Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  “I’ll wait,” Plum said. Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, how long she would wait for the priest to come.

  “All right then. I’ll see if I can get him on the phone.”

  “Tell him my name is Plum.” As soon as she spoke, she knew she shouldn’t have given her name.

  The boys again dribbled the basketball and each time the ball bounced on the floor, the thump reverberated in the oversized room. Noise filled the room, making it seem smaller. She leaned forward, her chin resting on laced fingers, the small watch on her hand ticking away the minutes. By now the girls would be eating dinner, then settling in for the Friday night movie, which quite likely would be something they had already seen a hundred times. Had she been home, she would be curled up with them too, one girl on either side, her thighs and soft stomach the pillow upon which their heads, heavy with sleep, would eventually fall.

  The ringtone—church bells—was most appropriate. Plum stepped into the hallway, hovering on the landing above the steps, the double doors in front of her offering a quick escape, and said hello into the small microphone. “I’ve gone to see the priest,” she told him when he asked, omitting that she had gone to see Father Barrett at St. Paul’s and not Father Bailey at St. Matthews. “It won’t be long.”

  Plum was not religious. In truth, she had long given up on God, given up on the belief that God heard and answered prayers, that he didn’t give her more than she could handle. She went to church at Christmas for the beauty of the carols accompanied by a harp and bells and violins. Yet, unlikely as it was that she would have gone to see a priest, Alan didn’t ask why. She was surprised and relieved. In the background, the chattering from the movie played on and no matter what Alan said, the girls wouldn’t take the phone.

  8:26. The priest had not yet come. “We’re going to lock up soon. Can you come back tomorrow?” Mrs. Barrett’s voice was sweet, patient. Four giggling girls passed behind her heading to the far corner of the hall, away from the dribbling basketball.

  “I’ll wait.” There it was, the thought Plum hadn’t allowed to fully develop: she wouldn’t leave until she saw Father Barrett, looked him in the eye, compared the man he was now with the man he had been before, and asked the question she had asked herself over and over all these years. Why? The probability of a prolonged night, locking herself in the church until he came, was the thought she wouldn’t think, and she acknowledged at last that that was the reason she had prepared so much food for Alan and the girls. She didn’t know when she would leave or whether he would come at all.

  She looked around the room at the two adults who remained—Mrs. Barrett and the warden who held the keys—and the six sweaty boys and four girls.

  “You can’t stay here overnight,” the man with the keys said, laughter in his voice. “We’re locking up at nine.”

  “Make me move,” Plum wanted to say. But even in her mind it sounded like something her daughters would say on the school playground. Instead, she pulled up a chair, stretched her legs out and slid her bottom down in the chair so her head rested on the chair’s back.

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “This is a house of God, a place of refuge. You wouldn’t want to do that.” Plum didn’t yet know why she felt emboldened. “It’s kind of an emergency. I’ll wait until he comes.”

  “He’s been with the children all evening,” Pauline said. “Maybe when I get back he can come.”

  Children. Plum’s heartbeat quickened.

  “I’ll wait,” Plum said. Leaving without an answer wasn’t an option. Not after seventeen years of waiting and looking and hoping, of shelving disappointment and fear. Not that particular night.

  On the far end of the hall, one girl slipped away from the group, into the long narrow hallway, presumably toward the vestry and the church.

  “Opal?” Pauline looked around for the girl she called. “Where’s she?”

  The girls at the table shrugged, nonchalantly, uncaring.

  “Steve, Mike, take Opal home for me. And straight home.” She wagged a single finger, underscoring her point, mumbled, “That girl . . .” To the group, “Not a minute after nine.”

  That girl, the one who had slipped inside the church couldn’t be Plum’s. Pauline would not have left her, would she?

  Pauline’s shoes, impossibly high heels, clicked on the stairs. The door locked behind her. The warden pulled up a chair and the boys resumed dribbling the basketball on the wood floor. “It can’t wait till tomorrow?” the warden asked. “I haven’t even had dinner yet.”

