Plum kissed Alan goodbye, a long, lingering kiss at which Nia and Vivian stared. Plum wondered as well about the kiss, how closely it was linked to the plan at the back of her mind, the one that paralyzed her because it was simultaneously probable and improbable. The very plan and the reason for it that she hadn’t told Alan about. And she couldn’t tell him then, not without peeling back the layers of secrets—the reasons behind the multiple trips to Jamaica before they married, the reason she shut down every September 16, the reason she had held him at bay for so long before agreeing to marry him—that she had allowed to compound and conflate that age-old issue of trust.
Trust, Alan thought, was the last thing to go before a marriage truly disintegrated. Respect was first and friendship second. He figured that by the time the trust was gone, the marriage itself was over; love alone, no matter how deep, was never enough to hold it all together. For them, the respect and friendship were still there. They had either bypassed the first two or upset Alan’s long-held belief.
Then he was gone and Plum was alone with the girls, who lingered in the kitchen waiting for breakfast, and the rush to get dressed and off to school. Plum weighed the consequences—the loss of her marriage or giving up on meeting her daughter—and chose the one she wouldn’t live without. And when she thought back on that kiss, she imagined the possibility that it could have been their last.
Yet, the plan returned, floating, tempting like the scent of forbidden food. So she buried the thought under a crevice in her mind, pictured an image of the brain—the tissue that folded in on itself—pictured her hand lifting a fold and shoving the thought under the fold away from the places in the brain whose sole purposes were remembering, planning, or thinking through consequences. What she thought about though was the first part of the plan: it was her eldest daughter’s birthday, and she would confront Lenworth on that day. But the second part of the thought she didn’t let linger in her mind. Four days of burying the second part and still that Friday she wouldn’t think it, wouldn’t let it hatch and grow wings as a plan should.
Instead, Plum filled her mind with everyday tasks, the endless duties that defined a mother’s life. She cracked and whipped eggs, buttered toast, sweetened hot chocolate and warmed strawberry milk. She wiped one snot-filled nose, swapped brown leggings for a polka-dotted pair with a tiny hole, brushed the fuzzy hairline of two heads of hair, dabbed a heavy, orange-scented oil to hold wayward curls in place and searched for a second pair of polka-dotted leggings to stop Vivian’s belated tantrum. She checked two backpacks, swapped a peeled orange for apple slices, wiped the sticky place in front of the fridge where Alan had spilled orange juice and wiped but not wiped carefully enough, searched the toy box for a yo-yo for the girls’ sound bag, then searched again for a whistle when she realized that the lesson was the science of sound and not the sound of the letter, set out chicken breasts to thaw for the night’s dinner, emptied a full clothes hamper into the washer, realizing too late that what she added was full-strength bleach and not the color-safe kind.
7:44 a.m. Plum walked the girls down the stairs, through the hall past the living room, through the triple-locked front door and metal gate, down a second flight. Dry leaves and oak bark crunched beneath their feet. Nia skipped. Vivian held Plum’s hand, questioning her about where squirrels kept their babies (in tree nests), why animals build nests on thin branches (because the animals are light), how many times baby birds and squirrels fall from their nests to the ground (not often). Plum left the girls at the front door of the school, watched them skip away toward their classrooms, turn around and wave. She waved back, turned away from the double doors, the rubberized mats on the playground and walked back home where, listening to the near silence, she began putting her plan in motion. The refrigerator hummed. The grandfather clock ticked. Outside, a garbage truck screeched as the driver braked. A siren screamed its urgent notes. Without the girls laughing, screaming, running, calling “Mommy,” shouting “Daddy,” tugging at toys, this was silence.
Plum moved as if she had a settled plan, as if she had indeed let the plan hatch and grow wings, and written down a list of things that she checked off one at a time. Again, she concentrated on the tasks as if the outcome of her meeting with Lenworth and everything that followed would depend on how well she accomplished each task. She returned chicken breasts to the freezer, removed a bag of deveined and shelled shrimp, ran cold water over the chunk of frozen seafood, chopped and sautéed onions and garlic and scallion, and stirred the thawed shrimp over the sautéed bulbs. She set a pot to steam rice, re-removed the frozen chicken breasts and set them in a pan of water to thaw, chopped onions and garlic and scallions again, chopped lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers, grated a bag of carrots, separated the grated carrots into two separate bowls, sprinkled sugar and raisins in one bowl of carrots, tossed the second bowl of carrots with the lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. She tossed the half-frozen chicken breasts into a pot with curry powder, the chopped bulbs, salt, pepper and thyme, scanned the refrigerator and the stove and calculated she had enough for at least five days’ dinners. Too much, she knew.
Plum stood still for a moment, shoved the thought she didn’t want at the front of her mind back in its place, then tidied the living and dining rooms. She fluffed the toss pillows, folded the throws, got on her knees with the small broom and dust pan and swept the crumbs from the area rug, changed and washed the girls’ sheets, folded the first batch of unintentionally bleached clothes—all her husband’s.
