Come Sunday: A Novel (30 page)

Cicely calls and, surprised to find me home, stammers the sentiment she had intended for the answering machine. When I ask about Rhiaan, she speaks as though she has been let off the hook. His trip back to South Africa went well, and she thinks her decision not to go along probably accounts for part of that. He met some people who are making a film that they want him to coproduce, so that was good too. And he had paid a visit to the cemetery. Someone, apparently, had left flowers on my mother’s grave. Who, I puzzled, would leave my mother flowers?

After Cicely’s call there are no more distractions. There is nothing left to do but sit on the floor in Cleo’s room and go through her closet. I gently lift the dresses free from their hangers, fold them along the seams to avoid creasing, and put them in the boxes left over from Greg’s move. One box is going to be just for all her dress-up clothes, with their wands and crowns and wings.

It is only among her stuff where I find bits of Greg, in the things he couldn’t resist buying her. Suddenly it seems wrong to pack up her closet, so I stack the empty boxes at the foot of the shelves and close the doors. Maybe another day. Returning from the linen closet with clean sheets, I remake her bed and fill the empty vase next to it with a hibiscus flower. I straighten her bookshelf. Her sketch pad opens to a crayon drawing of three people. From enormous lollipop heads sprout root-thin limbs, the tips of which have Ping-Pong ball fingers. Two of the figures have curly hair; the one whose hair is short and spiky is me. Around them are green shoots. “Lost in the Forest” is what the picture is titled. On the bottom, in my handwriting, is a written account of her story:
The mommy and the daddy are lost in the forest. They are calling and calling. The little girl finds them. She is brave and kind. She takes them home and gives them bread and honey. The End.
As if being “brave and kind” is all
it takes to find the lost and fix the broken. There is only one place to which the lost and broken can go at an hour like this: daytime TV.

IT IS ALMOST half past six when Petal knocks at the door, wearing what looks like a dishcloth around a floor-length paisley skirt and a tank top with a picture of an orange on it with the word “art” printed below it.

“Jenny’s in the car,” she lisps, and gives me a quick kiss before I can pull away.

“You’re late,” I snap, feeling like a scratchy sweater my grandmother might have knitted.

“It’s all my fault. Sorry about that. Blossom got all worked up just as we were about to leave, so I had to nurse her till she fell asleep. Didn’t want Granddad to be all in a tizzy from the get-go.”

“Didn’t know he could be anything but,” I mumble.

“You sit in the front, Abbe,” she says, holding open the door for me as though I were a cantankerous elderly aunt.

The car is not even out of the driveway before Petal hands me a gift wrapped in hand-stamped paper. “It’s for you in memory of Cleo,” she says, chewing her bottom lip. “Hope you like it.” I unwrap it to find a CD, the back of which is listed with song titles from the sixties. I really must roll my eyes now. “I wrote some of the lyrics down so you could sing along if you wanted to,” she says, pointing to the insert.

I see Jenny glance at me from the corner of my eye, and I know she is pleading with me to be kind.
Brave and kind
.

“Thank you, that’s very thoughtful,” I say.

“SHALL WE HAVE WINE?” asks Jenny, peering over the top of her menu.

“Why not?” I reply.

When the waiter brings the bottle, Petal announces that she really ought not to, cupping her breasts quite unexpectedly, which I take to
mean she is still breast-feeding, but Lord only knows what the waiter thinks. Evidently he sees it as a sign to move on to the next empty glass—mine—but she says, “Oh, what the heck. It’s a party, innit?” and then just as quickly her smile falls. “Oh, blimey, Abbe, I am so sorry. I never seem to say the right thing.”

It is as though we are locked in a game of Statues, the waiter bent over with his bottle poised at the lip of my glass, Jenny nose-up from the top of her menu, me with hand ready to remove the napkin from my plate, Petal with hers clasped to her mouth.

“No, you’re right. It’s not a wake. Tonight, just for tonight, how about we live a little.”

The waiter, relieved, pours the wine and Petal reaches over and gives me another hug.

“To life,” says Jenny, wineglass poised in a toast. “And to Cleo, who showed us how to live it.”

