Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  Evelyn’s family clustered around the bed. He held one of her hands and began a prayer so softly none of the others heard. Her hand felt weightless, and he couldn’t shake the sense that he was attending to his mother, ushering his mother’s soul along. Was his mother indeed on her deathbed nearly two thousand miles away waiting for him to come home? Seventeen years of days and months and hours building up one on top of the other, one fateful decision like a sandbar after a hurricane separating his early life from the second half.

  He led the family in song, Evelyn’s favorite hymn. Singing wasn’t part of the ritual, but he had heard a dying person’s sense of hearing was the last to go. And he wanted her to have a cacophony of voices surrounding her. It was what his own mother would want, and since he couldn’t shake the feeling that his mother was lying in a bed in Woodhall, Clarendon, counting down her last breaths, waiting for the son she hadn’t seen to come, he sang along with the family, saying nothing when the one song became a medley of choruses, and the night turned into an impromptu wake. So caught up were they in song that they missed what they had been waiting for, her eyes fluttering slightly, her last breath, her last heartbeat, her body going cold.

  And then his feeling lifted. He expected to, but didn’t feel a pang of loss, didn’t feel a gaping emptiness as if someone close to him had passed. So by the time he left Evelyn’s house, he no longer expected to hear the details of his mother’s passing, but rather anticipated that a message would come to him that she was waiting for his return. How and when the message would come he didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he liked this ability to divine something before it occurred.

  Back on Albemarle Terrace, the rectory was still quiet, the children sleeping deeply, and except for a nightlight in the hall, it was still pitch black inside. Opal, with the exception of her face and her toes, was wrapped completely in the sheets, and snoring lightly. In the next room, the boys were completely turned around. Craig, asleep on the top bunk, had slipped toward the edge as if he had begun to climb down and fallen asleep again before his toes touched the ladder rungs. He righted the boys’ bodies and their sheets and tiptoed out, avoiding the toys spread out on the floor like land mines, and across the master bedroom, not wanting to wake Pauline. She slept lightly, like a hen guarding her eggs against mongooses or rats. As he expected, she woke, glanced at the clock, and turned away to the opposite wall. She sniffled once but said nothing, and he tumbled in beside her, back-to-back like a defiant child refusing to speak or acknowledge the other.

  He didn’t get the deep and satisfying sleep he wanted, but drifted instead into a restless state, between active thoughts and dreams, unable in the end to distinguish between dream and thought. He thought of his mother’s cakes and the icing, thick, sweet, hard and with little silver balls mixed into it. She always baked her cakes and puddings on a coal stove, with fire on top and fire below the pan, the heat enveloping the pan as any modern stove would, but the coal and the smoke flavoring the food as no gas stove could. He dreamt of her attending the coal stove, squatting on her haunches, her back to him, while he made circles in the dirt with an old bicycle wheel he had attached to a stick. He woke, for he did indeed remember that toy, and the cart he eventually built with a second wheel and discarded crate. The dream had been so vivid that he felt he had touched the knobby stick, felt the wheel wobble as it rolled over small stones and the uneven ground. And when he drifted off again, he had the same dream of his mother in front of the stove. In the second dream, the fire flared up and caught her skirt. He rushed to her side, grabbed a bucket of water and doused her with it. She patted his head and said, “My boy.”

  He interpreted the dream as the second sign that his mother was indeed still alive and what he had felt when he attended to Evelyn was his guilty conscience reminding him of how long he had stayed away. It wasn’t his mother, he was sure. He turned over, pulled the sheet and the pillow over his head to block out the morning light, and slept.

  The house was mostly quiet when he woke, sunlight streaming in through the open blinds, a radio somewhere in the house belting out gospel music. The children were gone, and Pauline as well, off to a meeting or a store or volunteer hours somewhere. He had dreamt of his mother again, and even as he lay there, refitting the pieces of the dream like puzzle pieces, he felt that she was there, watching him as she had in childhood, sitting by his bed as he slept in a fevered state, watching for the seizures that sometimes came upon him when his temperature spiked. Pieces of the dream began flitting away and he reached for the bits he remembered: he had moved into another house, a basement apartment that was already furnished. As he walked through it, he found that the apartment adjoined another, but had no dividing walls, just an invisible line he shouldn’t cross. Pauline’s name, along with another he couldn’t recall, was clearly marked on the house’s main front door, silently declaring that he didn’t belong up there. His mother was there, though, helping him move his things from the main part of the house to a closet in the basement. He tried but couldn’t picture the emotion reflected on his mother’s face. He played it over and over, a silent movie for which he had lost the plot.

  Even with the bits of the plotless dream spread out before him, the pieces refusing to fit together in any meaningful way, he felt her presence still and chalked it up to the fact that he couldn’t interpret the dream, couldn’t make sense of how these disjointed pieces of his life had made their way together in a dream. He got up, padded through the house to turn the radio off, stripped off his pajamas and stepped into the shower, believing that his mother wouldn’t follow him in there and the water would wash away the niggling feeling he couldn’t shake.

