Come Sunday: A Novel (6 page)

Sleep does not come, not the sleep I want. Not oblivion. Through the haze of exhaustion, I keep stirring, hearing Cleo sing on the deck outside our bedroom or call to me from her bed. Through lashes weighed down by leaden eyelids, I see her shadow sweeping across the foot of the bed, in hot pursuit of Pilgrim. When my eyes are sealed tight, Cleo is underwater, drifting away like kelp in a current. One time she is climbing into bed with me, patting my face, pressing her nose against mine, but my arms are strapped down and I cannot embrace her.

I do not know what time it is when I get up. Jenny, in keeping with her tradition from Jamaica, has covered the clock on the wall with an old pillowcase. There is a tray of uneaten food next to the bed and crumpled tissues like paper roses strewn around it. I open the blinds and not day but a starless night peers in: an impenetrable curtain that
separates me from my mother, my grandmother, and now my child. For a moment I think I might go downstairs, where an amber glow keeps watch and the voices of late-night TV drone on. Greg will be down there, on the couch; Jenny too. The thought of even the most banal verbal exchange makes the dizziness return, so I go pee and climb back into the dark sea.

Day and night blur into an endless gloaming from which I cannot escape, not even with the help of the contents of this little bottle. Has it been a day? A week? A month? The pills are yellow. The color of cowardice, I think as I swallow two more and replace the bottle on the nightstand. Why is the song about a yellow ribbon on the old oak tree? Why do the bumpers of cars have yellow ribbons that say SUPPORT OUR TROOPS on them? Blue ribbons are more appropriate for boys out fighting a war, for the color of their lips and nails when they are zipped up in their body bags. Blue for the code that signals no vital signs, blue for the music of inconsolable lamentation. Yellow is the color of desert sand before the blood of the fallen soaks into it; the color for mommies who cannot get up when their children are stuck in icy drawers in cold cellars. Yellow is the color of bile, the lingering hue of a bruise. The color of a kite.

Blue was always Cleo’s favorite color. The first color she learned to name. Cinderella wore a ball gown of the sweetest shade of cerulean blue, a replica of which Cleo wore every other day. In the tiny Catholic chapel at the retreat center where Greg once conducted an ecumenical worship service for those living with HIV/AIDS, she went up to the statue of the Holy Mother and with almost reverence stroked her blue tunic.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

“That’s Mary, Jesus’ mommy,” I answered.

“Is she sad?” she wanted to know, glancing up at the Holy Mother with her downcast eyes.

“I’m not sure,” I said after a pause.

But I know now. I know that Mary’s grief is a thousand fathoms deep, where blue is so dense it becomes black. So vast is her sorrow
that she cannot speak but only part her robe and reveal the crimson heart that in its stubbornness will not cease its beat.

“WHAT DAY IS IT?” I ask when I walk into the kitchen, squinting out at the sheets of rain.

“Sunday, honey,” says Jenny, cleaning the oven.

It has been two days, then, which makes it Easter Sunday. But there is no resurrection today, the timing is all wrong. I am standing in the midst of the empty tomb, but there is no angel asking,
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
and no gardener calling my name.

“Did you get some sleep?” Jenny asks.

I shrug. “Where’s Greg?”

“In the garden,” she says. “He hasn’t slept much.”

“How about you?”

“Here and there,” she says, and smiles weakly at me, her coffee-colored face dim.

“Rhiaan called, and someone from your work—he wouldn’t leave his name. Also, several people from church. I wrote it all down on the pad. I told them you’re not up for company yet.”

“Thank you,” I say, taking the cup of coffee she has just poured.

“I called most of the people in your address book and a few others Greg made a list of. He called his family.”

We sit at the kitchen table and peer into our mugs, silent enough to hear the mynah birds arguing on the porch.

“If you would rather me go home, I will. I don’t want to intrude,” she says. “I want to do what’s helpful.”

“No, please don’t leave; I’m glad you are here.”

We each take an end of the quiet, as though it were a tablecloth that needed laying.

“I wanted to see her,” Jenny says finally, looking up. “I wanted to hold her one last time.” And suddenly she cries and I realize it is the first time in the ten years we have been friends that I have ever seen her weep. Isn’t this the part where I apologize for refusing to allow her to
hold Cleo in the hospital? Where I say sorry? She wipes her nose with the back of her wrist, and I picture her sitting at the table holding Cleo in one hand and eating with the other. “She was my baby too.”

