Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  “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.

  “I could have killed him,” she replied. “I could have killed us.” Lesson: Could-haves carry just as much weight as gone-done-its.

  After dinner that night she asked my father for the telephone key and the number the farmer had written on the back of his cigarette box.

  “I called him already,” my father told her. “The dog’s going to be fine once his leg heals. He’ll probably be out chasing cars in a couple of weeks.”

  But she persisted till he gave in. She called the farmer; she must have told him “sorry” a dozen times. And still that wasn’t enough. She called the next night and the one after until my father refused to give her the key. But for her it seemed that enough sorries could not be said, sorries that would ease her guilt for a dumb dog’s leg or for the guilt that drove her to take Dead Man’s Curve at ninety in the first place.

  My father did help pay for the vet bills, working overtime to do it. But he did not spend one dime to have my mother’s fender mended. So it sat there, lopsided with its dog-shaped dimple, a visual reminder for my mother that absolution did not come for free and someone else had paid her price. The point everyone seemed to be missing, however, was that if it hadn’t been for my father pulling up alongside her, distracting her from the business of driving, she would not have hit the dog in the first place. To my mind, he was just as culpable.

  “HE’S GOING TO KEEP CALLING,” I tell Greg.

  “I don’t think so.”

  As if Greg had not spoken, I shake my head. “He can’t keep calling.”

  “Abbe, he’s not going to call again. All right? Just forget about it.”

  But I feel as though I am approaching Dead Man’s Curve with someone else’s foot strapped to the accelerator. “What if he calls again? What are you going to tell him?” We peer at each other as though two drivers in two separate cars . . .

  “I’m not going to tell him anything, because he isn’t going to call!”

  THE THUNDER WAKES ME and I feel the headache creep up my neck and over the top of my head to settle on my left eyebrow. Greg is still asleep in the other chair and does not stir, even though the room gets day-bright before the next big bang. I get up from the sofa, turn off the TV, and head to the kitchen, but I stop at the dining room table where Greg’s Bible serves as a paperweight for his sermon. Sunday tomorrow. I sit down, pull the pages free from their weight, and begin to read.

  I have been back to before the beginning of time, when the earth was formless, and darkness covered the land. A cold, uninhabitable nowhere of a place, I want to tell you. Where chaos and calamity are the order of dawnless days, where ears are deaf to the Creator and marbled eyes are white from crying. There is not much to see and not much to know. All that is is the Eternal Absence, invisible yet more real than breath. And Death is all there is to know . . .

  As most of you know, our daughter Cleo died a little over two weeks ago on the cusp of Good Friday, the night Jesus knelt under an olive tree. “Remove this cup from me,” he prayed, a cup that offered no sustenance; a poisoned chalice that promised only death.

  By noon the next day, it was not a prayer but a plea he offered. “Eli, Eli lama sabachthani—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Jesus was already on his way back to the beginning of time when darkness covered the face of the earth. Abandoned first by his friends and then by his God, Jesus seems to be shouting down the canyons of time, but all that comes back are the seemingly indifferent echoes, the sound that Absence makes.

  I shouted down those empty canyons the night Cleo suffered. Please, I begged, let her live. Most certainly the purest prayer I have ever uttered. A wish I felt sure would be granted. After all, was I not a faithful servant, had I not served the Master these past twenty years? Was it not true that Jesus, after being beckoned by the synagogue ruler, rushed to the bedside of his daughter to summon her from the grip of death? I believed, I want you to know; I
truly believed. “Your faith has restored her,” I was waiting to hear. Instead we were told that she had suffered, then rallied briefly, suffered a little more, and then finally died. Alone.

  Oh, I know those Scripture verses—thank you to those of you who wrote them in your kind notes. Indeed I have recited those same words many times to grieving family members. Some of you here today have heard me say them to you. “Weeping may endure for the night but joy cometh in the morning,” declares the psalmist. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” promises our Lord. But where was my God when I needed him more than ancient words which roll off the tongue a little too easily? Where was God when the young man he called “Son” cried for help? Where was Cleo’s God the night she stepped out onto a narrow street, lit only by looming headlights? And why couldn’t God grant this one small prayer? Why couldn’t God spare her? It is not as if I were asking for world peace, an end to hunger. What difference would it have made in the grand scheme of things?

