Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  Lenworth remained in the dark office, his cupped hands chest high, mimicking the way his congregation knelt before him to receive the sacrament. He waited for God to speak, to send a blessing, inspiration for Sunday’s sermon, even a single word. Like every other night when he sat like that waiting for God to speak, he fell into sleep. His hands drifted down to his lap, his head drooped forward, and his jaw hung loose. Asleep, he was exactly how he pictured himself—a marionette controlled by an invisible string, except in his case he was his own puppeteer, incapable or unwilling to right his own wrongs.

  He dreamt again of his mother. She stood outside hanging clothes on a line, the breeze pushing the wet clothes back against her body. The sheets, heavy with water, flapped, thwacked, flicked droplets of water through the air. When she turned around at last, she said, “Oh, you come,” just as she had done the very last time he saw her in person. Her disappointment in him was as palpable as the leather seat pressed against his thighs. As he did in every dream in which she came to him, he explained himself. As happened in every dream in which she came to him, she didn’t hear a single word he said. He spoke but someone or something muted his voice or plugged her ears. He heard her questions and accusations, but his words, his explanations, were held back by an invisible shield of sorts. They continued like that until he sprung up, weary and frustrated, suspended between sleep and wakefulness, fighting to fall back to sleep.

  8

  One by one, Plum blew the candles out. Opal, her nervousness growing, paced, rubbing her hand along the gold plated banister leading to the altar.

  “He should have come by now,” Opal said. “What if he doesn’t know we’re in here? Maybe we should leave the lights on?”

  “Yes, good idea.”

  Plum stood and tiptoed out, using the illumination from her phone’s screen as a dim flashlight, and her hands along the wall as a guide. The room flooded with light and she blinked against it. The empty, cavernous hall would tell Lenworth nothing. She undid her scarf and draped it on a chair, which she placed in the center of the room. Back in the hallway, she turned on another light, hoping it would work like a lighthouse and guide him through the vestry to the church itself.

  Opal lay on a pew, her back curled and knees to her chest. “You’re going to get me into trouble.”

  “Not at all. You don’t know me, but trust me. You’re not in any trouble at all.”

  “You don’t know my stepmother.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Cinderella.” Her voice was muffled by the cushions. “Can do nothing right.”

  “Say that again?” Plum asked.

  “Never mind.” Opal stood, walked away from the pew and started pacing again.

  They were again in their separate places—Opal pacing five steps one way and five steps back and Plum sitting in the front pew looking toward the lectern.

  “I know you’re worried,” Plum said. “But trust me when I say don’t worry. I’m responsible for you being here and I will take the blame for that.”

  “It’s not that,” Opal said. “My father should have come by now. If not for you, then he should have come to look for me.” Opal stopped to look in Plum’s direction. “What do you want from him?”

  “It’s a complicated thing.”

  “Maybe my stepmother was right.”

  “About what?”

  “Women like you.”

  “What do you mean?” Plum felt her heart quickening.

  “Never mind.”

  “You’re protecting him. I understand that.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  Plum hadn’t pictured her daughter that way, not as a teenager thinking herself her father’s savior, setting herself up to be a footnote in her father’s biography, noted for saving her father and attempting even in her youth to right her father’s wrongs. She thought of her daughter as a version of herself, bold and brave and assertive when necessary. But here was Opal, a nervous girl, afraid of disappointing, desperate it seemed to find her place in her father’s life.

  “You’re too young to be his savior.” As Plum spoke, she realized that perhaps she was talking about herself, the young adult protecting Lenworth from her aunt and her parents’ wrath, protecting him from her parents even after he had left and she had come back to Brooklyn broken and empty.

  There in the church, the minutes ticking away, the clock inching toward midnight, the thought seeped into Plum that perhaps Lenworth would not come, that Opal who thought herself his savior would leave. That she would lose the daughter for whom she had searched all these years. Seeking a way to ease into what she needed to say, Plum asked, “What happened to your mother?”

  “She flew away.”

  A euphemism for death, Plum thought. “What do you mean when you say she flew away? Do you mean she died? Or do you mean she left?”

  But Opal didn’t answer. Not directly.