“Yes,” I muster. “Yes, she was.”

Everyone wanted a piece of Cleo when she was a baby. The women at the church, young and old, lined up to hold her, passing her from one bosom to the next, leaning into her smell and taking deep breaths. Sylvia Horton almost had one of her hyperventilating spells the Sunday Cleo smiled at her, and ran into the choir room for rehearsal an uncharacteristic ten minutes late. She might not have hurried—only the three old tenors sat there, britches up to their rib cages, gumming their way through the music sheets—the warbly sopranos and altos still lined up to see Cleo smile at them from Jenny’s cradling embrace. But Jenny had wanted more than a piece. Maybe it was because her nest was still warm from Leroy’s flight to UCLA, her second son to leave the island. Maybe it was because Cleo was the little girl she’d never had.

“The other mother,” the women at church called her. Taking leave from her teaching job, Jenny moved into our home the first few weeks of Cleo’s life. She gave Cleo her first bath, showing me how to hold her with one hand and wash around the little clothespin attached to Cleo’s navel with the other. She prepared an old Jamaican remedy that eased Cleo’s colicky cries and gave me herb tea supposedly to make my milk sweeter. Her omnipresence that first month eased our transition from couplet to trinity, and forged a thick-as-blood bond between her and Cleo of which everyone was envious. Even me. After Jenny returned to her own home and went back to teaching her first-graders, she insisted every Friday was her time with the baby. So we would drop Cleo off at her boxy two-bedroom cottage after I had nursed her from both breasts, and go to the mall, aimless and dazed. Cleo-less. Looking at other people’s babies and our watches till it was time to pick her up again.

But in the last few months the Friday ritual had ceased. I tried not to chalk it up to the New Year’s Eve incident because we had been
friends too long for that to change things and also because Jenny started taking care of the retired high school principal who had first hired her twenty-five years ago, taking a risk on a poorly educated but keen Jamaican girl running from her past. Now the old man, living alone and without family to help him, was forgetting to eat and bathe, and lucky for him, Jenny was a believer in repaying debts. Five nights a week she walked to Mr. Finnegan’s house on the slope of Diamond Head, finding him often naked and disoriented, sometimes soiled, in his leather chair. She helped him wash, cooked him a modest meal, and then read Dickens or Auden till he settled enough to go to sleep. Then she walked back home and waited for the ritual to repeat itself the next day.

The worn look of a housemaid had etched itself on Jenny’s face since then. Her mother’s face, she had told Theresa and me a few weeks ago, stared out from her bathroom mirror each morning, and her mother’s back began to make her limp almost imperceptibly. “Hey, girl, if that’s all you inherited from your mom, you got off light,” I had told her. The doctor told her otherwise: she was not to lift anything heavier than ten pounds, no children. What he had not told her was the effect the carrying out of his orders was to have on Cleo. Cleo began to miss riding on Jenny’s hip, and would frequently beg to go to Jenny’s house. Just last week I had called. “When can Cleo come visit?” I asked. “She’s nagging me about going to your house.”

“I can’t do this weekend, Abbe. My back is acting up something terrible,” she said. “How about next weekend?”

“Okay,” I said, feeling as though into my cupped hands a copper coin had fallen.

And that is why when Jenny sits opposite me at the dining room table across the stack of unopened cards and talks to me of “my baby” that I come close to grabbing her arm and clawing my way through the layers of flesh and fat to the bone. It is your fault, I want to say. You and your crooked back! Next weekend never came and now there would be no next weekends! You, who hand-stitched her baptism gown and took her up to the chancel while Greg murmured holy words and sprinkled ordinary water, are to blame too!

“It’s my fault,” she suddenly confesses, as though she had read my mind.

“What?”

“The night before the accident, I woke up and saw a woman standing in the corner of my room. I asked her who she was and she just stood there and pointed to the picture of Cleo on my dressing table. Oh dear Lord, Abbe, it must have been Cleo’s grandmother. She was coming to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

Without saying a word, I get up from the table and go to the shelves in the laundry room, from where I retrieve the old photo album of my family. A chill pricks my skin. I return to the table and open it to the first page, where a young bride, unsmiling, stands next to a surly boar of a man on the steps of the Cape Town courthouse. Chosen to conceal the swell of her belly, her outfit is as stiff as their pose. Jenny hesitates, then shakes her head. “No, not her.”

