Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  Would that be Plum too, held down by the baby and waiting, the forward trajectory of her life stalled? Plum wouldn’t want to live there in Clarendon, he knew. Not without running water. Not without the sea nearby. Not for a day. And she wouldn’t leave the baby there with his mother, to come back to it on weekends and holidays away from campus. No way she, who thought her parents had cast her off like old clothes, would consider it. But reading his father’s letter and watching his mother, he could only see Plum, her life stalled, her dream deferred.

  He returned the way he had come, by taxi and bus through the lowlands, along roads cut too close to the river bed and which, in the rainy season, were more often impassable than passable, past villages that the country seemed to have forgotten. He had his mother’s gift to Plum: a white crocheted blanket rolled up inside a plastic bag. In his mind he had the root of his gift to Plum: a future, whatever she chose, unencumbered, free from the wait for someone or something.

  Yet, Plum hadn’t been free or unencumbered. He saw it now, how he had miscalculated the equation. How he had mistakenly thought that Plum’s parents’ disappointment in their daughter was a mirror of Plum’s disappointment in herself. How he had mistakenly thought that Plum crying for the loss of her parents was equivalent to her inability to live with being a disappointment to the parents who had put everything into their one and only child, how he had projected his mother’s and sister’s arrested lives onto Plum. A simple miscalculation. A rookie engineer’s mistake: subtracting emotions and passion and color and context, seeing life solely as equations and numbers and angles. Except he hadn’t begun training as an engineer and had only built rudimentary things.

  All these years, he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine the person Plum had become, whether and how she had survived his gift to her. And so now, he had no idea where Plum would have taken Opal. Returning to the place where they last had been seemed like the best place to start.

  17

  And so to the inevitable, the man for whom Plum had searched for seventeen years, the rectory she believed she should know but couldn’t picture. Not that she had ever had any reason to visit the St. Paul’s rectory. Not that the rectory had a sign that labeled it as such. This was her mission and she took back control, pulled it back like a baby on a leash wandering too far out of reach.

  “Address?” Plum stepped off the curb, waved at a passing taxi, forgoing the bus for the return journey to Flatbush. “We can’t put this off any longer. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  And so they sat like lovers after a quarrel, Plum pressed up against one door and Opal up against the other, each looking out her window at the city sidewalks, the oak trees growing in a small square of dirt, the food wrappers blowing against the concrete and brushing up against the tree trunks. Plum didn’t allow herself to think of Lenworth, to imagine the scene playing out, to imagine even that the police may be there searching the house for clues as to Opal’s whereabouts. But what of Alan and the girls? How to return after a day’s unplanned absence and selfish silence? How to explain to the girls that she had not run away, hadn’t been kidnapped, wouldn’t leave again without first letting them know. How to forgive herself for doing exactly what he had done: disappeared without leaving a trail of crumbs so she could be found.

  Much closer, from inside the car this time, Plum heard, “this gate.” Opal leaned in from the door, shifting slightly toward Plum. “We’re here.”

  Here was a narrow, three-story, brick brownstone on a narrow street—not what Plum would have imagined if she had bothered to think at all about the rectory. There wasn’t a gate at all, just two steps that led to a short walkway and the front door, a bright red that stood out against the dark brown brick. Before Opal pressed the bell, the door opened, and she stood with her finger suspended above the buzzer looking down at the boys. The taller of the two leaned against the door, his mouth slightly open as if he expected something less.

  “You’re in trouble,” the other said, before turning and running away down the hall, screaming “Mommee,” as if that was the last call he would ever utter.

  “Daddy left to look for you,” the second boy said before he too ran off in the same direction.

  In spite of the boys’ call and footsteps padding down the hall, the house was quiet, like a mausoleum or museum, with photos everywhere. The photos were mostly of the boys, growing from infancy into the young boys they now were. But Opal was absent from the walls, present only in one family portrait that Plum couldn’t see clearly. Plum looked at the way he lived, the life he had crafted for himself without her in it, or perhaps more precisely, the life Pauline had crafted for him.