  “I saw her once,” Opal said, and Plum sat up, imagining for a minute a missed chance to reconnect. “Or maybe just someone who looked like how I think my mother would look.”

  Opal kept her eyes closed as she spoke. Her imagined memory began outside the windows of the car, where the Brooklyn streets moved at first in a blur of colors and sound she hadn’t seen in the Maryland suburbs. As the car got closer to Flatbush, it moved much more slowly—stop, stop, stop, go—the colors unblurred and the faces around which the colors were wrapped became more defined. Street noise burst into the car, which, except for the chatter of the boys, had been quiet most of the four-hour drive from Maryland. Her parents didn’t speak, hadn’t spoken to each other for more than a week. Both boys slept. Opal, awake, saw the city in reverse. She kneeled on the seat with the seatbelt still wrapped around her body and stared through the dusty window at the streets they were leaving behind. There, on the sidewalk, a woman with one foot on the curb and the other on the roadway, stopped midstride. She raised a hand to hail a cab. The arm, partially covered in green, split the woman’s face in two but the half of the face that Opal saw looked a little bit like her own. She opened her mouth to say “look,” but the car moved and she was thrown back against the front passenger seat, startling and jolting her father and stepmother, who in turn shouted, “sit properly,” and “sit down,” their voices in unison but their bodies objecting to any kind of unity.

  The face Opal thought she saw was long gone from her memory but the imagined reunion she had created from it remained. She told Plum of the faceless mother and her other family, a mother with whom Opal always had unplanned meetings. She looked in always on her mother and a little girl and boy having an impromptu picnic on a slice of paved walkway in front of a brownstone. Why she chose Brooklyn and not Jamaica was not something she could explain. In truth, though, she had little memory of any house other than the one in Anchovy with the crawl space beneath the house and floorboards that dipped beneath her feet. Curiously, she didn’t ever picture her imaginary mother living there with her father.

  Always, her mother unfolded a pink, child-sized picnic table, the kind that comes with a miniature umbrella and chairs, and the two children—the girl with plaits dangling over her ears and the boy with a truck in his hand—walked tentatively to the picnic set as if surprised no one else had come. In all the years she had imagined her mother and her family, the children never aged. Her mother arranged three folding chairs, and Opal always looked up at the front door and scanned the windows for a rustle of life inside. Always, her mother lifted a picnic basket and gave the children their dinner then placed two empty plates on the adult chairs, poured herself a glass of juice and sat down to watch the children eat.

  It was only then that Opal let herself move forward and encroach upon the private meal. They were in the shadow of an enormous oak. Leaves softened the bricks under their feet and sunshine peeked through the branches, dotting the ground with bits of yellow. They would be a curious sight—a woman, a teenage girl, and a young boy and girl picnicking on a Saturday afternoon in the
front yard of a brownstone, inches from the wide paved steps and the small porch.

  Only after the meal would her mother invite her inside into a living room cluttered with children’s toys and books, stacks of magazines on the coffee table, framed photos scattered around the room, and sculptures and pieces of artwork that her mother had accumulated through the years. Her eyes were hungry, seeking an explanation for her mother’s long absence from her life, the life her mother had chosen instead of mothering her.

  That’s where her reunion always ended, with Opal inside the house soaking up her mother’s life, her newfound family in limbo, her mother and the ageless children, watching her encroach upon their lives.

  In Opal’s voice was a wistfulness and longing that hurt Plum. She was grateful for the dark, and she bent her head and wept for her daughter and herself, and for the simple fact that Opal’s chattiness and bravado couldn’t replace one simple fact: her father had not yet come to find and claim her.

  9

  A sliver of sunshine peeked in through the blinds, stirring Lenworth fully awake. Seven already. The rooms above were still. He drew his legs toward the chair, pulled himself up, and tottered to the kitchen to put water on to boil, anxious to escape with Opal before Pauline or the boys woke. Opal’s bed was neatly made, the pillows at the head of the bed, forming a slight mound beneath the comforter, and the oversized orange bear still in its usual place in the middle of the pillows. He remained at the door, staring back at the stuffed bear’s glass eyes, his body stiff, as if waiting for someone to cast a rod and reel him further in. The window was closed, but he walked toward it to convince himself that it was indeed latched from the inside. As he passed the bed he ran his palm on the comforter, confirming what he already suspected: the bed was cold.

