Tea by the Sea Page 9

  The pastor, the Reverend Alexander Turner, who was also on his way out, didn’t bother with pity or judgment. Instead, he laid his hand on Lenworth’s head and prayed. In the end, Lenworth’s rationalization about engineering and the priesthood being one and the same didn’t matter. The pastor, who had his own checkered past, endorsed the plan wholeheartedly, recommended a seminary in Maryland where he had once taught, and fished from a drawer the paperwork to get him started.

  “Got this for another young man who changed his mind,” the pastor said. “You will make better use of it.”

  And so Lenworth started on a journey toward a career he never imagined, an escape hatch that took him out of Jamaica to the Maryland suburbs, away from the life he had pulled together in Anchovy and the problem with a student that threatened to mushroom into a permanent stain on his character and life. And so he defied the devil making a mockery of his good intentions, the devil’s attempts to muck up the life he had pulled together in Anchovy.

  7

  Outside, the rain pounded, the droplets tat-tat-tatting against the window and sprinkling through the open bottom half. The sound of the rain blocked out the muted sounds of life rising from the neighborhood streets. Slivers of light slipped in through cracks in the blinds, making shadows on the wall.

  Plum moved down the stairs on bare feet, her shoes in hand and a small bag slung over her shoulder. Alan was already outside, doubleparked on the tight street, the headlights forming halos in the rain. It was too early to matter how he had parked and where. Plum sprinted, raindrops tickling her skin, her feet tramping through water pooled on the uneven sidewalk and the mud around an oak.

  “Morning. Bad day for this.” Plum smiled tentatively at Alan, reaching back at the same time to drop her bag on the back seat.

  “Never a bad day. It’s just rain.”

  “Too early in the morning for that spiritual talk.”

  “Still cranky, I see. But I promise. It’s not raining there.”

  There was St. Michael’s, a water town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that Alan had picked for the crabs and the water—mostly for the water because Plum liked seaside and riverside towns and he had come to like them too. She could sit by the water for hours, staring out at the flat body, watching birds dip and rise with a beakful of marine life, contemplating the segments of a waterman’s life, or by a lazy river listening to the trickle of water over rocks.

  They left the city behind. The sky lightened and the rain eased, and before long, the sun filtered through the clouds. Plum closed her eyes, shutting out the uninspiring highway, the abandoned or seemingly abandoned farms that butted up against the Interstate, and the little pockets of modern life visible from the highway.

  “Tired,” Plum said, abandoning all pretense that she would speak.

  Plum hadn’t wanted this trip, but Alan, urged on by Plum’s parents, had pushed it on her. He pushed the trip for his own personal reasons, and her parents for a less selfish one: Plum was depressed, had been since her return from Jamaica, and they thought that Alan could pull her somehow from that depressive state. She had let him into her life slowly, allowing him to meet her parents and allowing her parents to think that theirs was a serious, concrete relationship. In truth, Plum and Alan were still tangled in a cat and mouse game, Alan continuing to chase his elusive love and Plum shying away from a commitment of any kind.

  Plum had come to know this stretch of I-95 well, and she measured how far they had gone by the bumps on the road, the starts and stops for tolls, the shifting sounds of the tires against grates or concrete bridges or asphalt.

  Well on the way, deep in the southern part of New Jersey, Alan reached a hand across the gear shaft to Plum’s knee. He glanced at her, and back at the road. “What happen? What you so down about?”

  “Nothing. Just a part of everyday life.”

  “It has to be something more specific. Tell me.”

  “Nothing you can do anything about.”

  “Maybe I can’t fix it. But talking about it might help.”

  “Not this time.”

  “I can’t take the silence.” Alan, who wasn’t necessarily talkative, talked on about random things—the violations he wrote up as a public health inspector, how glad he was to be done with inspecting pools now that the summer was over, how badly he wanted another job in public health that didn’t involve trekking across the five boroughs, closing a restaurant for multiple violations only to see it reopened in record time with the same staff and a new name.

  Plum gave up the pretense of sleeping. “What other type of job would you do?”

  “Education. Implementing programs. Studying the impact of some new initiative. Anything that doesn’t involve writing violations.”

  “Go for it,” Plum said. “You were always good at analysis anyway.”

  “I’m looking.”

  Plum shifted her eyes back to the passenger window, the cars on the opposite side of the road, her mind drifting in the lull back toward her second great disappointment: finding Lenworth’s mother but learning nothing about his whereabouts.

  “Did I tell you my parents are moving to Fort Lauderdale? Leaving me the house.”

  “Ah. Big house. At least you won’t have a mortgage.”

  “Yeah. Want to fix it up. Redo the bathrooms and get rid of the carpet. Fixing it up real nice for when you decide to marry me.” There was a playfulness about Alan, but a serious note in his voice as well.

  “Who says I will?”

  “You will.”

  “Why you so sure?”

  “Two reasons. One, despite how you act, you love me. And the second thing, you’re here, and always with me. That tells me something.”

  Plum had no argument for the latter. She was indeed always with him and dependent on his loyalty. “Not ready yet.”

  “What will make you ready?”