It is the barking that startles me, not the knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” Jenny says, and I sit and stare at the young woman who would first become Rhiaan’s mother and then mine. There was a time when she smiled, although it would be years ahead, but for the life of me I cannot recall whether it had ever been captured on film. Gillian Beech’s high-pitched jabber pollutes the quiet: “I don’t want to be a bother. I just wanted to say how very sorry we all are—you know, the entire neighborhood association—and how much we will miss the little girl. We are all praying for the family. Please tell Reverend Deighton and his wife that if there is anything we can do . . .”

Thanks issued, the door closes and Jenny walks in with Easter lilies that have no doubt come from Gillian’s church, a Pentecostal runt in the industrial park of Kakaako. There is no available space on any of the tables, so she puts it at the foot of the stairs. I watch her move around my house like it is hers, with the same familiarity she had when I’d sat on this same chair and nursed my newborn baby. She comes back to the album and flips through what could be construed as a journal of my mother’s misery. “There!” she says, pointing. “That’s the woman!”

My mother is older in this picture, no longer the frightened bride.
It has something to do with the passage of time, the bearing of children, the bearing of things heavy enough to round the shoulders. But she is older too. Rhiaan assures me there are other family portraits in the boxes in his attic, but this one to which Jenny points is the only one I have. Captured by my grandmother with my mother’s new Instamatic, a Christmas gift from Rhiaan, we seem as we were. My father, standing behind my mother, has lost half his head (thanks to my grandmother’s careless framing), and his mouth is cemented in a line as straight as a mason’s level. Rhiaan, next to him, has avoided the same fate by bending to where I sit on my mother’s lap, his fingers finding my ribs. I am blurred by the action of swinging around to counterattack, my left foot hooked around my mother’s leg for balance. Of the four, hers is the only face fully captured, holding dead center. I imagine my grandmother trying to coax a smile or even issuing a stern command—“ ’Sakes alive, Louise, smile! You look as though you’ve seen a ghost”—and then giving up, snapping the picture and forever immortalizing the moment just before our family unraveled for good. I have wondered often if my mother looked that way because she knew what was ahead, felt it a long time coming. Or if that day she looked not into the lens but into a mirage where all good things dissipated the closer she got.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I tell Jenny, as I do each time she relates one of her wacky visions.

“Neither do I,” she replies. “But that doesn’t stop them from showing up on my doorstep from time to time.”

“You sure it was her?”

Jenny nods. “Back home people believe the spirits show up to warn us, sometimes to bring comfort. Sometimes just because there is unfinished business.”

“But why would my mother pay you a visit and not me?”

“Maybe she knows you don’t want to see her.”

“That’s dumb,” I say.

“Perhaps.” But Jenny knows what a ball of twine my feelings for my mother are. Maybe she did come to warn Jenny, or maybe she was the angel at the tomb of a child long gone.

LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, when Jenny is folding the body-warm clothes from the dryer, I walk into the family room, sit down on the couch, and watch TV. Greg is sitting on the floor, knees up, elbows propped on top of them, hands cradling his head, a cup of coffee slimy and cold in front of him. He turns, sees me looking at him, crawls over, and sinks his head into my lap. He weeps loudly, and I feel my hand lift as though by a system of pulleys and then fall down on his head, a gesture automatic and removed, ten miles from my screeching heart.

Evening takes forever to come, the twilight unusually long, the blazing sky spectacular in its farewell. Greg is asleep on the carpet in front of me; Jenny covers him with a quilt.

“Can you eat something?” she whispers. I shake my head and she says, “You should eat something.”

She sits down at the kitchen table, the light still off, and I sit opposite her. There are six dishes of food in front of us: a congealed whole chicken, a quiche, a Jell-O salad, a box of donuts, a tub of rice, and a big bowl of chili. The table is set for three, with plates and knives and forks and glasses with melting ice cubes and napkins and salt and pepper. The place at the head of the table—Cleo’s place—is bare. I put my head in my cold plate and gasp: I cannot go on.