No, no. Don’t laugh.”
Plum looked up at the thick, grey clouds moving swiftly into place and out where pockets of pitch suggested that the road had once been asphalted and smooth. She wrote her telephone number and address on scrap paper, hoping as she did that his mother would soon have some good news. Plum said a quick goodbye and returned to the rented car and the maps and the long drive back on roads that looked like river beds, over cavernous potholes, and up across the Dry Harbor Mountains to the north coast. Coming away again empty-handed, no closer to finding Lenworth or her daughter. Tears blurred her vision as much as the raindrops on the windshield.