  Next door, in the boys’ bedroom he counted the shapes—two—and kept time with the rhythm of their breaths. He walked the hall again, and descended the stairs slowly and deliberately. He jiggled the locks and checked each room, peering underneath tables and in the closet as if he were again a young father playing hide-and-seek with his young daughter. And as he moved, he thought back to the previous night, Pauline coming in, jangling her keys as usual and calling out as she walked from the front door to the kitchen. He hadn’t moved from his desk, pausing only long enough to throw his greeting over his shoulder. He didn’t recall Opal’s voice, and he wouldn’t have thought anything of her not coming back with Pauline that Friday night because she often stayed later and returned home with the boys who lived next door.

  He headed up the stairs again, a little quicker this time around, calling Pauline’s name the moment his feet landed on the top step. Even before she opened her eyes, he asked, “Where’s Opal? She’s not here. Where is she?”

  “Look at how long you’ve been awake. Why are you asking me?”

  “She’s not in her bed. She didn’t come back with you last night?”

  “I left her there with the boys from next door. They were there at the church. In the gym.”

  “So she didn’t come home at all?” Even as he asked, Lenworth realized his question made him sound like a disconnected parent. How could he not have known his own daughter hadn’t come home? He pulled the robe tight around his body. “I’m going next door.”

  “Dressed like that? In your pajamas and robe?”

  “Yes, dressed like this. My daughter is missing and all you care about is what people will think of how I look?” He was already at the bedroom door when he finished speaking, moving so fast he nearly slipped on the rug, and again on the stairs. He heard Pauline struggling with a dress, her slippers flapping on the wood floor.

  But he didn’t stop running until he was on the neighbors’ stoop, two footsteps away from the door, his finger already reaching for the doorbell. He pressed once, twice, three times, stopping when he heard shuffling behind the door. Carl, the father of the boys, opened the door a crack, looked out.

  “Sorry, I know it’s early. But Opal . . .” Lenworth paused, waiting for Carl to fling open the security gate, then stepped back out of reach of the gate. “It’s Opal,” he said again, taking a step forward away from the morning light to the dark interior, keeping his voice low. “She’s missing. Don’t know if she even came home last night and I thought that maybe the boys would know where she is. Pauline said she left Opal with the boys there last night.”

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “I don’t know what to think.” Lenworth was inside the house now, waiting for his eyes to readjust to the dark. Pauline slid in behind him, her breath on his neck, her bare hand brushing his.

  “Let me get the boys.”

  Pauline leaned in to him, laying her fingers on his shoulder. But he stepped away from her ever so slightly, then moved again to lean fully against the back of a sofa. Upstairs, feet padded around on squeaking floors and squeaking steps, and he straightened himself as the boys and their parents came toward him, asking as he stood if the boys—still sleepy, still rubbing their eyes—knew anything about Opal’s whereabouts.

  “We thought she left with you,” the older of the two boys said, leaning slightly to look at Pauline. “One minute she was there and then she was gone. So we thought she left with you. And that woman left too.”

  “What woman?” Lenworth asked.

  “A woman who was there asking for you. She too just disappeared.”

  “Woman? What woman?” He turned to Pauline. “You didn’t tell me about a woman.”

  Both boys lifted their shoulders up into a shrug, the answer Lenworth hated most of all.

  “She said her name was Plum.” Pauline opened her mouth at last.

  “Plum?” He didn’t recognize his own voice, the squeak that escaped his lips. “Plum?”

  “She wanted to talk to you but since you were home with the boys I didn’t call. I figured whatever it was could wait.”

  Beyond repeating Plum’s name, Lenworth had no words at all. He had no strength in his legs either and he reached behind for something to hold, but his hand simply flapped like an awkward fin. He caught himself, pulled his hand in against his body, nodded and left, struggling, as he walked, to maintain his composure. It was, after all, what was expected of him. Everyone expected a priest to be composed at all times, whether he prayed over the living or dying or counseled a couple not yet ready for marriage. He held himself together only by repeating a question he couldn’t answer. Why now? Why now? Why now? He sensed the neighbors and Pauline staring at him walking so fast he was almost trotting, his robe, open now, flapping behind him. He slowed his steps and his breathing and then he asked himself the other pressing question: How did Plum find Opal? Or was it the other way around: how did Opal find Plum?

