Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  “My daughter,” he said again.

  The officer threw his hands up, his exasperation slipping out along with his heavy breath. “We have a dead woman over here. For missing persons, you have to report her missing at your local station. Nobody’s getting inside there for now.”

  It was unlikely, he thought, that Plum, having found the child for whom she had searched for seventeen years, would remain at the church, within his reach. No way, he thought.

  “A prayer, at least,” he said to the officer, “for Delores.” In the midst of the prayer, he heard a deep male voice say, “Plum Valentine. I’m looking for Plum, is that her?” The man who spoke held the hands of two little girls, both of whom looked up at the man, their father he presumed, as if they hadn’t seen him or heard him like this before. The girls looked exactly like Plum. Like Opal. Again, the light brown eyes and skin as dark as hers. Neither girl smiled but he suspected that if they did, he’d see the dimples too. There was no mistaking to whom the girls belonged. He didn’t finish the prayer, but turned around and took the man’s arm. “The deceased is white,” he said, “and elderly. It’s not your wife.”

  “Thank you.”

  The fact that Plum was missing too, confirmed what Lenworth suspected: Plum and Opal were together.

  12

  A ware again of how quickly it could end, how quickly she could lose something precious, Plum said, “I want to show you something.”

  Opal was lying on the floor like a dog in the sun, fingers clasped beneath her head, staring at nothing.

  “You asked if what I want to talk to your father about was worth getting arrested over.” That Plum wasn’t ready now to call him by name said plenty. He. Your father. Father. The priest. Reverend. Any one of those monikers would do. Just not his name, which she had not uttered in eight years, not since the day she left Anchovy heavy with disappointment that all she found of her daughter was a naked, dirty doll. No identifiable trace of him. That she would call him Father and Reverend, despite knowing what kind of a man he had been before he entered the seminary, made her chuckle. But there was no joy in the sound. She wanted to cry, wanted to let out all the emotions that had built up. And she cried, fumbling in her bag as the tears clouded her vision, reaching down, wading through a package of chewing gum and keys, a notebook and a novel, a book of puzzles, more fruit and nut bars, until at last she found the pouch with the palm-sized mirror inside. “Come over here.” She held the mirror up at arm’s length, watched her daughter watching her, watched herself watching her daughter, two pairs of topaz eyes, unusual in their dark skin.

  “Look at me.”

  And Opal did. Plum looked back at the face she hadn’t been able to see in the dark, back at the eyes, so like her own, eyes that stood out against such dark skin, the eyes that at one time or another prompted a stranger to ask if she wore colored contact lens. The high cheekbones. The dimples. Down at the slight build, a dancer’s or runner’s body, without the defined or bulging muscles. Down even further to Opal’s long toes splayed in her sandals. Looking and waiting for Opal to fit the pieces together. Looking and seeing a gradual awakening, the glimmer of tears. Looking and seeing what she hadn’t expected—something a bit like disappointment or disbelief. Opal blinked and looked away instead of embracing Plum.

  “I am your mother.” Plum waited a moment.

  “You’re dead. He said you died in childbirth.”

  “I wanted to name you Marissa. It’s Spanish, means ‘of the sea.’ Your birth wasn’t easy. I slept after you were born and when I woke up he was gone. And you were gone. Without a word. Without even leaving a note. I couldn’t even remember your face. Didn’t know where he took you.”

  “He told us you were dead.”

  “What else could he say?”

  “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t just leave like that. That’s not the kind of man he is. And if that is true, then how did you find me?”

  “I didn’t know it was you. I saw his picture in the paper. I wanted him to tell me, on your birthday, why he left, why he took you.”

  “Kidnapped? You’re saying he kidnapped me? He wouldn’t do such a thing. My father wouldn’t do such a thing. He’s a priest.” Opal dropped her body back into the space beneath the robes, hiding but not quite hidden.

  “He wasn’t always a priest. He was a different man then.”

