Tea by the Sea

by Donna Hemans

  What Plum thought in that moment was not how Lenworth and Pauline would deal with the child’s outburst—dismissal from the table? A stern talking-to?—but how Lenworth had wiped away her life. She was no more than the scribbles on a chalkboard, removed with a single downward swipe and leaving only tiny particles swirling in the air and landing indiscriminately on everything within reach. Had he looked at her that night in the hospital, still fatigued from labor, drowsy from medication, and seen a dying woman or a woman struggling to live? And she had struggled. And she had lived, pushed and pulled and willed herself to climb from the weakness pulling her under, struggled until she regained the normal rhythm of breathing and came out on top. She had lived to hold the baby she wanted to call Marissa, had lived to look up at him and smile. Triumphant.

  Her smile hadn’t mattered.

  He declared her dead and walked away with her child.

  Plum stood up now, struggling to free herself from the chair jammed too close to the table. “Dead?” The chair legs caught in the rumpled rug, and the chair tumbled backward. “Dead.” This time Plum gritted her teeth, her lips pulling back and flattening out across her teeth, no longer in the relaxed and slack-jawed ‘O’ of a question.

  The rehearsed speech would come back to her later, long after she had left, and lay thinking through what transpired and what else she could have said, how she could have made her words singe his skin and heart. For the moment, though, all she felt was rage, seventeen years’ worth, pushing the word “dead” up her throat, across her tongue and through her clenched teeth.

  “You left me there in the hospital for dead. Alone. Not even a note. Just took my baby and left. My baby. Just walked out like you went to the grocery store, picked up a baby and then walked on home. No thought at all for me, her mother, lying there after hours of labor. Not a thought about me. Just left me there and declared me dead. Dead.”

  For the first time, Plum looked at him, really looked at him, his eyes downcast, the balding top of his head pointing toward her, his fingers laced beneath his chin as if to hold his head in place. Her eyes on him, he closed his eyes, not just blocking her out, not just blocking out the situation, but dismissing her again.

  “You can’t even look at me. Look at me. Look.” But none of the pairs of eyes wavered. Opal, Pauline and the boys didn’t look away from Plum. Lenworth didn’t open his eyes to look up at her. “Such a shame. You still can’t even see me, the human being you left in that room for dead.”

  Plum’s legs weakened and she reached for the chair, then steadied herself, straightened her back and forgot about needing to sit. Had she had a plan she would know what to do next, how exactly to make him suffer as she had every year since that September day when she woke to find her child missing and the hospital around her so quiet she thought the world had ended.

  “That night . . .” She held her breath to prevent herself from crying. “All these years, I’ve thought of what it would be like to see you suffer. I’ve thought of killing you with my bare hands. Yes, I did. I’ve thought . . .”

  “Boys,” Pauline said, “you’re excused. Go on upstairs.”

  The boys left, reluctantly, looking up at Plum, as if they still, impossibly, thought she was dead, a zombie come to harm their father. She heard them in the hallway, a shuffle now and then, the sounds of children hushing each other, trying to remain quiet but making more noise in the process of it, listening to what they shouldn’t hear. Yet she continued laying out her desire to make him suffer, thinking as she did of families on the news, a simple quarrel exploding into something momentous, which, to outsiders with no emotion vested in the argument, was unnecessary violence, another moment to decry the lack of morals in society, the downward spiral of what was once a civilized nation. If only they knew how seventeen years of fossilized grief bred violent thoughts—to her, necessary violence—the desire to knock the smug look from his face, just punching him once in the stomach and watching him double over in pain, punching and punching until her arms tired and the anger and hatred and grief she felt all these years melted and dissipated from her body. And she said exactly that and more. “I could kill you even now.”

