by Donna Hemans
Plum waited out the rain just within view of her laughing, cavorting girls. She held the newspaper up, using the pages as a shield from the girls’ gaze. At least for the moment, Nia had given up the cartwheels and handstands and she sat with Vivian playing jacks. Behind the newspaper, Plum’s calcified grief, all seventeen years of it, broke apart, and tears almost as fierce as the rain dribbled down her cheeks, settling uncomfortably in the corners of her mouth.
The girls, absorbed by their game of jacks, didn’t pay attention to the sniffles coming from behind the newspaper. Plum could have moved to a quieter room—the windowless bathroom, perhaps—to cry unchecked, without worrying about the girls eventually gazing and questioning the reason for her tears. Instead, she chose to remain behind the newspaper, to cry without sound and let the tears roll down her face. Surely, if she had moved in search of seclusion, one or both of the girls would have followed her, wandering through every room until they found her again and transported their game within her line of sight.
Plum wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked again at the man in the center of the photo, surrounded by a group of community leaders. Other than the hairline that had receded, he was exactly as she remembered him. Thick lips, a deep pink like a painted hibiscus bloom. Thick, bushy brows came close to meeting in the center of his face, their fullness like a miniature ledge shielding eyes that seemed to capture everything. A thin nose. He was a little thicker, of course, but not significantly so. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that the man who had disappeared like a deep-water creature into the depths of the ocean had resurfaced in Brooklyn, skimming the water for a long breath of air. He was within reach, a catch she could finally haul in. But how long before he dipped his head and swam again out of reach?
Nia called her mother to stand in as referee for the girls’ own inconsistent and slippery rules.
“Coming.” Plum wiped her eyes on her sleeve, roughly, quickly, and forced herself to smile as if smiling was another one of those things she had to practice how to do convincingly. She counted her breaths, one, two, one, two, then faced the girls, her actions suggesting that all that mattered were the oversized neon ball and jacks scattered before them on the floor.
Behind Plum, the newspaper, tented at first, flopped down. Lenworth’s face kissed the cushion. Six steps away, Plum struggled to understand the rules the girls had established, tried to simplify their game and play it the way she had learned years earlier, struggled even more to quash the anger and the anxiety simmering at the pit of her chest and rising up like bile at the back of her throat. Seventeen years later she was still angry, and surprised that her onand-off search had come to this: his photo in a newspaper, the name of the church he led in bold letters below his image, the church’s address at her fingertips, a face-to-face confrontation a short bus ride or walk away. That he’d become a priest was a shock, a considerable alteration of the course he’d set for himself, tutoring and teaching to finance his studies to become an engineer. Surely, God was mocking her. That he’d migrated to Brooklyn, settled in Brooklyn, was also a shock. And yet, where better to live than the city of her birth, a city of anonymous millions, a place she wouldn’t expect him to hide, the very place she had told him over and over that she had come to despise and to which she hadn’t wanted to return.
But after he disappeared she had indeed returned. Where else could she go but home?
On the floor, in that moment, she was simply Mother, balancing her girls’ competitive nature with her duty to teach fairness (“Remember what I said about rules. Rules make the game fair and make it the same for everybody.”) and the art of losing gracefully (“No, no. You don’t cry because you lose a game.”), while simultaneously instilling in them the idea that people and life weren’t always fair and they wouldn’t always win. “Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.” Trite, but true. “What matters is that you did your very best.”
By necessity, Plum parceled her thoughts and anger, shelved them for a later time, and suggested Monopoly to the girls, another game with rules they all understood. It dissolved into chaos.
Snakes and Ladders imploded as well, when Vivian, whose token slipped too often down the ladder and too close to the starting point, accidentally kicked the board and dislodged the tokens.
At last, Alan, rain-soaked, returned with afternoon treats—pastries and chocolate-dipped ice cream bars. The girls abandoned Plum, at least temporarily. Plum slinked away from the girls, away from mothering, to a dark place where she could simply be a woman who needed to cry. Upstairs in the bathroom, with the mat up against the door to keep out the sliver of light, Plum broke up the remaining block of grief, letting the weight of seventeen years of not knowing dribble away.
