Opal didn’t know it yet, but at fourteen she was living her mother’s life—at least partially—looking for a way to matter and to be loved or lovable. For she had once been lovable and so precious her father named her after a gem with an iridescent rainbow of colors. The way he told it, he alone was responsible for her name, he alone who thought her precious. She believed.
Yet, here they were, again at a crossroads, a boarding school in Jamaica like an immovable mountain between Opal, Lenworth, and Pauline.
“I’m telling you, high school in Jamaica is the best thing for her.” Pauline had a way of punctuating her words with her hands or whatever object she held. She moved her spoon now, raising it up and down like a drummer without a drum.
Lenworth, with his head bent and palms like a tent in front of his face, said no. “You’re not sending my daughter away like somebody dead-lef’.”
“So you going to leave her to run around like a vagabond?”
“Vagabond?” He looked up, face wrinkled, one corner of his mouth lifted scornfully.
“Maybe not vagabond.” Pauline pulled her word back. “But you know what I mean. She can’t just do as she please. You have to set some rules.”
Lenworth looked at Opal, and quickly looked away, his words dissolving like honey in tea. His daughter, he thought, and corrected himself. Her daughter. He stressed her, for Opal had morphed into a life-size version of Plum, a permanent reminder of the woman he should have loved to the very end.
“Tell her where you go after school.”
“The library.” Opal spoke in a whisper, the pain of not being believed evident in her voice.
Lenworth knew it to be true, for he had followed Opal from school at least once to find out for himself exactly where she went and why. He didn’t tell Pauline, though.
“Your homework is never done.” Pauline, incredulous still, raised her palms then dropped them back on the table in exasperation. “You spend all evening in your room doing homework. So what do you do at the library?”
“I write movies and plays.”
That, too, Lenworth also knew to be true. He had found and read through Opal’s stack of marble notebooks, filled with one-act plays and half-written movies. Once he found the notebooks, he went back time after time to learn about the world his daughter created, stepping away each time thinking that his daughter hated her life and escaped into her own altered reality to get away from the present.
Opal’s movie that week was about the Tainos, a group long extinct from Jamaica, decimated by hard labor and the diseases brought to the island by Christopher Columbus and the cohort of explorers, diseases for which their bodies had built no immunity. In her notes, Opal had written that she wanted to return the Tainos to Jamaica. In one corner she had described the small house in Anchovy, the long ride down Long Hill toward the coast, the walled compound at the foot of Long Hill and the sea directly behind the wall. She imagined the sea butting up against the land for the concrete wall and the thick rows of trees that had grown up around the wall blocked outsiders from seeing what went on within the walled compound. Opal wanted to set her movie in an inlet behind the walled compound, with the city of Montego Bay to the right and to the left the jagged coastline stretching toward Negril. The script was still in its infancy, with Opal unable to move beyond the thought of it, unable to determine who would win her war: the Tainos returning to an island that wasn’t necessarily or specifically their ancestral land or the descendants of African slaves who had been brought to the island hundreds of years earlier. She hadn’t figured either how to write herself into it. Her movies had one basic storyline—Opal the savior, needed, accepted, lauded.
“Discipline,” Pauline was saying. She had turned to Lenworth, and she punctuated her words with a slap of her fist against her palm. “She needs to learn how to be disciplined, how to get her priorities straight. And the only place I can think of is a boarding school in Jamaica. That private school we’re paying for isn’t doing a thing.”
“Yes,” Opal said. “I want to go.”
“No.” Lenworth spoke more forcefully than he intended. He softened his voice and repeated, “No.”
“Why not?” Pauline dipped a tea bag once, twice, then squeezed it against the spoon. “You think she too good to go to a school in Jamaica?”
“I told you already. You’re not packing up my daughter and sending her anywhere.”
“But, what if I want to go?” Opal’s voice was small, like that of a girl not used to speaking her mind, and afraid of her words disappointing the listener.
Lenworth looked up at Opal and again pulled his eyes away. Again that plea in her eyes, that desperate look, so like her mother’s. And again, he closed his eyes, tented his fingers in front of his forehead. He pictured Plum, the misery of her teenage years at the boarding school, how she longed to be back at home. Yes, Plum’s situation was different; she had been tricked into going to Jamaica. But he wouldn’t think of Pauline sending Opal away, wouldn’t think of Opal going that far and discovering the truth he had been hiding all this time. “No,” he said again, more forcefully this time. “You’re not sending my daughter away.” Only he did not address Opal’s question.
Lenworth knew there was something more in Opal’s plea, a longing for something else. Lenworth could compartmentalize Opal’s life in two segments: before America and after.
Before America, Opal was a tomboy, partial to flicking marbles in the dirt, needling her way into a cricket game, fashioning cars and trucks from boxes and bits of wood, tramping through the bush with the neighborhood boys to explore a murky pond or cave. She played with a doll just long enough to pull its legs from its body to investigate the hollow space inside and remove more easily the thin pine needles and scraps of sawdust she had fed through the doll’s tiny mouth like noodles. Then, she had no interest in fashioning doll’s clothes, or curling or braiding its hair. Back then, when he pictured her as a teen, he pictured her as an athlete, more at home competing in a game than confined in a classroom or any domestic setting.
