Plum woke with her breath catching in her throat, a feeling like drowning. Her nostrils were clogged, head and eyes heavy, and her body felt as if it had indeed struggled against a strong current all night. She had slept in fits, and now, barely awake, her mind foggy and body achy, she clutched at the space beside her, reaching for the bodies of Nia and Vivian, and came up empty. “No,” she whispered at first. Then, more awake, she said it again louder, all the while feeling around her, pressing her hand into the cushion, bumping up against the sloped back of the pew and her tote bag and back down to the soft velvet cushion. Panicked, she swung her legs down, stood up, looked around and made out the stained glass windows, the sunlight up against the thick, colored glass impossibly trying to filter through, and remembered where she was and why. She slowed her breath, closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, sucking on must and the lingering remnants of incense.
Across the aisle, Opal lay on her belly, one arm between her face and the cushion, her legs crossed at the ankles. Plum stepped back.
How close she had come to seeing Lenworth. And yet he hadn’t bothered to come at all. She was forgettable. Forgotten again. Not just Plum this time, but Opal as well.
For a moment, Plum panicked, pushed through a feeling of doom in which she pictured Lenworth packing in the night and leaving again once he heard her name. Plum tried to steady her heart, her mind, the pressure of blood pulsing through her arteries, easing the anxiety and fear settling into her body, the calcified heartache, the anger at the man who once had her heart and discarded it. Despair as deep as the feeling that urged on the stick figure in the boat.
Plum walked down the aisle and back, playing through various scenarios in her head, picturing Alan and Nia and Vivian. The girls, who had never spent a night away from Plum, would be waking now. Vivian was usually the first to rise and shake Nia awake. Tights and leotards and tutus and ballet and tap shoes. A flurry of disorder in the girls’ room. The girls walking out to something very wrong—the television silent and dark, without animation, without the artificial and tinny voices of their favorite cartoons, an absent mother, a worried and disheveled father, the kitchen silent and odorless, without the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla rising from the Saturday morning’s staple breakfast—cornmeal porridge—and the house itself worried into an uneasy quiet. Perhaps Alan and the girls weren’t home at all but out finishing up their fifth or sixth or seventh hour of searching for her, or at a police station describing her hair and face and body, Alan reluctant to accept that it was too early to file a missing person’s report, trying to make the police officer understand that every year on this date Plum spirals downward to a place he had never been able to pull her from, realizing too late that he implied Plum was chronically depressed, and realizing even later that depression and suicide were too often linked. Indeed they were. But Alan didn’t know about the stick figure in the boat on the mighty sea, disappearing to nothing. Had he known he probably would have scoured the waters, Brooklyn’s seaside towns that were accessible by bus or train—Coney Island, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach—and would have found out from Plum’s parents about a night she spent sleeping on a boardwalk bench in Coney Island, her eyes to the dark sea. He wouldn’t have hesitated to save her from herself.
But there she was, alive, disappointed but neither suicidal nor depressed, a woman once unforgettable to Lenworth, but now forgettable. She had Opal. Now hers. Plum had her now. And yet, she didn’t. Not fully. Not completely. There was, of course, no certainty that Opal would believe Plum’s version of events, no certainty that she would walk away from the only parents she had known. And still Plum wanted one more thing: to know the why of it all. Midstride, Plum stopped and looked up to the pulpit as if looking at the man she had come to see.
“What would you tell him?” Opal gave herself away, and walked toward Plum who had remained in front of the altar, looking up at an imaginary person. Plum didn’t answer immediately, and Opal sidestepped her, taking the marble stairs two at a time, brushing past the enormous eagle lectern and toward the pulpit. “It would be funny if you interrupted his sermon. Just stand right here.” Opal shouted “Hello!” and giggled, then looked again at Plum. “It would surely wake up the congregation. They never listen to him anyway.” She shrugged, took another step toward the altar and shouted “hello!” again. Her voice echoed in the near-empty church.
“Shh. Not so loud.” Plum stepped back, let her weight rest against the front pew. “Take me to see your father.”
“No.”
“This is important. There was a reason I wanted to see him last night. The time and the day were important.”
“I can’t go home now.”
“Why?” Concerned, even a bit protective, Plum stepped closer.
“Why don’t you go home and come back tomorrow? You can always talk to him after church.”
“Why don’t you want to go home?”
“Can’t you tell?” Opal’s emotions shifted again. “He doesn’t care about me. Even if he didn’t want to see you, he should at least have come to find me.” Opal waved her hand, trying to brush aside her earlier words. But her voice was choked. “Maybe he hasn’t missed me yet. But by now, he must have come in to say ‘happy birthday’ and noticed that I’m not there. And if I’m right, all hell is breaking loose.”
Plum moved quickly then, closing in on the altar like an animal let loose from a noose. “Happy birthday,” she said through sniffles. “You’re crying. Why does my birthday make everyone sad? Even you, a stranger.”
“Your father, is he sad on your birthday?”
“Yes. Sometimes I just wish he would forget the date altogether. Just let the day pass without acknowledging it. Maybe that would make it better for him.”
“You shouldn’t be sad because he’s sad.”
“I’m not. Besides, I’m too old now to be excited about my birthday. It’s just a day like any other.”
“Is the thing you’re crying about the same reason you came to see my father?”
“Yes.” Plum turned away, searching for a way to say the simplest of words, I am your mother. Instead she cried, the depth of emotion overtaking her body and surprising Opal, who stood away from Plum.
