Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  Why now, he asked again. But he could only imagine the worst, an impending death or death itself, a restless spirit hovering and haunting because it could not rest without being appeased. Those were the kinds of beliefs he had set aside. A man like him, educated, an escapee from a small and poor country town, couldn’t believe in his ancestors’ version of the spirit world, couldn’t believe in duppies—the restless ghost or spirit of the dead, or the ancestral spirit who remained in limbo appearing at will or when called upon to help the family still living. He couldn’t believe at all what his mother would believe, that the problems that had befallen him his entire life were the result of obeah, some evil spell set upon him, which he could reverse by having a more powerful obeahman counteract the effects of the spell. He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, believe.

  Yet he knew there had to be a reason his mother and sister played so prominently in his thoughts now. And because he couldn’t believe in his ancestors’ spirit world, he thought their presence could only mean one thing: His past was catching up to him. But he didn’t know how to prepare.

  For the moment, Lenworth had a funeral to plan and a family to console. He went about the business of planning the funeral as if that was all that mattered. He was again at his parishioner’s house, around the dining table this time, listening as her sister recounted the dead woman’s last meaningful conversation, her life in a small, mountain town and the countless children she helped through school. How, with a disabled and then dead husband, nothing but a primary school education, two children to feed and clothe and educate, she sent off her children one by one, to homes of a teacher and a nurse, so each could have an opportunity she could never provide.

  Lenworth heard his mother’s story, or something so similar to it, and he almost cried. His mother had done the same, sent him off to another family, only he had looked at it not as his mother attempting to ensure he had opportunities she didn’t have, but a throwback to another time when those who had no agency, slaves and their immediate descendants, were sent like property from one master to another. This squandered opportunity, his misreading his mother’s and his benefactors’ intentions, had led to Plum, his seventeen-year absence from his family, this haunting, this sense of doom that sat upon his chest like a heart ticking slowly toward an explosion.

  Lenworth sat upright, a hand to his chest, for he recalled that a sense of impending doom was a cardiac symptom. He shifted in his chair, not wanting to alarm, not wanting to wait, anxious for the moment when he could slip away, make his way to his doctor’s office and ask to be seen, or directly to the emergency room. He made a point of looking at his watch.

  “She never complained,” Evelyn’s sister was saying. Then, “You have to go. I know we keeping you too long.”

  Relieved, Lenworth said, “I have another funeral to attend to.”

  “Carmen, bring the paper with the hymns and scriptures.”

  He blew deep breaths, made a point of thinking about his breathing, realizing, as he sucked in the air, that despite what he taught his parishioners about being ready to meet their maker, he wasn’t ready to die.

  In the doctor’s office, the smell of antiseptic stung his nose. “This is probably nothing, but I feel like something horrible is going to happen. And, no, I’m not depressed. But I’ve heard that people having heart attacks sometimes feel a sense of doom. So since I can’t shake it off, I wanted to check it out.”

  “Of course, just a precaution.”

  The doctor went about his business as if he suspected something more. “Chest pain?”

  “No.”

  “Indigestion?”

  “No.”

  “Heartburn?”

  “No.”

  “Any coughing? Dizziness?”

  “No.”

  “Deep breath. Again. We’ll run an EKG and maybe set you up for a stress test.”

  Alone, he felt foolish but assured. Lying with his arms stretched out beside him, leads taped to his body, he assured himself that his panic was only a momentary lapse. Lying there, he made note of the color of the walls, a shade of beige. The color reminded him of sand, and he thought of crabs that were that color. Long ago, on a beach in Montego Bay, he had watched the crabs, their nearly translucent skin and black bulging eyes, how they crawled sideways across the sand then scampered back to their holes in the ground to shield themselves from any suspected threat. At the shoreline, he found yet another species of crabs—tiny hermit crabs—pulling their bodies up and into their shells. So completely did the crabs hide themselves that he didn’t know until after he had picked up the shell that a living being was within.

