Tea by the Sea Read online

  Lenworth, with Opal in his arms, headed downhill. At the gate, he turned left, looking for the blue house with the rusting zinc roof, a verandah with a white railing, and clothes on a line in the back.

  When he came up to the blue house, he hesitated, waiting for a dog’s bark or the scuttle of paws on the grass, then called out, “Hello.”

  The woman, the front of her dress wet from washing, came out onto the verandah. She wiped her hands on the already wet dress, stopping for a moment to push aside a cat that had sidled up beside her. She was, as he suspected, older—perhaps in her seventies.

  “Morning, ma’am,” Lenworth said as he walked toward her. “How you do?”

  Closer to her, he said his name, “Lenworth,” and held out a hand to grasp hers. “I’m staying up there at the Ramsey place.”

  “Sister Ivy. Yes, I heard that family come back to take over the place.”

  “Yes, me and my daughter.” He looked down at Opal, who slept with her head on his shoulder. “Don’t want to bother you. I come down here ’cause I’m looking for somebody to help with the baby girl. Just during the daytime.”

  “Where her mother?”

  “Died in childbirth.” How easily Lenworth’s story formed.

  “Sorry to hear. Such a painful thing to have to grow up without her mother.” Sister Ivy also looked at Opal, at the wisps of hair visible under her hat and her tiny fist laying on Lenworth’s shoulder.

  Lenworth felt a pang of guilt, but he didn’t let on. He simply shifted his eyes away as if he were blinking away tears.

  “What you feeding her?” Sister Ivy shifted the conversation so easily it seemed like a practiced move.

  “Formula.”

  “Arrowroot porridge good for young baby. Easy on the stomach.”

  Lenworth nodded as if he knew about feeding a baby arrowroot porridge or even how to make it.

  “Let me see. Miss Daisy daughter looking work. Gwennie too. Let me ask them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  The morning was already half-over and the sun high in the sky, but here he was returning home, climbing the hill and looking again at the old fowl coop. Each time Lenworth climbed the hill, the old chicken coop, which was enclosed with chicken wire fencing and unfinished wood, bothered him. It was too close to a cherry tree, and where it stood, to the right of the house, it seemed out of place. Had he been the original builder, he would have put it behind the house, out of sight. But there was no room in the back; the house itself backed up to a cliff and the sliver of space between the cliff and the house was wide enough only for a small body to pass. Lenworth had two options: tear it down or put it to good use. He wouldn’t be raising chickens. He was sure of that. Neither would he raise pigs or goats or even bother with a dog.

  Lenworth sat on the verandah in an old rocking chair with Opal. That too, sitting on a verandah in the middle of the day, was something he would never have had time for in his past life. If not teaching, he would have been tutoring, and setting aside every extra dollar to work toward becoming an engineer. He wouldn’t think about that past life, how he had come to be here in Anchovy alone with the baby girl, who at that moment was scrunching her face as if to cry. He moved her to his chest, stood up, and walked the length of the verandah. Lenworth put his past firmly behind him, patted down and buried his guilt, and went on with his thoughts on how to reestablish his life.

  When Opal fell asleep again, he put her inside and went to the fowl coop. Inside, he looked around, up at the roof and down at the sagging wood frame. He imagined it as something else: a workshop where he could remake things. For the moment, he would shelve his long-held dream of being an engineer and instead return to an old habit of turning other people’s garbage into something of value.

  By evening, Lenworth had acquired and spread fresh sawdust on the ground, reinforced the sagging wood frame, built a work table out of an old door, and unearthed from the cellar and the crawl space beneath the house the first pieces of unwanted things he would convert into something useful.

  Sister Ivy, halfway up the hill, called out hello. Lenworth jumped. He had fallen asleep on the verandah. Inside, Opal cried—the sound full-throated and loud. It had been years since he had worked like that—cutting overgrown grass with a machete and hauling old lumber from the crawl space beneath the house. Every muscle in his body ached.

  “Come, come,” he said to Sister Ivy. He rubbed his eyes and went to get Opal.