“To life, and to Cleo,” we say before Petal drains half her glass of wine.

By the time the desserts arrive, Jenny and I have both exchanged half a dozen glances each time Petal drained and then refilled her glass. We have listened to all the “brilliant” things Blossom has accomplished in the past few months, moved through a litany of Kelsey’s idiosyncrasies and Fay’s reasons for sainthood, and ended with Petal’s decision to return to England.

“That’s good,” I remark. “I am sure your father misses you very much and is eager to see the baby.”

She nods. “You have to go back eventually, haven’t you? Can’t put it off forever.” Well, yes you can, I want to tell her; I have.

“Speaking of trips,” Jenny announces, “I think I might go back home for a visit.” When she sees what must be a look of shock on my face, she explains. “A visit, I said.” While Petal nods with the enthusiasm of a plastic dashboard-mounted chihuahua, Jenny explains. “I talked to my sister the other night and she says my mother is getting a bit feeble, and you know how it is with old people. Besides, I have been waiting for something to spend my tax return on.”

“I would love to visit Jamaica if I had the money,” gushes Petal. “All
those things you hear about—spells and voodoo—it must be a very spiritual place.”

“Well now, don’t go believing everything you hear. Poor’s what my hometown is more than anything else.”

Petal is not to be dissuaded from the topic. “Where would you go if you had the money, Abbe?”

Without hesitating, I tell her, “If I had the money I wouldn’t have to go anywhere,” but I can’t keep the tremble from my tone.

“What’s wrong?” asks Jenny.

I shake my head. “I don’t think I am going to be able to hang on to the house much longer. Greg’s got his own bills to pay come June, so unless I get a buyer for my grandmother’s property soon, I’m going to have to sell the place.”

“Where will you go?” asks Petal.

“We’ll just add that to the bullet-point list of things to worry about,” I snap.

Jenny, who will gladly forfeit her trip to Jamaica to pay just one month of my mortgage, is quick. “You can always stay with me.”

The waiter clears our dessert dishes and I ask for the check.

“I am sure there will be a buyer—it’s a nice place, right? Farms have such good energy—you know, from all the growing things.”

“Not this one, apparently.”

“What do you mean?”

I look over at Jenny. “She’s going to love this,” I say.

“What? What am I going to love?”

“It has a curse.” There. When I say it, it sounds as ridiculous as it did when I brought up the matter with Rhiaan.

As though at a séance, Petal gasps. “What kind of curse?”

“Well, Petal, the bad kind.”

“What was the curse?” This must be as close to pulling teeth as Petal can get.

“It was a curse on the land, that none of the trees would produce fruit until wrong was made right. I’m not one to believe in stuff like that”—and I can just see Petal’s incredulous look:
Why not?
—“but the weird thing is that those trees haven’t produced fruit in twenty years.
They’re barren, and that’s why no one has bought the farm. It doesn’t have anything to do with the curse; all anyone has to do is take a look at those poor trees to figure the soil’s gone bad. And what farmer is going to buy a fruit farm with bad soil?” The waiter brings our check, and for a moment there is a flurry of handbags and a race to see who can draw their wallets first. Petal stirs her coffee, sucks on her spoon, and then points it at me as though it were a wand. “Curses can be broken, you know.”

On the way back home in the car I am preoccupied by thoughts of those sick stick trees. When we pull into the driveway, the house is completely dark because I forgot to turn on the porch light. Petal no doubt brings up Greg because it looks overbearingly lonely. “You must miss Reverend Deighton an awful lot.”

“Actually, not much.”

“I miss him,” she continues. “It’s too bad he had to go away.”

I bend over to give Jenny a hug and get out the car. “He didn’t go away, Petal; he left. There’s a difference.”

Jenny has to drive another thirty minutes to take Petal home. For Petal, the porch light will be on and a baby will be waiting. A grandmother will greet her, while across the ocean her father will count off the days on his calendar till it is upon his doorstep she stands. For a girl just turned twenty-four, of course curses can be broken, just as Cleo’s stick figures can find their way out of the forest to a table of bread and honey—Petal, after all, is on an even-numbered year.

