George drove them away from the small crowd outside the church and the coroner’s van that remained. Most of the police officers left too, cruising slowly through the congested street behind George’s car. Lenworth saw the city as he hadn’t seen it before. He saw the people—the slim, the fat, the playful teens, the toddlers holding on to the hands of adults walking too fast for their little legs, those who looked like the morning had caught them in the previous night’s clothes—rather than the street lights and the brake lights of slowing vehicles. He scanned the faces for Opal’s or Plum’s, hoping to see the familiar eyes, Plum’s easy smile. Would she still have the smile, the slight gap between her upper front teeth?
“Now, this business about the kidnapping,” George was saying, “you’re not going to say a word about that. As your lawyer and the church’s lawyer, I’m telling you not to tell the police anything about how you came to have custody. The most important thing is to find Opal.”
“All right.” But it wasn’t.
Outside the precinct, George turned around, leaning his head against the headrest.
“Now, is there anything going on at home that would make Opal want to run away? Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Has she ever run away before?”
“No.”
“Drug use?”
“No.”
“Alcohol?”
“No.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No.”
“I’m not asking you anything the police won’t ask.”
“I understand.”
“They don’t always make a missing teen report a priority at first. After all, she’s seventeen and teenagers run away all the time. I’m just telling you that so you understand what we may be dealing with inside there.”
“Thanks.”
The air was warmer now than it had been hours earlier when he stepped outside in his green robe and slippers, and cold again inside the air-conditioned building.
George was more right than wrong, and not satisfyingly so: That she was just another runaway. A teen with a secret life kept hidden from her family—whether a lover or addiction or pregnancy—details she was too afraid to share. A teen with a hunger for freedom or the illicit activities New York City promised. That he would find that she had been out with a boyfriend. That she would turn up in a day when the freedom she craved proved to be something else. That he should wait for her to come crawling back home.
George was more incensed than he at the scenarios the police officer laid out, at how the officer, in a few simple words, had managed to reduce Opal to a statistic: one dark-skinned girl among a large number of white- and dark-skinned teenage runaways. Later he would learn that there are upwards of 1.5 million teenage runaways a year, a staggering number that shouldn’t have surprised a priest accustomed to hearing confessions, more aware than others of the messiness of people’s private lives.
It was too late then to reverse the strategy he and George had agreed upon in the car, too late to tell the officer about Plum, to backtrack from the agreed-upon story about a seventeen-year-old runaway and invoke Plum’s name, shift the attention somehow from the supposed ordinariness of a teen runaway to the more controversial parental interference or parental kidnapping charge. He couldn’t without incriminating himself and not without painting another picture altogether of a dysfunctional home, and inadvertently confirming the police officer’s suspicion that Opal ran away to escape something at home.
Except for passing along Opal’s photo and descriptions of what she had been wearing—blue jeans, the uniform of American teens, and a T-shirt, the color of which he could not definitively say—there was little more he could do at the precinct. Go home and wait. She will call. Or she will return.
Lenworth stood on the sidewalk outside the rectory like a recalcitrant teen returned home by a friend’s parent. The tiniest flicker of movement at the window and he knew Pauline was just inside the door, with questions or an argument waiting to tumble from her lips. The story he’d told, years old now, was simple. Opal’s mother had died in childbirth. Surely not her name or how they’d met. That he had taken the baby and left Plum alone in the hospital, childless and without a job or a home, just so she could, in his mind, get on with the life he had caused her to lose, no. That Plum had come to reclaim her daughter, no.
Too late now. Seventeen years of lies had caught up to him, had arrested his life as he knew it. And it had arrested his and Pauline’s life together, permanently blocked any possibility of their moving forward in a meaningful way. Their life together could only be lived backwards now—she parsing through everything he had said and done, looking for the truth, and he doing the same but mining the details to find out where he could have backtracked to find Plum and righted his wrongs. He had never bothered to look for her, the mother of his first-born child, never enquired of her whereabouts or tried to find out if she had indeed taken advantage of his ‘gift’ to her and gone on to live a productive life. All these years in Brooklyn he could have opened a phone book, looked for someone named Plum Valentine and if not her then called other Valentines until he found her parents or someone who recognized the name. He could have called her aunt in Jamaica, of course without revealing his true name, to inquire of her whereabouts. But he hadn’t. Too ashamed. Too guilty. Too fearful of the outcome: losing everything and gaining nothing.
The curtain twitched again. He glimpsed the boys instead of Pauline, both kneeling on the couch and looking out at him standing like a statue in the driveway contemplating the old rectory, the borrowed house that soon would no longer be theirs. Nothing, he knew, would remain the same after this. Just as quickly as the boys appeared, they disappeared and reappeared at the front door, still in pajamas with cartoon characters on the front and back. Craig lifted his fingers in a listless, tentative wave, and Lenworth waved back, his own greeting just as anemic as his sons'. That the boys were there at the door meant Opal hadn’t returned, neither voluntarily nor involuntarily, and Pauline had spent long, anxious moments at the window looking out. He took another step, then two more halting ones, bent to pick up the neighborhood paper he never read, and stopped short of the step up from the sidewalk to answer the question that came at him from both boys, the younger boy’s question an echo of Craig’s. “Where’s Opal?”
“We’re still looking for her.”
“Did she run away?” Craig, again, the matter-of-fact one.
“No. No. She didn’t.”
“But Mommy said she ran away. Gone to live like a bum on the street is what she said.”
“No, no.” He couldn’t imagine Pauline saying that, going so far as to characterize Opal as a street child. “Opal’s just missing, that’s all.”
He suspected Pauline was just inside the door, waiting to catch him saying something he shouldn’t, something like, “Your mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or revealing a bit of truth that he wouldn’t tell her directly. He knew then that he wouldn’t go inside, wouldn’t stand before her and add another lie to the hill of lies he had told over the years. Since becoming a priest, he hadn’t lied, not exactly, not directly. Instead, he shut down the questions he didn’t want asked or which he didn’t want to answer and built up a wall of sorts around the parts of his life he didn’t want to talk about. It meant that Pauline knew much less than a wife should know, and, shut out of his life, hovering outside the walls he had built up around himself, she was lonely, alone.
“You should go on back inside. I just came to get the car and go back out to look for Opal. Go on inside and lock up.”
Just inside the door, on the small hall table, were the keys, and he grabbed them, then stepped back and hurried away to the car on the curb before Pauline could step out from wherever she was hiding and come outside. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed her pink slip of a dress floating around her body, her arms flailing as she waved at him to stop. But he angled the wheels and pulled the car out, nudging it carefully forward so as not to reverse, so as not to risk looking back, catching her eye and willfully ignoring her flailing arms. He cut the angle much too close to the car in front of his. The car lurched forward and he pressed the gas pedal, easing out into the street, slowing at the stop sign and moving ahead. Even though the windows were closed and he didn’t hear her call, the sound of his name coming from her mouth lingered in his head, loud and frantic. Len-worth. Len-worth. For a long while that was all he heard, not the reggae blaring from passing vans on Church Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, not the whoosh of traffic on the Belt Parkway, not the siren of an ambulance bearing down on his car and zipping around him at the very last minute. All he heard was his name, a prolonged and frantic call.