Slivers of light slipped in through cracks in the blinds, making shadows on the wall. The rectory was otherwise quiet. That was the way Lenworth preferred it; in its dark state, it showed itself for what it was—someone else’s home with stories that were not his buried in the walls. He left the darkened office, felt his way through the living room and up the stairs to bed.
Just as he was ready to turn off the bedside lamp, lie flat on his back and put away the burdens that his parishioners and his family brought to him, the telephone rang. Lenworth looked at the handset to make out the dim black writing illuminated by the green screen. As he suspected, it was indeed a call for him. A parishioner, Evelyn Eastmond, was near death, and her sister thought the time had come for him to give her last rites.
“You have to go now?” Pauline, her voice muffled beneath the sheet, was ready for a fight. “There must be a chaplain at the hospital they can call.”
“This is my job, Pauline. This is it. Going when they need me. Praying over the dying.” He didn’t say there was no chaplain, no hospital, just a woman dying at home rather than at a hospice, and who, weeks earlier, had asked that he be called when the time came. He kept those details to himself, fully conscious that what he didn’t say mattered as much as what he said.
“Yes, but now? You have a family too.”
“It’s my job, Pauline. You know that. This is what priests do.”
“I keep telling you, you need an assistant for times like this. Your family needs you too.”
“It’s not every day that a member of the church dies. It’s not every day that I have to go out at midnight. When was the last time I had an emergency like this? Tell me.”
“It might not actually be every day. But you’re hardly here.” “Not now.”
“If not now, when?”
“Not now.” A final, decisive answer that meant he didn’t want to have the argument then, that meant he knew that she was arguing about something else entirely. He closed the bedroom door as if to shut the argument within, and descended the stairs, stopping just briefly to pick up a prayer book and adjust his clothing.
Outside, he looked around, hurried to the car, and locked the doors. Inside, he turned off the music and once the car was in motion, opened the windows to let the breeze cool the top of his head. He liked to drive in silence, with nothing but his thoughts, the wind whistling through the open window, the road noise fading quickly into the background. Were it not for Evelyn’s imminent death he would have driven toward the Belt Parkway and Long Island and taken a long aimless drive. He would have gone to a beach, staying to watch the sun color the morning sky and the waters. He considered the optics—a priest in a car late at night on a deserted beach—and dismissed the thought. He would never have thought that he’d welcome this aspect of his job, being on call at all hours. Yet it offered him an escape from his daughter, Opal, and his wife—his daughter especially—not because they were of the gender that he didn’t always understand, but simply because they reminded him of the one thing he didn’t have. He never named it, the thing that was lost to him, nor would he admit, ever, that he welcomed opportunities to escape Pauline and Opal.
Loss wasn’t something he dealt with well, even though as a priest he should. He had learned, of course, to rationalize some events, to talk about spiritual gains instead of physical losses. Death, the finality of it, was the easiest of any kind of loss for him. There was one rational explanation: a heart had stopped beating. Regardless of what lead up to that final moment—a street fight, an errant gunshot, an aggressive tumor—he could always point to the heart. The other losses—divorce and the breakdown of a lifelong friendship, regardless of who was at fault—were more difficult situations, for they demanded an explanation for why love could fritter away or shrivel up. For himself, he had stopped trying to rationalize the greatest loss of his life. He knew exactly who was at fault and why.
Now, he prepared himself to wait, whether long or short, for Evelyn to take her last breath. As he did in moments like these, he made a list of the things he had lost or left behind: dewdrops on his bare feet; morning fog in a hillside’s pockets; the early morning maa-ing of an anxious goat; the soft, almost gel-like flesh around a star apple seed slipping around his mouth; walking barefoot on the grass; bursting the young buds on a leaf of life plant and listening for the soft pop; an empty Jamaican beach in the morning, with nothing in front of him but the unending sea with the sun glinting off its waves.
Then he was in front of Evelyn’s house in Canarsie, watching the curtain flutter. As he neared the door, it opened, and he stepped inside to face a death that wouldn’t wait. Evelyn’s anxious relatives pulled him forward into a dark room that already smelled of decay.
The old woman had shriveled, but before her illness, she reminded him of his mother. They had the same high and prominent cheekbones, lips that looked like they’d been blotted with raspberry paint, the build of once lithe and elite marathoners who had gone into old age just a shade heavier from their peak performance days. That, too, was another thing he kept from Pauline. Not coming to Evelyn would have felt like he had abandoned his mother on her deathbed as he had in fact abandoned her in life. He didn’t know whether she lived or had died in the years since he’d last left her standing in the yard with her hands akimbo watching him as he walked past the line of orange, tangerine and grapefruit trees in the yard and past the flowering poinciana, to the narrow road, with a crocheted blanket in a bag for the baby that was soon to make its way into the world and for whom he hadn’t yet a name. He never returned as he had promised with the newborn baby girl. His mother didn’t know either about the boys who came later, and who were now asking questions about his family, who belonged to whom and where exactly they belonged. The boys knew Pauline’s family, for she had made sure to return to Jamaica time and time again. But he had offered the boys and Opal no actual glimpse of his family, just random stories that they couldn’t confirm.
Evelyn’s family clustered around the bed. He held one of her hands and began a prayer so softly none of the others heard. Her hand felt weightless, and he couldn’t shake the sense that he was attending to his mother, ushering his mother’s soul along. Was his mother indeed on her deathbed nearly two thousand miles away waiting for him to come home? Seventeen years of days and months and hours building up one on top of the other, one fateful decision like a sandbar after a hurricane separating his early life from the second half.