  “Just not ready. I’ll tell you when.” Then, “How will I know that you will not leave?”

  “The same way you know I will not deliberately crash this car. Trust.”

  “That is hard for me.”

  “I know. And I wish you would trust me enough to tell me why.”

  “It was a long time ago. A schoolgirl thing.”

  “And this is an adult thing. Different circumstances. Grown-up people. Grown-up business.”

  “Yes.” But in the parallel, running conversation in her head, Plum added, and no, because Alan was roughly the same age as Lenworth had been when he took off and left. What she had with Lenworth had been grown-up business as well.

  “I will never force you.”

  “I know. Just not yet.” Once again, she skirted the real reason: She had unfinished business, a daughter she hoped was just a phone call or two away.

  That Sunday evening Plum stayed at home, blending sweet potatoes to make a pudding, keeping her fingers busy so as not to think. At seven, the kitchen clean, the pudding in the oven, the mixing bowls and blender put away in their rightful places, Plum went back upstairs to her room at the back of the house. She stood with her back to the door and dialed.

  “Sunday Contact.”

  The voice was what Plum had been waiting for. Still the deep baritone caught her off guard. “Good evening.” Her mouth felt as dry as sand, but she pushed the words out, reminded the host of her previous call, thanked him and the listeners who had called with the tidbits of information that had led to Lenworth’s mother. “I found his mother. No luck there. She hasn’t seen him for just about the same time he disappeared from my life.”

  “Okay, give me his name again.”

  “Lenworth Barrett.” For the second time, Plum listed the details she knew: Lenworth was born and raised in Woodhall, Clarendon. Lived for a time in Greenwood, Trelawny. Went to William Knibb High School and Moneague Teachers’ College. Has an eight-yearold girl.

  As he did on Plum’s previous call, the host repeated the details Plum had given. And to her, he said, “Tough, eh. Every little detail you ca
n give the listeners will get you closer to finding your daughter. Give us a number where listeners can reach you.”

  Then she waited.

  The morning after, Plum stood at the window, waiting for the phone to ring. She was sure that someone else would call. Within minutes after her call the previous night, calls had started coming in, some with promising details and others with farfetched ideas of where Lenworth could have gone.

  Outside, her father was hunched over a ragged garden that was largely weeds and anemic herbs, plucking bell peppers or lackluster cherry tomatoes from two feeble plants. He shouldn’t have been home at all. She willed him to stay there in the garden at the back of the brownstone, hidden, out of view of Plum leaving to catch the train to downtown Brooklyn for the afternoon shift. She left earlier than normal and missed the call and message that would change her life forever.

  Later, much later, when her parents had already gone to bed, Plum returned, and caught the message that stated simply, “I know a Lenworth Ramsey who lived in Anchovy with a little girl who is about eight years old. Round here, he went by the name Lenworth Ramsey, but every piece of mail that used to come to him at the post office said Lenworth Barrett.”

  She jotted the details down, her words on the page like a first grader’s nearly illegible scribble. Then she took another sheet and rewrote the details: Lenworth Ramsey, Anchovy.

  Plum thought first of Lenworth’s mother, and called the telephone number where his mother said messages could be left. And waited again for another response.

  A day later, Plum stood with her back to the door, listening to the ringing phone, waiting for someone on the other end to pick up and connect the pre-arranged phone call between Plum and Lenworth’s mother. Again, she waited, hung up and called again and again, until at last, she heard the line opening up and a voice saying, “Hello. Good evening.”

  “Good evening. This is Plum Valentine.”

  “Yes, yes. She right here. Hold on.”

  His mother, voice raspy, almost breathless, was anxious to get out what she knew. “Glad you could call. You know my mind run on you the other day.”

  Plum felt a lightening of her spirit. Her body slackened, hope again bubbling like a spring emerging from the earth.

  “Ramsey.” His mother continued, her voice quickening as she laid out the possibilities. “His grandmother’s name was Ramsey. That his father’s mother. And from he turn seventeen he wanted to change his name from Barrett, drop his father name and pick up his granny own. Hate his father and couldn’t wait to get rid of his father’s name. He even get the deed poll paper and all. He loved his grandmother bad, bad. But not him father at all.”

  “You really think it could be him?”

  “Could be him, yes. His grandmother had people out that way. I don’t know where exactly. Could be Hanover or Westmoreland or even Mobay. Not so sure. Just know it was over on that side.”

  Still, even with the uncertainty, his family’s tenuous connection to the western part of the island, his mother had given Plum something on which she could hang her hope: another possible name, another identity. Perhaps she had been searching all the while for a man living under a different name. Those were the details she passed on to the private investigator and again waited for what she thought was inevitable.

  8

  The scent of jasmine hung in the air, commingling with the scent of fried plantains and the previous night’s roast. Plum held an express mail envelope from Jamaica, inside of which was a familiar brown envelope with her typewritten name. She slid her finger beneath the flap, hopeful for a concrete clue.

  Inside was a map to a house on a hill in Anchovy. The months and years of searching came down to a sheet of paper from the private investigator with a crudely drawn map pointing the way from the main road, left of the abandoned train tracks, past the secondary school, down a rutted road, a quick left turn and the house upon the hill.

