Tea by the Sea Read online

  As if they sensed her thoughts and knew her plans, no one left her alone for long. The party host danced her into a corner and across the room, into a circle of tourists who, from the set of their faces, had miscalculated the timing of their exit from the room. And when Plum eventually escaped the music and the movement, the guests staying in the room next to hers fell in as her escorts (or she theirs), walking as a unified group back to their respective rooms. By the time Plum escaped the seemingly endless party, it was too late to sleep, impossible even to quiet the thrum of the music in her head. She had little time left to pack, little time to think about her earlier plan to head out to sea. As if he knew, the concierge called and the staff came to take her bags and send her on her way for the early morning flight.

  At the airport, an older woman who was flying for the first time latched onto Plum, telling her about the grandchildren born abroad whom she hadn’t yet met, how lonely it was being a grandmother from a distance, limited to sharing second-hand stories with her friends. Plum wanted to share her own pain of being a mother without anyone to mother.

  At the check-in counter, Plum changed her mind and her ticket, pushed her return back by two days, re-rented a car and drove back through the city, up the long hill back toward Anchovy.

  First, she stopped at the primary school and asked the principal about a Barrett or Ramsey girl.

  “What her first name?”

  But when Plum couldn’t give that, the principal became suspicious and said simply, “I can’t give out any information like that.”

  And back to the houses around the one on the hill.

  “Canada,” one neighbor, an elderly woman with a hunched back, said.

  “No sah,” her husband replied. “All of the Ramsey dem in England.”

  “Gwennie tell me Canada.”

  “Gwennie no know nutten. When she ever get anything right?”

  “Dearie, ask Rose. The wife and Rose were friends. Third house past Nurse. The one with the big mango tree in the yard and the blue verandah.”

  And on to Rose’s house with its blue verandah and red steps.

  “Friends? She never tell me nutten. Is after them gone I hear that they pack up and leave. Friends?” Rose sucked her teeth and shook her head. “Never see no friend like that.”

  With each conversation—sweetest little girl and the baby boy too; never did hear where the wife come from—Plum’s despair grew, pushing her back to where she had been immediately after Lenworth disappeared. She couldn’t help but think he knew she was coming, had perhaps heard her voice on the radio or heard from someone else that she was searching for him, and had in return gone underground like a species of marine life living deep within the sea.

  Inside the airport itself, Plum couldn’t see the sea, but she felt it calling her. Yet, she couldn’t answer the call, and when she could indeed see the sea from the small plane window, it was too late, much too late to go.

  Looking out the window, she imagined a stick figure adrift in a boat. A castaway. The teenager who had been tricked into going to Jamaica in the first place by her own mother. The teenager who found trouble on the island and later found that her parents were unwilling to welcome home an unwed daughter-turned-mother. Not a true castaway. Not just yet. By the time she returned to the rented cottage to find her Mr. Barrett, Lenworth, gone, she was in her mind a true castaway, twice-abandoned by her mother and once by her lover.

  Plum left that castaway, that abandoned girl, behind in Jamaica—a stick figure in a boat on the vast sea below, rowing without oars, her crying drowned by the plane roaring above. A speck in the distance disappearing to nothing.

  9

  A transformed Plum came back to Brooklyn, back to the neat lines in immigration that snaked toward stern and focused immigration agents. The female customs agent who greeted Plum spoke through her teeth, verifying Plum’s departure and her return, questioning the purpose of her visit, which Plum couldn’t, even if she wanted to, truly reveal. “Visiting family,” she said, even though she hadn’t seen a single relative or person she knew and the empty house and doll were the closest she came to seeing family.

  Nothing to declare. No rum. No ackee. No breadfruit. No fried or escoveitched fish. No illicit scotch bonnet peppers or bush teas. Only a one-legged doll that was of no interest to anyone but Plum.

  Outside, organized chaos. People as busy as ants in a disturbed anthill, pulling up and easing away from the curb, hefting suitcases, exchanging kisses and hugs, and shuffling passengers in crowded cars. Plum stood alone, sucking in the exhaust, acclimating to the blaring horns and the rapid and constant movement that defined New York. She wanted to be somewhere else, or if not to slow time and live each moment deliberately. Then she stepped off the curb into a slowing taxi, regretting immediately that she had chosen to step away from the curb and into that specific car driven by a Nigerian—inquisitive and chatty—who looked up and back at her through the rearview mirror each time he spoke. “Coming back from the islands?”

  “Jamaica.”

  “Yeah, mon.” He laughed and looked up at her again, checking whether his accent made her laugh as well. “I love everything Jamaican. The women,” he looked up again, giggling like a school boy, “reggae, ackee and saltfish, jerk chicken, curried goat. Everything. Everything.”

  Plum turned away instead, toward the window and the blurred lives on the other side of the highway, the family cars zipping by the taxi, carrying families. That was what she wanted—a replacement for the loneliness (though she felt alone rather than lonely). A child to take the place of the one she never got to raise. A husband to take his place. A new Plum to replace the castaway, the stick figure left adrift in a boat.