  From his own front door, he heard the urgent and insistent whistle from the kettle, the boys, awake and alone, calling and crying. The sounds spurted outward and even after he turned off the flame and Pauline quieted the boys, the raucous sounds lingered in his mind, rising to a grating, irritating crescendo. He couldn’t panic and yet he did, knocking a stack of papers loose. He sensed Pauline’s presence. She stood in the doorway with her hands around the boys’ shoulders, waiting for him to speak.

  “Go,” he said, quietly. But the second time he uttered the word it was a sharp bark that seemed to spurt from the depths of his stomach. He bent over the desk and breathed in deeply, closing his eyes as he concentrated on sucking in air. He thought of the secrets that would come tumbling out now: the very first scandal that had chased him from the high school for girls in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, his own daughter whom he had taken and kept all these years from Plum, the incident that prompted his escape to the seminary. His past was hurtling forward, rapidly tumbling into his present and shattering his vision of the future.

  10

  Plum woke with her breath catching in her throat, a feeling like drowning. Her nostrils were clogged, head and eyes heavy, and her body felt as if it had indeed struggled against a strong current all night. She had
slept in fits, and now, barely awake, her mind foggy and body achy, she clutched at the space beside her, reaching for the bodies of Nia and Vivian, and came up empty. “No,” she whispered at first. Then, more awake, she said it again louder, all the while feeling around her, pressing her hand into the cushion, bumping up against the sloped back of the pew and her tote bag and back down to the soft velvet cushion. Panicked, she swung her legs down, stood up, looked around and made out the stained glass windows, the sunlight up against the thick, colored glass impossibly trying to filter through, and remembered where she was and why. She slowed her breath, closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, sucking on must and the lingering remnants of incense.

  Across the aisle, Opal lay on her belly, one arm between her face and the cushion, her legs crossed at the ankles. Plum stepped back.

  How close she had come to seeing Lenworth. And yet he hadn’t bothered to come at all. She was forgettable. Forgotten again. Not just Plum this time, but Opal as well.

  For a moment, Plum panicked, pushed through a feeling of doom in which she pictured Lenworth packing in the night and leaving again once he heard her name. Plum tried to steady her heart, her mind, the pressure of blood pulsing through her arteries, easing the anxiety and fear settling into her body, the calcified heartache, the anger at the man who once had her heart and discarded it. Despair as deep as the feeling that urged on the stick figure in the boat.

  Plum walked down the aisle and back, playing through various scenarios in her head, picturing Alan and Nia and Vivian. The girls, who had never spent a night away from Plum, would be waking now. Vivian was usually the first to rise and shake Nia awake. Tights and leotards and tutus and ballet and tap shoes. A flurry of disorder in the girls’ room. The girls walking out to something very wrong—the television silent and dark, without animation, without the artificial and tinny voices of their favorite cartoons, an absent mother, a worried and disheveled father, the kitchen silent and odorless, without the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla rising from the Saturday morning’s staple breakfast—cornmeal porridge—and the house itself worried into an uneasy quiet. Perhaps Alan and the girls weren’t home at all but out finishing up their fifth or sixth or seventh hour of searching for her, or at a police station describing her hair and face and body, Alan reluctant to accept that it was too early to file a missing person’s report, trying to make the police officer understand that every year on this date Plum spirals downward to a place he had never been able to pull her from, realizing too late that he implied Plum was chronically depressed, and realizing even later that depression and suicide were too often linked. Indeed they were. But Alan didn’t know about the stick figure in the boat on the mighty sea, disappearing to nothing. Had he known he probably would have scoured the waters, Brooklyn’s seaside towns that were accessible by bus or train—Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach—and would have found out from Plum’s parents about a night she spent sleeping on a boardwalk bench in Coney Island, her eyes to the dark sea. He wouldn’t have hesitated to save her from herself.