A year on, September 16: the baby girl’s first birthday. Plum pictured her daughter like this: hair parted in four distinct sections, each section a mini afro puff; pudgy cheeks; a smile that opened up dimples; skin as richly pigmented as hers; pudgy arms and legs in a frilly yellow dress. Except the baby wasn’t hers. Just a stranger on the train, a baby who smiled openly at anyone who caught her eye. The child’s mother, soothed by the monotonous clacking of metal against metal and the rhythm of the rumbling train, drifted off to sleep, her head drooping forward.
In a second the baby girl could be gone, snatched from her stroller, Plum thought. Any one of these strangers on the train could take the baby girl who smiled so easily at people, slip through the closing doors onto a crowded platform and away, disappearing into the darkened tunnel or up the stairs and into the throng outside. Improbable, but not impossible. Plum had lived it.
Plum wanted to wake the mother. And yet, how could she without alarming her? Who among the misfits and career types and students and tourists would snatch a child from a crowded train? She took stock of the passengers. Beside her, a man snored and another read a newspaper, his arms brushing up against Plum each time he turned the page and flattened the creases of the paper. Another man standing near the door looked continuously at his watch as if that alone would speed the slow train. Two girls sitting next to the door whispered and giggled. A woman—white, older—hid behind a book and played peek-a-boo with the baby girl. There was nothing extraordinary about a woman playing peek-a-boo with a child she didn’t know, but Plum, already on edge, took note of everything as if capturing all the details that would matter in the end. Everyone was caught up in something.
The passengers’ preoccupation eased Plum’s anxiety, and she turned away from the child and her sleeping mother, tucked her head down and opened a textbook, flipping to a chapter on critical thinking. The words lost their shape and the sentences lost their structure. Everything—the anniversary of Plum’s greatest loss, the smiling baby girl with her afro puffs, an exhausted and sleeping mother, that feeling of isolation even in a crowded train—led Plum back to that single night in St. Ann’s Bay Hospital, waking with an awareness that something had changed.
The commotion around her had ceased and in its place was a quiet like death. Except, of course, she wasn’t dead but achingly awake, the pain in her pelvis brightening with each passing second. She looked for Lenworth, and around for a bassinet or crib, some sign of the baby girl she planned to name Marissa, Spanish for “of the sea.” Plum liked the promise of the sea, the flat unending body of water with its own will. It could take her anywhere or even nowhere, which was exactly what she wanted for her baby—promise and freedom.
Again, Plum looked around at the beige walls and curtains, listened for the sounds of life, footsteps on tile, voices behind the adjoining curtains, a newborn’s robust cry.
The nurse, when she came, was cheerful. “My baby,” Plum said.
“Sleeping,” the nurse answered. “Careful now.”
The nurse—an older woman, gentle—stood by Plum as she maneuvered her legs to the floor.
“Dizzy,” Plum said, and stood still for a minute while the feeling passed.
They shuffled down the hallway, Plum slow, the nurse patient, until at last they stood by the nursery looking through the glass for the Barrett baby girl. But there was no girl, just a name tag and sheets.
“The Barrett baby?” Plum’s nurse asked.
“With her father,” another nurse said, smiling as she spoke. “He had her. Proud man.”
“Where is he?”
“He took the baby back to the ward.”
“No.”
The nurses looked at each other, each struggling to hold their emotions together, to move without indicating panic.
“He here somewhere,” Plum’s nurse said, turning to her again and taking her hand. “We’ll find him, tell him you awake and ready to nurse.”
Plum didn’t panic immediately. As instructed, she waited in the ward, her legs dangling from the side of the bed. Five minutes, then ten, then thirty. The hospital buzzed with adrenaline and panic, and the nurses, once friendly and talkative, wouldn’t catch her eye. Before she knew it with absolute certainty, before she heard officially that Lenworth had taken the baby girl and left, Plum cried. Her body slumped forward from the side of the bed, pain shooting through her pelvis, and her heart pattering so strongly in her chest that she brought her hand up as if it could slow the beats.
Plum imagined alternate possibilities: the nurse confused or unaware of written discharge orders; her baby in another part of the hospital undergoing tests or treatment; Lenworth at home preparing the cottage for her return; her child mistakenly given to a stranger. Nothing in Plum and Lenworth’s history suggested he would have taken their child. They had planned for a life together, at least for the months immediately after the baby came home. He was making plans to find a new job teaching, at least for another year or two before heading to university in Kingston. “Town will suit you,” he said to Plum, an indication that he planned for her to be with him. Even then, Plum didn’t pare back her dream to study history or anthropology or archaeology. And neither did Lenworth. “Me, the engineer, making these big buildings, and you digging up the dirt. We make a good pair.” Plum had smiled and tapped his arm, softly, playfully, gently.
We make a good pair, was Plum’s last thought before Plum’s nurse, the head nurse, a doctor, and security guards had come to say definitively that neither Lenworth nor the baby could be found.
Remembering that moment and the immediacy of her loss, led to this: Plum stood, gathered her things and walked toward the baby and her mother. She jostled the stroller hard enough to push the handle back into the child’s mother and wake her.
“What’s wrong with you?” the mother, her face red and puffy, screamed at Plum. “Look where you’re going! Can’t you see?”