  And so she detoured to Alan’s place on East Thirty-Third Street, #237, to the rowhouse his parents had passed on to him when they moved to Florida, and which he was slowly converting from three distinct apartments to a single-family house. He had repainted the front door a bright green, and it stood out among the drab brown front doors of the neighboring houses. Dust hung in the air, escaping from under the weight of their feet and her luggage on the tarpaulin, floating up from the thick plastic wrapped around the living room couches and tables.

  “You’ve done a lot,” she said.

  “My father was a good a teacher. But you know it’s not all my work, right? Hired a company to do the heavy work.”

  But what Plum remembered was Alan complaining about his weekends during his teen years given over to his father, who thought he was grooming his son to take over the family business. Alan had learned much that his father taught, except for the love of it.

  “Three bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom finished. Just the kitchen and basement left.”

  “All for you alone?”

  “For now, yes.”

  Plum knew what he meant. Through the haze of dust, they walked to the unfinished kitchen. She fingered the tiled countertop, stopped to gauge the depth of the sink, the roominess of the space, the natural light filtering in. “Oh. You built a deck. Much better than the window alone.”

  “It beats walking down to the basement to get out to the backyard.”

  “Convenient, yes.”

  Upstairs to the three finished rooms, light yellow on the walls of one, peach on another, ecru on the walls of the third. She opened the closets, walked from window to wall as if measuring the width of the rooms. On to the bathroom to look at the reclaimed claw-foot tub and glassed-in shower, the black-and-white subway tiles, and back to the yellow room. “I can see our baby in here,” Plum said, looking at him, her gaze unwavering, her lips open slightly as if to pull her words back at the first sign of rejection.

  In the end, she chose him, instead of he her, and he was content to let it be, to let what he thought was inevitable fall into place. “Me too.” His grin swallowed the rest of his words.

  Plum didn’t tell Alan about the missing baby girl or Lenworth. In her mind, Alan was a stand-in for the missing two, the baby gi
rl especially. But she didn’t want Alan to think that she was motivated by anything more than love, and she wanted a clean slate, not one tainted by the past.

  In the days following Plum’s return, the private investigator went again to Anchovy to confirm Plum’s news. He, too, toured the empty house. And he inquired of the neighbors, the postmistress, the cooperative bank, the local schools. He too came away with nothing concrete.

  “No man, is Canada him gone.”

  “He have people in England. There him gone.”

  “Him gone a foreign.”

  “Me hear say him get work on a ship. Me no know where the wife and the pickney dem gone.”

  “The wife? Pauline. One day him come back wid har and say a him wife. She never talk much so I don’t know where she come from or where her people are.”

  He couldn’t determine if the residents in Anchovy were telling the truth or how one man could disappear so many times without a trace.

  “Part of me thinks they’re covering for him,” Plum told him. Unlikely as it was that the entire community had conspired to cover for Lenworth, the thought lingered. “And the other part thinks he heard I was looking for him. This whole business about him going to Canada or England or getting a job on a ship is just a lie. And he’s there on the island somewhere.”

  “Could be.”

  “No more bad news,” Plum told him. “Only so much I can take.”

  She moved forward with her plan: A quick wedding—a brief ceremony in a public garden and a low-key reception in a church hall—followed a year later by a birth. A year of forgetting the lost child, the one-legged doll and how close she had come to finding the child who had been taken away. Forgetting until the moment the babies—twin girls—eased their way into the world. Vivian and Nia. Even then, the minute they were born, they looked exactly as she remembered her first born. Plum wouldn’t, and couldn’t, let them out of sight, not for a minute or two. The old fear returned. There was no forgetting. The stick figure in the boat was still with her, still afraid of the past repeating.

  PART 3

  Belonging

  1

  Opal didn’t know it yet, but at fourteen she was living her mother’s life—at least partially—looking for a way to matter and to be loved or lovable. For she had once been lovable and so precious her father named her after a gem with an iridescent rainbow of colors. The way he told it, he alone was responsible for her name, he alone who thought her precious. She believed.

  Yet, here they were, again at a crossroads, a boarding school in Jamaica like an immovable mountain between Opal, Lenworth, and Pauline.

  “I’m telling you, high school in Jamaica is the best thing for her.” Pauline had a way of punctuating her words with her hands or whatever object she held. She moved her spoon now, raising it up and down like a drummer without a drum.

  Lenworth, with his head bent and palms like a tent in front of his face, said no. “You’re not sending my daughter away like somebody dead-lef’.”

  “So you going to leave her to run around like a vagabond?”

  “Vagabond?” He looked up, face wrinkled, one corner of his mouth lifted scornfully.

  “Maybe not vagabond.” Pauline pulled her word back. “But you know what I mean. She can’t just do as she please. You have to set some rules.”

  Lenworth looked at Opal, and quickly looked away, his words dissolving like honey in tea. His daughter, he thought, and corrected himself. Her daughter. He stressed her, for Opal had morphed into a life-size version of Plum, a permanent reminder of the woman he should have loved to the very end.

  “Tell her where you go after school.”

  “The library.” Opal spoke in a whisper, the pain of not being believed evident in her voice.