When Plum’s emotions settled, she wiped her eyes and turned back to Opal. “If you could wish for anything for your birthday, what would it be?” Plum’s voice was almost normal again, except it quivered and she spoke low as if she wanted no one, not even Opal, to hear at all.
“Tea by the sea.”
“How so?”
“When we first moved to Brooklyn, my father used to drive to Coney Island on Saturday mornings and walk along the boardwalk. He goes by himself. Except on my birthday. He takes me. Just the two of us. And afterwards we sat on a bench and drank tea from tiny little teacups. My stepmother’s porcelain cups with little flowers on the side. No matter how cold it was or how tired I was, it felt like everything was perfect. I was the perfect daughter. He was the perfect father. It felt like we were in a storybook. And nothing else that came before mattered. We didn’t really speak, but it felt just right. It felt like the world was all right.” Opal threw up her hands. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“You’re doing just fine. I understand.”
“That was the only time I drank tea. And I felt like a little girl from a different world. Like a princess drinking from those dainty cups. So I guess that’s my birthday wish, to feel like I matter to somebody.”
“You matter.”
“You’re crying again.”
“Sorry. I do that sometimes.” What Plum held onto was the simplest fact: Lenworth hadn’t forgotten one thing. Tea by the sea was Plum’s thing, the way she spent her Saturday mornings or holiday mornings when she was home from school: on a nearly empty beach with a thermos of tea, toast or fruit. Sometimes it was just Plum and the fishermen hauling in their catch. Sometimes Lenworth met her there, standing first at a distance and watching as she looked out at the flat and endless sea.
From her enormous tote, Plum removed two bottles of water, a box of apple juice, and two apple turnovers. “It’s not tea by the sea,” she said apologetically.
“Ah, breakfast. Guess you really came prepared to stay.”
A moment’s hesitation, then, “My girls like them.”
From the pew in front of Plum, “So what is the plan?”
“To see your father, of course.”
“Isn’t it obvious? He does not want to see you.”
“No. He doesn’t.” Plum hesitated. “Take me to him. This is my last chance. It’s either you take me to him or I make trouble for him here on Sunday. I’ll stand up during his sermon and tell the congregation what he doesn’t want them to know. And that’s not what you want. I can tell. You still want to protect him.”
“Who says I’m protecting him?”
“You’re here. You stayed last night. Protecting him from me. Or running away from something.”
“He’s coming.”
“I’m not so sure. He would have come by now.”
“He’s coming. I guarantee that he’s coming soon.”
“Why are you now so sure?”
“I just know it.”
“I like to have alternatives. If he doesn’t come by noon, then I want you to take me to him.”
“I’ll tell you where he is. But I don’t want to go home.”
“Ever?”
“Just not now.”
“What are you running from?”
Opal’s eyes slid away again. Plum looked away too, certain now that she had pushed for too much. She couldn’t mother Opal. Not just yet. Not without those four words: I am your mother. Opal gathered her things, her purse, retied her laces and fluffed the cushion beneath her.
“I’ll tell you where he is. But you have to promise not to tell him where I am. And I won’t tell anyone we were here together all night.”
“I can’t let you walk away like that. You’re not as old as you think.”
“Seventeen is old enough.”
“Believe me when I tell you that at seventeen, you’re not old enough. You’re not ready to do it all by yourself. You’re not ready for all the disappointments. You’re not ready to walk away from everything you know and live on your own.” Plum bent her head, trying to catch Opal’s eye. But Opal shifted her eyes again away from Plum, and her neck and shoulders followed.
“All right.” Hesitation. Disappointment. “Let’s just go now.” Opal led Plum through the passageway to the hall.
Unlike the church, the morning sounds—sirens and loud voices—bounced through the walls and around the cavernous hall. Red and blue lights, weakened in the daylight, danced against the windows. “Too late,” Plum said. “They’re here. Not just your father but the whole police force.”
“I told you he would come.” Almost immediately, Opal’s bravado wilted. “What’s the worst that could happen to us?”
“I don’t know.” Yet Plum did. She anticipated kidnapping or trespassing charges, Lenworth leaving in a hurry and taking her daughter with him. Again. “It’s not you who’s in trouble. It’s me.”
“Is the thing you want to talk to my father about worth getting arrested over?”
“Yes.” Plum, her face pressed up against the glass, said, “The church door. We could leave through the church door.”
“Maybe.” Opal, breathless, seemed excited now by the game, the one-sided hide-and-seek.
They went back through the church, not quite at a run, not quite at a trot, Opal ahead, thinking and talking too fast and trying to control her jagged breath. And failing.
At the back of the church, standing up against the red wooden doors, keyholes stared back at them. There was no knob to turn, no bolts to undo, just keyholes that needed keys.
“Then back to the first plan. We wait.” Really, Plum wanted only to hold on to Opal a little bit longer, to say what she hadn’t said earlier. The manner in which Lenworth had come, with police officers and flashing lights, guaranteed her nothing beyond the time she had with Opal there in the church.
“Not here,” Opal said. “Choir room. Upstairs. Come.”
Plum followed, extending the cat and mouse game, wanting Lenworth to come yet prolonging the search to avoid the police. And so they moved, Plum, who understood the consequences of being caught with a girl who they surely considered a runaway—kidnapping charges or something just as serious—following Opal, up the stairs to the room that was home to musical instruments and robes and books. Both breathless, anxious, waiting, hiding upstairs in the musty choir room.