  After many hours, after repeating these same questions over and over again, I was reminded of a different dark time. Not the pure dark, the cold dark before daybreak when the stone was rolled away. (I, like Thomas, had missed Easter, so could not shout “Hallelujah, he is risen,” could scarcely believe those who declared it that Sunday.) No, it is the dark night that John describes at the end of his Gospel when the disciples are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. Casting their nets all night in hopes of even the smallest morsel to sustain them, they catch nothing. When they are about to give up, they spot someone, a shadowy figure standing on the beach. Squinting into the darkness, they cannot tell whether it is friend or foe. They draw a little closer and the darkness is dispelled ever so slightly in the small embers of a charcoal fire. The stranger tells them to cast their nets once more. And they do, and you know what happens—their nets nearly burst from the weight of the fish. When they arrive at the shore, the stranger has cooked them breakfast, and in the sharing of the humble meal, in the tiny glow from a breakfast fire, the fishermen see it is their friend.

  The miracle of this story, you might be tempted to think, is the catch. No, dearly beloved, the miracle of the story is the existence of that small glowing coal, made by one who gently blew a small spark into a beachside hearth, who dispelled the darkness and ushered in the dawn, who offered this time not a chalice but a hot meal.

  As for us, it is our emptiness that draws us to that small flicker, our hunger that stretches out our hand. Only when we accept the humble meal from the stranger at the shore will we recognize the Light of the World. Like the disciples, we will be filled long enough to see the farthest edges of the horizon tinged with the merest hint of color. Our prayer—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—finally becomes a profession of faith: “My God.” Then we see how salvation comes in insignificant and easily overlooked acts, in bite-sized portions. It sustains us not for all eternity, as we might prefer, but only for a little while, until the edges of hunger narrow in again and the darkness settles over the earth.

  What then of faith? It is the bravery of going about our tasks with one eye scanning the shore for that small charcoal fire and for the oddly familiar stranger calling us to “Come, eat.”

  It is a communion mediation, I realize. Greg’s spindly flock will collect around the altar rail, eager to peck at the crumbs. Cupping their hands, they will wait for Greg to break off a morsel of the loaf and drop it into their hands: the Body of our Lord, broken for you. They will dip it into the cup when they hear him pronounce: the Blood of the Lamb, shed for you. They will receive the morsel of grace, of forgiveness, for cussing or lying or lying down with another man’s wife. Forgiveness, whether they ask for it or expect it or even deserve it. And Greg will bestow it on anyone who is beggar enough to kneel in front of him, even those who come with someone else’s blood on their hands.

  I look over at my slumbering husband, head tipped forward as though bowed in prayer. Mr. Nguyen will call again, and when he does I know Greg will not be able to send him away empty-handed. The last caller’s number is still stored in the phone’s memory. I dial in the instruction to connect me to the number. It rings for a long time. Just as I am about to hang up, a phlegmy voice croaks out a bewildered “Hello?”

  The beating in my ears is like the flapping of birds’ wings.

  “If you ever call my house again, I will kill you myself,” I whisper. Slowly, quietly, and without waiting for his response, I return the receiver to its cradle.

  SEVEN

  “Jenny called,” Greg announces when I come downstairs. “She said you haven’t returned her phone messages.” It is midmorning, the shadow of the mountain retreating from the harbor and already halfway up our hill. From this vantage point, I can see the H1, unraveling from Ewa through the congested sprawl of Pearl City to downtown, along which cars are strung like abacus beads. The freeway deposits most of them into the clogged tributaries of town. Honolulu, on a bus tour, is exactly what the brochures depict—a mix of modern and turn-of-the-century architecture, built around spidery banyan trees and ancestral burial sites.

  It’s a city as noisy as it is fragrant. With the windows open, I can hear the distant hum of traffic, the sirens, a radio turned to Krater FM, but it is the smell that’s distracting: overripe mangoes and papayas rotting in their trees. The houses on the street below us have the sun already beating down on their roofs, but we are still shaded. There are no trade winds today, and the sun-bleached palette of summer is unrelenting.

