Like pebbles falling into a waterfall, all of Plum’s rehearsed speeches fell away. The normalcy of the moment—mother, father, stepmother, and brothers all sitting down like a blended family for a daughter’s birthday meal—unnerved her, burying the words she had planned over the years. A harsh quarrel, a wife throwing a fit or turning her away, even setting dogs loose at her heels—those were the reactions she expected. Yet, she sat again like a trained student at the boarding school that defiantly held on to its colonial ways, her hands in her lap, her knees together, her feet flat on the ground, waiting. A composed student, anxious to please.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Until at last, “Are you dead?” The younger of the two boys, Christopher, emboldened now by cake and frosting and the presence of his father, looked directly at Plum, his eyes unwavering, his lower lip hanging down, and his fingers gripping the edge of the table.
“Christopher.” Pauline’s voice was stern, yet it had no bearing on the boy.
He held Plum’s gaze. “Daddy said Opal’s mother was dead.”
“No, I’m not dead. See? Feel my pulse.” Plum’s hand dangled over the meat, inches above the exposed breastbone and congealed gravy. But Christopher pulled his hands back away from the table, burying them out of sight. “Only your father can explain what he meant by ‘dead.’”
“Dead is dead. People don’t become undead. Only in cartoons.”
“Christopher.” Pauline’s voice rose higher this time. “Enough.”
“But,” he said, “Daddy said she was dead. He lied.”
What Plum thought in that moment was not how Lenworth and Pauline would deal with the child’s outburst—dismissal from the table? A stern talking-to?—but how Lenworth had wiped away her life. She was no more than the scribbles on a chalkboard, removed with a single downward swipe and leaving only tiny particles swirling in the air and landing indiscriminately on everything within reach. Had he looked at her that night in the hospital, still fatigued from labor, drowsy from medication, and seen a dying woman or a woman struggling to live? And she had struggled. And she had lived, pushed and pulled and willed herself to climb from the weakness pulling her under, struggled until she regained the normal rhythm of breathing and came out on top. She had lived to hold the baby she wanted to call Marissa, had lived to look up at him and smile. Triumphant.
Her smile hadn’t mattered.
He declared her dead and walked away with her child.
Plum stood up now, struggling to free herself from the chair jammed too close to the table. “Dead?” The chair legs caught in the rumpled rug, and the chair tumbled backward. “Dead.” This time Plum gritted her teeth, her lips pulling back and flattening out across her teeth, no longer in the relaxed and slack-jawed ‘O’ of a question.
The rehearsed speech would come back to her later, long after she had left, and lay thinking through what transpired and what else she could have said, how she could have made her words singe his skin and heart. For the moment, though, all she felt was rage, seventeen years’ worth, pushing the word “dead” up her throat, across her tongue and through her clenched teeth.
“You left me there in the hospital for dead. Alone. Not even a note. Just took my baby and left. My baby. Just walked out like you went to the grocery store, picked up a baby and then walked on home. No thought at all for me, her mother, lying there after hours of labor. Not a thought about me. Just left me there and declared me dead. Dead.”
For the first time, Plum looked at him, really looked at him, his eyes downcast, the balding top of his head pointing toward her, his fingers laced beneath his chin as if to hold his head in place. Her eyes on him, he closed his eyes, not just blocking her out, not just blocking out the situation, but dismissing her again.
“You can’t even look at me. Look at me. Look.” But none of the pairs of eyes wavered. Opal, Pauline and the boys didn’t look away from Plum. Lenworth didn’t open his eyes to look up at her. “Such a shame. You still can’t even see me, the human being you left in that room for dead.”
Plum’s legs weakened and she reached for the chair, then steadied herself, straightened her back and forgot about needing to sit. Had she had a plan she would know what to do next, how exactly to make him suffer as she had every year since that September day when she woke to find her child missing and the hospital around her so quiet she thought the world had ended.
“That night . . .” She held her breath to prevent herself from crying. “All these years, I’ve thought of what it would be like to see you suffer. I’ve thought of killing you with my bare hands. Yes, I did. I’ve thought . . .”
“Boys,” Pauline said, “you’re excused. Go on upstairs.”
The boys left, reluctantly, looking up at Plum, as if they still, impossibly, thought she was dead, a zombie come to harm their father. She heard them in the hallway, a shuffle now and then, the sounds of children hushing each other, trying to remain quiet but making more noise in the process of it, listening to what they shouldn’t hear. Yet she continued laying out her desire to make him suffer, thinking as she did of families on the news, a simple quarrel exploding into something momentous, which, to outsiders with no emotion vested in the argument, was unnecessary violence, another moment to decry the lack of morals in society, the downward spiral of what was once a civilized nation. If only they knew how seventeen years of fossilized grief bred violent thoughts—to her, necessary violence—the desire to knock the smug look from his face, just punching him once in the stomach and watching him double over in pain, punching and punching until her arms tired and the anger and hatred and grief she felt all these years melted and dissipated from her body. And she said exactly that and more. “I could kill you even now.”
Attuned to sound—seventeen years of not sleeping deeply, of waiting to spring forth, of never again having something precious stolen while she slept—Plum heard the boys again rustling outside the dining room, their footsteps skittering across the floor. They were more hurried this time, frightened, Plum thought, of what she said. Yet, too incensed by his dismissal of her, his inability to look at her, to say a simple, if inadequate, “I’m sorry,” she continued laying out how she wanted him to suffer. “Slowly. Something like solitary confinement and make you watch over and over every miserable day that I have lived. But even that may not be enough, because just like now I can’t make you watch. So it would have to be something else. Something more painful than that.”