  Attuned to sound—seventeen years of not sleeping deeply, of waiting to spring forth, of never again having something precious stolen while she slept—Plum heard the boys again rustling outside the dining room, their footsteps skittering across the floor. They were more hurried this time, frightened, Plum thought, of what she said. Yet, too incensed by his dismissal of her, his inability to look at her, to say a simple, if inadequate, “I’m sorry,” she continued laying out how she wanted him to suffer. “Slowly. Something like solitary confinement and make you watch over and over every miserable day that I have lived. But even that may not be enough, because just like now I can’t make you watch. So it would have to be something else. Something more painful than that.”

  It was taxing, the effusion of emotion. Plum stopped again. “So what do you have to say to me? Just tell me why. Let me understand.”

  Silence. The quiet in the dining room exploded. Plum could hear quite clearly the odd sound of the old-fashioned rotary dial phone carrying from the office at the front of the house across the living and dining rooms, and the boys’ hushed request for police to come to the rectory on Albemarle Terrace. It wasn’t Plum’s place to move, to undo the call the boys had made. It was, after all, up to Pauline and Lenworth to remind the boys that 911 was an emergency line, for true emergencies. And this was one, wasn’t it? The boys had their reasons: Plum’s anger and threats. And Plum, who had found and confronted her child’s abductor, had hers. But there was no record of the parental abduction here in Brooklyn or across the United States. After all, she hadn’t imagined he would have been here in Brooklyn, within reach, with the child he had taken from her.

  The police came quietly, not with sirens blaring as Plum expected. She knew only because the door squeaked a little as it opened and the alarm sensor beeped. She looked at Pauline and Lenworth, waiting for their next move, waiting for either to go to the door, to pull the boys back, and her chance to move.

  At last he moved, waited a few moments before calling out. “Oh, my God. Pauline. Come.”

  Plum reached the front window in time to see the two boys sprinting into the arms of a police officer, then pointing back to the house, and moving away toward one of six parked cars.

  “What now?” Opal asked, her voice a whisper.

  “I’m going out there,” Lenworth said.

  “Oh no you won’t,” Pauline said, turning away from the window as she spoke. “Not with all those guns pointing at you. Better to call the station and explain.”

  “Hostage negotiators always call,” Opal said. “At least in the movies they do.”

  “Hostage?” Plum asked.

  They were quiet, all four of them. Plum contemplated the turn of events, what exactly prompted the boys to call, what the boys may have said that had led to this. She rearranged her face, her body, thinking that he had somehow arranged this other escape.

  “We’re not criminals.” Lenworth stalked off as he spoke. “We have nothing to hide.”

  “Who knows what those boys said,” Opal said. “You know how they can make up things. For police to respond like this they must have said something significant.”

  “This isn’t a movie, Opal. This is not some Hollywood movie. Your life is not a movie.” Pauline, her hands emphatically punctuating every word, turned away from Opal.

  Opal moved back as if each of Pauline’s words had indeed struck her physically, each one an individual punch to her torso. She went to the phone, picked it up, listened to the familiar buzz of the dial tone, and placed it back in its cradle. The others stepped forward too and stood around the old rotary phone, the four of them looking down at it as if willing a ring to emerge. When the phone tinkled, the sound as urgent as a kettle’s choking whistle, they sucked in a collective breath.

  “Hostage?” Lenworth said. “Ther
e’s no hostage here.”

  Plum and Pauline looked on at him, trying to decipher the full context of the one-sided conversation.

  “No, no. I don’t know what the boys said but there’s no hostage here. Yes, she’s angry but there’s no kidnapping and no hostage. It looks like the whole police force is outside there, an overreaction to a little misunderstanding.” He paused. “So how can we clear this up?”

  Lenworth put the phone back in the cradle. “They want us to come out with our hands up.”

  “I’m not going out there.” Opal held out her hands, her fingers splayed exactly as the police would have wanted. “That’s how people end up getting shot.”

  “This isn’t one of your movies.” Pauline sucked her teeth. “So who exactly is the hostage here?”

  “They didn’t say.” Exasperated at her, his voice was clipped, almost formal.

