“You shouldn’t be in here, you know.” The girl stood behind Plum. Her breath came in ragged gasps.
Without turning around, Plum said, “Why are you hiding in here?”
“I didn’t want her to drive me home.”
Not her, Plum thought; the words the girl used distanced herself from Pauline. Her, the girl said, not mother or stepmother.
“You should go home. Your parents must be worried about you being out so late.”
“They know where I am. Why did you come in here?”
“The simple truth: I thought the priest was hiding back here and you came to keep him from me.”
The girl laughed, a short burst of sound.
Plum struck a match and lit one votive candle after another, keeping her eyes on the flames sputtering to life behind the red candleholders.
“You have to pay for each one you light,” the girl said. “And pray.”
“You don’t know that I’m not praying.”
“Maybe you should kneel and close your eyes.”
“Maybe I prefer to pray with my eyes open.”
“I know you haven’t put any money in the box.”
“Prayers shouldn’t come with a fee. It’s free to pray, you know.”
“You still shouldn’t be in here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Opal.”
Plum turned away toward the pew and sank into the red cushion lining the bench. She stretched her legs out in front of her, watching each candle flickering lazily.
“You have to put them out before you leave.”
To Plum, the girl sounded anxious, a bit worried now that she would get into trouble for leading Plum into the sanctuary.
Plum patted the empty space beside her. “Sit.” The girl did exactly as she asked. “Listen to the silence. You can almost feel the quiet inside here. It’s almost like you can touch it. This is what a sanctuary is supposed to feel like. Not with the singing and noise church people make on Sunday mornings.”
“This isn’t that kind of church,” Opal said.
“I know.” Even in the haze of darkness, Plum felt the intensity of Opal’s stare and the girl’s anxiety in every twitch of her leg. “I’m not going to burn down your church. I’m just waiting for the priest to come.”
The girl, nervous still, shifted her gaze away from Plum and back to the flickering candles. Plum closed her eyes and leaned her neck back against the bench. The church was cool and musty, the air tinged with a hint of incense and decaying flowers Plum couldn’t name. It was too dark to see the floral arrangements on the nearby altar, but she imagined several elaborate ones, a range of colors and textures and shapes, heart-shaped anthuriums, spiked birds of paradise that resembled yellow plumed birds in flight, the cone-shaped ginger flower. Even as she pictured the bouquets, she knew she was thinking of a different church altogether, tropical flowers on an altar at a church in Jamaica, herself as a boarding school student longing for home.
The girl beside her breathed deeply. “I think you mean trouble for the priest. My mother thinks women always bring trouble for priests. And, besides, if you were a member of the church, you’d know his office hours.”
“What kind of trouble?” Plum asked.
“I don’t know. Just trouble. There was a scandal. I don’t know exactly what. But the priest is rebuilding the church and it’s our duty to help him keep trouble away. You can’t just come out of nowhere and mess it up.”
“Then you should go on home. Nothing like a teenager staying out all night after youth fellowship to start a scandal at the church. What will your priest think of a young girl who doesn’t go home at night?”
“They won’t even know I’m missing.” Opal stretched out her legs. “Besides, you’re wasting your time. She didn’t tell him you came to see him. She always suspects the worst when women come to see him, so she wouldn’t have told him at all.”
Plum turned toward Opal, parsing through each of Opal’s words, she, too, searching through the haze of darkness to see Opal’s features. Earlier, she had hardly looked at the girl. She remembered a teenager’s lithe body, a girl conscious of the way she moved around the boys, so conscious she kept her eyes mostly down. So Plum hadn’t noticed the eyes, whether they were like hers or his, hadn’t looked at the girl’s nose or lips or ears. So focused was she on getting to Lenworth that she hadn’t paid attention to the girl at all. Mostly, Plum dismissed the possibility that she was hers because of how readily and quickly Pauline had walked away and left the girl behind.
“How do you know?”
“Know what?”
“That she didn’t tell him.”
“She never tells him anything. At least not if it involves a woman.”
A quickening now, an urgency to her voice. “The priest, is he your father?”
“Yes.”
Plum reached to pull Opal to her, but with the slightest shift she thought of what the girl would think of a stranger hugging her in the dark. And she thought, too, of her own failure to recognize her own offspring. Plum always imagined she would have known her daughter instinctively. But she hadn’t, and instead had nearly missed this reunion altogether.
Then Plum felt it, a peacefulness, an easing in every quadrant of her body, the release of every pent-up emotion.
Footsteps and angry, urgent voices echoed from the hallway connecting the church and the hall. “What was her name?” someone asked. “Either of you caught her name?”
“Don’t remember.” A husky teen voice.
“I’m locking up. You boys go on home.”
“What about Opal? We can’t go home without her.”
Opal stood up, turning in Plum’s direction as if to ask, “Aren’t you coming?”
Instead, Plum tugged on Opal’s arm. “Stay.”
Opal shrugged off Plum’s hand. “No,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be in here. We shouldn’t be in here. We’re going to be in trouble if we get caught.”
“It’s too late now,” Plum said.
The voices came closer and someone jiggled and turned a lock. Plum ducked behind a pew, quickly stretching her body out on the cold, concrete floor. “Get down.” Plum’s whisper was harsh.
Opal moved, ducking behind the pew, her hair brushing Plum’s forehead, tickling her skin. But Plum didn’t move.
“Call your parents and go on home.” The warden spoke and the footsteps faded away from the church, back down the hallway connecting the church and the recreation room. “They both must have left.”
Caught up now in her own cat and mouse game, a one-sided, misguided game of hide-and-seek, Plum simply said, “Don’t worry. Your father will come for you.” Even if Pauline hadn’t told Lenworth her name, Plum was sure that he would come. If not for Plum, he would come for Opal, come to reclaim what he once claimed as his and his alone.