Come Sunday: A Novel (28 page)

The trail is muddy in many places, with puddles of water in the dips of the path, and earthworms, half drowned from their waterlogged burrows, litter the way. A gaggle of Hawaiian nene is startled by my intrusion and quickly crosses the path and disappears into the bush. The morning is limp with humidity by the time I reach the lookout, but it seems too soon to stop. And too late to stop. Turn back, says a voice, and for a moment Greg’s sad face flares up, and I almost do. But then there is Carolyn’s face—or is it the Lord’s face? I can’t seem to tell them apart, so I press on.

There are parts where the trail is completely lost, covered with rocks and deadwood, and it is purely by accident that I find it again. Mosquitoes flicker about and the forest is tangy with the smell of mold. After climbing over a boulder that has come to rest against the trunk of a koka tree, I see that the path heads suddenly and steeply downward. Giant ferns with curlicued fronds elbow for room next to plants with bathtub-sized leaves. Spiraling around each tree trunk are pothos vines, and mossy monkey tails hang from the branches. The trail widens as it flattens out, and what I thought was freeway noise becomes the unmistakable sound of rushing water. I follow it past a patch of bamboo and over the hollowed trunk to where it has tumbled from a ledge two hundred feet above the rocky pool. The mist catches the sun so that it streaks down in rays as if from a children’s picture book. The spray is so luminous and light that if you had never seen snow, you might believe this was it.

Opening the backpack, I grasp the box and stumble over the boulders, black and slippery, to the veil of the falls. The pellets of water plaster down my hair, and I have to rub my eyes to see the scrap of blue between the treetops. In this cleft of the earth the roaring, soaking downpour shakes free as though the heaven-sent leak cannot be patched, and the long wait ends. I lift the lid, and with one shake, Cleo is an ashy mound no more. She is free.

I shall soar,

bid adieu to telluric shores

and bonjour, upon winged hope,

to birth, to life once more.

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? I was worried . . .” Greg says when I walk into the house. “What have you been doing?” He points at my legs, muddy and scratched, dotted with mosquito bites.

All the way home, I have thought of what to tell Greg. Perhaps that children were not to be cooped up, perhaps recite the line from Rhiaan’s poem. But with each step, the words came no closer.

His face is furrowed with concern, his frown deepening when I cannot reply. “Sit down.” He ushers me into the living room. “What’s going on?”

For a moment it is a horrible thing, a treacherous thing I have done. Ebullience makes way for guilt.

After a long silence, when I am convinced that the grain in the wood floors is not going to reconfigure into the script I seek, I look up at him.

“I let her go.”

He is tempted to rush at me with questions, but stops and frowns, spying the backpack at my feet. Grabbing it, lifting the flap, he finds the koa box. He knows before he lifts the lid, and begins to shake his head. Like me, Greg has come to know the weight of her in the box, knows now that the box has an unbearable lightness.

“No, Abbe.” He shakes his head, and shakes it till I think he must be
sick from dizziness. “No!” He hurls the backpack across the room, sending the lampshade crashing to the floor. “SHE IS MY CHILD TOO!” Greg’s face is swollen in anger, his fists clenched, and when he looks at me he might as well have an ax in his hand for how closely he resembles my father. “God damn you, Abbe. God damn you!”

IT WAS THE DEATH OF HER, having hope. People die for things far less audacious. I have never figured out what made her go from the woman of suicide prayers and unstitched seams to the one who was hopeful enough to summon the help of a man who smoked Van Rijan plain. Was it because neither a gin bottle, nor Dead Man’s Curve, nor a pot of boiling oil did the trick? I don’t know, but one thing I did know: from the moment my mother lifted her scrawny neck to look me in the face, she was as good as dead. And hope had done it just as surely as my father’s ax meant to.

A neat row of neighbors lined our side of the street; women who stood elbow to elbow, aprons lifted to conceal their gaping mouths or to cover the wagging tongues, I could not tell which. Mercy wasn’t what my mother wanted, even if the housewives rustled from their orderly kitchens were ready to give it. “Pity’s for cripples,” she said, ushering me into the car before my father’s truck returned. “Don’t ever let anyone make a cripple out of you, Abbe.”

She turned the key in the ignition and the car gave a dry heave. Again she turned it, stomping her foot on the accelerator in her own private tantrum. Just as she banged her hand on the steering wheel and sniffed at the tears she had been trying all this time to keep from spilling, the faces of Mrs. Folliett and Mrs. Beasley and the two widows from across the street peered through our windshield.

“Let out the hand brake, Mrs. Spenser,” instructed Mrs. Folliett. My mother did as she was told and slowly the car moved backward, out into the waiting street. When my mother turned the wheel so we faced the hills and threw the transmission in gear, we felt the weight of the women’s collective will shift to the back of the car, where it leaned
and heaved and panted till the darn car sputtered to life. If my mother had looked back, as I had, she would have seen the housewives slowing to an idle in the middle of the street, watching us with something as close to envy as I have ever seen.

Later, at the farm, after Beauty had made up the beds in the spare room with wind-whipped sheets, I told my grandmother what had happened. And then I cried the bone-marrow-tired cry for which sleep is the only cure. When I awoke to the predawn crows of the roosters it seemed impossible that the previous day had only just passed. Had I not awoken to a better story or a future more far-off? Was I still to face the question of What now?

