And so to the inevitable, the man for whom Plum had searched for seventeen years, the rectory she believed she should know but couldn’t picture. Not that she had ever had any reason to visit the St. Paul’s rectory. Not that the rectory had a sign that labeled it as such. This was her mission and she took back control, pulled it back like a baby on a leash wandering too far out of reach.
“Address?” Plum stepped off the curb, waved at a passing taxi, forgoing the bus for the return journey to Flatbush. “We can’t put this off any longer. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
And so they sat like lovers after a quarrel, Plum pressed up against one door and Opal up against the other, each looking out her window at the city sidewalks, the oak trees growing in a small square of dirt, the food wrappers blowing against the concrete and brushing up against the tree trunks. Plum didn’t allow herself to think of Lenworth, to imagine the scene playing out, to imagine even that the police may be there searching the house for clues as to Opal’s whereabouts. But what of Alan and the girls? How to return after a day’s unplanned absence and selfish silence? How to explain to the girls that she had not run away, hadn’t been kidnapped, wouldn’t leave again without first letting them know. How to forgive herself for doing exactly what he had done: disappeared without leaving a trail of crumbs so she could be found.
Much closer, from inside the car this time, Plum heard, “this gate.” Opal leaned in from the door, shifting slightly toward Plum. “We’re here.”
Here was a narrow, three-story, brick brownstone on a narrow street—not what Plum would have imagined if she had bothered to think at all about the rectory. There wasn’t a gate at all, just two steps that led to a short walkway and the front door, a bright red that stood out against the dark brown brick. Before Opal pressed the bell, the door opened, and she stood with her finger suspended above the buzzer looking down at the boys. The taller of the two leaned against the door, his mouth slightly open as if he expected something less.
“You’re in trouble,” the other said, before turning and running away down the hall, screaming “Mommee,” as if that was the last call he would ever utter.
“Daddy left to look for you,” the second boy said before he too ran off in the same direction.
In spite of the boys’ call and footsteps padding down the hall, the house was quiet, like a mausoleum or museum, with photos everywhere. The photos were mostly of the boys, growing from infancy into the young boys they now were. But Opal was absent from the walls, present only in one family portrait that Plum couldn’t see clearly. Plum looked at the way he lived, the life he had crafted for himself without her in it, or perhaps more precisely, the life Pauline had crafted for him.
“So you think you just going to waltz back in here like this?” Pauline didn’t look up from the stove. “All night you out and just waltz back in like you’re a grown woman? You think this is one of those movies you always trying to write?”
The boys looked at Opal, their eyes round with anxiety.
“So you not going to answer? Hmm?” Pauline looked up then, acknowledging Opal with a quick glance, sweeping her eyes quickly to Plum. She hesitated, looked again at Opal and back at Plum, her eyes widening and eyebrows arching slightly. “Lawd. She’s the dead stamp of you and I didn’t even see the resemblance.”
“Yes.”
“So where you come from now? All this time, where were you?” Pauline directed her question—an accusation and insinuation that Plum had run off and left her daughter motherless—at Plum.
“Looking for the daughter he stole from me.”
“Stole?”
“Whatever he told you, it wasn’t the truth.”
“I see that now.” Pauline snickered. “He told me you were dead. Died in childbirth.” Pauline tapped the back of a chair. “Is him you come to see?”
Plum nodded.
“Well he not here. All day he gone, out there looking for you. We may as well sit.”
“I wanted him to tell her himself.” Plum pointed at Opal. “I wanted you to hear from him exactly why he did this.”
Pauline leaned in. “I want to know too. I need to . . . well, we need to hear it from you. All these years, this man lying to me. I wouldn’t trust a word he say now.” She looked over at the boys. “Upstairs, you two. Go on now. Now.”
Like a detective laying out the evidence, Plum brought out the mementoes from her bag one at a time. “He worked at my school then.” She tapped the old photo of him standing akimbo on a beach. Pauline sucked her breath in quickly as if she had heard that story before. Plum looked up. “Well, my aunt hired him to tutor me. He didn’t exactly teach me at school. But after we met he ended working there in the lab.”
Plum pulled out the footless doll, which she had dressed in a premature baby’s onesie.
“Betty. Where did you find this?” Opal fingered the matted hair, closed the wayward eyelid that refused to shut when the doll lay flat.
“Anchovy. We finally found the house in Anchovy. By then I’d been searching for seven years and by the time I got there you were gone.”
“You really did look for me?”
“Of course.” How she had looked.
“I didn’t like dolls,” Opal said. “Thought there had to be something more inside it, some reason to play with this plastic thing that couldn’t do anything on its own. I wanted to play with other children, not this plastic thing that couldn’t jump or skip or do anything.”
A week-old newspaper clipping. “This is how I knew where to find him. All this time, you were right under my nose. I wouldn’t have ever looked for you here.”
Another piece of paper, crumpled and creased, soft and yellow with age. Hospital discharge papers for Plum Valentine—the only physical record she had all these years of having given birth to a baby girl on September 16, 1993.
Plum wasn’t prepared for this, the quiet retelling of her story that would, to a silent observer, resemble a chat between girlfriends at a dining table. No screaming or anger or fireworks. Just acceptance and quiet. The truth settling like wet concrete into crevices, filling holes in the stories he’d told over the years, adding up to a truth so unbelievable that they believed.
Quiet. Contemplating, all three of them, the man they thought they knew, the holes in the family story, patched up now, the man who had guarded his life so carefully now exposed.
“What now?” Pauline asked.
“We wait.” Plum, accustomed to waiting, crossed her arms and settled back in the chair. She could walk away with what she had—her daughter, if Opal wanted to come—yet she wanted to hear his story. Not that his explanation would matter now. Still she wanted to hear it, wanted to measure it up against the grief he had caused, weigh it against the grief she had carried for so long it had fossilized into something hard and immovable, like petrified wood.
“No. We celebrate.” Opal pointed to the chicken already roasted, the pot of rice and peas, fried plantains on a platter—the result of her stepmother’s habit of cooking when nervous and anxious.
“That’s Sunday’s dinner,” Pauline said, but she moved as she spoke toward the platter. “But of course we should celebrate. It’s not every day a mother comes back from the dead.”
“Yes, we celebrate.” Plum smiled. “I forget I can do that now.”
In the bathroom washing up, Plum looked at herself in the mirror, smiling. For so long now she had carried her grief so solidly etched on her face that she had to practice smiling, first a slight lift of her cheeks then an exaggerated lift with full teeth and squinted eyes. “At last,” she told herself. “At last.”
But why not leave? As soon as the thought came, she dismissed it. Another hour or two and she was convinced she would have what she wanted: an answer, and then her three girls together. She pictured Nia and Vivian, heartbroken, and then wide-eyed and smiling, rushing toward her, their arms and legs wrapping around her own legs and heads pressing into her belly. The girls would have her promise: she would never leave them. She said it to her reflection in the mirror: I will never leave you. And what of Alan? She had no answer yet, but she was sure it would work itself out. After all, everything else was falling into place.