There are several people with blue masks and white coats standing around me as I lie on a gurney and gaze into a circle of lights directly above me. They stare at my chest, and when someone cranks open my ribs I see them remove a tiny bird where my heart should be. The bird is sticky and wet, as if newly hatched, but its eyes are white; dead. An alarm sounds and they hurry to close up the cavity, but they do not put my bird back. They have taken my bird; there is no other bird. The ringing goes on and on, and the lights are very hot, and the people have gone away. When I manage to open my eyes, the afternoon sun is blazing down on the couch where I lie and the phone is persistent in its ring. Sweaty and shivery, I put a hand up to my chest and reach for the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Abbe, it’s Jen; I have some sad news.” Without waiting for a response, she says, “Jakes died yesterday.”

“What?”

“He died from complications after a kidney transplant. Remember his brother who was so sick? Jakes was giving him a kidney, but he never came out of ICU.”

I didn’t pray for bad things to happen to Theresa, so it is not my fault, is the first thing I think. And then: God is getting even, there’s a
universal justice at work in the world. And finally, I think, Dammit, Jakes is dead now too.

Jenny goes on, “It was just one of those flukes.”

“Terrible.”

“Theresa is having the funeral here,” she goes on. After Cleo died, Theresa and Jakes moved their family to Utah to be near his family. Before I made it clear to Jenny that I didn’t want updates on how their lives were getting along, she reported that Theresa missed Hawaii terribly. “Jakes’s family are Mormons; and you know Theresa and dresses,” Jenny had said. But really it was her family that Theresa missed, her sister, her mother, her girlfriends.

“When is it going to be?”

“Saturday. But I’m flying out to Salt Lake City tonight to help her.” There goes her trip to Jamaica.

“Terrible,” I repeat.

“I know.”

“And the kids?”

“The boys are in shock, but Tess doesn’t know yet. Theresa said she can’t figure out how to tell her her daddy isn’t coming home from the hospital.”

“I’ll call Greg.”

“He already knows.”

“He’s doing the funeral?”

“No, but he’ll be there.” After a pause, she says, “They say they come in threes.”

“What do?” But I know what she is going to say.

“Deaths.”

Cleo plus Jakes. “But there’s only been two.”

“I know; that’s what worries me.”

Perhaps the best newborn photo we have of Cleo is one I have not looked at since she was alive. Pasted in the book that tells of the day she was born, the picture on page three is of Jakes. With huge tattooed biceps, rounded shoulders, and resembling a wildebeest, Jakes is cradling a bean-sized Cleo. The caption beneath says,
On the day you were born, giants
bent down to smile at you
. He is not facing the camera but lost in the moment of swaddling new life.

You could say Jakes knew all about new life because he was in the midst of having one. Released from federal prison years before he had served his full sentence for grand theft auto, a newly converted Jakes threw himself headlong into acts of deep penance. “I am a different kind of prisoner now,” he was fond of saying, “a prisoner of the Lord,” confirming for me that Jesus always had time for people who didn’t feel like they had paid enough. Every Sunday morning before the first worship service, Jakes made breakfast for the hobos from the park across the street. Every Sunday afternoon, he went back to the prison to a motley assembly of no-gooders and held a Bible study. When his students got out, they looked him up, limped to the church like mange-riddled hyenas, and lined up patiently for pancakes and bacon, and salvation sunny-side up.

One morning a middle-aged man roasted by the sun hobbled to the front of the fellowship hall and leaned heavily on his cane as he bent down into the mike Greg had just set up for the service. “I murdered a man,” he confessed. Someone in the breakfast line cleared his throat, the rest of them turned to listen. “I murdered him because I never did like the look of him. Didn’t like what he said to me one day, and I did it lickety-split, without thinking. But here’s the thing: You take away someone’s life, whether you’re thinking about it or not, and your own life goes with it too. I’m a shadow here today, my brothers, but I’m here because Jakes told me about the Man who puts flesh on your bones again, breathes into you again. I ain’t saying I got life yet, but I’m saying I got hope, and if it’s good enough for me, it can be good enough for you.”