Then she stopped, for he was indeed within reach, no longer a character in her dream of a man returning with what he had taken away, but reelable, if only she could close him into a place from which he could not escape.
Later, much later, Plum woke on the floor in the narrow space between her bed and closet, with her face pressed into the carpet and a one-legged doll in the crook of her arm. How could she have slept so deeply in the mid-afternoon? She turned, relieving the left arm that had served as a pillow. Between her fingers, she held the priest’s photo, which she’d cut from the newspaper and folded so only his face showed. The full newspaper, minus the page with the article on the priest (an article that she still had not yet read), lay by her side, alongside an old cookie tin in which she kept three mementoes: an older photo of Lenworth, the one-legged doll and her own hospital discharge papers. She looked at the photos again, returned the old one to the cookie tin and placed the newspaper page on the floor with the doll’s head like a paperweight to hold it down. Mostly though, she wanted to hide the smile, his smile, which projected to the photographer and the world a peacefulness he did not deserve.
Yet, Plum unfolded the paper, covered his face again with the doll, and read the words around it. The article didn’t say anything at all about her daughter, who Plum could find only through him. It was too late in the day to go in search of him, too late to leave the house without an explanation. Surely, services were over and the church closed up for the afternoon. The meeting could wait one more day, for he couldn’t escape now. Not this time.
Plum moved only slightly, but the floorboards creaked under her weight, just enough to bring Nia and Vivian tumbling into the room as if pushed forward by a river’s current. Vivian reached for the old doll, while Nia backed away from it, a little afraid of the matted tufts of hair, the splotchy and discolored skin, and blue eyes that didn’t blink in concert. The doll clearly wasn’t one of theirs. Nia circled the doll and lay down in the crook of her mother’s left arm. Vivian followed, settling herself in the opposite arm. Plum held them as if she, or they, had gone away for a prolonged time, pressing the shape of her children into her body and the girls reciprocating. She was Mother again, setting aside the other pressing thought—no longer where to find him—but when and how to do so without completely upending the life she had built, or moving too fast and prompting him to go underground again.
Nights, Plum had a habit of lying with the girls in the middle of the two beds the girls preferred to keep side by side rather than bunked, and waiting until the rhythm of their breaths had evened out. It was the simplest thing, really, the rhythm of breathing, but it was what she watched each night as they slept and again in the morning when she slipped back into their room to wake them, noting the rise and fall of their chests, the flutter of an eyelid, the twitch of a mouth, listening for a bit of a dream escaping as a word or groan.
That night, she lay as she usually did, flat on her back, an arm around each girl, her eyes on the glowing plastic stars scattered across the ceiling. She fought against dreaming about the elusive reunion or the fallout it would bring and extricated herself from the middle of the beds earlier than she normally would. Across the hall, Alan had fallen asleep, and, except for his snores, the house was quiet.
The house was hers. The darkness and the quiet pushed her back where she did not want to go, toward a daydream of the reunion.
On her way down the stairs, she stopped mid-stride, unbalanced, and looked back at the empty bedroom, the guest room that rarely housed guests. The bed, perfectly made, and the knickknacks around the room were a little different from the rest of the house. There was no headboard, just an oversized antique tin poster that she had found at a flea market and mounted on the wall in place of a headboard. At the foot of the bed was another found item, an old trunk she’d sanded and painted a vibrant red. She and Alan had argued about the purpose of the room; he said it made no sense to have an empty room kept ready for guests who never came, and pushing for her to convert it to a bedroom for Nia or Vivian. In return, Plum pointed to the girls’ preference for each other’s company.
