Come Sunday: A Novel (42 page)

It is only when from my bandaged hood I groan that they smile: Yes, this is the right room; see, I told you, it is her. Susannah, red-eyed, dabs her cheeks with her free hand; the other one is still pulling me from the wreckage of my terror. “We made it,” she whispers. “You made it.”

“Etienne?” I croak.

“He’s fine, everyone’s fine. We all made it!”

No, I want to remind her, we didn’t all make it. Someone didn’t make it.

“The others?”

Delia and Susannah exchange looks. “Don’t worry about that now. Look, I’ve brought you something . . .”

Delia, holding her madam’s handbag, grins at me as though seeing propped-up mummies were a regular occurrence.

“What day is it?” I ask.

“Saturday. Saturday, the twenty-second of April. Your brother will be here day after tomorrow—we talked to him again last night; he’s very anxious to see you.” To Delia she turns and retrieves from her handbag the framed photo of Cleo. “I brought some of your things from the house; I thought they might be a comfort to you here.” She puts Cleo on the bedside table, along with the little clock. In my lap she places Cleo’s fluffy bunny. “They found it in Pepsi’s house, along with your other belongings. There, that already cheers the place up.”

“Thank you,” I say.

She starts to tear up. “We are the ones who should say thank-you. You saved our lives, Abbe; you risked your life for a couple of strangers you only just met.”

I shake my head. How to tell her? How to tell her I was saving myself. And not just from death. There are things worse than death. Guilt,
for one. The shallow grave of what-if. Waiting, too, is worse. If there is a hell, it is surely entered only after a long bout in a waiting room. Waiting for doctors to bring pronouncements of death, waiting for children to climb up out of their graves or waiting for one to open up so you might climb in. Waiting for a trigger to pull or a husband’s touch or a mother’s return. How to tell her I could wait no more?

“No, really. Everyone is saying so.” Delia hands her the newspaper, which she holds up for me to inspect. Pointing to a headline, EXPAT RISKS LIFE, THWARTS LOTTO THIEVES, Susannah gushes, “Everyone is calling you Paarl’s hero. The mayor—Etienne plays bowls with him—says they are going to give you a plaque, and Simon Wessels, you know, from the
Tribune
, is doing a full-page feature on you. He’s going to interview you as soon as the doctor gives the go-ahead.”

Susannah rambles on, answering questions I do not ask, filling in the blanks so a picture emerges. Etienne, she tells me, triggered the shop’s silent alarm before disabling it, even though he knew it would take the armed-response team ten minutes to reach them, ten minutes he knew they did not have. But he was thinking of his mother-in-law and the hyena boy who had her tied up. The alarm, sounding both in the police station and the bedroom of the neighborhood watch association’s chief, was not only zoned for the shop but also for the house. Two patrol cars were quickly dispatched. The first, arriving at the Bredenkamps’ home a little after 4:00 a.m., surprised Lucky, who, expecting the return of his cohorts, opened the door to find Karel van der Walt and his partner in no mood for talking. No one is quite clear how it happened, since there were no signs of resisting arrest, but the bullet Lucky had been so eager to discharge found its way into his own kneecap. Mrs. du Toit was untied from a chair in the dining room, and although unharmed in any outward way was taken to Green Valley Hospital to be on the safe side. “It took the wind out of her sails. But she’s a tough ol’ bird,” says Susannah. “She will be all right.”

The second patrol car got to the shop after Etienne had managed to pry open the driver’s door of his minivan with a crowbar from the shop’s hardware department and was in the process of pulling a semiconscious
driver from her seat. By that time Susannah had run to the nearest neighbor and returned with Hendrik Swanepoel and his twin teenage sons, all of whom brought rifles and were ready to shoot at anything that moved. Nothing apparently did. Etienne, Susannah, and I were loaded in one ambulance, the two burglars and a police escort in another. When the manager opened shop at seven o’clock on Thursday morning there was nothing to indicate the ordeal of the early-morning hours other than a sprinkling of glass and a stain on the side wall. Which is not to say that nobody was aware of what had transpired. By noon the city editor had received two dozen different calls about the incident and had already assigned his top journalist to cover the story, and at the end of the day Etienne’s manager reported record sales on everything from pepper spray to sausage rolls. I drift off as Susannah tells me about the journalist’s visit to their home.