  “I don’t know that they know.” Opal again.

  “Perhaps they do. When you didn’t come home, I reported you as missing. And once the boys called they probably put the stories together.” He looked at Plum, his eyes conveying his thought: Plum was the culprit here.

  Lenworth returned to the window, shifted the curtain ever so slightly. “So we’re criminals now. Hunted like criminals.”

  “Only one criminal here.” Plum looked pointedly at him.

  “Blame your sons,” Opal said. “And yourself.”

  So many things Plum wished in that moment—that she’d laid out a plan and involved Alan; that she’d waited to confront Lenworth at the Sunday morning service; that she had gone on home to Nia and Vivian; that she had taken Opal home to them instead of here back to him; that she had been able to let go of the wish to hear him say why. Mostly she wished that she had simply gone on home with her daughter and dared him to come take her away. Of course there was no guarantee that Opal would have gone along with her. Had Plum done that, she would have been the one charged with parental kidnapping. That wasn’t what she wanted.

  For a minute Plum thought about the stick figure in the boat on the unending sea, rowing without oars, and disappearing to nothing. All these years later, the stick figure was still with her, still afraid of being left, still afraid of her love being pulled away from her without warning. Not his love, but the love of the ones to whom she had given life—Nia, Vivian, and Opal. Even then, so very near the end, she had no idea how it would turn out, who would show allegiance to whom; whether respect and gratitude for a father and his unconditional love would win out over the unknown—a mother who turned up out of nowhere and couldn’t even recognize her own face staring back at her; whether Nia and Vivian would accept unconditionally this newfound sister. And what of Alan, who asked an unknown number of times about the significance of the date, September 16?

  She turned her back on them all and cried.

  20

  Lenworth looked at himself inside out. Not in the mirror at every inch of his skin, his bald pate and goatee, the arms with soft undefined muscles. But like a spirit looking down on the body it had left behind and the life the body lived. What he saw was a man who was always running away from something—from Plum, from Opal, from his own indiscretions, from Jamaica, and in a different way, from Pauline. Everything he’d run from had finally caught up to him. But cornered or not, staring like an antelope at the tiger about to pounce, he had one last fight left. He was a quick thinker, had always had to be. And now he thought of a way to come out of this intact, not just alive, but with the foundation of a life he could rebuild elsewhere. He had done it before, not once, but thrice, and would do it again, without Pauline if necessary, with her if she wanted to stick with him through this. He doubted she would do that now. Not again. With Pauline it had never been about love, not the sweeping, swooning kind of love, not infatuation and barely lust. It was an arrangement that grew out of his acknowledgement that Opal needed a mother and he a wife, a stand-in for a child beginning to notice his inadequacies as a parent. And Pauline, the sole unmarried girl among the group of six already-married sisters, fell for him like a bat baffled by the sun, a bee drunk on fermented nectar. When Pauline discovered her mistake, the inadequacies of their relationship and his own indiscretions, she held on. She believed his metamorphosis from sinner to saint, from saved to savior, and, instead of running back home defeated and deflated, she helped him build the public faÇade. That was then.

  Now, huddled in one corner with Plum, Opal in another, the women had united against him. He, who controlled everything, had lost control. That, more than anything, was what disturbed him. That he had no power to stop them, the women in his family, from absconding with their love and respect for him, from ruining the facade Plum’s absence and Pauline’s presence had helped him build to contain his life. And that was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Controlling his own life. Directing his life, operating like a movie director, really, dictating how his story was told and when, shuffling the characters in and out of position, choosing the scenes worthy of illuminating and recording. Giving Plum a chance at a life that his baby (their baby) would have taken away, and in doing so removing any opportunity for Plum to regret having loved him. Giving Opal a mother to replace the one he had taken away. Controlling his life to the very end. Never again being that teenage boy who was returned to his mother, returned to a life and house that couldn’t be compared to the mansion in the shadow of the Greenwood Great House, the teenage boy who had his future taken away.