  Opal didn’t leave, didn’t reject outright the possibility that Plum was right. Yet, Plum couldn’t haul her catch in, couldn’t own her, couldn’t take Opal’s hand. Not yet. Opal, so like a clam, washed ashore and exposed, then burrowing back into wet sand for protection against the pounding wave. Plum could lose her forever. Plum couldn’t lose her forever. Not again.

  She didn’t beg. The girl and the moment were hers.

  13

  George drove them away from the small crowd outside the church and the coroner’s van that remained. Most of the police officers left too, cruising slowly through the congested street behind George’s car. Lenworth saw the city as he hadn’t seen it before. He saw the people—the slim, the fat, the playful teens, the toddlers holding on to the hands of adults walking too fast for their little legs, those who looked like the morning had caught them in the previous night’s clothes—rather than the street lights and the brake lights of slowing vehicles. He scanned the faces for Opal’s or Plum’s, hoping to see the familiar eyes, Plum’s easy smile. Would she still have the smile, the slight gap between her upper front teeth?

  “Now, this business about the kidnapping,” George was saying, “you’re not going to say a word about that. As your lawyer and the church’s lawyer, I’m telling you not to tell the police anything about how you came to have custody. The most important thing is to find Opal.”

  “All right.” But it wasn’t.

  Outside the precinct, George turned around, leaning his head against the headrest.

  “Now, is there anything going on at home that would make Opal want to run away? Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Has she ever run away before?”

  “No.”

  “Drug use?”

  “No.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “No.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not asking you anything the police won’t ask.”

  “I understand.”

  “They don’t always make a missing teen report a priority at first. After all, she’s seventeen and teenagers run away all the time. I’m just telling you that so you understand what we may be dealing with inside there.”

  “Thanks.”

  The air was warmer now than it had been hours earlier when he stepped outside in his green robe and slippers, and cold again inside the air-conditioned building.

  George was more right than wrong, and not satisfyingly so: That she was just another runaway. A teen with a secret life kept hidden from her family—whether a lover or addiction or pregnancy—details she was too afraid to share. A teen with a hunger for freedom or the illicit activities New York City promised. That he would find that she had been out with a boyfriend. That she would turn up in a day when the freedom she craved proved to be something else. That he should wait for her to come crawling back home.

  George was more incensed than he at the scenarios the police officer laid out, at how the officer, in a few simple words, had managed to reduce Opal to a statistic: one dark-skinned girl among a large number of white- and dark-skinned teenage runaways. Later he would learn that there are upwards of 1.5 million teenage runaways a year, a staggering number that shouldn’t have surprised a priest accustomed to hearing confessions, more aware than others of the messiness of people’s private lives.

  It was too late then to reverse the strategy he and George had agreed upon in the car, too late to tell the officer about Plum, to backtrack from the agreed-upon story about a seventeen-year-old runaway and invoke Plum’s name, shift the attention somehow from the supposed ordinarine
ss of a teen runaway to the more controversial parental interference or parental kidnapping charge. He couldn’t without incriminating himself and not without painting another picture altogether of a dysfunctional home, and inadvertently confirming the police officer’s suspicion that Opal ran away to escape something at home.

  Except for passing along Opal’s photo and descriptions of what she had been wearing—blue jeans, the uniform of American teens, and a T-shirt, the color of which he could not definitively say—there was little more he could do at the precinct. Go home and wait. She will call. Or she will return.

  Lenworth stood on the sidewalk outside the rectory like a recalcitrant teen returned home by a friend’s parent. The tiniest flicker of movement at the window and he knew Pauline was just inside the door, with questions or an argument waiting to tumble from her lips. The story he’d told, years old now, was simple. Opal’s mother had died in childbirth. Surely not her name or how they’d met. That he had taken the baby and left Plum alone in the hospital, childless and without a job or a home, just so she could, in his mind, get on with the life he had caused her to lose, no. That Plum had come to reclaim her daughter, no.