THE NURSE pushes a button and my bed sits up obediently. She steers toward me the tray of mush she calls “lunch” and tells me she wants to see it all gone by the time she returns. “You are a celebrity now; can’t be looking like a scarecrow when your visitors come, can you?”

I feel the need to salute.

Each time the visitors come, it is with a little gift: Susannah brought a nightgown from Woolworths, lipstick, a few tabloid magazines. Etienne, on his visit, brought his gratitude, tied with a bow of stuttered sentences. Mrs. du Toit, too weak to venture farther than her own bed, sent with Delia a bag of apricots (“the last of them”), even though my jaw does not like to process much more than pulp. I have asked the nurses to eat them before they go bad, and occasionally they stand in clumps, juice dribbling down their chins, talking about nothing to do with cars or windshields or dead men. Bless them.

The guests have also left the newspapers folded in thirds where the stories are featured. The stories of that night. “Self-defense” is what my role has been chalked up to. At least by the police. But the good people of Paarl won’t have any of that.
“She saved their lives,”
the neighbor Yvette
Dickson is quoted in Mr. Wessels’s column.
“That makes her a hero in my book.”
Some of the local clergy, along with several other activists, have taken it as an opportunity to lobby even harder against lottery organizers.
“They serve only to heighten a sense of disparity, encouraging others to act in such desperate ways,”
a spokesman for the Dutch Reformed Church is quoted as saying. In response, the paper does not run a feature on the Lotto’s winner, just prints her name on the second to last page (Mvr. B. T. Naude of Franschhoek). Others are calling complacent neighbors to action, to form more “neighborhood watch teams” that will patrol the streets at night in shifts. But nowhere in the article and on no one’s lips is the word that seems, if not obvious, equally relevant: murder.

When my nurse comes back and inspects my plate she is clearly displeased. My punishment is a sponge bath on the wrong side of lukewarm. When she is done and my skin is pink and goosey from her efforts, I ask for my hairbrush, but instead of handing it to me she begins brushing my hair. “Long hair is back in style again, isn’t it?” she says. “In my day, a woman cut her hair as soon as her baby could yank on it, and it stayed that way forever-amen.” It seems years, possibly forever-amen, since I looked in a mirror, longer still since I took the shears to my head. How is it my hair has grown long without my noticing? “Let’s put it in a plait, shall we, that way it won’t get so tangled up.” She hands me a small mirror when she is done and tells me not to worry, it will be the same old face I will see in the mirror once the doctor removes the bandage. Not one that will win any contests on Halloween, she assures me.

As if on cue, the doctor with the turban comes in and flips through my chart. “Could have been worse,” he says, as he has done every day. “Could have been a whole lot worse.” He never elaborates as to how, and I never ask. Instead, I just nod and smile: Yes, yes, a lot worse. For dead does seem worse. Certainly it is worse for Boss, as it will be for Pepsi down the hall, who, they tell me, is losing his battle. And if dead isn’t worse, then being a skinny black boy with a girlie smile and a name like Lucky in a crowded prison certainly is. Barely Dead and About to Be Dead are clearly not states of advantage. And this is still a
novel thought for me. My mind runs over it like a tongue finding the tangy ditch in my gum where a few teeth once were.

Dead is also worse for the mothers whose wombs bore those two men. And though we will never meet, I can’t help but wonder if we will forever be tethered by the same filament of grief at losing our children. Headlines with “hero” have done nothing to assuage the sense that I owe these women something. A debt I will never be able to repay. Wasn’t that what Greg said of Mr. Nguyen? Are the old Vietnamese driver and I tethered now too? Mr. Nguyen has been on my mind a lot in the past few days. The old man killed by accident, and I called him a murderer. I killed on purpose, yet people call me a hero.

It is these unseen visitors, the ones who use my conscience as a stage, who point to such things as murder and blame. The hobo who had once hobbled up to the mike that Sunday morning confessing to murder and how the Man had, as Ezekiel had prophesied, put flesh on his bones and breathed new life—he revisits me with his words: “You take away someone’s life, whether you’re thinking about it or not, and your own life goes with it too.” I know what he means now. With Boss has gone what was left of my old life. The Abbe who had given up, perhaps in part even before Cleo died. The Abbe whose only act of being was to wish for death. And in her stead is this other Abbe. Can’t say I know her very well, but she has long hair and an idea that being alive is something good. Her old bones are being patched together and padded with flesh that feels like it can put up one more fight. And with a sudden huff and a puff her lungs are filled as though they might, someday, give out a whoop.