  “So you think you just going to waltz back in here like this?” Pauline didn’t look up from the stove. “All night you out and just waltz back in like you’re a grown woman? You think this is one of those movies you always trying to write?”

  The boys looked at Opal, their eyes round with anxiety.

  “So you not going to answer? Hmm?” Pauline looked up then, acknowledging Opal with a quick glance, sweeping her eyes quickly to Plum. She hesitated, looked again at Opal and back at Plum, her eyes widening and eyebrows arching slightly. “Lawd. She’s the dead stamp of you and I didn’t even see the resemblance.”

  “Yes.”

  “So where you come from now? All this time, where were you?” Pauline directed her question—an accusation and insinuation that Plum had run off and left her daughter motherless—at Plum.

  “Looking for the daughter he stole from me.”

  “Stole?”

  “Whatever he told you, it wasn’t the truth.”

  “I see that now.” Pauline snickered. “He told me you were dead. Died in childbirth.” Pauline tapped the back of a chair. “Is him you come to see?”

  Plum nodded.

  “Well he not here. All day he gone, out there looking for you. We may as well sit.”

  “I wanted him to tell her himself.” Plum pointed at Opal. “I wanted you to hear from him exactly why he did this.”

  Pauline leaned in. “I want to know too. I need to . . . well, we need to hear it from you. All these years, this man lying to me. I wouldn’t trust a word he say now.” She looked over at the boys. “Upstairs, you two. Go on now. Now.”

  Like a detective laying out the evidence, Plum brought out the mementoes from her bag one at a time. “He worked at my school then.” She tapped the old photo of him standing akimbo on a beach. Pauline sucked her breath in quickly as if she had heard that story before. Plum looked up. “Well, my aunt hired him to tutor me. He didn’t exactly teach me at school. But after we met he ended working there in the lab.”

  Plum pulled out the footless doll, which she had dressed in a premature baby’s onesie.

  “Betty. Where did you find this?” Opal fingered the matted hair, closed the wayward eyelid that refused to shut when the doll lay flat.

  “Anchovy. We finally found the house in Anchovy. By then I’d been searching for seven years and by the time I got there you were gone.”

  “You really did look for me?”

  “Of course.” How she had looked.

  “I didn’t like dolls,” Opal said. “Thought there had to be something more inside it, some reason to play with this plastic thing that couldn’t do anything on its own. I wanted to play with other children, not this plastic thing that couldn’t jump or skip or do anything.”

  A week-old newspaper clipping. “This is how I knew where to find him. All this time, you were right under my nose. I wouldn’t have ever looked for you here.”

  Another piece of paper, crumpled and creased, soft and yellow with age. Hospital discharge papers for Plum Valentine—the only physical record she had all these years of having given birth to a baby girl on September 16, 1993.

  Plum wasn’t prepared for this, the quiet retelling of her story that would, to a silent observer, resemble a chat between girlfriends at a dining table. No screaming or anger o
r fireworks. Just acceptance and quiet. The truth settling like wet concrete into crevices, filling holes in the stories he’d told over the years, adding up to a truth so unbelievable that they believed.

  Quiet. Contemplating, all three of them, the man they thought they knew, the holes in the family story, patched up now, the man who had guarded his life so carefully now exposed.

  “What now?” Pauline asked.

  “We wait.” Plum, accustomed to waiting, crossed her arms and settled back in the chair. She could walk away with what she had—her daughter, if Opal wanted to come—yet she wanted to hear his story. Not that his explanation would matter now. Still she wanted to hear it, wanted to measure it up against the grief he had caused, weigh it against the grief she had carried for so long it had fossilized into something hard and immovable, like petrified wood.

  “No. We celebrate.” Opal pointed to the chicken already roasted, the pot of rice and peas, fried plantains on a platter—the result of her stepmother’s habit of cooking when nervous and anxious.