He led the family in song, Evelyn’s favorite hymn. Singing wasn’t part of the ritual, but he had heard a dying person’s sense of hearing was the last to go. And he wanted her to have a cacophony of voices surrounding her. It was what his own mother would want, and since he couldn’t shake the feeling that his mother was lying in a bed in Woodhall, Clarendon, counting down her last breaths, waiting for the son she hadn’t seen to come, he sang along with the family, saying nothing when the one song became a medley of choruses, and the night turned into an impromptu wake. So caught up were they in song that they missed what they had been waiting for, her eyes fluttering slightly, her last breath, her last heartbeat, her body going cold.
And then his feeling lifted. He expected to, but didn’t feel a pang of loss, didn’t feel a gaping emptiness as if someone close to him had passed. So by the time he left Evelyn’s house, he no longer expected to hear the details of his mother’s passing, but rather anticipated that a message would come to him that she was waiting for his return. How and when the message would come he didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure he liked this ability to divine something before it occurred.
Back on Albemarle Terrace, the rectory was still quiet, the children sleeping deeply, and except for a nightlight in the hall, it was still pitch black inside. Opal, with the exception of her face and her toes, was wrapped completely in the sheets, and snoring lightly. In the next room, the boys were completely turned around. Craig, asleep on the top bunk, had slipped toward the edge as if he had begun to climb down and fallen asleep again before his toes touched the ladder rungs. He righted the boys’ bodies and their sheets and tiptoed out, avoiding the toys spread out on the floor like land mines, and across the master bedroom, not wanting to wake Pauline. She slept lightly, like a hen guarding her eggs against mongooses or rats. As he expected, she woke, glanced at the clock, and turned away to the opposite wall. She sniffled once but said nothing, and he tumbled in beside her, back-to-back like a defiant child refusing to speak or acknowledge the other.
He didn’t get the deep and satisfying sleep he wanted, but drifted instead into a restless state, between active thoughts and dreams, unable in the end to distinguish between dream and thought. He thought of his mother’s cakes and the icing, thick, sweet, hard and with little silver balls mixed into it. She always baked her cakes and puddings on a coal stove, with fire on top and fire below the pan, the heat enveloping the pan as any modern stove would, but the coal and the smoke flavoring the food as no gas stove could. He dreamt of her attending the coal stove, squatting on her haunches, her back to him, while he made circles in the dirt with an old bicycle wheel he had attached to a stick. He woke, for he did indeed remember that toy, and the cart he eventually built with a second wheel and discarded crate. The dream had been so vivid that he felt he had touched the knobby stick, felt the wheel wobble as it rolled over small stones and the uneven ground. And when he drifted off again, he had the same dream of his mother in front of the stove. In the second dream, the fire flared up and caught her skirt. He rushed to her side, grabbed a bucket of water and doused her with it. She patted his head and said, “My boy.”
He interpreted the dream as the second sign that his mother was indeed still alive and what he had felt when he attended to Evelyn was his guilty conscience reminding him of how long he had stayed away. It wasn’t his mother, he was sure. He turned over, pulled the sheet and the pillow over his head to block out the morning light, and slept.
The house was mostly quiet when he woke, sunlight streaming in through the open blinds, a radio somewhere in the house belting out gospel music. The children were gone, and Pauline as well, off to a meeting or a store or volunteer hours somewhere. He had dreamt of his mother again, and even as he lay there, refitting the pieces of the dream like puzzle pieces, he felt that she was there, watching him as she had in childhood, sitting by his bed as he slept in a fevered state, watching for the seizures that sometimes came upon him when his temperature spiked. Pieces of the dream began flitting away and he reached for the bits he remembered: he had moved into another house, a basement apartment that was already furnished. As he walked through it, he found that the apartment adjoined another, but had no dividing walls, just an invisible line he shouldn’t cross. Pauline’s name, along with another he couldn’t recall, was clearly marked on the house’s main front door, silently declaring that he didn’t belong up there. His mother was there, though, helping him move his things from the main part of the house to a closet in the basement. He tried but couldn’t picture the emotion reflected on his mother’s face. He played it over and over, a silent movie for which he had lost the plot.
Even with the bits of the plotless dream spread out before him, the pieces refusing to fit together in any meaningful way, he felt her presence still and chalked it up to the fact that he couldn’t interpret the dream, couldn’t make sense of how these disjointed pieces of his life had made their way together in a dream. He got up, padded through the house to turn the radio off, stripped off his pajamas and stepped into the shower, believing that his mother wouldn’t follow him in there and the water would wash away the niggling feeling he couldn’t shake.
His mother was there again when he returned to the room, moving—as the elderly would, slowly, without the sprightliness of the young—from the bed to the bedroom door. He blinked and shook his head, closed and rubbed his eyes, and followed the figure out of the room. Still naked, he went into the kitchen, thinking that satisfying his hunger would take care of the thoughts that haunted him.
Lenworth didn’t know it then—and wouldn’t know the details for another week, not until all the things that once mattered no longer did, not until after his carefully controlled life had ruptured, not until he had been exposed and the stories about him spilled and scattered like thick mud, drying hard and fast in some crevices, loosening up and moving again in others—but his mother, Girlie, had indeed taken her last breath quietly in her sleep. She died an unremarkable death, with no one keeping watch, without song, without a last prayer, holding onto a little piece of paper pinpointing the exact location of her long-lost son. Some two thousand miles away from Brooklyn, his sister woke at 2 a.m. in their childhood home for no specific reason, moved around the house checking windows and doors to ease her uneasiness, and found their mother lying on the floor, lifeless. She held a mirror above her mother’s nose to confirm what she suspected, and when she saw no vapor, no fog on the glass, she dropped the mirror and wailed.