  Underneath it all, his thoughts of crabs, their physical presence—spotted or striated shells, translucent bodies—what he really contemplated was the ability to escape quickly and easily from perceived or real threats. Which is exactly how he had lived his entire adult life, like a crab, not so much retreating but escaping fully and completely, assuming a new identity when necessary, protecting himself to the very end.

  The doctor returned. “Do what you tell your parishioners: put everything in God’s hands.”

  He knew he should. But he couldn’t.

  Home again, the little drummer boy still tapped a staccato rhythm in his chest, and that feeling of doom still rode alongside the drummer boy’s rhythm. Inside the rectory, Lenworth found chaos: the two boys with plastic swords jousting, dancing round the furniture and over the back of the sofa, and the television playing out the fight they were mimicking and exaggerating; in the kitchen, a kettle on the verge of whistling and Pauline inches from Opal’s face demanding to know where she had gone and why.

  “You think you’re a grown woman, right? Coming and going as you please?” Pauline’s voice an octave higher, piercing and cracking under the emotion. “Where were you all evening?”

  “At the library.”

  “Don’t lie to me, you know.”

  “Why do you think I’m lying?”

  “Don’t come to me with that attitude.” And to him. “You need to talk to this girl. She can’t come and go as she please. Not in my house.”

  They had had this argument before, in this very location with Pauline moving between kitchen and dining room, and Opal rooted in place but looking for a way to escape. He glanced at Opal. Her watering eyes held a pleading, desperate look, so like her mother’s. He remembered the two of them—he and her mother—on a shop piazza right after a fight. At that moment, he had wanted to get away to let things calm. But Plum had looked at him, her eyes saying, “don’t leave me,” her lips quivering, her body leaning toward him, one hand outstretched. Back then, he had stayed.

  Now, he didn’t let his eyes linger on the girl who looked just like her mother, didn’t allow himself to see the plea in her eyes. He said nothing, just waved his hand as if swatting away something inconsequential. “We’ve been through this before,” he said to Pauline, and turned back toward his office at the front of the house leaving the two of them to sort it out.

  5

  Plum kissed Alan goodbye, a long, lingering kiss at which Nia and Vivian stared. Plum wondered as well about the kiss, how closely it was linked to the plan at the back of her mind, the one that paralyzed her because it was simultaneously probable and improbable. The very plan and the reason for it that she hadn’t told Alan about. And she couldn’t tell him then, not without peeling back the layers of secrets—the reasons behind the multiple trips to Jamaica before they married, the reason she shut down every September 16, the reason she had held him at bay for so long before agreeing to marry him—that she had allowed to compound and conflate that age-old issue of trust.

  Trust, Alan thought, was the last thing to go before a marriage truly disintegrated. Respect was first and friendship second. He figured that by the time the trust was gone, the marriage itself was over; love alone, no matter how deep, was never enough to hold it all together. For them, the respect and friendship were still there. They had either bypassed the first t
wo or upset Alan’s long-held belief.

  Then he was gone and Plum was alone with the girls, who lingered in the kitchen waiting for breakfast, and the rush to get dressed and off to school. Plum weighed the consequences—the loss of her marriage or giving up on meeting her daughter—and chose the one she wouldn’t live without. And when she thought back on that kiss, she imagined the possibility that it could have been their last.

  Yet, the plan returned, floating, tempting like the scent of forbidden food. So she buried the thought under a crevice in her mind, pictured an image of the brain—the tissue that folded in on itself—pictured her hand lifting a fold and shoving the thought under the fold away from the places in the brain whose sole purposes were remembering, planning, or thinking through consequences. What she thought about though was the first part of the plan: it was her eldest daughter’s birthday, and she would confront Lenworth on that day. But the second part of the thought she didn’t let linger in her mind. Four days of burying the second part and still that Friday she wouldn’t think it, wouldn’t let it hatch and grow wings as a plan should.