  Back on the verandah, the crying baby cradled in his arms, he pointed to a matching rocking chair. “Sit down, please.”

  “Porridge for the baby.” Sister Ivy held out a bag with a bowl inside. “It can’t be easy for you. Alone with a baby so young.”

  That was the pity and concern Lenworth expected. Without question, he would not have earned Sister Ivy’s empathy so easily had he been a woman. His sister hadn’t earned it—not even their mother’s—and his mother hadn’t earned it from anyone else either.

  Sister Ivy held out her hands for Opal, who still wasn’t soothed. “Porridge still warm,” she said. “Put some in a bottle.”

  By the time Lenworth returned to the verandah, Opal was calm, lying still and looking up with unfocused eyes at Sister Ivy. She drank the porridge easily, lying in the old lady’s arms as if she belonged there.

  “So far away from family,” Sister Ivy said. “Why you come back here?”

  “Where else to go?” He bent his finger back and listed his reasons. “Only child. Mother died. Father, gone abroad long time. No family to speak of.” Only the third reason he listed was true. As he spoke, he knew he was invalidating and burying his brother, sister, and mother, who were all indeed alive and well in the southeastern part of the country.

  “Went to school with Walter. He your father or uncle?”

  “Uncle.”

  Sister Ivy nodded. “Good people them. Good people.”

  Lenworth let her believe his surname was also Ramsey, allowing the second untruth—that Walter was his uncle and not a cousin—to morph into the community’s collective truth. He became Lenworth Ramsey in that moment. Up until then, he hadn’t contemplated a whole new identity, but now he assumed it wholeheartedly and developed a new piece of his autobiography that explained why his legal surname was Barrett. His excuse would have made his mother weep, though, for he knew that if anyone ever asked, he would have said that his mother had given him the wrong man’s surname to protect her own indiscretions.

  “Life hard when you don’t have anybody,” Sister Ivy said. “Until you find somebody, I can watch her in the daytime.”

  “I don’t want to take up your time.”

  “No, no, don’t worry yourself. My children gone abroad and no grandchildren here for me to look after. So what to do with myself? I plant my garden. That’s all. I used to run the basic school up the road there, so taking care of her is nothing at all.”

  He looked at Opal, asleep, content, pressed against Sister Ivy’s bosom. For the second time that day, he felt guilt at what he had done, what he had taken away from Opal. But it was too late. Once he left the hospital with the baby and without Plum, there was no returning. He couldn’t face Plum. Not ever.

  3

  Plum had nothing left in Brown’s Town, and yet she stayed in the cottage, hopeful Lenworth would return, and dependent on the kindness of her landlady, Mrs. Murray. The landlady was indeed kind, an artist who never forgot her meager beginnings and who gave freely of her time, her money, and herself. She fed Plum and let her stay in the cottage in exchange for household help. Mrs. Murray became mother and father, too, for Plum refused to call her parents, declining to let back into her life the people she believed had already abandoned her twice, or the aunt with whom she had lived before setting up house with Lenworth.

  Mrs. Murray inquired of the school on Plum’s behalf for a forwarding address, a hint of where Lenworth had come from or where he could possibly have gone. She, too, came away
with nothing. The school wouldn’t or couldn’t release any details, not to Mrs. Murray, and not to Plum, who returned to the school time after time to plead for a morsel of information about her Lenworth, their Mr. Barrett. Plum got nothing, save for an ill-timed lecture from the school’s guidance counselor, a British expat who had no business guiding or counseling and whose sanity the students had long questioned.

  In those days after Lenworth’s disappearance, Plum looked for him so fiercely that she could have been mistaken for a mad woman, a schizophrenic, who’d refused medication in favor of the voices that came at will. She wandered the streets, peering into buses and cars, locking her eyes onto the faces within, looking for the goatee, the small eyes beneath the bushy eyebrows, the hairline already receding even on one so young. But the folks who stared back at her could offer nothing.

  For two months, Plum walked.

  She visited a bush doctor, who prescribed bush baths to beat away the curse. After all, what but a curse on a mother could have made a father take off with their child?