  His mother was there again when he returned to the room, moving—as the elderly would, slowly, without the sprightliness of the young—from the bed to the bedroom door. He blinked and shook his head, closed and rubbed his eyes, and followed the figure out of the room. Still naked, he went into the kitchen, thinking that satisfying his hunger would take care of the thoughts that haunted him.

  Lenworth didn’t know it then—and wouldn’t know the details for another week, not until all the things that once mattered no longer did, not until after his carefully controlled life had ruptured, not until he had been exposed and the stories about him spilled and scattered like thick mud, drying hard and fast in some crevices, loosening up and moving again in others—but his mother, Girlie, had indeed taken her last breath quietly in her sleep. She died an unremarkable death, with no one keeping watch, without song, without a last prayer, holding onto a little piece of paper pinpointing the exact location of her long-lost son. Some two thousand miles away from Brooklyn, his sister woke at 2 a.m. in their childhood home for no specific reason, moved around the house checking windows and doors to ease her uneasiness, and found their mother lying on the floor, lifeless. She held a mirror above her mother’s nose to confirm what she suspected, and when she saw no vapor, no fog on the glass, she dropped the mirror and wailed.

  3

  The darkness of the underground subway station crept up toward Plum, and the dank smell reached up and wrapped itself around her like a loose scarf. Halfway down the stairs, she stopped.

  “Aieee.” Another hurried commuter jolted by Plum’s sudden stop, muttered, sucked her teeth, and made an exaggerated move to bypass Plum. “You can’t just stop so.”

  More angry words floated around Plum and away from her. The city, too busy to stop, didn’t stop. But Plum stood there momentarily like a boulder in the midst of a moving stream with water flowing around it rather than over it. Had it not been for a man with two boxes, the second so high it touched his chin, she would have remained there longer, contemplating how to continue her forward movement down the stairs, through the turnstile, onto the narrow platform, onto a train overflowing with artificial light, out again and into the basement lab. Sunlight didn’t reach the lab, and she could spend the day there in the lab and the break room without seeing any hint of natural light.

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bsp; Plum stepped backward up the stairs, away from the man with the boxes, until she was again directly in sunlight and squinting to block it. Like she did after the early morning phone call to Jamaica, Plum rehashed her reasons for wanting to wait a week to confront Lenworth, for craving the sight of Lenworth cornered and unable to escape, the relief of seeing her daughter, at last. And she worried about losing them, about him escaping again as he had from the house in Anchovy just months before she found his whereabouts. Now, she found she was wrong about the agony of waiting seven whole days, for thinking seven days would seem like nothing, a blip in time, when lined up against seventeen years (6,205 days, give or take a few for leap years) without a word from him.

  No, she would not wait. Plum was expected at work at ten, but she rearranged her workday, then sprinted down Nostrand Avenue to Church Avenue and hopped in a route taxi. She was pressed in between two heavy women, uncomfortable and anxious in that position, and also overwhelmed by the commingled scent of artificial coconut and vanilla that wafted from a bottle dangling from the rearview mirror, and the rose-scented perfume one of the women wore. The car moved haltingly, as the driver maneuvered around other stopped vehicles and pedestrians stepping out into the street to hail a passing taxi or to cross against the light.

  Plum hopped out of the car across from Bobby’s Department Store, and walked back toward the church, where she stood as if she were on a shop piazza waiting for the shopkeeper inside to open up. Plum looked at her watch. 9:10. She had no idea how the church ran its business, whether it had an office and administrative staff who came daily to see to business affairs, whether priests came into the office as any other employee would, whether Lenworth would come that Monday morning.

  Plum walked the length of the building, looking for another entrance. Stained glass covered the length of the building, one pane with a throng of enraptured listeners looking toward a group of shepherds. With the vines creeping along the brick walls and shrubs packed in close beneath the windows, the building seemed cloistered.

  St. Paul’s main doors—which were like those in a fairytale, with three arches overhead and black ironwork extending from the hinges like orderly vines inching pointlessly across the wood—were closed. In the topmost part of the arch were stained glass with candles. “I am the light, the truth and the way,” Plum thought, pulling a memory from her teen years in Jamaica, another Anglican church.

  She couldn’t imagine him here, a priest responsible for this enormous building and two hundred, maybe three hundred parishioners. A room of students, yes. She could picture him in a classroom, and she could picture him before a group of Sunday School students. But how she really saw him was as the engineer he had wanted to become, with his name or a personally identifying symbol etched into whatever building or bridge he had engineered. Back then, when he talked of his adult life, he talked of greatness, leaving behind a lasting reminder of what he had overcome and who he had become. Once, on a beach, he had pointed in the direction of a three-hundred-year-old fort, partially intact, battered by the wind and the sea and countless tropical storms and hurricanes, underlined how despite the spitefulness of nature, the fort had remained, a lasting reminder of another time. That was what he wanted. Yet, here he was a priest, building the intangible among his parishioners. The priesthood, as noble as it was, didn’t seem sufficient to express the legacy he had wanted to leave.