  Instead, Plum filled her mind with everyday tasks, the endless duties that defined a mother’s life. She cracked and whipped eggs, buttered toast, sweetened hot chocolate and warmed strawberry milk. She wiped one snot-filled nose, swapped brown leggings for a polka-dotted pair with a tiny hole, brushed the fuzzy hairline of two heads of hair, dabbed a heavy, orange-scented oil to hold wayward curls in place and searched for a second pair of polka-dotted leggings to stop Vivian’s belated tantrum. She checked two backpacks, swapped a peeled orange for apple slices, wiped the sticky place in front of the fridge where Alan had spilled orange juice and wiped but not wiped carefully enough, searched the toy box for a yo-yo for the girls’ sound bag, then searched again for a whistle when she realized that the lesson was the science of sound and not the sound of the letter, set out chicken breasts to thaw for the night’s dinner, emptied a full clothes hamper into the washer, realizing too late that what she added was full-strength bleach and not the color-safe kind.

  7:44 a.m. Plum walked the girls down the stairs, through the hall past the living room, through the triple-locked front door and metal gate, down a second flight. Dry leaves and oak bark crunched beneath their feet. Nia skipped. Vivian held Plum’s hand, questioning her about where squirrels kept their babies (in tree nests), why animals build nests on thin branches (because the animals are light), how many times baby birds and squirrels fall from their nests to the ground (not often). Plum left the girls at the front door of the school, watched them skip away toward their classrooms, turn around and wave. She waved back, turned away from the double doors, the rubberized mats on the playground and walked back home where, listening to the near silence, she began putting her plan in motion. The refrigerator hummed. The grandfather clock ticked. Outside, a garbage truck screeched as the driver braked. A siren screamed its urgent notes. Without the girls laughing, screaming, running, calling “Mommy,” shouting “Daddy,” tugging at toys, this was silence.

  Plum moved as if she had a settled plan, as if she had indeed let the plan hatch and grow wings, and written down a list of things that she checked off one at a time. Again, she concentrated on the tasks as if the outcome of her meeting with Lenworth and everything that followed would depend on how well she accomplished each task. She returned chicken breasts to the freezer, removed a bag of deveined and shelled shrimp, ran cold water over the chunk of frozen seafood, chopped and sautéed onions and garlic and scallion, and stirred the thawed shrimp over the sautéed bulbs. She set a pot to steam rice, re-removed the frozen chicken breasts and set them in a pan of water to thaw, chopped onions and garlic and scallions again, chopped lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers, grated a bag of carrots, separated the grated carrots into two separate bowls, sprinkled sugar and raisins in one bowl of carrots, tossed the second bowl of carrots with the lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. She tossed the half-frozen chicken breasts into a pot with curry powder, the chopped bulbs, salt, pepper and thyme, scanned the refrigerator and the stove and calculated she had enough for at least five days’ dinners. Too much, she knew.

  Plum stood still for a moment, shoved the thought she didn’t want at the front of her mind back in its place, then tidied the living and dining rooms. She fluffed the toss pillows, folded the throws, got on her knees with the small broom and dust pan and swept the crumbs from the area rug, changed and washed the girls’ sheets, folded the first batch of unintentionally bleached clothes—all her husband’s.

  By noon, she was ready for another outing, this time to the supermarket. She bought enough to stock the refrigerator and cupboards full of the girls’ favorite things—cookies with lickable fillings, hard red grapes without seeds, Granny Smith apples they’d sprinkle with salt, pizza dough, cookie dough, green plantains Alan would have to fry, coconut drops and gizzadas from the Jamaican bakery, hard dough bread and guava jelly, Ting grapefruit soda.

  At home again, she wrote a simple note: Will be back late. There’s dinner in the fridge and pizza dough in case the girls want to make pizza. He would wonder, she knew, when she found the time to cook shrimp, chicken and rice and about the reason for her late return. But Plum offered no other explanation.

