Lenworth looked at himself inside out. Not in the mirror at every inch of his skin, his bald pate and goatee, the arms with soft undefined muscles. But like a spirit looking down on the body it had left behind and the life the body lived. What he saw was a man who was always running away from something—from Plum, from Opal, from his own indiscretions, from Jamaica, and in a different way, from Pauline. Everything he’d run from had finally caught up to him. But cornered or not, staring like an antelope at the tiger about to pounce, he had one last fight left. He was a quick thinker, had always had to be. And now he thought of a way to come out of this intact, not just alive, but with the foundation of a life he could rebuild elsewhere. He had done it before, not once, but thrice, and would do it again, without Pauline if necessary, with her if she wanted to stick with him through this. He doubted she would do that now. Not again. With Pauline it had never been about love, not the sweeping, swooning kind of love, not infatuation and barely lust. It was an arrangement that grew out of his acknowledgement that Opal needed a mother and he a wife, a stand-in for a child beginning to notice his inadequacies as a parent. And Pauline, the sole unmarried girl among the group of six already-married sisters, fell for him like a bat baffled by the sun, a bee drunk on fermented nectar. When Pauline discovered her mistake, the inadequacies of their relationship and his own indiscretions, she held on. She believed his metamorphosis from sinner to saint, from saved to savior, and, instead of running back home defeated and deflated, she helped him build the public faÇade. That was then.
Now, huddled in one corner with Plum, Opal in another, the women had united against him. He, who controlled everything, had lost control. That, more than anything, was what disturbed him. That he had no power to stop them, the women in his family, from absconding with their love and respect for him, from ruining the facade Plum’s absence and Pauline’s presence had helped him build to contain his life. And that was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Controlling his own life. Directing his life, operating like a movie director, really, dictating how his story was told and when, shuffling the characters in and out of position, choosing the scenes worthy of illuminating and recording. Giving Plum a chance at a life that his baby (their baby) would have taken away, and in doing so removing any opportunity for Plum to regret having loved him. Giving Opal a mother to replace the one he had taken away. Controlling his life to the very end. Never again being that teenage boy who was returned to his mother, returned to a life and house that couldn’t be compared to the mansion in the shadow of the Greenwood Great House, the teenage boy who had his future taken away.
That Opal had chosen her mother over him, that she brought her here into his house, irked him more than Pauline’s betrayal. That the boys had betrayed the family, called the police to his home and in doing so catapulted a private family matter onto the local (and probably national) news, irked him too.
Another glance at the women and what he had missed smacked him square in the forehead. His sons hadn’t betrayed him. They’d given him a way out. He was the hostage here, the bug caught in a spider’s web, struggling to free itself. Like that bug, he had used up most of his energy trying to keep ahead of Plum and ward off his inevitable downfall. But freedom and a chance at a decent life were still possible if he regained control of the only thing he could ever control: how his story was told and when.
But it meant getting outside ahead of the women. It meant being the first to tell the police his story and clear up the misunderstanding that had brought the large police response to the rectory. The boy engineer in him recalculated the equations, weighed the known against the unknown. The police knew Opal had been missing. The police knew Opal’s mother was in the house threatening him. But they didn’t know how Lenworth came to be the only parent Opal knew.
He moved quickly, giving no warning of his intentions, away from the only woman he had loved too much and let go, away from the one he should have been able to love, away from the daughter with her mother’s eyes, whose very presence asked the question he was afraid to answer: why did you leave me? And on toward the front door, his hand on the knob, his fingers on the bolt, opening it slowly and quietly. The door eased toward him, the alarm beeped and he stepped out with his hands up, lowered himself to the ground as the police commanded and waited for them to rescue him.
“She let me go.” His first words. His last desperate effort to save himself and emerge with his reputation intact. After all, there was some truth there. It was Opal, the rediscovered daughter, who Plum wanted.
“Are there any weapons in the house?”
“No.”
“No guns?”
“No.”
He should have known the police would storm the house. Yet the speed with which they moved up the short walkway to the front door and inside surprised him. He didn’t look at his neighbors who’d stepped out to bear witness to his downfall, or search for faces of his parishioners. But he looked for his sons, his saviors now, realizing that the boys were all he would have left.