Outside, the rain pounded, the droplets tat-tat-tatting against the window and sprinkling through the open bottom half. The sound of the rain blocked out the muted sounds of life rising from the neighborhood streets. Slivers of light slipped in through cracks in the blinds, making shadows on the wall.
Plum moved down the stairs on bare feet, her shoes in hand and a small bag slung over her shoulder. Alan was already outside, doubleparked on the tight street, the headlights forming halos in the rain. It was too early to matter how he had parked and where. Plum sprinted, raindrops tickling her skin, her feet tramping through water pooled on the uneven sidewalk and the mud around an oak.
“Morning. Bad day for this.” Plum smiled tentatively at Alan, reaching back at the same time to drop her bag on the back seat.
“Never a bad day. It’s just rain.”
“Too early in the morning for that spiritual talk.”
“Still cranky, I see. But I promise. It’s not raining there.”
There was St. Michael’s, a water town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that Alan had picked for the crabs and the water—mostly for the water because Plum liked seaside and riverside towns and he had come to like them too. She could sit by the water for hours, staring out at the flat body, watching birds dip and rise with a beakful of marine life, contemplating the segments of a waterman’s life, or by a lazy river listening to the trickle of water over rocks.
They left the city behind. The sky lightened and the rain eased, and before long, the sun filtered through the clouds. Plum closed her eyes, shutting out the uninspiring highway, the abandoned or seemingly abandoned farms that butted up against the Interstate, and the little pockets of modern life visible from the highway.
“Tired,” Plum said, abandoning all pretense that she would speak.
Plum hadn’t wanted this trip, but Alan, urged on by Plum’s parents, had pushed it on her. He pushed the trip for his own personal reasons, and her parents for a less selfish one: Plum was depressed, had been since her return from Jamaica, and they thought that Alan could pull her somehow from that depressive state. She had let him into her life slowly, allowing him to meet her parents and allowing her parents to think that theirs was a serious, concrete relationship. In truth, Plum and Alan were still tangled in a cat and mouse game, Alan continuing to chase his elusive love and Plum shying away from a commitment of any kind.
Plum had come to know this stretch of I-95 well, and she measured how far they had gone by the bumps on the road, the starts and stops for tolls, the shifting sounds of the tires against grates or concrete bridges or asphalt.
Well on the way, deep in the southern part of New Jersey, Alan reached a hand across the gear shaft to Plum’s knee. He glanced at her, and back at the road. “What happen? What you so down about?”
“Nothing. Just a part of everyday life.”
“It has to be something more specific. Tell me.”
“Nothing you can do anything about.”
“Maybe I can’t fix it. But talking about it might help.”
“Not this time.”
“I can’t take the silence.” Alan, who wasn’t necessarily talkative, talked on about random things—the violations he wrote up as a public health inspector, how glad he was to be done with inspecting pools now that the summer was over, how badly he wanted another job in public health that didn’t involve trekking across the five boroughs, closing a restaurant for multiple violations only to see it reopened in record time with the same staff and a new name.
Plum gave up the pretense of sleeping. “What other type of job would you do?”
“Education. Implementing programs. Studying the impact of some new initiative. Anything that doesn’t involve writing violations.”
“Go for it,” Plum said. “You were always good at analysis anyway.”
“I’m looking.”
Plum shifted her eyes back to the passenger window, the cars on the opposite side of the road, her mind drifting in the lull back toward her second great disappointment: finding Lenworth’s mother but learning nothing about his whereabouts.
“Did I tell you my parents are moving to Fort Lauderdale? Leaving me the house.”
“Ah. Big house. At least you won’t have a mortgage.”
“Yeah. Want to fix it up. Redo the bathrooms and get rid of the carpet. Fixing it up real nice for when you decide to marry me.” There was a playfulness about Alan, but a serious note in his voice as well.
“Who says I will?”
“You will.”
“Why you so sure?”
“Two reasons. One, despite how you act, you love me. And the second thing, you’re here, and always with me. That tells me something.”
Plum had no argument for the latter. She was indeed always with him and dependent on his loyalty. “Not ready yet.”
“What will make you ready?”
“Just not ready. I’ll tell you when.” Then, “How will I know that you will not leave?”
“The same way you know I will not deliberately crash this car. Trust.”
“That is hard for me.”
“I know. And I wish you would trust me enough to tell me why.”