  Lenworth knew it to be true, for he had followed Opal from school at least once to find out for himself exactly where she went and why. He didn’t tell Pauline, though.

  “Your homework is never done.” Pauline, incredulous still, raised her palms then dropped them back on the table in exasperation. “You spend all evening in your room doing homework. So what do you do at the library?”

  “I write movies and plays.”

  That, too, Lenworth also knew to be true. He had found and read through Opal’s stack of marble notebooks, filled with one-act plays and half-written movies. Once he found the notebooks, he went back time after time to learn about the world his daughter created, stepping away each time thinking that his daughter hated her life and escaped into her own altered reality to get away from the present.

  Opal’s movie that week was about the Tainos, a group long extinct from Jamaica, decimated by hard labor and the diseases brought to the island by Christopher Columbus and the cohort of explorers, diseases for which their bodies had built no immunity. In her notes, Opal had written that she wanted to return the Tainos to Jamaica. In one corner she had described the small house in Anchovy, the long ride down Long Hill toward the coast, the walled compound at the foot of Long Hill and the sea directly behind the wall. She imagined the sea butting up against the land for the concrete wall and the thick rows of trees that had grown up around the wall blocked outsiders from seeing what went on within the walled compound. Opal wanted to set her movie in an inlet behind the walled compound, with the city of Montego Bay to the right and to the left the jagged coastline stretching toward Negril. The script was still in its infancy, with Opal unable to move beyond the thought of it, unable to determine who would win her war: the Tainos returning to an island that wasn’t necessarily or specifically their ancestral land or the descendants of African slaves who had been brought to the island hundreds of years earlier. She hadn’t figured either how to write herself into it. Her movies had one basic storyline—Opal the savior, needed, accepted, lauded.

  “Discipline,” Pauline was saying. She had turned to Lenworth, and she punctuated her words with a slap of her fist against her palm. “She needs to learn how to be disciplined, how to get her priorities straight. And the only place I can think of is a boarding school in Jamaica. That private school we’re paying for isn’t doing a thing.”

  “Yes,” Opal said. “I want to go.”

  “No.” Lenworth spoke more forcefully than he intended. He softened his voice and repeated, “No.”

  “Why not?” Pauline dipped a tea bag once, twice, then squeezed it against the spoon. “You think she too good to go to a school in Jamaica?”

  “I told you already. You’re not packing up my daughter and sending her anywhere.”

  “But, what if I want to go?” Opal’s voice was small, like that of a girl not used to speaking her mind, and afraid of her words disappointing the listener.

  Lenworth looked up at Opal and again pulled his eyes away. Again that plea in her eyes, that desperate look, so like her mother’s. And again, he closed his eyes, tented his fingers in front of his forehead. He pictured Plum, the misery of her teenage years at the boarding school, how she longed to be back at home. Yes, Plum’s situation was different; she had been tricked into going to Jamaica. But he wouldn’t think of Pauline sending Opal away, wouldn’t think of Opal going that far and discovering the truth he had been hiding all this time. “No,” he said again, more forcefully this time. “You’re not sending my daughter away.” Only he did not address Opal’s question.

  Lenworth knew there was something more in Opal’s plea, a longing for something else. Lenworth could compartmentalize Opal’s life in two segments: before America and after.

  Before America, Opal was a tomboy, partial to flicking marbles in the dirt, needling her way into a cricket game, fashioning cars and trucks from boxes and bits of wood, tramping through the bush with the neighborhood boys to explore a murky pond or cave. She played with a doll just long enough to pull its legs from its body to investigate the hollow space inside and remove more easily the thin pine needles and scraps of sawdust she had fed through the doll’s tiny mouth like noodles. Then, she had no interest in fashioning doll’s clothes,
or curling or braiding its hair. Back then, when he pictured her as a teen, he pictured her as an athlete, more at home competing in a game than confined in a classroom or any domestic setting.

  But, as it turned out, he moved the family long before Opal’s life unfolded fully. Nearly seven years had passed since Lenworth, Pauline, Opal, Craig and the newborn baby left Jamaica for Greenbelt, Maryland. They came at the end of August when the grass was still green, the trees full and fragrant, and the humid, sun-filled days suggested nothing of the chill that came two months later. Neither the promise of a new beginning nor the novelty of an immigrant’s life warmed Lenworth and Pauline’s frosty relationship.

  But Opal, who was too young to understand her father’s transgressions, too young to question his repentance and who had no reason not to believe in his dream or his transformation to a repentant seminarian, embraced the small apartment—two bedrooms, a den that was barely big enough for a twin bed, and a balcony, the only outdoor space that belonged to them—to which her father had ferried his family.

  The apartment was nothing like the house in Anchovy, with its small, adjoining rooms and expansive yard. The trees in the complex, ornamental instead of fruit trees, weren’t meant for children to climb. And, indeed, if there were no apples or mangoes or star apples or almonds to pick, what was the use in shimmying up a tree trunk and stepping out onto a branch twelve feet away from the ground? Still, the balcony was more spacious than the den, the quadrant of a room in which Opal could barely turn around without hitting her knees or elbows on something. It was the space, or lack of it, that tempered her boyishness.