“Sorry,” Plum said. “Sorry.” But jostling the stroller worked as intended. The child’s mother leaned toward the baby.
Plum stood in front of the train door, willing it to open, unable in that moment to see through the blur of tears, to make out the names of the local stops printed on white tile. The express train rattled on. The passengers behind Plum, who initially looked on at the commotion Plum caused, had already looked away and wrapped themselves back into their lives. They had already moved on.
Plum couldn’t go on, couldn’t even go into the building that day and face the other undergraduates with their petty concerns—manufactured slights; Alan’s wistful looks at her; Allison scheduling study sessions around a work schedule; Melonie giggling about a crush on Sean and prolonging cafeteria breaks to coincide with his break; the group hashing out the details of yet another party in a stuffy, dim basement. Most of all, it was Alan’s plaintive looks—how she simultaneously pulled him to her and pushed him away—that she didn’t want to face. Like a cat toying with a mouse, giving him hope and pulling it away just as quickly. She hated herself for that. But she wasn’t ready, couldn’t yet imagine having a boyfriend or building another relationship.
Above, students and staff moved through the pedestrian bridge, their concerns at the moment so remote from Plum’s. Plum turned away from the building and went back the way she had come, back to the subway, the dank underground smell. Even among the strangers on a relatively crowded train she was alone. Plum shut her eyes and willed her mind to think about something other than the baby girl’s birthday. The train rattled out of Manhattan and back into Brooklyn, screeching and clanging.
Plum didn’t go home, but rode the train like a bum, looking out on the stations the train rattled past—Prospect Park, Church Avenue, Newkirk Avenue, Kings Highway—below ground at first then above ground. The brownstones and apartment buildings—red brick, beige or grey stucco—rolled by in a blur. Sheepshead Bay. Brighton Beach. Coney Island. From the train and in the sunlight, the lights on the amusement park rides were dim, almost useless. And nearly empty. Past its peak summer days, it looked like something trying to relive a glorified past. But it drew Plum anyway and she walked toward it, past the open-mouthed clown heads set up for patrons to squirt water into the clowns’ mouths, bypassing the opportunity to win a stuffed animal.
Plum rode the Cyclone over and over, before switching to the boat that swung back and forth, higher and higher each time, screaming to keep from crying. But she did cry uncontrollably on a boardwalk bench, her back to the park’s neon lights and the rides that seemed to go on forever, her eyes to the dark sea. She remained there all night, slept, but not for long, waking after only a few minutes and crying again when she remembered the significance of the day, her baby girl who was probably pulling herself up and taking her first steps. Bawling when she thought of all the milestones she had missed: the first voluntary smile, the first tooth, the first sound that resembled a word, the first step with help, the first step without help, the simple word “Mama.”
Coney Island wasn’t safe. Not then. It was overrun with drug addicts and dealers, prostitutes and pimps, the homeless and the insane who made their home beneath the boardwalk. But Plum survived the night and the elements, got up in the morning and walked away, hungry and grimy and cold, walked back across the deserted park, across Surf Avenue, and up the steps to the subway and a ride back toward Prospect Park. By then her emotions had flatlined and she sat like a discarded shell unaware of the other passengers, the conductor calling the names of the stops, the train screeching and shrieking through the borough.
Plum’s feet, programmed to walk home, took her up Prospect Park West and on to President Street and the brownstone where her parents, more frantic than they had been when they discovered her bed empty, pulled her to them, then quickly pushed her away when they felt the particles of dust and sand and smelled her unwashed body.
“My God, child, you want to give us heart attack. Where you been all night?”
Later, Plum would think how ironic it was that the very parents who, upon hearing of her pregnancy, hadn’t wanted her to return to their house and who took her in only because she was returned to them by her former landlady in Jamaica, those same parents worried about her not returning home one single night. But at that moment, confronted at the door by an angry and concerned mother and equally angry and concerned father, she wept again, fell to her knees, and cupped her head in her palms. “Today’s her first birthday. I should be celebrating her birthday.”
Until then, Plum hadn’t spoken directly to her parents about Lenworth or the baby, hadn’t given them the details of how he disappeared with their child. They knew, of course, because Mrs. Murray had told them. When they asked, Plum had skirted the issue, too pained to talk about the greatest loss of her life, how the memory of what she had lost sometimes overwhelmed and blossomed like algae in a stagnant pond, spreading out and taking over her whole being.
“Hush, hush.” Her mother stooped, pulled her prostrate child up and into her arms. “Hush. Everything has its time, child. Everything has its time.”
That, of course, was not what Plum wanted to hear. No matter what transpired, Plum couldn’t reclaim the lost year, couldn’t recreate the firsts that she missed—babbling and footsteps and smiles. Plum couldn’t see beyond the immediate loss to that time her mother hinted would come. She pulled herself up, whispered, “I need a shower,” and walked away from her mother who was saying, “I’m going to make you some cornmeal porridge.” A hot meal was her mother’s, and perhaps every Jamaican woman’s, way of giving comfort and showing love.
Without looking back, Plum nodded. “Yes, thanks.” She didn’t say what she thought: that porridge was baby’s food and her mother had long given up the role of babying her. That food could do little to erase the ever-present thought: your daughter is gone. That she feared she would live the remainder of her life with the gnawing hunger for the answer to the simple question: why?