“It was a long time ago. A schoolgirl thing.”
“And this is an adult thing. Different circumstances. Grown-up people. Grown-up business.”
“Yes.” But in the parallel, running conversation in her head, Plum added, and no, because Alan was roughly the same age as Lenworth had been when he took off and left. What she had with Lenworth had been grown-up business as well.
“I will never force you.”
“I know. Just not yet.” Once again, she skirted the real reason: She had unfinished business, a daughter she hoped was just a phone call or two away.
That Sunday evening Plum stayed at home, blending sweet potatoes to make a pudding, keeping her fingers busy so as not to think. At seven, the kitchen clean, the pudding in the oven, the mixing bowls and blender put away in their rightful places, Plum went back upstairs to her room at the back of the house. She stood with her back to the door and dialed.
“Sunday Contact.”
The voice was what Plum had been waiting for. Still the deep baritone caught her off guard. “Good evening.” Her mouth felt as dry as sand, but she pushed the words out, reminded the host of her previous call, thanked him and the listeners who had called with the tidbits of information that had led to Lenworth’s mother. “I found his mother. No luck there. She hasn’t seen him for just about the same time he disappeared from my life.”
“Okay, give me his name again.”
“Lenworth Barrett.” For the second time, Plum listed the details she knew: Lenworth was born and raised in Woodhall, Clarendon. Lived for a time in Greenwood, Trelawny. Went to William Knibb High School and Moneague Teachers’ College. Has an eight-yearold girl.
As he did on Plum’s previous call, the host repeated the details Plum had given. And to her, he said, “Tough, eh. Every little detail you can give the listeners will get you closer to finding your daughter. Give us a number where listeners can reach you.”
Then she waited.
The morning after, Plum stood at the window, waiting for the phone to ring. She was sure that someone else would call. Within minutes after her call the previous night, calls had started coming in, some with promising details and others with farfetched ideas of where Lenworth could have gone.
Outside, her father was hunched over a ragged garden that was largely weeds and anemic herbs, plucking bell peppers or lackluster cherry tomatoes from two feeble plants. He shouldn’t have been home at all. She willed him to stay there in the garden at the back of the brownstone, hidden, out of view of Plum leaving to catch the train to downtown Brooklyn for the afternoon shift. She left earlier than normal and missed the call and message that would change her life forever.
Later, much later, when her parents had already gone to bed, Plum returned, and caught the message that stated simply, “I know a Lenworth Ramsey who lived in Anchovy with a little girl who is about eight years old. Round here, he went by the name Lenworth Ramsey, but every piece of mail that used to come to him at the post office said Lenworth Barrett.”
She jotted the details down, her words on the page like a first grader’s nearly illegible scribble. Then she took another sheet and rewrote the details: Lenworth Ramsey, Anchovy.
Plum thought first of Lenworth’s mother, and called the telephone number where his mother said messages could be left. And waited again for another response.
A day later, Plum stood with her back to the door, listening to the ringing phone, waiting for someone on the other end to pick up and connect the pre-arranged phone call between Plum and Lenworth’s mother. Again, she waited, hung up and called again and again, until at last, she heard the line opening up and a voice saying, “Hello. Good evening.”
“Good evening. This is Plum Valentine.”
“Yes, yes. She right here. Hold on.”
His mother, voice raspy, almost breathless, was anxious to get out what she knew. “Glad you could call. You know my mind run on you the other day.”
Plum felt a lightening of her spirit. Her body slackened, hope again bubbling like a spring emerging from the earth.
“Ramsey.” His mother continued, her voice quickening as she laid out the possibilities. “His grandmother’s name was Ramsey. That his father’s mother. And from he turn seventeen he wanted to change his name from Barrett, drop his father name and pick up his granny own. Hate his father and couldn’t wait to get rid of his father’s name. He even get the deed poll paper and all. He loved his grandmother bad, bad. But not him father at all.”
“You really think it could be him?”
“Could be him, yes. His grandmother had people out that way. I don’t know where exactly. Could be Hanover or Westmoreland or even Mobay. Not so sure. Just know it was over on that side.”
Still, even with the uncertainty, his family’s tenuous connection to the western part of the island, his mother had given Plum something on which she could hang her hope: another possible name, another identity. Perhaps she had been searching all the while for a man living under a different name. Those were the details she passed on to the private investigator and again waited for what she thought was inevitable.