No, she would not dream. She stepped forward and headed down the stairs toward the kitchen. She cleaned, scrubbing the kitchen sink and floor as if rubbing out evidence of a crime, brushing crumbs from the dining and living room rugs, erasing fingerprints from metal and shellacked wood and glass. When there was nothing left to clean, when she had packed away all the toys and fluffed the pillows and swept up all the crumbs, she stood outside on the tiny balcony off the kitchen, barefoot, a knot in her chest, looking out at nothing. Careless, Alan would say. But she stayed there anyway, in the dark, fully conscious that the night had eyes she couldn’t see.
Late as it was, after midnight, she made an international call to Mrs. Murray, the former landlady who had once been her savior, who had known her way back then when Plum said we and meant her and him, when theirs was a basic story: boy meets girl and falls in love. When love and together and forever were the same.
Through the crackling line, Plum said, “He’s a priest.”
“Priest?” Mrs Murray’s voice was gravelly. “What you telling me? You sure?”
“Yes. I saw his picture in a newspaper.”
“I would never have imagined that. Where is he?”
“Here. In Brooklyn.”
“So close, eh?”
“Real close. Can’t let him get away this time.”
“I’m praying for you. No mother should have to go through what you have been through.”
In the dark, Plum weighed her options, how to walk away from him with exactly what she wanted. She closed her eyes—another careless move in the dead of a Brooklyn night—and pictured one scene unfolding: her standing up in the middle of the following Sunday’s sermon, walking to the front of the church and waiting just below the pulpit for him to acknowledge or to ignore her presence, stutter and stumble through his words or just walk away. It seemed a likely option, a scenario from which he couldn’t readily escape. She would wait the week for the inevitable confrontation.
Back upstairs, Alan no longer snored but wrestled with his dream, punching at the air and shouting, “Watch me and you.” Some nights he acted out his dreams, punching, kicking, lunging at some unseen being. Three or four times a year, when she slept too deeply to catch him or didn’t respond quickly enough, he tumbled from the bed to the floor. She was never sure what was worse, her insomnia or this violent and restless sleep.
Now, she rubbed his back, calmed him in his sleep. Curling her legs, she pressed her body against his back and wrapped an arm around him, trying to change his dreams. She lay like that as if this, too, were forever, as if finding the priest wouldn’t split their life in two.
Early in the morning, when the sun hadn’t yet imprinted color onto everything, when the moon was a fading white in the lightening sky, when dew sparkled on the leaves and grass, Plum thought of another person who should know of her find. His mother, whom she had met only once, briefly, at a time when every dark-skinned girl with deep red lips made her turn her head and stare and wonder.
She called the private investigator and asked him to relay to Lenworth’s mother the whereabouts of her son. But even then, she didn’t tell Alan, just left that one secret between them. Telling him now, after all these years, would make him question the one thing he asked for: her trust. And stoke her greatest fear: abandonment, her becoming again the castaway, the stick figure left adrift in a boat.
2
Slivers of light slipped in through cracks in the blinds, making shadows on the wall. The rectory was otherwise quiet. That was the way Lenworth preferred it; in its dark state, it showed itself for what it was—someone else’s home with stories that were not his buried in the walls. He left the darkened office, felt his way through the living room and up the stairs to bed.
Just as he was ready to turn off the bedside lamp, lie flat on his back and put away the burdens that his parishioners and his family brought to him, the telephone rang. Lenworth looked at the handset to make out the dim black writing illuminated by the green screen. As he suspected, it was indeed a call for him. A parishioner, Evelyn Eastmond, was near death, and her sister thought the time had come for him to give her last rites.
“You have to go now?” Pauline, her voice muffled beneath the sheet, was ready for a fight. “There must be a chaplain at the hospital they can call.”
“This is my job, Pauline. This is it. Going when they need me. Praying over the dying.” He didn’t say there was no chaplain, no hospital, just a woman dying at home rather than at a hospice, and who, weeks earlier, had asked that he be called when the time came. He kept those details to himself, fully conscious that what he didn’t say mattered as much as what he said.
“Yes, but now? You have a family too.”
“It’s my job, Pauline. You know that. This is what priests do.”