  “I’ve been here a long time,” Plum said. “This would have been over if he had come from the very first call.”

  “Father is a busy man.”

  “Of course. That’s why I’ll wait.” What Plum remembered was leaving Anchovy empty-handed, how close she had come to finding Lenworth and her daughter, and coming away with nothing, disappointment like a pox consuming her body. How close she had come to choosing death.

  “I have to run around the corner and pick up my order. Want anything?”

  “No.”

  The warden jangled his keys, looked up at the indefatigable teens still dribbling the ball and running and jumping and hooting. The girls waved their goodbyes and left with him. Plum stood up and stretched, arching her back, then bending forward at the waist, letting her fingers extend to the floor.

  “Aren’t your parents expecting you at home?”

  The boys laughed, dribbled the ball again, but gave no answer. The girl still had not returned.

  Plum paced a little, walked back to the landing, down the stairs. She stopped in front of the double red doors and contemplated them—the sturdy steel, the system of bolts, the exit sign that would glow in the dark. She walked down into the basement, looked around and turned back, clomping her way back up the stairs, past the teen boys, through the narrow hallway separating the recreation room from the sanctuary—no light, no obvious signs of a hidden priest—and into the pitch-black church.

  6

  “You shouldn’t be in here, you know.” The girl stood behind Plum. Her breath came in ragged gasps.

  Without turning around, Plum said, “Why are you hiding in here?”

  “I didn’t want her to drive me home.”

  Not her, Plum thought; the words the girl used distanced herself from Pauline. Her, the girl said, not mother or stepmother.

  “You should go home. Your parents must be worried about you being out so late.”

  “They know where I am. Why did you come in here?”

  “The simple truth: I thought the priest was hiding back here and you came to keep him from me.”

  The girl laughed, a short burst of sound.

  Plum struck a match and lit one votive candle after another, keeping her eyes on the flames sputtering to life behind the red candleholders.

  “You have to pay for each one you light,” the girl said. “And pray.”

  “You don’t know that I’m not praying.”

  “Maybe you should kneel and close your eyes.”

  “Maybe I prefer to pray with my eyes open.”

  “I know you haven’t put any money in the box.”

  “Prayers shouldn’t come with a fee. It’s free to pray, you know.”

  “You still shouldn’t be in here.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Opal.”

  Plum turned away toward the pew and sank into the red cushion lining the bench. She stretched her legs out in front of her, watching each candle flickering lazily.

  “You have to put them out before you leave.”

  To Plum, the girl sounded anxious, a bit worried now that she would get into trouble for leading Plum into the sanctuary.

  Plum patted the empty space beside her. “Sit.” The girl did exactly as she asked. “Listen to the silence. You can almost feel the quiet inside here. It’s almost like you can touch it. This is what a sanctuary is supposed to feel like. Not with the sin
ging and noise church people make on Sunday mornings.”

  “This isn’t that kind of church,” Opal said.

  “I know.” Even in the haze of darkness, Plum felt the intensity of Opal’s stare and the girl’s anxiety in every twitch of her leg. “I’m not going to burn down your church. I’m just waiting for the priest to come.”

  The girl, nervous still, shifted her gaze away from Plum and back to the flickering candles. Plum closed her eyes and leaned her neck back against the bench. The church was cool and musty, the air tinged with a hint of incense and decaying flowers Plum couldn’t name. It was too dark to see the floral arrangements on the nearby altar, but she imagined several elaborate ones, a range of colors and textures and shapes, heart-shaped anthuriums, spiked birds of paradise that resembled yellow plumed birds in flight, the cone-shaped ginger flower. Even as she pictured the bouquets, she knew she was thinking of a different church altogether, tropical flowers on an altar at a church in Jamaica, herself as a boarding school student longing for home.

  The girl beside her breathed deeply. “I think you mean trouble for the priest. My mother thinks women always bring trouble for priests. And, besides, if you were a member of the church, you’d know his office hours.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Plum asked.

