Come Sunday: A Novel (10 page)

Rhiaan knocks and enters my bedroom with two mugs of tea.

“What’s all this?” he asks, sitting on the corner of the bed.

“Oh, one of Mom’s old letters. I’ve often wondered if she knew she was going to die . . . What do you think?”

“It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely.”

I go on. “There’s this one line that puzzles me, like she had a total change of heart. She says things always turn out for the best. What were her letters to you about?”

“She wrote mostly about Dad and how she pitied him because he had missed out on so much of my life, so many of the good things. I read them every now and then, when I need some inspiration. It was her greatest gift to me—that she could only ever see promise in me. Isn’t that how all mothers see?” he asks.

I nod. “Last week Cleo told me she wanted to be a mother when she grew up. She wanted to have babies, ‘possibly five,’ she said. And I was so looking forward to the day when I could watch her deliver them, and then love them one by one. And yes, as you say, see in them all their promise. I can’t bear it, that she’s gone and I’m left with nothing. Nothing. Just one little curl.” I retrieve from the coin envelope her
golden tuft. “See this? It’s all I have of her. And to think it was dead long before she was.”

“There,” he says, holding me. “There now.”

“The worst part is that I didn’t get to say goodbye to her. I didn’t get to tell her how proud I was and how much I loved her and to say sorry for all the times I yelled at her for not packing up her toys.”

After a while, he pulls from his pocket a pen.

“Why don’t you write her a letter and tell her all that,” he suggests.

When Rhiaan leaves, I get off the bed and move to the writing desk at the window. I pull out the drawer with my stationery and extract a crisp blank page.
Dear Cleo
, I begin, and the words begin to flow. When I am done, I retrace my words to my daughter, and notice that wedged between the lines of guilt and grief is my own brief admission of a broken vow. So I write a second letter, this time to the writer of the card.

JENNY DRIVES RHIAAN and me to West Park Funeral Home a little before five o’clock in the middle of rush-hour traffic. If Mrs. Avery is surprised to see me return after a few short hours, she does not let on. She ushers us into the same room and exits as Jenny begins to wail. Rhiaan puts an arm around her shoulder without ever taking his eyes from Cleo’s face. She bends down and kisses Cleo’s forehead, lingering there as though she were inhaling that sweet baby smell one last time.

After Rhiaan escorts her out, I pull from my purse the letter I have written for Cleo, folded into a square. I lift up her hands just enough to slide the note on her breast beneath them.

“Goodbye, sweet girl,” I whisper. “I am going to miss you so much.” Mrs. Avery shakes my hand on the way out and I tell her that there will be no more visitors for Cleo, that they may close the casket. We step out of the catacombs, past the bustling weekend trade of painted flesh and stilettoed heels, and into an endless stretch of Good Fridays. On the way to the car, we pass a mailbox in which I deposit the second letter, the one to the man who imagines himself in love with me.

It is the phone that wakes us, piercing the dark with its insistent shrill. When I push Pilgrim off my legs and turn over to look at the digital alarm, it reads 5:15. My heart pounds because I imagine it is someone calling to tell me my mother has died. But then awake, I remember that that nightmare is over and another is about to begin. Today is Saturday, the day of the funeral. Someone in another room answers. Somebody from the mainland calling, no doubt, someone who doesn’t know the time difference.

Saturdays used to be for getting up late and having pancakes soggy with syrup, and then taking two hours to pack a picnic and get ready to go to the beach. Saturdays were for wading out in the shallows with all the other mothers and their toddlers, learning to share the sand bucket and leftover sand castles. Saturdays were for taking long naps, still salty from the seawater, and for waking up to sunburned shoulders and a sandy bottom.

On those rare Saturdays when it rained all day over the hills of Honolulu, Cleo and I stayed inside and watched
Sesame Street
videos back-to-back and built tents out of stale-smelling patchwork quilts. Saturday dinners were leftovers or takeouts, whichever was easiest. And each Saturday rolled on by, one after the next, without special acknowledgment of their extraordinary power.

Saturday. Sabbath. (
When even the closest did not return to the tomb.
) We were good at observing the Sabbath, Cleo and I. Not Greg. If he wasn’t conducting a wedding, he was holed up in his office, putting the last touches to his Sunday sermon. Occasionally I would remind my husband that for all his fervent commitment to Christ, he was violating the Fourth Commandment. Arguing that the Sabbath was a workday for him, he compromised by taking Fridays off. So he would, for a few weeks, clear his calendar of meetings and spend Fridays with Cleo, sometimes picking me up from work for a quick midday meal at Buster’s. “Good Fridays,” Cleo called them, delighting in having her father to herself. For her, Saturday would come all too soon, as it does for me now.

Frank Tucker, the church’s lay leader and Greg’s closest ally in the church battles, has come to drive us to the church in his ugly brown Cadillac. It is the first time I have seen him in long pants and lace-up shoes, and with his sailor’s windswept gray hair neatly pressed into place. There had been talk of a limousine, but, thankfully, Greg had declined. A hideous idea.

It is overcast again today but not raining, as if the sky were holding its breath. The peaks of the Ko’olau Range are blanketed with dark clouds, and I am reminded of Cape Town’s Table Mountain and its foggy tablecloth that frequently drapes over it. There is no pretense in the streets of Honolulu today—even the plumeria trees do little to draw attention from the mounds of trash stacked along the sidewalks. Bits and pieces of people’s living rooms, bedrooms, basements, sit out on the curb rusting or rotting away, on display. High-density living has taught us there are no secrets; there is no use putting on airs. It’s okay, then, to put out the corduroy recliner Uncle Kimo died in or the baby’s metal crib, the cheap toys bought from someone else’s garage sale. You jam people in tight enough and soon it’s even okay to hang wet underwear from balconies as though they were Christmas garlands.