By noon, she was ready for another outing, this time to the supermarket. She bought enough to stock the refrigerator and cupboards full of the girls’ favorite things—cookies with lickable fillings, hard red grapes without seeds, Granny Smith apples they’d sprinkle with salt, pizza dough, cookie dough, green plantains Alan would have to fry, coconut drops and gizzadas from the Jamaican bakery, hard dough bread and guava jelly, Ting grapefruit soda.
At home again, she wrote a simple note: Will be back late. There’s dinner in the fridge and pizza dough in case the girls want to make pizza. He would wonder, she knew, when she found the time to cook shrimp, chicken and rice and about the reason for her late return. But Plum offered no other explanation.
Plum packed a bag for herself: a book of puzzles, cell phone charger, four fruit and nut bars, four bottles of water, a novel she had twice given up on completing, a thin scarf, the old cookie tin with the newspaper clipping, the one-footed doll and the hospital discharge papers. Four-fifteen. Alan would pick up the girls at five. At 5:20, the girls would dash inside, dropping bags and shoes, filling the house again with sound. Plum took her oversized tote, headed away from the subway stop and the school, turned right toward Church Avenue, left on Church past Nostrand Avenue and Flatbush, meandering past the West Indian grocery stores and bakeries, the Chinese takeout shops and the what-not stores that sold a hodgepodge of things.
Plum could have taken a taxi but she walked instead, stepping out into traffic as if she had every right to do so, ignoring the blaring horns, the brakes squealing as cars jerked to a halt, the drivers pushing their heads through open windows to yell and shout every obscenity imaginable. Finally, St. Paul’s Place and Church Avenue. She stopped and turned right, looking up at the grey stone building, the stained glass windows, the bright red, double wooden doors at the main entrance shut up tight. Even though she had already been there once, Plum circled the church, walking down St. Paul’s Place, past the high-rise apartment buildings on either side of the block, back to Church Avenue, and around again. Three times she circled, trying to slow her heart that was pulsing too hard and her breaths that came in shallow spurts. She reminded herself of her ultimate goal, how close she was to standing face to face with him after seventeen years, how close she was to seeing her daughter.
At six-thirty she was again at the entrance to the church hall. She stopped. Sounds, a thumping sound and voices, drifted through open windows. She climbed the stairs and stepped into the musty foyer. Upstairs, she could see the cavernous recreation hall and caught glimpses of boys dribbling a basketball. Youthful voices rose up from the basement rooms. The Friday evening youth fellowship, she guessed.
Plum took another deep breath and climbed the stairs toward the recreation room. She closed her eyes, realizing after that shutting her eyes wouldn’t filter out the odor of must and sweat trapped in the room, and peered again inside. “Father Barrett?”
“Excuse me.” The boys stopped mid-play.
Plum hadn’t expected a polite answer, hadn’t expected them to have heard her question at all. She thought she was still playing out the question in her mind, working out what she was going to do now that she had come this far. The question out of her mouth, she couldn’t turn back now. “Father Barrett,” she said again.
“Let me see.” The boy with the ball turned away toward a door in the far left of the building that Plum presumed led to an office and the sanctuary.
Another boy brushed past her down the stairs to the basement. His words floated back up the stairs. “There’s a woman upstairs asking to see Father Barrett.”
Plum stepped inside the hall, her ballet flats soft on the wooden floor, unfolded a chair and bent to sit. The seat was lower than she thought and her body fell heavily into it, pushing the legs back, throwing up a screech that floated around, lingering and echoing. She paid attention to the sounds, the soft hushed whispers from the basement, the air circulating in the room, laughter bursting unexpectedly from the rooms below, footsteps coming from the darkened corridor to the left, footsteps coming up the stairs toward the hall, transitioning from concrete to wood, then stopping before her.
“May I help you?” The woman who stood before Plum had eyebrows penciled in place, arching unnaturally high above her eyes, a thick layer of foundation and powder and concealer congealed on her skin, breath that smelled like mint.
“I’d like to see Father Barrett, please.”
“I’m Mrs. Barrett. Pauline. He isn’t here now but perhaps someone else can help?”
“No, no one else.” Plum hesitated, then in a bolder voice, said, “It’s a personal matter that I must talk to him about.”
Without hesitation, Pauline’s eyes dropped to Plum’s stomach, rolled over the soft folds of flesh that Plum had never bothered to work to retighten after the twins. Plum straightened her back, pushed her stomach out, flattened her hand against the T-shirt, and sat back waiting for the roving eyes to rest again on her face, which was partly shielded by oversized sunglasses.
“It’s Friday evening. Priests have families too, you know. Can it wait till Sunday or Monday when he’s back in office?”
“I’ll wait,” Plum said. Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, how long she would wait for the priest to come.
“All right then. I’ll see if I can get him on the phone.”
“Tell him my name is Plum.” As soon as she spoke, she knew she shouldn’t have given her name.
