Come Sunday: A Novel (22 page)

“I said something nice to Petal today,” I tell Greg when his head pokes in the door, tentatively, as though a brick might be launched his way.

“Excuse me?”

“I called her this afternoon to see how she is doing.”

“And?”

“I told her she reminded me of an E. E. Cummings poem, courageously breaking all the rules.” What I didn’t tell her was there would come a time when she would be forced to move along in brisk, neat sentences with the punctuation marks all in place. That there might even come a time, God forbid, when the cruelty of life would strip her, as it had Mrs. Chung, to a haiku poem. Lean and tucked in tight, and smelling of almonds. “You said I couldn’t say something kind to her.”

“I shouldn’t have said a lot of things, Abbe.”

When I don’t reply, he turns to head out of the room.

“I didn’t sleep with him,” I announce hastily.

Greg moves back into the doorway.

“I wanted to. I would have.” Greg lifts his hand for me to stop, but I ignore it. “I wasn’t playing the fool, Greg. I was unhappy. I know you don’t think this is any kind of solution, but I wasn’t thinking about you or church or even Cleo. I kissed him because I wanted to find out if there was something that could make me happy, even when I knew ten-to-one it wouldn’t. Do you understand?”

Greg’s sigh of a million lonely nights echoes through the room. “I met Mr. Nguyen for coffee after he called the house that night. I thought it would help me. I never expected that it would help him or that there would be more meetings.”

“How many times have you met with him?” I ask.

“Several.”

“How many?”

There is a beat. “Several.”

There are five names I want to call Greg, but I remain silent.

“I swear, Abbe, I never intended it to turn out this way. It just sort of happened.” After the words are out I realize I might have said them to him about Sal.

We stare out the sliding glass door beyond the deck and today’s droppings from the birds to the sun, a small orange orb landing on the ocean. The sun is sinking, Cleo said once, panicked that it might never come up again. And we laughed at her furrowed concern. But it seems tonight, with the clouds streaked with pink flares, that she might just be right.

Greg is the first one to break the silence. “Did you love him?”

“I don’t think it matters anymore.” And what is left of my deceit goes the way of the sun.

I am awake when the phone rings at 5:10, having wormed my way through only five lines of mediocrity, the noon deadline chasing my heels. Kelsey Oliver, crisp and curt as though he has been up longer than God, is down to business before I can finish my greeting.

“Petal has gone into labor. Kapiolani Hospital, third floor. She has requested you and your husband’s presence.”

“She’s early,” I say.

“Obviously,” he replies. “When should I tell her to expect you?”

“Tell her we will come right away.”

“Right, then.”

“Kelsey,” I say before he hangs up. “Her father coming?”

“Norman cannot take any more time off from work until the Christmas break. We are presuming she will be home by then.” Punctuating his remark is an abrupt click.

“A bit of a cliché, going into labor on Labor Day, isn’t it?” I say, watching Greg run from the closet to the bathroom and back again, gathering items as though the house were burning down.

“Not as cliché as having that loser dump her just in time,” he replies, and rubs the fatigue from his eyes. Jeff has exited the stage on cue, failing only Petal’s expectations. Greg, on the other hand, is
the understudy, only too eager to pick up his lines. “What is she going to need?”

“Not a Bible, I know that much,” I say as he crams his grandfather’s Bible into his shoulder bag.

“I thought she might like to hear a few psalms.”

“Do we still have any of the lollipops left over from last year’s Halloween? She might like those,” I suggest, picking out a few CDs. “And put in a pair of those woolly socks your mother sent you for your birthday—they’ll finally get some use.”

Kapiolani Hospital is wide awake by the time we arrive—nurses bustling in and out of rooms with blood pressure monitors, bothering groggy-eyed patients with thermometers and the spryness of a clambake. A chirpy nurse at the maternity ward station points us down the hall to Petal’s room just as Kelsey and Fay walk out of it. He nods a hard-boiled greeting in Greg’s direction and tells the nurse that he and his wife will be back at lunchtime.

“Miserable bastard,” I murmur, and try to paste on an elastic smile when we enter her room.

Petal is wide-eyed with fright. Her skin is flushed and her brow prickled with sweat.

“It’s too early,” she says, clutching my hand. “Something’s going wrong.”

I look over at the nurse who is reading the printout of her contractions as though she were scanning the NASDAQ composite. She shakes her head and smiles.

“No,” I tell Petal. “No, everything is fine. Babies aren’t like trains, Petal. They don’t care about our schedules. They come when they’re ready.”

The force of an unseen entity seems to strike her with such vigor that she bolts forward, eyes bulging, her hand suddenly a vise.

