Come Sunday: A Novel (27 page)

COMING HOME FROM TENNIS PRACTICE, I watched my mother, overbloomed in her pink chenille gown, wincing at the insults my father hurled at her: liar, bitch, whore. After running out of expletives,
he flung the soiled dishes she had so neatly stacked instead of washing till it seemed a flock of porcelain birds had taken flight in our kitchen. “You think you can leave me? You think you can just walk out of my house? You think you can just go and I won’t drag your skinny ass back here again? Is that what you think?”

My mother didn’t answer him but rather turned to me and beseeched me to go to Mrs. Folliett’s house. This time she did not even bother with a reason: tartar sauce, a cup of sugar, a barrel of gasoline, a box of matches. “I’m not going, Ma,” I protested.

“Someone’s got some fucking sense around here!” he spat.

“Harry, please—”

“Please? Please? You don’t ‘please’ me anything! It’s about time she knew about her mother, about what a lying little whore she is, about how she was just going to up and leave her own daughter for some prick without so much as a goodbye.”

Looking at me again, she pleads, “I wasn’t going to leave you. I wasn’t.”

“You going to lie to your own goddamn kid now, Louise?”

When all the dishes had been smashed against the cupboards and the air was thick with cussing, my father thundered out the back door. I picked out the shards from my mother’s hair while her gaze fixed on the stain Mr. No-One-Friend’s unattended cigarette had left on the Formica kitchen table. The stain might as well have been a damp spot on a mussed bedsheet for all its testimony. “You weren’t going to leave me, were you, Mom?”

Before she could answer my father was back, this time with his ax. In one deft blow—
thwack
—he chopped off the corner of the kitchen table and the burn mark with it.

“Teach you a lesson,” he muttered, padded-cell crazy. “Teach you to bring another man in my house and have him pack your bags!” Wild, he swung the ax over his shoulder and above his head, his eyes scanning the room for its next mark. And I watched them come to rest on my mother at the moment she sank to her knees.

I did scream then, as if all I was ever born to do was become a single, piercing siren.

CICELY KISSES ME GOODBYE while Greg loads the picture and the bags in the trunk of Rhiaan’s car. In place of blinding cheeriness, Cicely shows signs of resignation. She will never leave Rhiaan, and I am glad, but I can’t say the same for myself. Greg wants to give up the past the way cocksure people give up smoking. Which seems to leave me with only two choices: either I give up the past too, or I give up Greg.

“I never understood why Ma didn’t leave him when she had the chance,” I tell Rhiaan as I hand him the pink parka at the airport.

“She found a way in the end, don’t you think?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “I don’t think she did.”

He rubs my head, shakes Greg’s hand, and watches us till we pass through the security checkpoint.

Greg steers us to two empty seats in front of the departure lounge’s TV set. He watches the news while I think about the passion that binds my brother and his wife, a bedrock that cannot crack from the weight of humdrum, or even, I suspect, from catastrophe. It occurs to me now, in a flash, that the kind of love I once sought is the kind that is not found but rather stumbled upon when the gaze is fixed on something else. The kind of love Mr. Pope’s lovers knew all about. I retrieve from my backpack the airline’s magazine and open it to the crossword puzzle. Fourteen across:
Pope’s lovers
(
6,7
). Eloisa, Abelard.

The garage door is open when I drive up in the car, and Greg is stacking the cardboard boxes with his office books in the left corner even though it is raining hard outside. The new roof inspires that kind of confidence now.

“I didn’t think you would make it home this early,” he says when I get out. “They have shut down the Pali Highway to one lane because of a huge rockslide.”

“It wasn’t raining that hard when I left the office, but the traffic is crazy. You’d swear we were having a blizzard.”

“Did your boss like your Tahoe travelogue?” Greg asks, changing the subject, following me inside the house.

“Oh, I guess,” I reply. “I think she likes the advertising it generated.” Greg brings out the basket of laundry and starts folding it while I sift through the mail.

“It’s her birthday week after next,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been thinking . . . a remembrance service might be a nice way to commemorate it.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And that it could be the right time, you know . . . to spread her ashes.”

“You have a place picked out?” I ask curtly.

“Let’s not make it like this, please, Abbe.”

“You do, don’t you? Where?”

He gives up. “I thought the beach by the lighthouse. The time we went shell-collecting, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we could recite some poems and say a prayer.”

It is a watery grave, then. We think it is quiet under the waves, but when they roll over it sounds like the distant beating of thunder on the Highveldt when the rains herald the arrival of summer. And in between, the perpetual rustle, like cicadas in the bush.

“You can’t go on keeping her under the bed,” he says.

“You’re probably right.” I think of Rhiaan’s “ashy mound.”
What kindness then to puff / and words shall be no more
.

I ARRIVE AT WORK bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and Buella follows me to my office with a report that the city’s sewer system has burst in several places, the one closest to us at Bishop Street and Nimitz Highway.

