Come Sunday: A Novel (13 page)

“You go,” I say, watching the sparrows bide their time on the balcony rail, the cardinals’ apparent disinterest.

“Come with me, Abbe,” he pleads.

I turn to look at him and his face threatens to collapse on itself. Slowly, deliberately, I shake my head and turn away. His sigh is a flutter of wings.

“We are going to have to talk about this, you know,” he says, walking to the rocking chair, scaring the birds from their meal.

I look ahead and blink.

“About what to do with her. About what to do with her ashes,” he presses.

“Yes, I expect so.”

“Well?” he asks.

“Well, what?”

“Well, what are we going to do? Where are we going to spread them?”

“I can’t have this discussion now,” I say, seeing the first bold sparrow return to the feeder.

“So you want me to just bring them home and prop the box next to the sugar bowl till you are ready to talk about it? Is that what you want?”

“Greg, please.”

“No, Abbe, not this time. You don’t get to always have it your way.”

“Who the hell are you to talk to me about my way?” I shout, facing him. “If I had it my way, she would not be dead. Do you understand? If I had it my way, your church members would not be clogging up my refrigerator with food that’s fit for a Fourth of July picnic. And if I had it my way, you would not be standing here right now provoking me into a conversation I do not want to have.”

We stare at each other, blinking at the heat of an unearthly fire, until he turns away and walks out of the room. When I look at the feeder, all the sparrows have returned to peck at the cardinals’ leftovers, and I rock again, slowly, for the souls of the deceased.

SHE STEPS into a dark swamp, where the trees are up to their knees in water. The reeds are sharp and the mud smells bad like boiled rot. She doesn’t like the dark, she doesn’t like forests, this is going to scare her, I think. “Cleo,” I call to her, but she cannot hear me. “Cleo!” I call louder over my own terror. She is lost; I can tell because she looks around and then walks a little deeper into the darkness. From behind I try to speed up, to reach her, but even though she is very scared now, taking very few steps at all, I still cannot get closer. I reach out my arms, stretching across the abyss: “Cleo!”

I wake up and pull at my hair, crying out into the silence of the room. Greg runs up the stairs, turns on the bedside light, and holds out his arms. “Shh, shh,” he whispers. “It’s only a dream. Shh.”

“I couldn’t help her,” I stammer. “I was trying to get to her, but she couldn’t hear me. She was in some kind of hell, Greg, and I couldn’t save her.”

“It’s only a dream, babe,” he whispers. “Come downstairs, come have some dinner.”

It is not the middle of the night but only seven-thirty, and Greg has just settled down for his evening vigil in front of the television.

“Anything on?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I have come to believe that this is one of the things we can rely on in life: that there will be nothing on television.”

I sit down in his chair and he brings me a tray with a plate of cheese and biscuits and an apple cored, pared, and peeled the way Cleo used to eat hers. We watch sitcom reruns, deadpan through all the one-liners, and Greg answers the phone each time it rings. Patiently, he says the same things over and over again: No thank you, we don’t need anything right now; yes, it was a moving service; thank you for your thoughtfulness; yes, see you Sunday.

“You’re not honestly going to church on Sunday,” I say, incredulous at the thought.

“Yes, I am. In fact, I’m going to preach,” he says to the TV.

I frown, stare at this man I suddenly do not know. “What?”

“It’s what I know to do, okay? It’s how I process things,” he says.

“These are not ‘things’; this is mourning—there is no ‘processing.’ ”

“If you don’t mind, I would really rather not argue about semantics. I am going to church on Sunday, I will be in the pulpit, and I would very much like it if you could come with me,” he says.

“I am not about to go to church and face all those people and sing praises to God,” I say.

“That’s what I thought. And I completely understand.”

I am about to say, Understand? There is nothing about this that anyone can understand, but catch myself. Semantics. I begin to tremble, and realize that it is not Cleo walking into the swamp, losing her way. It is me.

When the phone rings for the fourth time, I tell him to leave it, but he picks up anyway, and rather than the usual acceptances, I hear him say, “Yes, this is Reverend Deighton, who is this?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I cannot hear you very well; could you speak up?” I look over at him just in time to see his eyes glaze over.

“Who is it?” I whisper, but he gets up and leaves the room.

“Yes,” I hear him say over his shoulder. And then, again, “Yes.”

Fifteen minutes go by but Greg does not return. I put the tray of half-eaten food down, get up, walk through the kitchen to his study, and find him sitting quietly on his chair in the dark.

“Who was that?”

He looks over at my quivering face and delivers the answer for which I am quite unprepared.

“Mr. Nguyen,” he says.

“Who?”

“The driver.”

What I know of the driver is that he owns a white Toyota Corolla, older model, impeccable but for the slight dent on the left-hand side of the bumper and a missing headlight. I know he lives alone in a cinder block house at the cul-de-sac of River Street. That his only family is a son in Los Altos, California. And that he has never been cited for so much as a moving violation.

Involuntary manslaughter, the police had first said (nothing in the books about childslaughter), and then changed their minds. No evidence, I overheard the officers tell Greg in our hallway, of negligent driving. He had not been drinking, or speeding; it was one of those random, no-fault accidents. Unaware that I was standing at the top of the stairs, they continued their report, although I heard Greg twice invite them to sit in the living room and drink some coffee. “The driver has no priors. Hell, Reverend, the man has not even been ticketed before.” The voice sounded apologetic. There was a pause and I imagined them to be standing around, shaking their heads in amazement. Was it then that Greg offered them coffee a third time? “The skid marks corroborate what the witnesses testified. The strange thing about it,” the officer said, “is that the old man keeps hanging around the station. Every day. I swear he’s disappointed we haven’t arrested him.”

“What does he do there?” Greg asked.