  Two days later, Plum was on a plane to Jamaica, pressed up against the window, then rushing again through customs with a single wheeled bag. Outside, the heat embraced her. At another time she would have stood for a moment to let the sun warm her body that was still chilled from the forced indoor air. But she moved quickly to the van and off-site car rental office, then away from the oversized villas sprouting out of the hillside, the hotels overlooking the sea and the tourists so at home in her country in a way that she had never felt in theirs. And then she checked herself, for she was as American as some of the tourists were but still not as comfortable in her own country as the tourists were in any place they visited.

  At Reading, she turned left toward Anchovy. How close she had been on her last trip here. This stretch of road—winding, and dark from trees that towered overhead and filled the gully to the right—wasn’t familiar to Plum. She drove slowly, carefully, blowing the horn just before rounding each curve of the road, holding up impatient drivers more familiar with the road. There was no place really to stop and let them pass. On one side was the gully and on the other a wall of damp rocks with ferns and weeds growing from the crevices. Plum pressed on, counting her breaths, her hands tight on the steering wheel.

  The road flattened out and houses, small and not as flamboyant as the buildings on the coast, emerged on the left and right. The road, still narrow, wound around corners, until at last it opened up to a commercial stretch. She let the vehicles pass and as she waited bought a drink from a roadside vendor. Then she was on the way again, looking out for the point where the railroad crossed the main, the school, and a road on the left.

  Again, Plum practiced her breathing. “I am your mother,” she said again and again. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time now.” She didn’t know what she would say to him.

  The yard was overrun with weeds. The grove of banana and plantain trees and cocoa plants at the bottom of the hill was choked with weeds as well. Plum knew immediately that she wouldn’t find him there, but she climbed the hill anyway, hopeful, feeling her way with a stick through the knee-high brush, climbing until she reached the steep stone steps that led up to the wrap-around verandah. To the right of the house was an old chicken coop that someone had built too close to a cherry tree. Perhaps the tree had come after and had grown up and around the chicken coop. It didn’t matter. Up the steps. She glanced once to the left and once to the right, her eyes glancing over the chicken coop, catching a glint of metal from within it.

  On the verandah, she tested the boards then stepped gingerly, avoiding the slats of wood that looked soft, like pieces that would crumble under her weight. She could see nothing through the windows, and the locks, though they jiggled and felt weak, didn’t budge. Plum wasn’t certain what the empty house could tell her, but she circled it, walking again through the brush to the back of the house, where someone had once had an outdoor kitchen. The blackened zinc sheets and stones remained, a testament to another life. Beneath the house, in the dark crawl space, she found a forgotten doll, its hair matted and face grungy and missing one of its legs. She caressed it as if it were indeed a child forgotten beneath the house, then cleaned it at the pipe that jutted from the bottom of the large water tank and left it in the sun to dry.

  Eight years of active searching had come to this: an abandoned house, an outdoor stove and a doll (signs of a former life, but not necessarily his and hers), no trace of where Lenworth and her daughter had gone, no trace even of the girl’s name. There was no telling how long the house had been empty. Weeks? Months? Years? She wouldn’t cry. Instead, Plum forced her disappointment deep within, and buried again the words she had practiced for her little girl.

  There was no use in waiting, but Plum waited anyway on the verandah, her arms on the railing, her eyes trained on the hill and the roof of the house in the valley below, her body like that of a woman expecting her family or visitors to appear any minute at the bottom of the hill. Clouds shifted in and out. Smoke rose from an outdoor fire near the house below with the rusted zinc roof. Goats let loose in th
e morning bleated as they made their way back home. Only when the sun was nearly down did she leave, weaving her way back down the hill in the shadows of the large breadfruit and star apple trees, and back down the long hill past Reading, through the city of Montego Bay and on to a mid-size hotel in Ironshore. She took with her the one-legged doll and an unconvincing conviction that her search would end right there at the house in Anchovy. She had come up empty too many times, and each time she walked away empty-handed she relived that first night, waking to find her baby gone, coming home to a house that was no longer hers, feeling again like a castaway abandoned at the first sign of trouble.

  That night would have been her last. What saved her? Perhaps divine intervention. Perhaps the dirty, one-footed doll. She bathed it, wiped the skin clean with cotton balls doused in facial toner and detangled the hair, snipping stubborn knots with tiny manicure scissors, then braiding what remained. A mother without anyone to mother, without even an inkling of who her lost child had become. She left the hotel room for the beach, the vast body of water slapping up against the shore, with a plan to walk out to sea and not return. In the lobby, the hotel manager pulled her wrist and body toward him, dancing her into the night’s party on the patio overlooking the beach. The music, which from upstairs had only been a soft pulse, thrummed. He danced her into a circle of tourists, all dancing too fast for the beat, seemingly unaware of the rhythm. Her body betrayed her mind. It moved to the music. Her feet, her arms, her head, her hips, her lips fell in with the changing reggae beats, and she remained in the circle, a dark-skinned woman among the lighter-skinned tourists, teaching them how to feel the rhythm and move with the rhythm instead of against it.