“Most of the staff can’t get into work. You might say we are well and truly up shit creek now,” she scoffs.

The TV is on in the staff lounge and the reporters are telling viewers to stay off the beaches and out of the water, now contaminated. There’s a report of two hikers missing, presumably a result of new waterfalls.

“Speaking of shit creeks . . . ,” she says, handing me a postcard. “This is from the One Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken.”

On the front is a picture of New York at night, on the back Sal’s hastily scribbled note. It is addressed to “the Belle of Kahako High.” “See, it was me he was really secretly in love with!” she teases. The note says that he’s getting married again, to a chorus girl named Charlie. At the bottom, a postscript:
Tell Abbe that Dionysius beats Apollo 2-to-1
.

“What the hell does that mean?” she asks.

“It means he’s giving love another chance.”

Buella reaches over to answer the phone, “Abbe Deighton’s desk, may I help you?”

“For you,” she says, and waves goodbye with her postcard.

“Hello?”

“Elizabeth, Carolyn here. I got your work number from Jenny, I hope you don’t mind.”

“What can I do for you?” I ask, already bristly about the chorus girl.

“Some of the ladies at church want to have a reception after the event and I thought we should check with you first.”

A rummage sale? The annual women’s auxiliary meeting? “What event?”

“The remembrance service next Saturday, of course. Even though it’s not going to be at church, Lou and I thought we could have the reception at Sylvia Horton’s house, since she lives on that side of the island.”

I can’t be sure if I reply before dropping the phone down on its cradle. Picturing Carolyn standing on the rocks, flagging the group of well-wishers into a neat pattern of assembly for a good look at my girl’s ashes, is almost too much to bear. I dial Greg’s office, but Betty says he has gone over to Petal’s place to talk about the baptism. The number she gives me rings until I hang up on Kelsey Oliver’s answering machine. Jenny comes to the phone after I insist the school secretary page her.

“Did you know about this?” I demand.

She doesn’t answer for a beat. “Didn’t Greg speak to you about it?”

“He mentioned a service but not a tea party for Carolyn and company!”

Jenny’s apology rolls into an explanation and then a hasty defense. Nobody, she says, really planned it this way—it just sort of took on a life of its own. It is probably going to be only thirty or so people, even less if the damp gets the better of everyone’s arthritis.

“I should be so bloody lucky,” I snap.

“I will gladly call them all and tell them it is going to be a private ceremony,” she says. “Nobody will hold it against you.”

“It’s just that I—I don’t know, Jen—it’s not a spectator sport, that’s all.”

“You’re right. How about a compromise: whoever you want goes to the beach, and the rest joins in at the reception.” She thinks she has mediated a settlement, but the only thing to feel well and truly settled is Sal’s marital status. It’s unmistakable—his giddiness—even if it weren’t confirmed by the postscript. Sal has chosen the dance of Dionysius, and he’s going to take his chances.

I SPEND THE WEEKEND keeping track of the reports about the weather, the contaminated water in Honolulu Harbor, the roads pockmarked with potholes, the flooded houses on the Ewa Plains. Everyone wants the rains to go. Everyone except me. But go they do. Today, five days before the service, the skies are clear and a rainbow straddles every valley from Pearl City to Hawaii Kai. Blooming a month early, the shower trees decorate our street, and Ronnie is out on the ladder again, clearing out the eaves. I call Buella and tell her that I won’t be coming into the office, that I will be working at home today.

The keyboard sits quiet and the computer screen blank. The words are not coming today, only thoughts of birthday parties in the park, mothers who are happy with the forecast, calling friends: “We’re on for Saturday.” Wedding coordinators, glad not to have to face “Plan B,” will give the brides thumbs-up for beach thongs. And the nurse aides at Belmont Village will wheel out the comatose along Kuhio Boulevard for a whiff of fresh air. Cooped up, my grandmother used to tell me. “You’ve been cooped up too long.” And she would shoo me out of the house and into the garden, where I didn’t have a clue what to do. Which gets me to thinking about children in boxes, in coops.

I rush upstairs and reach under the bed for the treasure that used to be my child. It is only when I feel the rucksack beside the box that the idea comes, quick as a beetle from under a rock. Pulling them both out from under the bed, I mentally check off the plan’s bullet points. The box, wrapped in my favorite old T-shirt, and the water bottle fit together snugly in the backpack. I throw in a snack bar, and before my
head clears and the edge dulls against acrimonious voices shaming my plan, I run out of the house. Mrs. Chung calls out a greeting and I wave hastily, and instead of turning right to go down the hill to town, I make a left.

There is nothing to mark the head of the south Nuuanu Trail, set behind the water tower, so if anyone hikes it it is bound to be a local or someone who has stumbled upon the Division of Forestry and Wildlife’s outdated brochure. Several years have passed since we last hiked the trail, and even then not all the way to the ridge crest but to the halfway point, where the lookout under the monkeypod tree gets you a view of the city in one direction and the Ko’olaus in the other.