“Sometimes he adds something to his statement, but mostly he just keeps giving us the same details. One of us usually has to tell him to leave; otherwise he sits out in the waiting area for hours.”

What I know about the driver, perhaps better than anyone else except maybe for Mr. Nguyen himself, is that he, like Theresa, like me, is getting away with murder. That there is no such thing as a no-fault accident.

“WHAT DID HE WANT?” I now ask Greg.

“I’m not really sure. He offered his condolences,” Greg replies, still stupefied. I put my hand over my mouth to smother the erupting scream. “He said how sorry he is, that he would never be so bold as to ask forgiveness.”

“What did you say?”

“I can’t remember. I don’t know if I said anything.” He frowns, trying to recollect.

I sit down on the floor, lean against the doorpost. Minutes go by.

“He sounded so . . .” Greg begins, and pauses again, shaking his
head. After a while I get up and turn around to head out. “. . . damned,” he says. “He sounded like a damned man.”

MY MOTHER knew what it was like to be damned, and if on a morning after waking up she temporarily forgot, my father would find a way to remind her. After the day the telephone left skid marks on the wall and Mr. No-One-Friend stopped calling, my father did not repeat the word that had turned his “wife” into a “whore.” Which is not to say he had changed his mind on the matter. He cut up her purple frock, dumped the hot rollers into the trash can, and replaced the telephone with one that came with a lock and key, while my mother’s fingernails went back to being chipped instead of painted.

Ever since the earth was formed my father had the same schedule—off to work by seven, home by six for dinner, Wednesday nights ten or eleven depending on when he got kicked out of the pub, weekends mostly fishing in the afternoons and playing darts at the pub in the evenings. But after the incident (which in my mind came to be known as “the last laugh” because of my father’s new best phrase, “Who’s having the last laugh now, hey, Louise?”), you could no more predict his timetable than you could an earthquake’s. It had surely cost him the offer of promotion to foreman, leaving work at two or three in the afternoon without permission or an hour before clock-out time. But my dad had more important things to check on. My mother, for instance.

She had come to pick me up from school one day, not too long after the telephone incident, and she told me we were making a quick stop on the way home.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Can we get an ice cream from Pick ’n’ Pay?”

“We aren’t going to the grocery store,” she replied.

“Well, then where?”

“I am stopping by the City Hall to pick up some papers.”

I didn’t have time to ask her what papers because I was leaning
over my seat to reach my backpack for the uneaten banana in it when I noticed a familiar car behind us.

“Isn’t that Dad’s pickup?”

My mother, checking her rearview mirror, sighed. “Not again.” And that’s how I learned that this was not the first (nor was it to be the last) time my father followed my mother. She turned left at Main Street, and instead of heading east for the municipal buildings, she headed west. I swung around to check and, sure enough, my father made the turn and kept right on coming.

“Shouldn’t we stop? Maybe he wants to tell us something?” I suggested, but my mother kept driving, both hands clamped to the steering wheel, muttering under her breath and shaking her head.

By the time she turned onto R45, the road that led to my grandmother’s farm, my father’s truck was so close to our bumper that it appeared as though we were towing him.

“Mom,” I said. “Slow down.” I glanced at the speedometer—100 kilometers per hour, the needle still arching its back. Instead of watching her speed, she glanced from her rearview mirror to the road and back again. Within minutes we were in the farmlands, the road veering past the vineyards headed for Dead Man’s Curve.

“Mom, the sign says fifty!” She barely tapped her brakes, then carved up the curves till she got to the hairpin bend that had totaled more cars than the Kyalami Racetrack. I prayed that ours would not be one of them. But she eased up, eyes so fixed on the road that she did not notice, as we rounded the bend, that my father had tied us for first place. With the truck window rolled down, he gestured for my mother to pull over.

“Not today, Harry,” she whispered to herself, and stepped on the gas.

I saw a flash of black the same second I felt its impact on my mother’s car. Only then did she hit her brakes, skidding to a stop on the road’s gravel shoulder. It was a hard blow, one that should have killed the animal, one I wished had so we might have been spared its loud, agonized wailing. I looked first at my mother, slumped over the wheel in defeat, and then behind me to where my father was getting
out of his truck and making his way to the middle of the road, where the whining dog lay. I got out in time to see my father wrap it in his windbreaker and lift it off the center line. “Get back in the car, Abbe,” he said. Out of nowhere a man who identified himself as the dog’s owner appeared, his own pickup at the foot of the driveway on the opposite side of the road. The dust had not yet settled from where he had come, the farmhouse at the line of trees.

The dog was big—a bull mastiff, the man told my father. “Always chasin’ cars; too dumb to know it would be the death of him one day,” he shouted above the noise. My father laid the dog on the man’s flatbed and they talked as old friends.

“Helluva sorry about this,” my father apologized. (So that’s what it sounded like.)

“Aw, that’s all right,” the farmer said. “He’s a tough bugger—probably just a busted leg, by the look of it. I reckon you should worry more about that car over there.”

“My wife,” my father explained. “Tell you what, give me your number and let me help out with the vet bills if this guy over here survives.”

Numbers exchanged and apologies issued, the farmer got in his truck and drove his dog, still yowling, down the road. My father, ushering me across the street, went to my mother’s side of the car where she was still heaving silent sobs on the steering wheel. I climbed in the passenger seat, expecting to hear my father’s biting insults.

“You okay to drive home?” was all he asked, and when she nodded he closed the door so quietly you could barely hear it click.

When my mother finally pulled a U-turn and headed back for Paarl, my father was long gone, but you could see my grandmother’s water tower on the horizon behind us. I wanted to exonerate her. “He just came out of nowhere, there wasn’t anything you could do, Mom,” I said.