  That Opal had chosen her mother over him, that she brought her here into his house, irked him more than Pauline’s betrayal. That the boys had betrayed the family, called the police to his home and in doing so catapulted a private family matter onto the local (and probably national) news, irked him too.

  Another glance at the women and what he had missed smacked him square in the forehead. His sons hadn’t betrayed him. They’d given him a way out. He was the hostage here, the bug caught in a spider’s web, struggling to free itself. Like that bug, he had used up most of his energy trying to keep ahead of Plum and ward off his inevitable downfall. But freedom and a chance at a decent life were still possible if he regained control of the only thing he could ever control: how his story was told and when.

  But it meant getting outside ahead of the women. It meant being the first to tell the police his story and clear up the misunderstanding that had brought the large police response to the rectory. The boy engineer in him recalculated the equations, weighed the known against the unknown. The police knew Opal had been missing. The police knew Opal’s mother was in the house threatening him. But they didn’t know how Lenworth came to be the only parent Opal knew.

  He moved quickly, giving no warning of his intentions, away from the only woman he had loved too much and let go, away from the one he should have been able to love, away from the daughter with her mother’s eyes, whose very presence asked the question he was afraid to answer: why did you leave me? And on toward the front door, his hand on the knob, his fingers on the bolt, opening it slowly and quietly. The door eased toward him, the alarm beeped and he stepped out with his hands up, lowered himself to the ground as the police commanded and waited for them to rescue him.

  “She let me go.” His first words. His last desperate effort to save himself and emerge with his reputation intact. After all, there was some truth there. It was Opal, the rediscovered daughter, who Plum wanted.

  “Are there any weapons in the house?”

  “No.”

  “No guns?”

  “No.”

  He should have known the police would storm the house. Yet the speed with which they moved up the short walkway to the front door and inside surprised him. He didn’t look at his neighbors who’d stepped out to bear witness to his downfall, or search for faces of his parishioners. But he looked for his sons, his saviors now, realizing that the boys were all he would have left.

  21

  How quickly it came to an end. One minute Lenworth was there and then he was gone, slipping awa
y again out of reach and without a word. And in his place were police officers handling Plum like a criminal, patting down her body, searching her tote, uttering those words she had never expected to hear directed at her: “You’re under arrest.” Kidnapping. Holding the family against their will. Terroristic threats. In another corner, Pauline sat like a deflated balloon, her eyes on Plum, then on Opal and at the door through which her husband had left. And back again to Plum, with sad eyes that reflected what Plum had felt seventeen years earlier when she realized she was truly alone.

  Opal screamed, “No. It’s him you should be arresting, not her. You don’t understand.” An officer held her back, tried to calm her flailing arms.

  “Don’t make me handcuff you.” Gruffly. To which Plum wanted to say, “No use in struggling, Opal. It will work out better if you just let them take control.” But she didn’t, couldn’t get her brain to open her lips and form words, while also keeping herself from blubbering uncontrollably.

  How quickly she was outside in the night—the cool night air a sure sign that summer had come and gone and the fall and winter months were rapidly approaching—out in the midst of the artificial lights trained on the house. Immediately, Plum looked up at the small crowd. It was dark in places, lit in others by a flood of emergency lights. She saw Lenworth though in another car, looking out at her, at what he had orchestrated yet again. Opal stood in the frame of the red door, looking out and struggling with her shoes, pushing her feet down and tying laces without looking down at the knots at all.

  The officer started the engine, wasting no time in taking Plum away from the daughter who had slipped from her reach for the second time, away from him. Plum looked behind for a last glimpse of the house and the daughter whose birthday he had spoiled yet again, the man she had once loved. She held on to the hope that at the station they would sort out fact from fiction, the simple, unadorned truth of what Plum had said at the dining table and why, what the boys overheard and misinterpreted.