The darkness of the underground subway station crept up toward Plum, and the dank smell reached up and wrapped itself around her like a loose scarf. Halfway down the stairs, she stopped.
“Aieee.” Another hurried commuter jolted by Plum’s sudden stop, muttered, sucked her teeth, and made an exaggerated move to bypass Plum. “You can’t just stop so.”
More angry words floated around Plum and away from her. The city, too busy to stop, didn’t stop. But Plum stood there momentarily like a boulder in the midst of a moving stream with water flowing around it rather than over it. Had it not been for a man with two boxes, the second so high it touched his chin, she would have remained there longer, contemplating how to continue her forward movement down the stairs, through the turnstile, onto the narrow platform, onto a train overflowing with artificial light, out again and into the basement lab. Sunlight didn’t reach the lab, and she could spend the day there in the lab and the break room without seeing any hint of natural light.
Plum stepped backward up the stairs, away from the man with the boxes, until she was again directly in sunlight and squinting to block it. Like she did after the early morning phone call to Jamaica, Plum rehashed her reasons for wanting to wait a week to confront Lenworth, for craving the sight of Lenworth cornered and unable to escape, the relief of seeing her daughter, at last. And she worried about losing them, about him escaping again as he had from the house in Anchovy just months before she found his whereabouts. Now, she found she was wrong about the agony of waiting seven whole days, for thinking seven days would seem like nothing, a blip in time, when lined up against seventeen years (6,205 days, give or take a few for leap years) without a word from him.
No, she would not wait. Plum was expected at work at ten, but she rearranged her workday, then sprinted down Nostrand Avenue to Church Avenue and hopped in a route taxi. She was pressed in between two heavy women, uncomfortable and anxious in that position, and also overwhelmed by the commingled scent of artificial coconut and vanilla that wafted from a bottle dangling from the rearview mirror, and the rose-scented perfume one of the women wore. The car moved haltingly, as the driver maneuvered around other stopped vehicles and pedestrians stepping out into the street to hail a passing taxi or to cross against the light.
Plum hopped out of the car across from Bobby’s Department Store, and walked back toward the church, where she stood as if she were on a shop piazza waiting for the shopkeeper inside to open up. Plum looked at her watch. 9:10. She had no idea how the church ran its business, whether it had an office and administrative staff who came daily to see to business affairs, whether priests came into the office as any other employee would, whether Lenworth would come that Monday morning.
Plum walked the length of the building, looking for another entrance. Stained glass covered the length of the building, one pane with a throng of enraptured listeners looking toward a group of shepherds. With the vines creeping along the brick walls and shrubs packed in close beneath the windows, the building seemed cloistered.
St. Paul’s main doors—which were like those in a fairytale, with three arches overhead and black ironwork extending from the hinges like orderly vines inching pointlessly across the wood—were closed. In the topmost part of the arch were stained glass with candles. “I am the light, the truth and the way,” Plum thought, pulling a memory from her teen years in Jamaica, another Anglican church.
She couldn’t imagine him here, a priest responsible for this enormous building and two hundred, maybe three hundred parishioners. A room of students, yes. She could picture him in a classroom, and she could picture him before a group of Sunday School students. But how she really saw him was as the engineer he had wanted to become, with his name or a personally identifying symbol etched into whatever building or bridge he had engineered. Back then, when he talked of his adult life, he talked of greatness, leaving behind a lasting reminder of what he had overcome and who he had become. Once, on a beach, he had pointed in the direction of a three-hundred-year-old fort, partially intact, battered by the wind and the sea and countless tropical storms and hurricanes, underlined how despite the spitefulness of nature, the fort had remained, a lasting reminder of another time. That was what he wanted. Yet, here he was a priest, building the intangible among his parishioners. The priesthood, as noble as it was, didn’t seem sufficient to express the legacy he had wanted to leave.
Until then, Plum hadn’t given much thought to how his life had changed by his one selfish act, how raising a child alone would alter the plan he had had for his life. Empathy was not what he deserved, so she shelved the thought of his dream of greatness frittering away. What mattered? Lenworth was here, within reach, probably behind the red doors, the black matte handle that didn’t budge. She went down the street again, toward the back of the church and the adjoining church hall, which had another set of red doors—except these doors were steel and not as ornate as the arched doors at the main entrance.
“Can I help you?” A voice from behind, a baritone.
Not his. She knew instinctively for his voice was etched in her memory and his last words, “We have a daughter,” tattooed in her mind.
Plum turned slowly. “The priest, is he in?”
“Not today.” He waved his hand, a slight brush, as if to swat something away. “Other business came up. Can I help?”
“No, I need the priest. Confession.” Plum also waved as if a confession were a light matter easily dismissed. Her heart pounded, the truth bubbling to emerge. But she held it tight, afraid of giving herself away too soon, giving him room to run again.
“The secretary, when she comes in . . . she can make an appointment for you. Give me your name and number. I’ll pass it on to her and tell her to call you.”
Plum wouldn’t leave her name. “I’ll come another time.” She turned away before he had another chance to question her motive or her presence, to remember her eyes or her nose or her lips or her birthmark—a small patch of depigmented skin where her jaw met her right ear.
Away from the church, Plum cried with her hands covering her face, releasing the anxiety that had started building Sunday afternoon. Then, the crying spell over, she called the lab and rearranged her schedule again. This time, she made it all the way down the subway steps and into a train rattling toward downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan, and walked into the lab, shook out and put on her lab coat as if everything in her life was as it had always been.
The lab itself was quiet. Plum sensed that something had gone wrong, perhaps a grave mistake in typing blood or an experimental treatment involving a patient gone awry. Likely it was something simpler: another episode of Lorna and Marlene clashing about the division of work or Marlene again correcting something Lorna had done. Plum was used to it now, the petty quarrels of the technicians about extended lunch breaks and the division of labor. Plum stayed above it all. She didn’t want the friendships or the alliances, just the anonymity of the work.
Plum picked up a waiting specimen and pulled out her stool, ready to begin the process of typing the blood. The collection date—September 11—and time—10:35 a.m.—routine details Plum looked at every day, stopped her this time. There were five more days to her daughter’s birthday.
Every year on that date she celebrated the same way, sitting in the dark and counting down the minutes as she had done some seventeen years earlier. She likened it to climbing up stream, up waterfall after waterfall, following a river to the place where it emerged from the earth, either as a gush or a trickle, smooth and jagged stones pressing against her soles, and the water, when it flowed steadily down an incline, pushing her back with a thunderous splash. She imagined instead pushing her body against the flow of water, grabbing with her fingers onto crevices in the rocks, searching with her toes for a foothold, slipping and falling back with each move. Every year, on this specific night that was the pain she felt, water pounding her body, her feet slipping and crashing against the rocks. All night she climbed, alone, teary-eyed, tired. In the morning, she always had an excuse—a cold, a migraine, a sore throat—that explained away her pulling the covers over her head until the girls’ chatter and Alan’s fumbling through the morning routine quieted and fell away completely.
But not this year. She would meet the anniversary differently, wait and confront him, make him relive what she had lived these past seventeen years, the agony of not knowing growing like a palpable mass in her heart.