  “That’s Sunday’s dinner,” Pauline said, but she moved as she spoke toward the platter. “But of course we should celebrate. It’s not every day a mother comes back from the dead.”

  “Yes, we celebrate.” Plum smiled. “I forget I can do that now.”

  In the bathroom washing up, Plum looked at herself in the mirror, smiling. For so long now she had carried her grief so solidly etched on her face that she had to practice smiling, first a slight lift of her cheeks then an exaggerated lift with full teeth and squinted eyes. “At last,” she told herself. “At last.”

  But why not leave? As soon as the thought came, she dismissed it. Another hour or two and she was convinced she would have what she wanted: an answer, and then her three girls together. She pictured Nia and Vivian, heartbroken, and then wide-eyed and smiling, rushing toward her, their arms and legs wrapping around her own legs and heads pressing into her belly. The girls would have her promise: she would never leave them. She said it to her reflection in the mirror: I will never leave you. And what of Alan? She had no answer yet, but she was sure it would work itself out. After all, everything else was falling into place.

  18

  Lenworth sensed a shift in the house. Nobody was looking out, anticipating and awaiting his return. The boys, gone now from the window, had moved on to other things, toys and the television, cartoons, no doubt. An entire day away and he returned empty-handed, with nothing—not even a theory he wanted to voice—to explain Opal’s disappearance. So he lingered in the twilight, plucking dead leaves from the rose bushes, picking up leaflets that had fluttered into the yard and wrapped around the plants. He watered the garden he tended—his garden, not Pauline’s—with the herbs and vegetables tucked away among flowering plants, the cherry tomatoes and red and yellow peppers simply a pop of color like any bloom. Pauline wanted only flowering plants. He wanted a garden like back home that would allow him to step outside and pick what he wanted—a few stalks of callaloo for breakfast, bell peppers and tomatoes for a salad, a sprig of thyme to season meat. In the twilight he did just that, plucked a handful of tomatoes the squirrels hadn’t yet found, two cucumbers, a bell pepper, and marched up to the house that no longer awaited his return.

  The house was hushed, the television silent and the rooms drenched with yellow light. How unlike Pauline to leave an empty room lit. Had Pauline finally left and taken the boys? She had threatened it and he had managed for some time now to hold her back from moving on alone without him. Or so he told himself. Yet he knew her staying was not his doing, not because of her duty to him. It was stagnation, really, like a lake so polluted, so overgrown with scum and algae that the water didn’t ripple. It was, he knew, only a matter of time before she did indeed leave, and this business with Opal and Plum could have been the last offense she intended to suffer.

  But there they were—his daughter and her mother, his wife and his sons—all sitting together around the dining table. A cake without candles was in the midst of Pauline’s good china. A roasted chicken, rice and a salad surrounded the cake. The boys were underdressed for a formal dinner but with the good behavior to match the occasion. No one spoke. No one ate. No one turned away from him. Even the boys, uncontrollable on most occasions, sat like mute dolls, marionettes waiting for a puppeteer to pull a string. It was too late now for Lenworth to turn away, to slide back toward the door.

  “Good evening,” he said at last.

  Only the boys answered, their words squeezed and constricted. Opal moved first, stepping toward him with her hands stretched out to take the produce he still held in the crook of an arm. She was like a machine, moving and turning away without a word, placing the tomatoes on the kitchen counter and returning to her place at the table, her back to him as if he had already come and gone from the room or was simply a powerless ghost.

  He should assert himself, he knew, demand to know where Opal had been, throw Plum out of the house, his house. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his feet take a single step or his lips open to say what he wanted.

  “Sit, eat,” Pauline said. “It’s Opal’s birthday dinner. We have a lot to celebrate.”

  He couldn’t decide if Pauline was mocking him or goading him into saying something that would trigger a fight.

  “Even her mother has risen from the dead. That alone is worth celebrating.”