It was taxing, the effusion of emotion. Plum stopped again. “So what do you have to say to me? Just tell me why. Let me understand.”
Silence. The quiet in the dining room exploded. Plum could hear quite clearly the odd sound of the old-fashioned rotary dial phone carrying from the office at the front of the house across the living and dining rooms, and the boys’ hushed request for police to come to the rectory on Albemarle Terrace. It wasn’t Plum’s place to move, to undo the call the boys had made. It was, after all, up to Pauline and Lenworth to remind the boys that 911 was an emergency line, for true emergencies. And this was one, wasn’t it? The boys had their reasons: Plum’s anger and threats. And Plum, who had found and confronted her child’s abductor, had hers. But there was no record of the parental abduction here in Brooklyn or across the United States. After all, she hadn’t imagined he would have been here in Brooklyn, within reach, with the child he had taken from her.
The police came quietly, not with sirens blaring as Plum expected. She knew only because the door squeaked a little as it opened and the alarm sensor beeped. She looked at Pauline and Lenworth, waiting for their next move, waiting for either to go to the door, to pull the boys back, and her chance to move.
At last he moved, waited a few moments before calling out. “Oh, my God. Pauline. Come.”
Plum reached the front window in time to see the two boys sprinting into the arms of a police officer, then pointing back to the house, and moving away toward one of six parked cars.
“What now?” Opal asked, her voice a whisper.
“I’m going out there,” Lenworth said.
“Oh no you won’t,” Pauline said, turning away from the window as she spoke. “Not with all those guns pointing at you. Better to call the station and explain.”
“Hostage negotiators always call,” Opal said. “At least in the movies they do.”
“Hostage?” Plum asked.
They were quiet, all four of them. Plum contemplated the turn of events, what exactly prompted the boys to call, what the boys may have said that had led to this. She rearranged her face, her body, thinking that he had somehow arranged this other escape.
“We’re not criminals.” Lenworth stalked off as he spoke. “We have nothing to hide.”
“Who knows what those boys said,” Opal said. “You know how they can make up things. For police to respond like this they must have said something significant.”
“This isn’t a movie, Opal. This is not some Hollywood movie. Your life is not a movie.” Pauline, her hands emphatically punctuating every word, turned away from Opal.
Opal moved back as if each of Pauline’s words had indeed struck her physically, each one an individual punch to her torso. She went to the phone, picked it up, listened to the familiar buzz of the dial tone, and placed it back in its cradle. The others stepped forward too and stood around the old rotary phone, the four of them looking down at it as if willing a ring to emerge. When the phone tinkled, the sound as urgent as a kettle’s choking whistle, they sucked in a collective breath.
“Hostage?” Lenworth said. “There’s no hostage here.”
Plum and Pauline looked on at him, trying to decipher the full context of the one-sided conversation.
“No, no. I don’t know what the boys said but there’s no hostage here. Yes, she’s angry but there’s no kidnapping and no hostage. It looks like the whole police force is outside there, an overreaction to a little misunderstanding.” He paused. “So how can we clear this up?”
Lenworth put the phone back in the cradle. “They want us to come out with our hands up.”
“I’m not going out there.” Opal held out her hands, her fingers splayed exactly as the police would have wanted. “That’s how people end up getting shot.”
“This isn’t one of your movies.” Pauline sucked her teeth. “So who exactly is the hostage here?”
“They didn’t say.” Exasperated at her, his voice was clipped, almost formal.
“I don’t know that they know.” Opal again.
“Perhaps they do. When you didn’t come home, I reported you as missing. And once the boys called they probably put the stories together.” He looked at Plum, his eyes conveying his thought: Plum was the culprit here.
Lenworth returned to the window, shifted the curtain ever so slightly. “So we’re criminals now. Hunted like criminals.”
“Only one criminal here.” Plum looked pointedly at him.
“Blame your sons,” Opal said. “And yourself.”
So many things Plum wished in that moment—that she’d laid out a plan and involved Alan; that she’d waited to confront Lenworth at the Sunday morning service; that she had gone on home to Nia and Vivian; that she had taken Opal home to them instead of here back to him; that she had been able to let go of the wish to hear him say why. Mostly she wished that she had simply gone on home with her daughter and dared him to come take her away. Of course there was no guarantee that Opal would have gone along with her. Had Plum done that, she would have been the one charged with parental kidnapping. That wasn’t what she wanted.
For a minute Plum thought about the stick figure in the boat on the unending sea, rowing without oars, and disappearing to nothing. All these years later, the stick figure was still with her, still afraid of being left, still afraid of her love being pulled away from her without warning. Not his love, but the love of the ones to whom she had given life—Nia, Vivian, and Opal. Even then, so very near the end, she had no idea how it would turn out, who would show allegiance to whom; whether respect and gratitude for a father and his unconditional love would win out over the unknown—a mother who turned up out of nowhere and couldn’t even recognize her own face staring back at her; whether Nia and Vivian would accept unconditionally this newfound sister. And what of Alan, who asked an unknown number of times about the significance of the date, September 16?
She turned her back on them all and cried.