The boys again dribbled the basketball and each time the ball bounced on the floor, the thump reverberated in the oversized room. Noise filled the room, making it seem smaller. She leaned forward, her chin resting on laced fingers, the small watch on her hand ticking away the minutes. By now the girls would be eating dinner, then settling in for the Friday night movie, which quite likely would be something they had already seen a hundred times. Had she been home, she would be curled up with them too, one girl on either side, her thighs and soft stomach the pillow upon which their heads, heavy with sleep, would eventually fall.
The ringtone—church bells—was most appropriate. Plum stepped into the hallway, hovering on the landing above the steps, the double doors in front of her offering a quick escape, and said hello into the small microphone. “I’ve gone to see the priest,” she told him when he asked, omitting that she had gone to see Father Barrett at St. Paul’s and not Father Bailey at St. Matthews. “It won’t be long.”
Plum was not religious. In truth, she had long given up on God, given up on the belief that God heard and answered prayers, that he didn’t give her more than she could handle. She went to church at Christmas for the beauty of the carols accompanied by a harp and bells and violins. Yet, unlikely as it was that she would have gone to see a priest, Alan didn’t ask why. She was surprised and relieved. In the background, the chattering from the movie played on and no matter what Alan said, the girls wouldn’t take the phone.
8:26. The priest had not yet come. “We’re going to lock up soon. Can you come back tomorrow?” Mrs. Barrett’s voice was sweet, patient. Four giggling girls passed behind her heading to the far corner of the hall, away from the dribbling basketball.
“I’ll wait.” There it was, the thought Plum hadn’t allowed to fully develop: she wouldn’t leave until she saw Father Barrett, looked him in the eye, compared the man he was now with the man he had been before, and asked the question she had asked herself over and over all these years. Why? The probability of a prolonged night, locking herself in the church until he came, was the thought she wouldn’t think, and she acknowledged at last that that was the reason she had prepared so much food for Alan and the girls. She didn’t know when she would leave or whether he would come at all.
She looked around the room at the two adults who remained—Mrs. Barrett and the warden who held the keys—and the six sweaty boys and four girls.
“You can’t stay here overnight,” the man with the keys said, laughter in his voice. “We’re locking up at nine.”
“Make me move,” Plum wanted to say. But even in her mind it sounded like something her daughters would say on the school playground. Instead, she pulled up a chair, stretched her legs out and slid her bottom down in the chair so her head rested on the chair’s back.
“I’ll call the police.”
“This is a house of God, a place of refuge. You wouldn’t want to do that.” Plum didn’t yet know why she felt emboldened. “It’s kind of an emergency. I’ll wait until he comes.”
“He’s been with the children all evening,” Pauline said. “Maybe when I get back he can come.”
Children. Plum’s heartbeat quickened.
“I’ll wait,” Plum said. Leaving without an answer wasn’t an option. Not after seventeen years of waiting and looking and hoping, of shelving disappointment and fear. Not that particular night.
On the far end of the hall, one girl slipped away from the group, into the long narrow hallway, presumably toward the vestry and the church.
“Opal?” Pauline looked around for the girl she called. “Where’s she?”
The girls at the table shrugged, nonchalantly, uncaring.
“Steve, Mike, take Opal home for me. And straight home.” She wagged a single finger, underscoring her point, mumbled, “That girl . . .” To the group, “Not a minute after nine.”
That girl, the one who had slipped inside the church couldn’t be Plum’s. Pauline would not have left her, would she?
Pauline’s shoes, impossibly high heels, clicked on the stairs. The door locked behind her. The warden pulled up a chair and the boys resumed dribbling the basketball on the wood floor. “It can’t wait till tomorrow?” the warden asked. “I haven’t even had dinner yet.”
“I’ve been here a long time,” Plum said. “This would have been over if he had come from the very first call.”
“Father is a busy man.”
“Of course. That’s why I’ll wait.” What Plum remembered was leaving Anchovy empty-handed, how close she had come to finding Lenworth and her daughter, and coming away with nothing, disappointment like a pox consuming her body. How close she had come to choosing death.
“I have to run around the corner and pick up my order. Want anything?”
“No.”
The warden jangled his keys, looked up at the indefatigable teens still dribbling the ball and running and jumping and hooting. The girls waved their goodbyes and left with him. Plum stood up and stretched, arching her back, then bending forward at the waist, letting her fingers extend to the floor.
“Aren’t your parents expecting you at home?”
The boys laughed, dribbled the ball again, but gave no answer. The girl still had not returned.
Plum paced a little, walked back to the landing, down the stairs. She stopped in front of the double red doors and contemplated them—the sturdy steel, the system of bolts, the exit sign that would glow in the dark. She walked down into the basement, looked around and turned back, clomping her way back up the stairs, past the teen boys, through the narrow hallway separating the recreation room from the sanctuary—no light, no obvious signs of a hidden priest—and into the pitch-black church.