  “She’s worried about you. You should call her,” he suggests. I manage a polite nod. There is still some milk in the carton that hasn’t soured, which will be my breakfast.

  “Want to go out and get some brunch?” Greg asks. Before I can answer, he says, “Abbe, you need to get out of the house; it’s been two months.”

  “Seven weeks,” I correct him. “What’s that?” I ask, seeing a writing pad scribbled with notes on the far corner of the dining room table.

  “Some stuff for church,” he says guiltily.

  “The church is filling her place.”

  “Excuse me?” It is a warning I do not heed as Greg picks up his paperwork and tucks it under his arm like a security blanket.

  “You can’t substitute her with the church.”

  “It helps, all right? It helps me get my mind off things; it gives me something to do. It’s not a substitute.”

  All I do is roll my eyes, but he says, heat rising up his neck, “Don’t go off on a tirade now, because I do not want to hear it.” I don’t recognize the voice of the man who stands in my kitchen any more than I recognize my own reflection, and he would not recognize a tirade even if I had the inclination to share one with him.

  “Keep your mind off things? Like your dead daughter?” I ask with icy calm.

  “How dare you!” Greg shouts. “Don’t you ever, ever say that to me again, do you understand?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he marches out of the house, grabbing the keys on his way. The door slams like a slap and I shout into the silence of the house, “Your dead daughter! Your dead daughter! Your dead daughter!”

  I walk into our bedroom, sit down in my closet, and close the door. Anger makes the thoughts piling up in my head snap like dry twigs, as though the devil is preparing kindling for a bonfire. I want to beat my arms against the walls till they too splinter. This fury is my new companion, taking up the vacancy that sleep has left. It makes me want to smash plates, to scalp books of their bindings. When I close my eyes, wild horses beat their hooves in panicked flight across my chest. There is no walking away from it, slamming the front door on it. How do I tell Jenny with her thoughtful concern that I have become mad with the bristling of unsubsiding rage? That I am the rabid, mangy dog at the end of the street, baring its teeth at imaginary threats, jerking and jumping and frightening the children who wait for Atticus Finch to come home? That there is nobody who, in mercy, comes to peer at me down the barrel of a borrowed rifle, finger poised to e
nd my misery. Just a long road sided by houses where nice folks play out their parts in suburban Technicolor. People who see me coming and herd their children back indoors and peer out through lace-covered windows: Crazy!

  Suddenly Solly barks, hearing the garden gate open. Oh God, Greg’s back, I think, and I consider hiding in the closet till he goes away. But the doorbell rings and an unfamiliar male voice hollers an impatient “Hello!” I dredge myself out of the shoe pile and make the long journey down the stairs to the front window, shouting at Solly to stop making a racket. A fidgety tattooed man in a brown uniform stands next to a box that is four feet high. “Delivery,” he says when I open the door, and then he sees me and grows very still. Even his frenetic gum-chewing ceases.

  “You have the wrong house,” I say, not calling Solly in, not apologizing for the barking.

  “1886?” he says, reading his gadget.

  “Yes, but there are six houses at this address.”

  “House C?” he asks tentatively. “Deighton?”

  It is my turn to look afraid. What has come?

  “Would you mind putting it in the living room?” I ask, taking his clipboard to sign. He hesitates, as though I might deliver a well-placed rabid bite, then lifts the package and takes a wide berth around me, the monster with hair like sprigs. A burnt bush, that’s what I am; a singed remnant, smoky and brittle. Not the burning bush Moses encountered, the kind that makes you remove your shoes and bow your head and avert your eyes. “I Am,” declared the unconsuming fire. No. Ravaged by the Great I Am, I make people turn away. Yesterday it was Gillian Beech with the agenda for the annual homeowners’ association meeting and her campaigning for Mrs. Chung’s resumption of the presidential seat. The day before that, Greg’s secretary, Betty, with another casserole. They come and go, with their downcast eyes; So sorry, they say, or nothing at all. Just those marshmallow faces. Why don’t they burn? How come there are no singed places around their edges, no smell of sizzling hair?