  Too late now. Seventeen years of lies had caught up to him, had arrested his life as he knew it. And it had arrested his and Pauline’s life together, permanently blocked any possibility of their moving forward in a meaningful way. Their life together could only be lived backwards now—she parsing through everything he had said and done, looking for the truth, and he doing the same but mining the details to find out where he could have backtracked to find Plum and righted his wrongs. He had never bothered to look for her, the mother of his first-born child, never enquired of her whereabouts or tried to find out if she had indeed taken advantage of his ‘gift’ to her and gone on to live a productive life. All these years in Brooklyn he could have opened a phone book, looked for someone named Plum Valentine and if not her then called other Valentines until he found her parents or someone who recognized the name. He could have called her aunt in Jamaica, of course without revealing his true name, to inquire of her whereabouts. But he hadn’t. Too ashamed. Too guilty. Too fearful of the outcome: losing everything and gaining nothing.

  The curtain twitched again. He glimpsed the boys instead of Pauline, both kneeling on the couch and looking out at him standing like a statue in the driveway contemplating the old rectory, the borrowed house that soon would no longer be theirs. Nothing, he knew, would remain the same after this. Just as quickly as the boys appeared, they disappeared and reappeared at the front door, still in pajamas with cartoon characters on the front and back. Craig lifted his fingers in a listless, tentative wave, and Lenworth waved back, his own greeting just as anemic as his sons'. That the boys were there at the door meant Opal hadn’t returned, neither voluntarily nor involuntarily, and Pauline had spent long, anxious moments at the window looking out. He took another step, then two more halting ones, bent to pick up the neighborhood paper he never read, and stopped short of the step up from the sidewalk to answer the question that came at him from both boys, the younger boy’s question an echo of Craig’s. “Where’s Opal?”

  “We’re still looking for her.”

  “Did she run away?” Craig, again, the matter-of-fact one.

  “No. No. She didn’t.”

  “But Mommy said she ran away. Gone to live like a bum on the street is what she said.”

  “No, no.” He couldn’t imagine Pauline saying that, going so far as to characterize Opal as a street child. “Opal’s just missing, that’s all.”

  He suspected Pauline was just inside the door, waiting to catch him saying something he shouldn’t, something like, “Your mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or revealing a bit of truth that he wouldn’t tell her directly. He knew then that he wouldn’t go inside, wouldn’t stand before her and add another lie to the hill of lies he had told over the years. Since becoming a priest, he hadn’t lied, not exactly, not directly. Instead, he shut down the questions he didn’t want asked or which he didn’t want to answer and built up a wall of sorts around the parts of his life he didn’t want to talk about. It meant that Pauline knew much less than a wife should know, and, shut out of his life, hovering outside the walls he had built up around himself, she was lonely, alone.

  “You should go on back inside. I just came to get the car and go back out to look for Opal. Go on inside and lock up.”

  Just inside the door, on the small hall table, were the keys, and he grabbed them, then stepped back and hurried away to the car on the curb before Pauline could step out from wherever she was hiding and come outside. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed her pink slip of a dress floating around her body, her arms flailing as she waved at him to stop. But he angled the wheels and pulled the car out, nudging it carefully forward so as not to reverse, so as not to risk looking back, catching her eye and willfully ignoring her flailing arms. He cut the angle much too close to the car in front of his. The car lurched forward and he pressed the gas pedal, easing out into the street, slowing at the stop sign and moving ahead. Even though the windows were closed and he didn’t hear her call, the sound of his name coming from her mouth lingered in his head, loud and frantic. Len-worth. Len-worth. For a long while that was all he heard, not the reggae blaring from passing vans on Church Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, not the whoosh of traffic on the Belt Parkway, not the siren of an ambulance bearing down on his car and zipping around him at the very last minute. All he heard was his name, a prolonged and frantic call.

  14

  To look at Opal cloistered in a musty room, waiting for her father to come find her, and realizing slowly that her father would not come at all. To look at the girl lying flat on her back with her knees brushing up against the choir robes, and see the disappointment tattooed on her face, her eyes brimming with tears. Plum felt Opal’s disappointment in every quadrant of her body.