  “I don’t know. Just trouble. There was a scandal. I don’t know exactly what. But the priest is rebuilding the church and it’s our duty to help him keep trouble away. You can’t just come out of nowhere and mess it up.”

  “Then you should go on home. Nothing like a teenager staying out all night after youth fellowship to start a scandal at the church. What will your priest think of a young girl who doesn’t go home at night?”

  “They won’t even know I’m missing.” Opal stretched out her legs. “Besides, you’re wasting your time. She didn’t tell him you came to see him. She always suspects the worst when women come to see him, so she wouldn’t have told him at all.”

  Plum turned toward Opal, parsing through each of Opal’s words, she, too, searching through the haze of darkness to see Opal’s features. Earlier, she had hardly looked at the girl. She remembered a teenager’s lithe body, a girl conscious of the way she moved around the boys, so conscious she kept her eyes mostly down. So Plum hadn’t noticed the eyes, whether they were like hers or his, hadn’t looked at the girl’s nose or lips or ears. So focused was she on getting to Lenworth that she hadn’t paid attention to the girl at all. Mostly, Plum dismissed the possibility that she was hers because of how readily and quickly Pauline had walked away and left the girl behind.

  “How do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That she didn’t tell him.”

  “She never tells him anything. At least not if it involves a woman.”

  A quickening now, an urgency to her voice. “The priest, is he your father?”

  “Yes.”

  Plum reached to pull Opal to her, but with the slightest shift she thought of what the girl would think of a stranger hugging her in the dark. And she thought, too, of her own failure to recognize her own offspring. Plum always imagined she would have known her daughter instinctively. But she hadn’t, and instead had nearly missed this reunion altogether.

  Then Plum felt it, a peacefulness, an easing in every quadrant of her body, the release of every pent-up emotion.

  Footsteps and angry, urgent voices echoed from the hallway connecting the church and the hall. “What was her name?” someone asked. “Either of you caught her name?”

  “Don’t remember.” A husky teen voice.

  “I’m locking up. You boys go on home.”

  “What about Opal? We can’t go home without her.”

  Opal stood up, turning in Plum’s direction as if to ask, “Aren’t you coming?”

  Instead, Plum tugged on Opal’s arm. “Stay.”

  Opal shrugged off Plum’s hand. “No,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be in here. We shouldn’t be in here. We’re going to be in trouble if we get caught.”

  “It’s too late now,” Plum said.

  The voices came closer and someone jiggled and turned a lock. Plum ducked behind a pew, quickly stretching her body out on the cold, concrete floor. “Get down.” Plum’s whisper was harsh.

  Opal moved, ducking behind the pew, her hair brushing Plum’s forehead, tickling her skin. But Plum didn’t move.

  “Call your parents and go on home.” The warden spoke and the footsteps faded away from the church, back down the hallway connecting the church and the recreation room. “They both must have left.”

  Caught up now in her own cat and mouse game, a one-sided, misguided game of hide-and-seek, Plum simply said, “Don’t worry. Your father will come for you.” Even if Pauline hadn’t told Lenworth her name, Plum was sure that he would come. If not for Plum, he would come for Opal, come to reclaim what he once claimed as his and his alone.

  7

  Lenworth reached for his slippers in the dark, and, as he had learned to do over the years, felt around with his foot for whatever toy, book, plate or half-full glass of juice one of the boys had left untended on the floor. Nothing. He sat upright, his feet dangling from the bed, his soles brushing the top of his slippers. Careful, he thought, or Pauline might wake, and if she did, her voice would come at him in the dark like a needle pricking at an already sore spot.