  She was indeed mocking him. But he pulled out a chair and sat between the boys, feeling dwarfed, like prey trapped between adult predators teaching their young to hunt. Except in the wild, the trapped animal—deer or antelope or giraffe—would have bolted, made an attempt to get away, put up a fight. Instinctively. But there he sat, a yielding prey, zapping the thrill of the chase, dampening their adrenaline. Or so he hoped.

  The boys stared at the three women, anticipating a catastrophe, watching it unfold, powerless to stop it. Lenworth dipped the fork into the rice, acknowledging as he did that he had no appetite for it or the chicken or the plantains. In his dry mouth every bite tasted like a blob of wet paper, tasteless. Though he was the only one chewing, he kept on cutting into the meat, robotically lifting the fork and turning the food around in his mouth. Waiting. Waiting for someone to pounce.

  Somewhere in the house, the radio was playing a medley of choruses he’d sung as a boy in Sunday School and morning devotion at both his primary and secondary schools. He caught snippets of the songs and tried to concentrate on them, tried to pull strength from his belief in God the Father as he had taught his congregation to do. In his head, he sang along.

  But since he had never managed to escape mentally from situations he didn’t like, the song in his head petered out quickly. He had always managed to remain sharply present, to suffer fully every indignity meted out to him, every word of chastisement from family, friend, or foe. Now, he was intensely present, fully aware of everybody—Pauline’s exaggerated attempt to make the evening seem like an ordinary one, the boys cowered in silence, Opal cracking her knuckles and steadily gazing at her plate, Plum looking at him and waiting—and fully aware of everything—the garish gold cutlery, the plates with the peeling band of gold around the edges, chicken fat congealing in the gravy, Pauline’s lopsided cake hurriedly frosted with store-bought canned frosting. He wanted to turn off the hypersensitivity, but he couldn’t. Seventeen years of it and he was tired now of always being aware, always looking back over one shoulder then the other, above and beneath him, always waiting for that moment when it all came to an end. He hadn’t anticipated how the crescendo would come, that his daughter would disappear and reappear with her mother, on her birthday no less.

  The reunion was like death: inevitable. And, as a priest, he should have been prepared for the inevitable. He should have known that this day would one day come. Not quite like this scene—Opal and Plum and Pauline and his boys sitting together like an extended family, not happy or unhappy, just there, together, aware of the bloodlines and other lines that banded them together, Pauline gettin
g dessert plates and lighting candles left over from the boys’ birthday parties, Opal blowing out candles and smiling instead of making a wish.

  “I have everything I ever wished for.” Opal looked at Plum instead of him, her eyes with a soft and tender look he’d only seen on a woman in love.

  19

  Like pebbles falling into a waterfall, all of Plum’s rehearsed speeches fell away. The normalcy of the moment—mother, father, stepmother, and brothers all sitting down like a blended family for a daughter’s birthday meal—unnerved her, burying the words she had planned over the years. A harsh quarrel, a wife throwing a fit or turning her away, even setting dogs loose at her heels—those were the reactions she expected. Yet, she sat again like a trained student at the boarding school that defiantly held on to its colonial ways, her hands in her lap, her knees together, her feet flat on the ground, waiting. A composed student, anxious to please.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Until at last, “Are you dead?” The younger of the two boys, Christopher, emboldened now by cake and frosting and the presence of his father, looked directly at Plum, his eyes unwavering, his lower lip hanging down, and his fingers gripping the edge of the table.

  “Christopher.” Pauline’s voice was stern, yet it had no bearing on the boy.

  He held Plum’s gaze. “Daddy said Opal’s mother was dead.”

  “No, I’m not dead. See? Feel my pulse.” Plum’s hand dangled over the meat, inches above the exposed breastbone and congealed gravy. But Christopher pulled his hands back away from the table, burying them out of sight. “Only your father can explain what he meant by ‘dead.’”

  “Dead is dead. People don’t become undead. Only in cartoons.”

  “Christopher.” Pauline’s voice rose higher this time. “Enough.”

  “But,” he said, “Daddy said she was dead. He lied.”