  She went to Wednesday night revival at the neighborhood Pentecostal Church. She answered the call to the altar, rose, and waved and wobbled and dipped in spirit, writhing on the floor and, surprisingly, babbling in tongues. She prayed morning and night, prostrating herself in the morning sun and in the moonlight, asking for a small window of hope. She succumbed to a riverside baptism, even. And still nothing.

  She rode to Lluidas Vale, a place she thought he had mentioned living in once. She rode on through the town, which was no more remarkable than any other small Jamaican town, and looked out the window of the minivan at the sugar cane lining the roads of the expansive valley, hopping out on the very outskirts of town, just as the little shops built at random began popping up. The shops were like any other she had seen—the proprietor and her goods behind a partition built with chicken wire and wood and a small opening through which the shoppers poked their heads and spoke. The local postmistress, purveyor of secrets, had never heard his name, couldn’t recall a young fellow of that name receiving mail there.

  “What his mother name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You know his father first name?”

  “No.”

  The postmistress’s gaze shifted too, away from Plum’s face, down to her still-swollen belly. “The baby father?”

  “Yes.”

  Plum didn’t want her pity. She set it aside as if it were something physical, a weight she could remove by hand from her body and cover under a rock.

  And on to Greenwood in Trelawny, another place where Lenworth said he had lived. Except for the great house for which Greenwood was known, it, too, was unremarkable. A strip of a town split in two by the main road to Montego Bay and larger, more wellknown towns a short distance away on the western and eastern sides. Again nothing. No one Plum asked knew of him.

  All that and still she came away with no trace of where he had lived or where he could have gone.

  Plum lay down to die. She chose the midday sun as her weapon, heatstroke and dehydration as the ultimate causes of her death. She lay on a narrow concrete wall, a remnant from the pimento estate, with her arms at her side, her back flat against the concrete and toes pointed skyward.

  But her timing wasn’t perfect. The gardener came to deliver yam and sweet potato he’d pulled from the ground in a nearby field the landlady leased. He did what he thought best: sprinkled Plum with water to lower her body’s temperature and carried her onto the verandah, away from direct sunlight. And he called the postmistress and Nova Scotia Bank, the secretary in the office at St. Mark’s Anglican Church, and the mechanic who serviced Mrs. Murray’s car. He called the dry goods store. One by one the message circulated and not thirty minutes later, Mrs. Murray returned to find a groggy Plum, sitting up but listless, muttering gibberish.

  Overnight, Mrs. Murray nursed Plum, and in the morning, with the sun still behind the flame of the forest, the hibiscus blooms uncurling and opening up again as if to greet the day, she pulled Plum back to reality, dismissed the coddling and pity. “You can’t stay here forever. You have to go on with your life.”

  “What life?”

  “You think you’re the only woman who ever lost a child? Maybe not the same way. But it hurt just the same if you lose a baby at birth. Five times I went through labor. Only two children I raise. So I know it’s hard. But you can’t just give up on your life so. Not because of a man.”

  “The baby . . .”

  “No. Listen. Some people will tell you that everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan for you. But I won’t tell you that. I can’t imagine that the merciful God the church preaches about would plan anything like this. But the one thing I know for sure, this is the one life you have and you have to make it work.

  “So two things I’m going to do for you. The first one is to get you back home to your parents. It’s not my business but you’re too young to be wasting your life like this. You hearing me?”

  Plum nodded.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to buy a ticket for you to fly back home to Brooklyn. That’s where you belong, with your parents. And the second thing is that I’m going to hire a private investigator—my son—to look for Lenworth and the child. My son just retired from the police force. Only one thing I ask from you. Go on to university. Get a degree and go on with your life. You hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The money, it’s a loan. If you finish university you don’t owe me a thing. If you don’t get a degree, you pay me back for the plane ticket and the private investigator. You understand me?”

  “Yes.”