My mother’s bed was both empty and made, and for a horrible minute I wondered if she had, in fact, run away without saying goodbye, just as my father had accused her of attempting to do. Hastening through the farmhouse, I found her neither in the bathroom, nor in the kitchen. Beyond the back door was my mother’s car, still parked next to the outhouse, and beyond it the chicken coop, where the silhouettes of Beauty and my mother bent to the task of collecting eggs. Shivering more from relief than cold, I drew nearer to their hushed voices just as they rounded the coop and headed behind it to the wattle tree, where the chickens too stubborn to roost on racks lay their double yokers.

“I need your help, Beauty; I don’t know what else to do,” I heard my mother say. I was only a few feet from them, seconds away from when they would turn and see me against the rising sun.

“Don’t worry, miss,” Beauty promised. “We going to help you make it all better.”

How? is what I wanted to ask. How was an old
sangoma
going to fix a white woman’s worries? How was a maid too poor to do anything but clean house going to remedy a wrong so set in its ways? But before I could ask anything, my mother turned around and saw me. Noting the absence of a dressing gown and slippers, she scolded me back indoors as though catching a cold were the greatest of our worries.

That afternoon my mother made me a promise I later found out she could not keep. “It’s only for a few weeks,” she said, unpacking my clothes from the suitcase but not her own. I was to stay at my grandmother’s
house while she went back home and “sorted things out” with my father. There was no arguing with her; the gin-riddled mother of the spare room was one of steely resolve, if only on this point: I was not to return with her.

“It’s not safe for you to go back, Ma,” I begged. “He’s going to kill you.”

“Nonsense!” she snapped. “Your father is ill, Elizabeth—very, very ill. I’m going to see he gets what he needs. And then I’ll come back for you.” Only her hands gave her away, trembling as she smoothed out the collars of my shirts.

Yes, but what was it
she
needed? Surely not the home where her kitchen table was chopped in two. And what about what I needed?

Her admonitions did not stop me from pleading, even when I stood on my grandmother’s red
stoep
to watch her load her suitcase in the trunk of the car. “She doesn’t want to go back there, Grandma; make her stop!” I begged my grandmother. What my mother
wanted
and what she
needed
weren’t the same thing, according to my grandmother. In her estimation it was a thing called “Gilead’s balm” that my mother needed. And when Beauty, who had made one of her mysterious treks to the
kopje
earlier that day, came to the car and gave my mother a parcel wrapped in newspaper, I assumed she was being handed just that.

“What did Beauty give you?” I asked when my mother mounted the steps to kiss me goodbye. She smoothed back my hair, cleared my cheeks of their teary trails, and ignored my question. “It won’t be for long. I promise.”

“Don’t leave me, Ma,” I cried, but she shook her head firmly as if to free her hair from the last shards of porcelain and said, “I’m not, sweetheart.”

Then she got in her car, turned the ignition, which started on the first try, and drove away.

Odd-numbered years, it seems, have the unenviable task of signaling an end to things. One: the end of infancy; thirteen: the end of childhood. Twenty-one and you can kiss goodbye all the excuses that come with being a minor. Twenty-nine: the end of young adulthood; sixty-five: the end of a career. Even-numbered years, though, get to flag new beginnings. Six: big school; sixteen: driving; eighteen: voting (and in my country, drinking and conscription). With forty comes the permissiveness of a midlife crisis, while sixty gets you senior menus and discount movie tickets. Somewhere between twenty-nine and death, almost assuredly on an odd-numbered year, spouses set aside marriage vows, write carefully worded Dear Johns, pack suitcases, and hire lawyers. Both my age and my marriage are on odd-numbered years.

AT FIRST I step over the envelope on my way to the kitchen. The morning gusts have knocked over the skinny vase that nobody bothers either to fill with flowers or put away, and blown the table clear of clutter. Sunday’s worship bulletin, Greg’s grocery list and the coupons paper-clipped to it, the TV guide, and the envelope all form a haphazard path on the parquet floor. A bill, I think; as good a place as any.

Two sips of tea later I bend down to pick it up, and it is only after
I turn it over that my chest begins behaving like an accordion. I stare at my name written out in full in Greg’s neat cursive, marveling at how closely it resembles my mother’s. Greg has gone to the effort of buying special stationery for the occasion. Rather than his customary yellow legal pad, he has chosen parchment the color brides wear when honesty rather than chastity is the virtue to be showcased. Stiff at the folds, his letter is one continuous neat script. No errors. Copied out.

Dear Abbe,

I have tried and tried to reach you, but I cannot. I cannot comfort you with the right words—the words that will bring you back to me—or the right actions. I had desperately—I see now, vainly—hoped that our trip to Tahoe might shorten the distance between us. It seems only to have made things worse. “Love is not enough,” you said a few months ago, and I brushed off that comment as a product of a heated argument. But I now believe you are right. Love is not enough. Not mine, at any rate.

I cannot help but wonder whether you stopped loving me a long time ago, or only after I was no longer “Cleo’s daddy,” even though I know it doesn’t make any difference. Whatever the case, I know I cannot make you love me any more than I can get you to accept my inadequate offerings of love.

A part of each of us died with Cleo, and though we have both wished at times that it was not a part but the entirety, we are still faced with the incredible challenge of living without her. Perhaps living
and
loving was too tall an order. Even though I cannot yet forgive you for dispersing her ashes without me, I feel you have done me a favor. I see now that the only way to really honor Cleo’s memory is not just to go on living as a function to be endured, but to
live
on. Fully. I don’t know how I am going to do that, but I am going to give it my best shot.