  Until then, Plum hadn’t given much thought to how his life had changed by his one selfish act, how raising a child alone would alter the plan he had had for his life. Empathy was not what he deserved, so she shelved the thought of his dream of greatness frittering away. What mattered? Lenworth was here, within reach, probably behind the red doors, the black matte handle that didn’t budge. She went down the street again, toward the back of the church and the adjoining church hall, which had another set of red doors—except these doors were steel and not as ornate as the arched doors at the main entrance.

  “Can I help you?” A voice from behind, a baritone.

  Not his. She knew instinctively for his voice was etched in her memory and his last words, “We have a daughter,” tattooed in her mind.

  Plum turned slowly. “The priest, is he in?”

  “Not today.” He waved his hand, a slight brush, as if to swat something away. “Other business came up. Can I help?”

  “No, I need the priest. Confession.” Plum also waved as if a confession were a light matter easily dismissed. Her heart pounded, the truth bubbling to emerge. But she held it tight, afraid of giving herself away too soon, giving him room to run again.

  “The secretary, when she comes in . . . she can make an appointment for you. Give me your name and number. I’ll pass it on to her and tell her to call you.”

  Plum wouldn’t leave her name. “I’ll come another time.” She turned away before he had another chance to question her motive or her presence, to remember her eyes or her nose or her lips or her birthmark—a small patch of depigmented skin where her jaw met her right ear.

  Away from the church, Plum cried with her hands covering her face, releasing the anxiety that had started building Sunday afternoon. Then, the crying spell over, she called the lab and rearranged her schedule again. This time, she made it all the way down the subway steps and into a train rattling toward downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan, and walked into the lab, shook out and put on her lab coat as if everything in her life was as it had always been.

  The lab itself was quiet. Plum sensed that something had gone wrong, perhaps a grave mistake in typing blood or an experimental treatment involving a patient gone awry. Likely it was something simpler: another episode of Lorna and Marlene clashing about the division of work or Marlene again correcting something Lorna had done. Plum was used to it now, the petty quarrels of the technicians about extended lunch breaks and the division of labor. Plum stayed above it all. She didn’t want the friendships or the alliances, just the anonymity of the work.

  Plum picked up a waiting specimen and pulled out her stool, ready to begin the process of typing the blood. The collection date—September 11—and time—10:35 a.m.—routine details Plum looked at every day, stopped her this time. There were five more days to her daughter’s birthday.

  Every year on that date she celebrated the same way, sitting in the dark and counting down the minutes as she had done some seventeen years earlier. She likened it to climbing up stream, up waterfall after waterfall, following a river to the place where it emerged from the earth, either as a gush or a trickle, smooth and jagged stones pressing against her soles, and the water, when it flowed steadily down an incline, pushing her back with a thunderous splash. She imagined instead pushing her body against the flow of water, grabbing with her fingers onto crevices in the rocks, searching with her toes for a foothold, slipping and falling back with each move. Every year, on this specific night that was the pain she felt, water pounding her body, her feet slipping and crashing against the rocks. All night she climbed, alone, teary-eyed, tired. In the morning, she always had an excuse—a cold, a migraine, a sore throat—that explained away her pulling the covers over her head until the girls’ chatter and Alan’s fumbling through the morning routine quieted and fell away completely.

  But not this year. She would meet the anniversary differently, wait and confront him, make him relive what she had lived these past seventeen years, the agony of not knowing growing like a palpable mass in her heart.

  4

  Even awake, Lenworth found that his mother was present again, along with his sister this time, their images projected on his brain like a movie in 3D, both so vivid, so real he removed his glasses and tried to rub the vision from his eyes. Not that he could. He rubbed and yet they returned, their images still bitingly vivid: his mother more wrinkled, more worn than he remembered, and his sister, a plumper version of the young woman he remembered, also worn.

  After all these years, why had they come to haunt him now? Of course, he had failed them too, walked out on them, repeat
ed the pattern of his country’s migrant men who sailed to Panama in the early 1900s to labor on a canal. When work on the canal dried up, they went to Cuba or Costa Rica to cut cane and harvest bananas. Still later, they went to England, the mother country that preferred not to mother the colonized migrants who washed up on its shores, and to America that invited but seemed to resent the very farm workers it requested, and to many a country in between. Some returned with the symbols of wealth they had sought. Some came back broken, some disappointed. Some, like his father, didn’t return at all. Instead, his father invited them—Lenworth, his sister, his mother, his brother—into his life only through occasional packages that came to them via someone returning home, and letters and photos of an unrecognizable man bundled up against the cold. With scarf and hood framing his face, he could be anyone. Certainly he wasn’t the father Lenworth barely remembered. Maybe his father didn’t have the papers that would allow his easy movement from one country to another. Maybe he preferred his new life and wanted no reminder of the old. Maybe his father, like his son, had committed a misdeed he couldn’t explain. Without intending to, Lenworth had turned out exactly like his country’s migrant men and like his father. In truth, Lenworth was like a migrant worker or runaway who left women in limbo—three of them to be exact. Only Lenworth’s departure hadn’t been noble at all. And he had promised nothing.