  4

  Three months on from the greatest loss of her seventeen-year life, Plum stood at the Donald Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay thinking of herself as a failed hunter who set her traps and caught nothing. She contemplated two things: the early Christmas travelers surrounded by their island carvings, straw baskets, and rum; and her own empty hands. In truth, Jamaica was Plum’s trap, sort of, a trap she fell into when her parents reengineered her life without her knowing it and sent her away as if she hadn’t mattered at all. In one simple act, her parents nipped their teenage daughter’s behavior before it got out of hand, before she morphed into an uncontrollable teen headed for juvenile prison or an otherwise derailed youth. They acted swiftly, decisively, and without warning. Like training a bonsai plant, containing it before it followed its willful nature. Like clipping the wings of a bird to prevent it from escaping its cage and flying away.

  Plum flew to Jamaica, her parents’ island home with which they had a complicated relationship. Her parents loved the island but refused to live on it. Instead, they adopted Brooklyn but talked constantly of going back home to live out the last of their days, extolling the ease of island living, yet visiting and, while there, talking incessantly of the ease of things in Brooklyn—customer service and banking and shopping and dealing with government bureaucracies. They visited and talked of getting away from the family and friends who acted as though living in America meant her parents could bankroll their lives. And it was the place they held up for wayward children, as in: “You children born in America have life too easy. You don’t appreciate what you have. You think when I was your age I could waste food like that. Sometimes all we had to eat was dumpling and butter, what we call slip and slide. And you here throwing away the chicken because you want a hotdog.” And it was indeed the place where misbehaving children were sometimes sent as a last resort by parents frustrated with the negative influences in and around Brooklyn schools, and fearful that a disrespectful child would report abuse if punished.

  That was Plum’s fate. What contributed to her ouster from Brooklyn was the actions of Sandy, her close confidante and constant companion, who happened to be at a basement party raided by police for suspicion of drugs. Plum’s guilt was purely that of association, but her parents feared what could have been and acted upon the long-established threat they held u
p to their wayward child. Except they kept the plan secret from Plum.

  Plum packed just the ordinary things: the obligatory gifts—soap, deodorant, perfume, plastic sandals, cheap plastic watches—along with the packaged breakfast foods that she sometimes preferred over Jamaican breakfasts of boiled ground provisions and ackee and salt fish, and callaloo and salt fish. All of that came before that flight out, before her parents clipped her wings, or in the midst of it, when Plum didn’t yet know the details of her parents’ plan, when Plum hadn’t yet begun to hate her parents for shipping her away without warning. And she left the precious things to which she soon expected to return: a locked diary beneath her pillow; a gold necklace with her name; a set of Cabbage Patch dolls she had outgrown but which remained on her dresser and shelves, a reminder of childhood years not very far behind.

  Beneath the plane, the sea shimmered, the water black, then blue-black, then blue, the dots of life on the island finally emerging as houses and hotels and vehicles and the sprawling airport. Her aunt and cousins met them there and they loaded the suitcases—four—into the back of a pickup truck. Plum and the cousins climbed in too, Plum looking up and eying the clouds, her aunt reassuring her that the sky had been overcast all day and no rain had yet come.

  “Before you know it, we reach home.”

  From the back of the van, Plum saw the towns in reverse, Rosehall, Greenwood, Falmouth, Duncans, Rio Bueno and on to Discovery Bay. Her aunt’s home was a four-bedroom house in Lakeside Park with a wrap-around verandah and a winding staircase that led up to the flat roof with a view of the sea and boats at a distance. The beach itself was just a five-minute walk. But in the week her mother was there, she never once felt the water. Instead, they went to other places, an old school on a hill, for one, which in summer months looked like an abandoned campus best suited as the setting for the kind of movie where the dead come back to life. Her aunt and mother disappeared inside an office, and from the verandah that wrapped around the building, Plum looked down on the mix of old and new buildings, a school unlike any she had ever seen. And then they were off to a dressmaker for Plum to be fitted for new clothes. “Just in case,” her mother said, “you grow out of what you brought.” In six weeks? Yet Plum had not been paying attention. When Plum thought back on it, it was too late. Her mother was back in Brooklyn, back in the brownstone near Prospect Park, calling with the unexpected news. She pictured her mother at the dining table, facing the kitchen, ready to run in to turn over frying meat or stir a boiling pot. “You enjoying yourself?”