With its blazing poinciana trees, the old church seems almost regal until a closer look reveals the peeling plaster, the rusty sign, the gum-pocked
sidewalk. The car pulls up in front of the church and Frank opens my door, gives me a quick, crushing hug when I step out, and then drives to the basement parking lot. Greg finds my hand and leads me up the stairs and into the cavernous, nauseatingly fragrant space that is Makiki United Methodist Church.

Jenny enters from the side door with a Tupperware box and heads to the reception table to set up the display. Someone has already erected a framed picture of Cleo and draped around it a purple orchid lei. It was my idea to arrive this early—before the casket, before the crowd—but when I see the big floral arrangements and the center table at the chancel, I know it is a mistake.

“Greg,” I say, feeling my stomach turn itself inside out, “let’s go wait in your office.”

The church offices are located adjacent to the sanctuary, above the fellowship hall on the second floor. Greg opens the door and flicks a switch so that the air conditioner starts to hum. He leaves the lights off and opens the blinds enough to cast long, horizontal shadows on the carpet. I lie down on the couch, and he sits in the small chair next to me. On the table is his grandfather’s Bible, which he picks up, flipping through its skin-thin pages. He begins to read aloud, sputtering as though something were lodged in his throat, and I do not have the will to stop him:

“Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to thee!

Do not hide thy face from me in the day of my distress!

Incline thy ear to me;

Answer me speedily in the day when I call!

For my days pass away like smoke,

And my bones burn like a furnace.

My heart is smitten like grass, and withered;

I forget to eat my bread.

Because of my loud groaning my bones cleave to my flesh.

I am like a vulture of the wilderness, like an owl of the waste places;

I lie awake, I am a lonely bird on the housetop.

My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass.”

The moment he reads the “But,” I know what is coming, and I lift my hand to cut him off. He does not see it.
“But thou, O Lord,”
he reads,
“art enthroned forever.”

I say abruptly, “Stop. Please.” Greg glances at me briefly, then reads on silently to himself while I picture myself, wings tucked tight, perched high up on a rooftop overlooking a smoggy city. The dry wind screeches over the chimney pots and threatens to topple me over. The nest and the baby bird have long since been blown away. I am a lonely bird; I am a lonely bird.

AND NOW the warm trade winds blow through the church, stirring not feathers but flyaway hairdos. One woman has the gall to wear a hat, her fingers becoming clothespins. Does she think she is attending a tea party, perhaps? I see when she tilts her head against the breeze that it is Buella Baxter from the magazine. Buella, whose rebellion against her southern upbringing brought her to the islands two decades ago, will relinquish neither her accent nor her knack for making everyone else feel underdressed, even in a church that, I would be willing to bet, she has not stepped in since her last wedding. Buella, married three times, is mother to none. “Can’t stand the little urchins!” she is fond of announcing. “Can’t see what all the fuss is about,” she said when our boss, after a decade of trying to conceive, got pregnant. Without an ounce of humor, Buella sent the poor woman a condolence card and boycotted the baby shower the editorial staff threw for her. Most days we laughed off Buella’s outrageousness, and when it became unbearably insensitive one of us would tell her and she’d spit a cuss and be done with it.

Shortly after I started working for the magazine, Buella adopted me as part of her coven. When she found out I was the wife of a preacher, she pronounced her almost psychopathic loathing for all things religious and made me promise not to genuflect or pray in public. “I am not Catholic and I’m not Charismatic,” I told her, but it was only after she saw that I was not the reincarnated version of her evangelical great-aunt that she felt reassured.

“Good morning, Reverend Mother,” she would call out from her
desk when I walked by to pick up my mail each morning. Often she would use her pet name for me in the company of others and flounce off, scarves and jingly jewelry trailing, leaving confused expressions and fumbled explanations. At first I liked her little nickname for me, but a few months ago, while folding laundry late at night, I realized what the moniker said about the person I had become. One word relating to my husband, the second relating to my child. Somewhere between preacher’s wife and toddler’s mother were the unnamed, unknown parts of me. An Abbe of the blank space, the person of the synapse, the imperceptible pause between those two words. And now, with a rush of regret, I realize that I am no longer “reverend” or “mother,” and the two definitions have taken the junction with them.

The first two pews are roped off, but fortunately Rita and Frank, and old Mrs. Scribner with her toy poodle assuming her regular Sunday morning post, ropes or no ropes, have taken some of the seats reserved for family. Michael, Greg’s younger brother, and his wife, Martha, have flown in from Ohio with their three sons, and take up the front row with us. Mike’s suit is a size too small for him, quite possibly the one he wore on his wedding day ten years ago. Martha, a woman who has modeled herself after her biblical namesake with an impressive exactness, has made sure all her boys are wearing matching plaid shirts and have their hair trimmed like hedges. She leans over Rhiaan—a buffer—to me and touches my knee. “Those are from Mother,” she says, nodding to the two unsightly bouquets that stand like sentries on either side of Cleo’s casket. “She wanted to be here.”

“No she didn’t,” I reply tartly, to which she responds by clearing her throat. For a moment I imagine the saints of departed family members seated among the living; the ones I miss most—Mother and Grandmother—and those I do not know. It is all I can do to stay seated in the pew and not lurch toward the coffin, bear down on it with all my weight. You cannot have her, I want to shout. Go back to your graves, the lot of you!

I look across the aisle at the five rows clothed in black, the Samoan choir. At the director’s signal they rise like a swarm of hornets to their hive, and even the wind seems to retreat at their deafening voices. The
words are indecipherable, but the melody weaves its familiar thread through the crowd. Behind me people begin singing along in English “Abide with Me.” Their song seems to rock the church as though it were a cradle until we are all gently swaying, swaddled in song.