One by one, Plum blew the candles out. Opal, her nervousness growing, paced, rubbing her hand along the gold plated banister leading to the altar.
“He should have come by now,” Opal said. “What if he doesn’t know we’re in here? Maybe we should leave the lights on?”
“Yes, good idea.”
Plum stood and tiptoed out, using the illumination from her phone’s screen as a dim flashlight, and her hands along the wall as a guide. The room flooded with light and she blinked against it. The empty, cavernous hall would tell Lenworth nothing. She undid her scarf and draped it on a chair, which she placed in the center of the room. Back in the hallway, she turned on another light, hoping it would work like a lighthouse and guide him through the vestry to the church itself.
Opal lay on a pew, her back curled and knees to her chest. “You’re going to get me into trouble.”
“Not at all. You don’t know me, but trust me. You’re not in any trouble at all.”
“You don’t know my stepmother.”
“What does she do?”
“Cinderella.” Her voice was muffled by the cushions. “Can do nothing right.”
“Say that again?” Plum asked.
“Never mind.” Opal stood, walked away from the pew and started pacing again.
They were again in their separate places—Opal pacing five steps one way and five steps back and Plum sitting in the front pew looking toward the lectern.
“I know you’re worried,” Plum said. “But trust me when I say don’t worry. I’m responsible for you being here and I will take the blame for that.”
“It’s not that,” Opal said. “My father should have come by now. If not for you, then he should have come to look for me.” Opal stopped to look in Plum’s direction. “What do you want from him?”
“It’s a complicated thing.”
“Maybe my stepmother was right.”
“About what?”
“Women like you.”
“What do you mean?” Plum felt her heart quickening.
“Never mind.”
“You’re protecting him. I understand that.”
“Somebody has to.”
Plum hadn’t pictured her daughter that way, not as a teenager thinking herself her father’s savior, setting herself up to be a footnote in her father’s biography, noted for saving her father and attempting even in her youth to right her father’s wrongs. She thought of her daughter as a version of herself, bold and brave and assertive when necessary. But here was Opal, a nervous girl, afraid of disappointing, desperate it seemed to find her place in her father’s life.
“You’re too young to be his savior.” As Plum spoke, she realized that perhaps she was talking about herself, the young adult protecting Lenworth from her aunt and her parents’ wrath, protecting him from her parents even after he had left and she had come back to Brooklyn broken and empty.
There in the church, the minutes ticking away, the clock inching toward midnight, the thought seeped into Plum that perhaps Lenworth would not come, that Opal who thought herself his savior would leave. That she would lose the daughter for whom she had searched all these years. Seeking a way to ease into what she needed to say, Plum asked, “What happened to your mother?”
“She flew away.”
A euphemism for death, Plum thought. “What do you mean when you say she flew away? Do you mean she died? Or do you mean she left?”
But Opal didn’t answer. Not directly.
“I saw her once,” Opal said, and Plum sat up, imagining for a minute a missed chance to reconnect. “Or maybe just someone who looked like how I think my mother would look.”
Opal kept her eyes closed as she spoke. Her imagined memory began outside the windows of the car, where the Brooklyn streets moved at first in a blur of colors and sound she hadn’t seen in the Maryland suburbs. As the car got closer to Flatbush, it moved much more slowly—stop, stop, stop, go—the colors unblurred and the faces around which the colors were wrapped became more defined. Street noise burst into the car, which, except for the chatter of the boys, had been quiet most of the four-hour drive from Maryland. Her parents didn’t speak, hadn’t spoken to each other for more than a week. Both boys slept. Opal, awake, saw the city in reverse. She kneeled on the seat with the seatbelt still wrapped around her body and stared through the dusty window at the streets they were leaving behind. There, on the sidewalk, a woman with one foot on the curb and the other on the roadway, stopped midstride. She raised a hand to hail a cab. The arm, partially covered in green, split the woman’s face in two but the half of the face that Opal saw looked a little bit like her own. She opened her mouth to say “look,” but the car moved and she was thrown back against the front passenger seat, startling and jolting her father and stepmother, who in turn shouted, “sit properly,” and “sit down,” their voices in unison but their bodies objecting to any kind of unity.
The face Opal thought she saw was long gone from her memory but the imagined reunion she had created from it remained. She told Plum of the faceless mother and her other family, a mother with whom Opal always had unplanned meetings. She looked in always on her mother and a little girl and boy having an impromptu picnic on a slice of paved walkway in front of a brownstone. Why she chose Brooklyn and not Jamaica was not something she could explain. In truth, though, she had little memory of any house other than the one in Anchovy with the crawl space beneath the house and floorboards that dipped beneath her feet. Curiously, she didn’t ever picture her imaginary mother living there with her father.
Always, her mother unfolded a pink, child-sized picnic table, the kind that comes with a miniature umbrella and chairs, and the two children—the girl with plaits dangling over her ears and the boy with a truck in his hand—walked tentatively to the picnic set as if surprised no one else had come. In all the years she had imagined her mother and her family, the children never aged. Her mother arranged three folding chairs, and Opal always looked up at the front door and scanned the windows for a rustle of life inside. Always, her mother lifted a picnic basket and gave the children their dinner then placed two empty plates on the adult chairs, poured herself a glass of juice and sat down to watch the children eat.
It was only then that Opal let herself move forward and encroach upon the private meal. They were in the shadow of an enormous oak. Leaves softened the bricks under their feet and sunshine peeked through the branches, dotting the ground with bits of yellow. They would be a curious sight—a woman, a teenage girl, and a young boy and girl picnicking on a Saturday afternoon in the front yard of a brownstone, inches from the wide paved steps and the small porch.
Only after the meal would her mother invite her inside into a living room cluttered with children’s toys and books, stacks of magazines on the coffee table, framed photos scattered around the room, and sculptures and pieces of artwork that her mother had accumulated through the years. Her eyes were hungry, seeking an explanation for her mother’s long absence from her life, the life her mother had chosen instead of mothering her.
That’s where her reunion always ended, with Opal inside the house soaking up her mother’s life, her newfound family in limbo, her mother and the ageless children, watching her encroach upon their lives.
In Opal’s voice was a wistfulness and longing that hurt Plum. She was grateful for the dark, and she bent her head and wept for her daughter and herself, and for the simple fact that Opal’s chattiness and bravado couldn’t replace one simple fact: her father had not yet come to find and claim her.