  Every year it was the same. His body remembered what he had trained his mind to forget, and every year on the morning of Opal’s birthday he woke long before dawn, in the hours before the birds outside his window started up a series of calls. But he never thought fully and deeply about the baby girl, seventeen years old now. Instead, he thought about her mother, Plum, lying in the hospital bed sleeping at last. The birth wasn’t easy, and for a while the doctors had thought he would lose both mother and child. But they pushed, one to reclaim and the other to lay her first claim on her space in the world. Resting, Plum was, as he had always thought, beautiful. Her dark skin glowed as if painted with oil, and her lips, a deep red that needed no additional color from lipstick or gloss, shone. In sleep, she rested her thumb against her lip as if she had fallen asleep sucking on her finger or was waiting for quiet and darkness to suck on it again. Every year, he thought about turning back the clock, walking away from the hospital that night for good, walking away from Plum empty-handed instead of with the baby girl wrapped in a blanket. In the crook of his arm, the baby had slept peacefully. When she woke, her eyes glistened with color, and he named her Opal for no other reason than she looked up at him with eyes that reminded him of a precious stone. He didn’t think signing his own newborn child out of the hospital without Plum’s knowledge was the worst of his mistakes. Up until then, his greatest mistake was falling in love with Plum, a student he had once been hired to tutor, and who was at that time not quite an adult. It didn’t matter that he was only twenty-four, a young teacher himself working temporarily as an assistant in the school’s chemistry lab and tutoring on the side.

  Looking down at Plum in the hospital bed with her thumb against her lip, he was certain he wanted her to have a different kind of future, not the one conscripted to her now that she had had a child at seventeen, not the life his mother and sister had. He thought of what had spurred his life for nearly ten years: what it meant to have agency, to have the capacity to exert power and control over his life. And he wanted Plum to have the same. What he had thought of in the days leading up to her being at the hospital seemed like a plan etched in stone. Walking away with the baby seemed like the only gift he had left to give Plum. His gift would mean Plum could have a life, a promising future, a university experience like any other young adult, a clean slate to start her life again. And he had indeed followed through on that plan: he left with the baby, not bothering to stop to scratch out a note to Plum explaining his gift to her.

  His gift: a future, an unencumbered start to whatever life Plum chose to live. In essence, power and control over her life.

  Only, they
hadn’t talked at all of what she wished or wanted. He forgot that his gift to Plum meant he was robbing her of the very control he thought he was giving.

  Now, like he had done every other September 16, he imagined Plum waking seventeen years earlier to his inadequate gift, bawling perhaps, her surprise melting into despair, her love into hatred, and holding her empty arms out in front for the baby she wouldn’t receive, seeing again and again her still-swollen stomach and empty arms, her breasts achingly full of milk that would feed no one.

  He closed his eyes to shut out the rest, and whispered the prayer he whispered every morning and night, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Yet, he had found no way to forgive himself.

  Here was Opal’s birthday again, come to remind him of what he had taken away, his own inadequate role as a father to Opal, his mistakes piling up one on top the other. Opal, with her mother’s eyes and rich dark skin, reminded him day after day of what he had done those seventeen years ago, how he had robbed his own daughter of her mother’s touch, how he had robbed Plum of what most mothers craved: cradling the baby to whom she had sung, to whom she had whispered stories for nine whole months. There was no counting the number of times he had to walk away from Opal to hide the unending agony of his mistake, how many times he lied about Plum’s fate to keep his own secret, how many times he gave too much to make up for what Opal had lost. And so he had come up with tea by the sea, his gift to Opal and Opal alone, a poor substitute for time with her own mother but something he imagined Plum would have considered or even done.

  He would take her to Coney Island that morning. Breakfast—tea, scones or bagels and fruit—by the sea with his daughter was the best that he could do on this birthday morning.

  Behind him, Pauline snored lightly. Her breath rustled the sheet, and its every movement was to him a whispered reminder of how he had failed. What Pauline knew, or thought she knew, was nothing compared to what he had actually done. He eased off the bed slowly, checking again for toys or one of his sons rolled up in a blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed, and tiptoed through the dark house to his office, the place where he found refuge from the eyes that looked at him with a combination of longing and awe of the man they all imagined he was. He didn’t think himself worthy of the collar and vestments he wore, nor of his family’s love, but week after week he tried to do some good, if not to make himself worthy then to erase bit by bit the gargantuan sin that shadowed his life.