Lenworth sensed a shift in the house. Nobody was looking out, anticipating and awaiting his return. The boys, gone now from the window, had moved on to other things, toys and the television, cartoons, no doubt. An entire day away and he returned empty-handed, with nothing—not even a theory he wanted to voice—to explain Opal’s disappearance. So he lingered in the twilight, plucking dead leaves from the rose bushes, picking up leaflets that had fluttered into the yard and wrapped around the plants. He watered the garden he tended—his garden, not Pauline’s—with the herbs and vegetables tucked away among flowering plants, the cherry tomatoes and red and yellow peppers simply a pop of color like any bloom. Pauline wanted only flowering plants. He wanted a garden like back home that would allow him to step outside and pick what he wanted—a few stalks of callaloo for breakfast, bell peppers and tomatoes for a salad, a sprig of thyme to season meat. In the twilight he did just that, plucked a handful of tomatoes the squirrels hadn’t yet found, two cucumbers, a bell pepper, and marched up to the house that no longer awaited his return.
The house was hushed, the television silent and the rooms drenched with yellow light. How unlike Pauline to leave an empty room lit. Had Pauline finally left and taken the boys? She had threatened it and he had managed for some time now to hold her back from moving on alone without him. Or so he told himself. Yet he knew her staying was not his doing, not because of her duty to him. It was stagnation, really, like a lake so polluted, so overgrown with scum and algae that the water didn’t ripple. It was, he knew, only a matter of time before she did indeed leave, and this business with Opal and Plum could have been the last offense she intended to suffer.
But there they were—his daughter and her mother, his wife and his sons—all sitting together around the dining table. A cake without candles was in the midst of Pauline’s good china. A roasted chicken, rice and a salad surrounded the cake. The boys were underdressed for a formal dinner but with the good behavior to match the occasion. No one spoke. No one ate. No one turned away from him. Even the boys, uncontrollable on most occasions, sat like mute dolls, marionettes waiting for a puppeteer to pull a string. It was too late now for Lenworth to turn away, to slide back toward the door.
“Good evening,” he said at last.
Only the boys answered, their words squeezed and constricted. Opal moved first, stepping toward him with her hands stretched out to take the produce he still held in the crook of an arm. She was like a machine, moving and turning away without a word, placing the tomatoes on the kitchen counter and returning to her place at the table, her back to him as if he had already come and gone from the room or was simply a powerless ghost.
He should assert himself, he knew, demand to know where Opal had been, throw Plum out of the house, his house. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his feet take a single step or his lips open to say what he wanted.
“Sit, eat,” Pauline said. “It’s Opal’s birthday dinner. We have a lot to celebrate.”
He couldn’t decide if Pauline was mocking him or goading him into saying something that would trigger a fight.
“Even her mother has risen from the dead. That alone is worth celebrating.”
She was indeed mocking him. But he pulled out a chair and sat between the boys, feeling dwarfed, like prey trapped between adult predators teaching their young to hunt. Except in the wild, the trapped animal—deer or antelope or giraffe—would have bolted, made an attempt to get away, put up a fight. Instinctively. But there he sat, a yielding prey, zapping the thrill of the chase, dampening their adrenaline. Or so he hoped.
The boys stared at the three women, anticipating a catastrophe, watching it unfold, powerless to stop it. Lenworth dipped the fork into the rice, acknowledging as he did that he had no appetite for it or the chicken or the plantains. In his dry mouth every bite tasted like a blob of wet paper, tasteless. Though he was the only one chewing, he kept on cutting into the meat, robotically lifting the fork and turning the food around in his mouth. Waiting. Waiting for someone to pounce.
Somewhere in the house, the radio was playing a medley of choruses he’d sung as a boy in Sunday School and morning devotion at both his primary and secondary schools. He caught snippets of the songs and tried to concentrate on them, tried to pull strength from his belief in God the Father as he had taught his congregation to do. In his head, he sang along.
But since he had never managed to escape mentally from situations he didn’t like, the song in his head petered out quickly. He had always managed to remain sharply present, to suffer fully every indignity meted out to him, every word of chastisement from family, friend, or foe. Now, he was intensely present, fully aware of everybody—Pauline’s exaggerated attempt to make the evening seem like an ordinary one, the boys cowered in silence, Opal cracking her knuckles and steadily gazing at her plate, Plum looking at him and waiting—and fully aware of everything—the garish gold cutlery, the plates with the peeling band of gold around the edges, chicken fat congealing in the gravy, Pauline’s lopsided cake hurriedly frosted with store-bought canned frosting. He wanted to turn off the hypersensitivity, but he couldn’t. Seventeen years of it and he was tired now of always being aware, always looking back over one shoulder then the other, above and beneath him, always waiting for that moment when it all came to an end. He hadn’t anticipated how the crescendo would come, that his daughter would disappear and reappear with her mother, on her birthday no less.
The reunion was like death: inevitable. And, as a priest, he should have been prepared for the inevitable. He should have known that this day would one day come. Not quite like this scene—Opal and Plum and Pauline and his boys sitting together like an extended family, not happy or unhappy, just there, together, aware of the bloodlines and other lines that banded them together, Pauline getting dessert plates and lighting candles left over from the boys’ birthday parties, Opal blowing out candles and smiling instead of making a wish.
“I have everything I ever wished for.” Opal looked at Plum instead of him, her eyes with a soft and tender look he’d only seen on a woman in love.