  “Let’s go,” Plum said. “You can have your birthday wish. Tea by the sea.”

  Opal looked up, her eyes watery, her face crumpled.

  “I just ask that you take me to your father in return.”

  They left the way they had come up the stairs, Opal leading, Plum following, Plum nervous and uncertain that even this plan wouldn’t fall apart.

  The church hall was quiet, eerie, and immediately outside the church, the street that earlier had been swarmed by police had eased back into a relative calm. How easily they left, as if no one had come to look for them at all, as if their absence didn’t matter to anyone either.

  Just on the corner, Church Avenue was as busy as ever. Too many buses, cars, pedestrians nudging and pushing to claim their own space. Two policemen appeared, their presence on the street nothing extraordinary. One looked at them and then away, no recognition or awareness that one was a girl reported missing and the other a mother and wife also reported missing. Neither had been missing long enough to cause alarm beyond their immediate families.

  Without looking back, Plum reached for Opal’s hand, and Opal, too big to be led, old enough to lose herself in a crowd and find her way home, reached forward, twined her fingers through Plum’s and skipped forward to match Plum’s pace. She didn’t let go, didn’t protest. For the moment they were neither hunters nor hunted, just mother and daughter strolling in the afternoon, dipping into a Caribbean bakery for patties and coco bread, two cups of red peas soup and water.

  Plum waved at a taxi, wanting to quicken the ride through the crowded city. On the sidewalk, just in front of the aquarium, Opal pointed at it and said, “Let’s go there.” She moved headlong through the crowds, running through the tunnels as if she were still a child.

  Plum emerged from the tunnel squinting at the sunlight and waiting for her glasses to darken in the sun. “Why here?”

  “I’ve never been. Been to the boardwalk so many times, but he never took me here. I’ve always wanted to come.”

  The sea lion show was beginning, and they wandered in that direction, toward
the trainer, a woman in yellow plastic boots, who dipped her hands into a bucket to pull out a fish for each of the obedient and anxious sea lions. A whistle or a clap and the sea lions barked, contorted themselves like gymnasts, danced, balanced a ball on their noses. Obedient. Perfect. All for a reward of fish they didn’t have to hunt.

  “It’s unnatural, is that what he said?” Plum asked.

  “Yes. He said something about the animals not jumping through hoops when they’re out at sea.”

  “I can hear him,” Plum said. “But it’s beautiful. How else would you get to see how the marine animals live?”

  Outside the aquarium, the beach was still full, the sand dotted with bodies. Like sprinkles on an ice cream cone. Like scattered marine life waiting for a giant wave to pull them back out to sea.

  Plum had imagined moments exactly like this, a simple stroll with her daughter, an easy conversation about the ordinary things. It wasn’t tea by the sea, but perfect in its simplicity. Perfect because Opal’s face lightened and her anxiety eased.

  15

  Lenworth drove to Coney Island, the very place he had intended to take Opal that morning, and by the time he arrived, the boardwalk was crowded with a hodgepodge of bodies—most in clothes better suited for another, smaller body—and the amusement park had taken on the traits of a never-ending carnival. He didn’t like it like this—raucous and crowded—but preferred it in the morning when the boardwalk shops were still asleep and the smell of hotdogs, fried potatoes, fried dough, and grilled meat didn’t hang in the air like clouds too weighted to move. In fact, he preferred that it remain a relic of another time, with just the façade of historic buildings and his imagination filling in the costumes reminiscent of that long-ago time. In the early mornings, the sun highlighting aged brick walls and old neon signs, the amusement park felt a little bit like an abandoned town, a historical site recreated for exhibition only. The boy engineer buried deep within him could sit for hours and stare at the parachute jump, the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone and imagine it being built, one steel post and one wooden plank at a time. From bare earth to a looping track, he could see it all going up, sweaty men layering the planks at equal distances apart, hammering and stomping to test a beam’s strength. He imagined a life that could have been—he as an engineer, building his own landmark, putting a semi-permanent mark on the earth.