“It’s all wrong,” she wheezes through the contraction.

“Don’t push,” the nurse instructs her. “Breathe deep breaths. That’s it. That’s it.”

Slowly she releases her grip, eases back against her pillow, panting.

“I wish my mum were here,” she whimpers. “It’s not right that Blossom will be born with no family.”

“We’ll be her family,” says Greg, as easily as oil poured on troubled waters.

Feeling the surprising flood of sympathy, I say, “You just worry about delivering that baby and we’ll figure the rest out later.”

I send Greg on a mission of gathering ice chips for Petal and a caffeinated soda for me before he makes any more promises, and sit at the edge of the chair holding her hand, waiting for the baby-train to arrive.

CLEO NEVER DROPPED, and a week after she was due Dr. Urukawa announced that he was going to induce labor. It was not at all what Greg and I had imagined, what we had prepared for: my water breaking in the middle of the night; Greg scrambling for the overnight bag, patting himself on the back for keeping the gas tank full even though it was only four miles to the hospital, rushing back inside to put out some dog food for Solly before driving with cautious haste, hazard lights on, to the hospital. That was how it was supposed to go. Instead, we were marched from the doctor’s office to the ultrasound department to the registration desk, where we were ordered to sit down and sign papers in triplicate while the registrar clickety-clacked our insurance details into the computer, her squirrel cheeks bobbing in time with her gum-chewing.

The African way is to have a midwife, relegating the husband to the outside corridor where his job is clear: pace until further notice. Pacing, then, goes on for a few hours if the expectant father is lucky, days if he isn’t. But a continent away, Greg, ill equipped to deal with my birthing fears, was up to the task of being a makeshift doula and a stand-in for the matriarchs in my family. “She’s not ready,” I kept telling him, but all he did was wipe my forehead till I feared it gleamed like alabaster, breathing on my behalf through each contraction. There was an order to the universe, an order knotted together by delicate threads of timing. Who could know the effects of disrupting that, of imposing a
man-made schedule on an infant’s introduction to the world? What if our baby was somehow altered by doctor’s orders? What if she was meant to be the Sabbath child but sentenced to the woe of a Wednesday’s child? And then I heard those first mewing sounds, and the panic drifted away like the smoke of freshly lit cigars.

“I’ll never let anyone hurt you,” I whispered. “I promise.”

BLOSSOM IS BORN, as her mother predicted, without any family present, just after her great-grandparents leave for supper at five, and twenty minutes before Greg and I return with one of Cleo’s quilted baby blankets.

“Isn’t she lovely,” Petal cries when we enter the room. “I did it, all by myself.” It seems that we have made her an impossible promise—to be her family—one we have already broken.

We nod and stare at this new child from the void left by another.

“See, there was nothing to worry about,” Greg says. “Here, let me hold her.” He scoops up Blossom with the nervousness of a new father and blinks back the tears.

“Well done, Petal. You’re a brave and clever girl,” I say, watching Greg fan out the baby’s fingers.

“Mum would think so, wouldn’t she?”

I nod and hand her the blanket. “Most definitely.”

Greg offers me the baby, but I shake my head quickly and he passes her back to Petal. “She looks just like you,” he says kindly.

When he leaves to buy flowers and balloons, I put on a CD. “What do you think—is it too soon to introduce Blossom to Enya?”

“Abbe?” says Petal when I sit down again, a pale tremor on her lower lip.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

MY GRANDMOTHER told me once that a secret shared was as a sorrow spared. I suppose she told me that because she knew I was keeping secrets, secrets about what had been happening in our house. But even before my mother’s hair started to grow out white, my grandmother could tell for herself that things were bad. She didn’t need me to give her a précis. All you had to do was take a good look at Louise Spenser and you would know it was no secret that she was digging her own grave. It amazed me then how grown-ups can look and look at a thing till their eyes go buggy, and still not see.

As if to spare us the effort of all that looking, my mother spent less and less time in the communal rooms of the house. She gave up her chair in front of the TV during my father’s standing ovation when the new state president—P. W. Botha—was elected. “About bloody time!” he said when the president declared a state of emergency. When, I wanted to know, was someone going to do the same for our household?

My mother spent the rest of her evenings in the guest room, where she would sit for hours in front of her sewing machine, threaded and idling. I would do my homework on the bed, the bed I knew she slept in after all the lights were out, just so I could be with her, the way one might keep a stone company. Sometimes, instead of doing algebra, I would watch her pin and repin the hem of a curtain she had no intention of hanging or the lining of a dress she had no intention of wearing. It was as if even the smallest act of permanence, the act of stitching, was too great a risk, too large a commitment.