But, as it turned out, he moved the family long before Opal’s life unfolded fully. Nearly seven years had passed since Lenworth, Pauline, Opal, Craig and the newborn baby left Jamaica for Greenbelt, Maryland. They came at the end of August when the grass was still green, the trees full and fragrant, and the humid, sun-filled days suggested nothing of the chill that came two months later. Neither the promise of a new beginning nor the novelty of an immigrant’s life warmed Lenworth and Pauline’s frosty relationship.
But Opal, who was too young to understand her father’s transgressions, too young to question his repentance and who had no reason not to believe in his dream or his transformation to a repentant seminarian, embraced the small apartment—two bedrooms, a den that was barely big enough for a twin bed, and a balcony, the only outdoor space that belonged to them—to which her father had ferried his family.
The apartment was nothing like the house in Anchovy, with its small, adjoining rooms and expansive yard. The trees in the complex, ornamental instead of fruit trees, weren’t meant for children to climb. And, indeed, if there were no apples or mangoes or star apples or almonds to pick, what was the use in shimmying up a tree trunk and stepping out onto a branch twelve feet away from the ground? Still, the balcony was more spacious than the den, the quadrant of a room in which Opal could barely turn around without hitting her knees or elbows on something. It was the space, or lack of it, that tempered her boyishness.
In Greenbelt, there was nothing to explore—no caves, or murky ponds, or abandoned wells—just a few children staring back at her from their own balconies and sometimes from the too-green grass between the buildings. She turned inward instead of outward, and, along with learning how to be an American—the required words and phrases and attitudes, remembering to say “on vacation” instead of “on holiday” for holiday was a specific day not a week- or month-long event—she learned how to be a girl, to like gold hoops in her ears, bangles that jangled when she moved, shoes with a bit of a heel, polka dotted tights, and boots that ended midway up her calf. She became a little more like her stepmother, finding use for the mirror, befriending the girl who stared back at her. She morphed into someone else: a girl who cared that her colors matched, who preferred dresses to pants, fashion magazines to comic books, every shade of nail polish and shiny lip gloss.
Lenworth looked at her as if she had been reborn, a newborn shedding her birthday wrinkles and mottled skin, growing each day into her own. Seeing how she became a life-sized wax doll or commemorative figurine of Plum that haunted him. Seeing how he had managed to make every woman and girl in his life seem inconsequential and small.
And then he looked away. He didn’t exactly pretend that Opal didn’t exist at all. But it was close. He did it subtly, turning down her third grade photos. In them, she had smiled instead of staring back at the camera stubbornly, defiantly refusing to smile. He removed Opal’s photos from the wall and replaced them with photos of the boys caught in the midst of a mischievous antic, surprise or amusement oozing from their faces.
Opal didn’t notice it then, not at ten or eleven years old, not until much later, after he had finished with the seminary and his training as an Episcopal priest, not until they moved to Brooklyn, not until the ladies from the altar guild came to help the new priest and his family settle in and decorate, not until one woman said, “So where are pictures of Opal? You must have some pictures of your daughter. Such a pretty smile too. And those eyes . . .”
That Opal, with skin the color of a coffee bean, didn’t resemble him was clear. That she didn’t look like Pauline was clear. To look at the family—Lenworth's milky-brown skin, heavy eyelids, and thick, bushy brows running across his forehead; Pauline and her sons, who, like her, had light brown skin; and Opal, a darker-skinned other with unusual topaz eyes and eyebrows so thick, so wide the outer edge dipped low and down toward the outer corner of her eyelid—it was hard to tell Opal physically belonged to them. And she knew it because people stared at her eyes, at her complexion, at her family’s eyes and complexion, the strangers’ awkward glances calculating and minds deciphering the ancestral line that could have made it so, and concluding without being told and without concrete evidence that one of the two adults—her father or stepmother—wasn’t genetically hers.
That he called her his daughter was all that mattered to the churchwomen. They didn’t question her true parentage. She belonged in the photos and on the wall. Which is how Opal came to realize that her own school photos had been turned away or down, and one, still in the frame, had been put away in his desk drawer. Which is how she came to believe that he no longer saw her but saw someone else staring back at him, someone he preferred not to see.
Yet, she wanted to be his. His daughter. His offspring. His family. His ballerina at the front of the stage, on her toes, lifting her arms as gracefully as a butterfly fluttering its wings, leaping like an acrobat suspended in air. But as far as Opal knew, he never came to the recitals, or if he did, he sat in the back, invisible to her on the stage, or snuck out early before the other parents excitedly mobbed the stage, throwing roses at their girls, regardless of whether they danced or simply stood shyly on the stage staring back at the audience.
She wanted to be wanted and seen.
Lenworth knew that, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t grant her wish, couldn’t face the life-size reminder of the gravity of his mistake. And he couldn’t send her away as she also wanted. Instead, he left Opal waiting to belong to him again.