THEY STAND and eat Mrs. du Toit’s apricots by my bedside, the visitors and the staff, at various times throughout the day. These moments of communion where nothing much happens except the savoring of leftover summer. The nice policeman who took my statement ate one when I insisted, as did Piet Slabbert, who ambled in last night. “If you want to talk to me, you have to try one,” I said.

“Didn’t know you could get them so late in the season,” he replied, selecting the ruddiest. After he was done, he pocketed the pit and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “Don’t suppose they allow smoking in here anymore.”

“They don’t allow anything much more than a grueling regimen of something called ‘health care.’ ”

“Sounds too exhausting for me.” He chuckled. “And speaking of exhausting . . .” The deal is still on, he told me. The developers, eager to move ahead with their plans, are still waiting for the papers to be signed.

“They are letting me out of here in another week,” I told him. “But Rhiaan arrives tomorrow; maybe he can sign them.”

“They can wait another week; it’s not going to kill them.” He cringed at the word. “Sorry!”

“What about the kids? Have you found them a place?”

“We are still working on it. But you leave that up to me and get on with the business of ‘health care.’ ” I waved at his suggestion as though it were a fly about to settle on something rather perfect.

“YOU LOOK GOOD, sis,” is the first thing Rhiaan says, his face spelled out in relief.

“For a mummy, you mean?”

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a Mary Shelley character.”

Cicely knocks his forearm with the back of her hand. “Stop it,” she says, and bends down to give me a gentle hug. “I am so sorry for what you have had to go through.”

Rhiaan ignores his wife’s sentimentality. “It’s the nurses I feel sorry for; from what I understand, you are giving them a lot of uphill. Nurses make terrible adversaries, didn’t anybody tell you that? They have access to some really long needles.”

“It’s not the needles you have to worry about; it’s the sandpaper they call ‘sponges.’ ”

“I brought you a quilt,” interjects Cicely. “A little one for the airplane.” She spreads it out on the bed.

“Now you not only feel like a granny, you will be equipped with the quintessential granny accessory!” says Rhiaan.

“Did you fly ten thousand miles to torture me, or did you have some other objective in mind?” I ask my brother.

He scratches his head, eyes scanning the ceiling. “Was there something else?” he mutters. “No, just torture,” he says finally.

After Rhiaan returns with an extra chair, they sit next to my bed while Cicely catches me up on the news. Jenny would like for me to call her—she has tried the hospital several times but always has the time difference wrong, so it usually ends up being in the middle of the night when only the nurses like to wake the patients. The animals are fine and Mrs. Chung is keeping an eye on the house and collecting the mail. The people at the magazine have been informed. “An awfully bossy woman by the name of Jean asked whether a travel story on Cape Town might be in order, and I told her it most certainly would not be—I hope you don’t mind.”

I smile gratefully. “And you told Greg what happened, I assume,” I ask.

Cicely looks at Rhiaan, who nods. “Right after we heard from Etienne Bredenkamp.”

“And?”

“He was shocked, of course. Wasn’t he, Rhiaan?” Cicely rushes.

Perhaps part of me was hoping Greg would hurry to my bedside, read from a stack of my favorite books, dispel the hours of boredom. By the looks on Rhiaan’s and Cicely’s faces, perhaps they were expecting this too. But it is too late for white horses and on-call knights.

“He has called a couple of times to find out how you are doing,” Rhiaan answers, his banter and chattiness having stalled. “And he sends his best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

“It’s funny,” I say. “They all call me Mrs. Deighton in here. But I haven’t been Mrs. Deighton for a very long time.” Cicely leans over to pat my hand. “It’s my own fault. I stopped making the effort long before
it even occurred to Greg that he needed to make more of one. He’s not going to now, and who can blame him?”

Blame. I had such high hopes for Blame. Wasn’t it going to sort out the good guys from the bad, and then dole out to each their just desserts? A stand-in for God, really. But Blame has been scrambled now. Who can tell one yoke from another? It’s good only as a serving to a world with no teeth.