“I keep telling you, you need an assistant for times like this. Your family needs you too.”
“It’s not every day that a member of the church dies. It’s not every day that I have to go out at midnight. When was the last time I had an emergency like this? Tell me.”
“It might not actually be every day. But you’re hardly here.” “Not now.”
“If not now, when?”
“Not now.” A final, decisive answer that meant he didn’t want to have the argument then, that meant he knew that she was arguing about something else entirely. He closed the bedroom door as if to shut the argument within, and descended the stairs, stopping just briefly to pick up a prayer book and adjust his clothing.
Outside, he looked around, hurried to the car, and locked the doors. Inside, he turned off the music and once the car was in motion, opened the windows to let the breeze cool the top of his head. He liked to drive in silence, with nothing but his thoughts, the wind whistling through the open window, the road noise fading quickly into the background. Were it not for Evelyn’s imminent death he would have driven toward the Belt Parkway and Long Island and taken a long aimless drive. He would have gone to a beach, staying to watch the sun color the morning sky and the waters. He considered the optics—a priest in a car late at night on a deserted beach—and dismissed the thought. He would never have thought that he’d welcome this aspect of his job, being on call at all hours. Yet it offered him an escape from his daughter, Opal, and his wife—his daughter especially—not because they were of the gender that he didn’t always understand, but simply because they reminded him of the one thing he didn’t have. He never named it, the thing that was lost to him, nor would he admit, ever, that he welcomed opportunities to escape Pauline and Opal.
Loss wasn’t something he dealt with well, even though as a priest he should. He had learned, of course, to rationalize some events, to talk about spiritual gains instead of physical losses. Death, the finality of it, was the easiest of any kind of loss for him. There was one rational explanation: a heart had stopped beating. Regardless of what lead up to that final moment—a street fight, an errant gunshot, an aggressive tumor—he could always point to the heart. The other losses—divorce and the breakdown of a lifelong friendship, regardless of who was at fault—were more difficult situations, for they demanded an explanation for why love cou
ld fritter away or shrivel up. For himself, he had stopped trying to rationalize the greatest loss of his life. He knew exactly who was at fault and why.
Now, he prepared himself to wait, whether long or short, for Evelyn to take her last breath. As he did in moments like these, he made a list of the things he had lost or left behind: dewdrops on his bare feet; morning fog in a hillside’s pockets; the early morning maa-ing of an anxious goat; the soft, almost gel-like flesh around a star apple seed slipping around his mouth; walking barefoot on the grass; bursting the young buds on a leaf of life plant and listening for the soft pop; an empty Jamaican beach in the morning, with nothing in front of him but the unending sea with the sun glinting off its waves.
Then he was in front of Evelyn’s house in Canarsie, watching the curtain flutter. As he neared the door, it opened, and he stepped inside to face a death that wouldn’t wait. Evelyn’s anxious relatives pulled him forward into a dark room that already smelled of decay.
The old woman had shriveled, but before her illness, she reminded him of his mother. They had the same high and prominent cheekbones, lips that looked like they’d been blotted with raspberry paint, the build of once lithe and elite marathoners who had gone into old age just a shade heavier from their peak performance days. That, too, was another thing he kept from Pauline. Not coming to Evelyn would have felt like he had abandoned his mother on her deathbed as he had in fact abandoned her in life. He didn’t know whether she lived or had died in the years since he’d last left her standing in the yard with her hands akimbo watching him as he walked past the line of orange, tangerine and grapefruit trees in the yard and past the flowering poinciana, to the narrow road, with a crocheted blanket in a bag for the baby that was soon to make its way into the world and for whom he hadn’t yet a name. He never returned as he had promised with the newborn baby girl. His mother didn’t know either about the boys who came later, and who were now asking questions about his family, who belonged to whom and where exactly they belonged. The boys knew Pauline’s family, for she had made sure to return to Jamaica time and time again. But he had offered the boys and Opal no actual glimpse of his family, just random stories that they couldn’t confirm.