Plum had nothing left in Brown’s Town, and yet she stayed in the cottage, hopeful Lenworth would return, and dependent on the kindness of her landlady, Mrs. Murray. The landlady was indeed kind, an artist who never forgot her meager beginnings and who gave freely of her time, her money, and herself. She fed Plum and let her stay in the cottage in exchange for household help. Mrs. Murray became mother and father, too, for Plum refused to call her parents, declining to let back into her life the people she believed had already abandoned her twice, or the aunt with whom she had lived before setting up house with Lenworth.
Mrs. Murray inquired of the school on Plum’s behalf for a forwarding address, a hint of where Lenworth had come from or where he could possibly have gone. She, too, came away with nothing. The school wouldn’t or couldn’t release any details, not to Mrs. Murray, and not to Plum, who returned to the school time after time to plead for a morsel of information about her Lenworth, their Mr. Barrett. Plum got nothing, save for an ill-timed lecture from the school’s guidance counselor, a British expat who had no business guiding or counseling and whose sanity the students had long questioned.
In those days after Lenworth’s disappearance, Plum looked for him so fiercely that she could have been mistaken for a mad woman, a schizophrenic, who’d refused medication in favor of the voices that came at will. She wandered the streets, peering into buses and cars, locking her eyes onto the faces within, looking for the goatee, the small eyes beneath the bushy eyebrows, the hairline already receding even on one so young. But the folks who stared back at her could offer nothing.
For two months, Plum walked.
She visited a bush doctor, who prescribed bush baths to beat away the curse. After all, what but a curse on a mother could have made a father take off with their child?
She went to Wednesday night revival at the neighborhood Pentecostal Church. She answered the call to the altar, rose, and waved and wobbled and dipped in spirit, writhing on the floor and, surprisingly, babbling in tongues. She prayed morning and night, prostrating herself in the morning sun and in the moonlight, asking for a small window of hope. She succumbed to a riverside baptism, even. And still nothing.
She rode to Lluidas Vale, a place she thought he had mentioned living in once. She rode on through the town, which was no more remarkable than any other small Jamaican town, and looked out the window of the minivan at the sugar cane lining the roads of the expansive valley, hopping out on the very outskirts of town, just as the little shops built at random began popping up. The shops were like any other she had seen—the proprietor and her goods behind a partition built with chicken wire and wood and a small opening through which the shoppers poked their heads and spoke. The local postmistress, purveyor of secrets, had never heard his name, couldn’t recall a young fellow of that name receiving mail there.
“What his mother name?”
“Don’t know.”
“You know his father first name?”
“No.”
The postmistress’s gaze shifted too, away from Plum’s face, down to her still-swollen belly. “The baby father?”
“Yes.”
Plum didn’t want her pity. She set it aside as if it were something physical, a weight she could remove by hand from her body and cover under a rock.
And on to Greenwood in Trelawny, another place where Lenworth said he had lived. Except for the great house for which Greenwood was known, it, too, was unremarkable. A strip of a town split in two by the main road to Montego Bay and larger, more wellknown towns a short distance away on the western and eastern sides. Again nothing. No one Plum asked knew of him.
All that and still she came away with no trace of where he had lived or where he could have gone.
Plum lay down to die. She chose the midday sun as her weapon, heatstroke and dehydration as the ultimate causes of her death. She lay on a narrow concrete wall, a remnant from the pimento estate, with her arms at her side, her back flat against the concrete and toes pointed skyward.
But her timing wasn’t perfect. The gardener came to deliver yam and sweet potato he’d pulled from the ground in a nearby field the landlady leased. He did what he thought best: sprinkled Plum with water to lower her body’s temperature and carried her onto the verandah, away from direct sunlight. And he called the postmistress and Nova Scotia Bank, the secretary in the office at St. Mark’s Anglican Church, and the mechanic who serviced Mrs. Murray’s car. He called the dry goods store. One by one the message circulated and not thirty minutes later, Mrs. Murray returned to find a groggy Plum, sitting up but listless, muttering gibberish.
Overnight, Mrs. Murray nursed Plum, and in the morning, with the sun still behind the flame of the forest, the hibiscus blooms uncurling and opening up again as if to greet the day, she pulled Plum back to reality, dismissed the coddling and pity. “You can’t stay here forever. You have to go on with your life.”
“What life?”
“You think you’re the only woman who ever lost a child? Maybe not the same way. But it hurt just the same if you lose a baby at birth. Five times I went through labor. Only two children I raise. So I know it’s hard. But you can’t just give up on your life so. Not because of a man.”
“The baby . . .”
“No. Listen. Some people will tell you that everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan for you. But I won’t tell you that. I can’t imagine that the merciful God the church preaches about would plan anything like this. But the one thing I know for sure, this is the one life you have and you have to make it work.
“So two things I’m going to do for you. The first one is to get you back home to your parents. It’s not my business but you’re too young to be wasting your life like this. You hearing me?”
Plum nodded.
“Tomorrow I’m going to buy a ticket for you to fly back home to Brooklyn. That’s where you belong, with your parents. And the second thing is that I’m going to hire a private investigator—my son—to look for Lenworth and the child. My son just retired from the police force. Only one thing I ask from you. Go on to university. Get a degree and go on with your life. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The money, it’s a loan. If you finish university you don’t owe me a thing. If you don’t get a degree, you pay me back for the plane ticket and the private investigator. You understand me?”
“Yes.”