  Plum packed a bag for herself: a book of puzzles, cell phone charger, four fruit and nut bars, four bottles of water, a novel she had twice given up on completing, a thin scarf, the old cookie tin with the newspaper clipping, the one-footed doll and the hospital discharge papers. Four-fifteen. Alan would pick up the girls at five. At 5:20, the girls would dash inside, dropping bags and shoes, filling the house again with sound. Plum took her oversized tote, headed away from the subway stop and the school, turned right toward Church Avenue, left on Church past Nostrand Avenue and Flatbush, meandering past the West Indian grocery stores and bakeries, the Chinese takeout shops and the what-not stores that sold a hodgepodge of things.

  Plum could have taken a taxi but she walked instead, stepping out into traffic as if she had every right to do so, ignoring the blaring horns, the brakes squealing as cars jerked to a halt, the drivers pushing their heads through open windows to yell and shout every obscenity imaginable. Finally, St. Paul’s Place and Church Avenue. She stopped and turned right, looking up at the grey stone building, the stained glass windows, the bright red, double wooden doors at the main entrance shut up tight. Even though she had already been there once, Plum circled the church, walking down St. Paul’s Place, past the high-rise apartment buildings on either side of the block, back to Church Avenue, and around again. Three times she circled, trying to slow her heart that was pulsing too hard and her breaths that came in shallow spurts. She reminded herself of her ultimate goal, how close she was to standing face to face with him after seventeen years, how close she was to seeing her daughter.

  At six-thirty she was again at the entrance to the church hall. She stopped. Sounds, a thumping sound and voices, drifted through open windows. She climbed the stairs and stepped into the musty foyer. Upstairs, she could see the cavernous recreation hall and caught glimpses of boys dribbling a basketball. Youthful voices rose up from the basement rooms. The Friday evening youth fellowship, she guessed.

  Plum took another deep breath and climbed the stairs toward the recreation room. She closed her eyes, realizing after that shutting her eyes wouldn’t filter out the odor of must and sweat trapped in the room, and peered again inside. “Father Barrett?”

  “Excuse me.” The boys stopped mid-play.

  Plum hadn’t expected a polite answer, hadn’t expected them to have heard her question at all. She thought she was still playing out the question in her mind, working out what she was going to do now that she had come this far. The question out of her mouth, she couldn’t turn back now. “Father Barrett,” she said again.

  “Let me see.” The boy with the ball turned away toward a door in the far left of the building that Plum presumed led to an office and the sanctuary.

  Another boy
brushed past her down the stairs to the basement. His words floated back up the stairs. “There’s a woman upstairs asking to see Father Barrett.”

  Plum stepped inside the hall, her ballet flats soft on the wooden floor, unfolded a chair and bent to sit. The seat was lower than she thought and her body fell heavily into it, pushing the legs back, throwing up a screech that floated around, lingering and echoing. She paid attention to the sounds, the soft hushed whispers from the basement, the air circulating in the room, laughter bursting unexpectedly from the rooms below, footsteps coming from the darkened corridor to the left, footsteps coming up the stairs toward the hall, transitioning from concrete to wood, then stopping before her.

  “May I help you?” The woman who stood before Plum had eyebrows penciled in place, arching unnaturally high above her eyes, a thick layer of foundation and powder and concealer congealed on her skin, breath that smelled like mint.

  “I’d like to see Father Barrett, please.”

  “I’m Mrs. Barrett. Pauline. He isn’t here now but perhaps someone else can help?”

  “No, no one else.” Plum hesitated, then in a bolder voice, said, “It’s a personal matter that I must talk to him about.”

  Without hesitation, Pauline’s eyes dropped to Plum’s stomach, rolled over the soft folds of flesh that Plum had never bothered to work to retighten after the twins. Plum straightened her back, pushed her stomach out, flattened her hand against the T-shirt, and sat back waiting for the roving eyes to rest again on her face, which was partly shielded by oversized sunglasses.

  “It’s Friday evening. Priests have families too, you know. Can it wait till Sunday or Monday when he’s back in office?”