Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  “Petal has gone into labor. Kapiolani Hospital, third floor. She has requested you and your husband’s presence.”

  “She’s early,” I say.

  “Obviously,” he replies. “When should I tell her to expect you?”

  “Tell her we will come right away.”

  “Right, then.”

  “Kelsey,” I say before he hangs up. “Her father coming?”

  “Norman cannot take any more time off from work until the Christmas break. We are presuming she will be home by then.” Punctuating his remark is an abrupt click.

  “A bit of a cliché, going into labor on Labor Day, isn’t it?” I say, watching Greg run from the closet to the bathroom and back again, gathering items as though the house were burning down.

  “Not as cliché as having that loser dump her just in time,” he replies, and rubs the fatigue from his eyes. Jeff has exited the stage on cue, failing only Petal’s expectations. Greg, on the other hand, is the understudy, only too eager to pick up his lines. “What is she going to need?”

  “Not a Bible, I know that much,” I say as he crams his grandfather’s Bible into his shoulder bag.

  “I thought she might like to hear a few psalms.”

  “Do we still have any of the lollipops left over from last year’s Halloween? She might like those,” I suggest, picking out a few CDs. “And put in a pair of those woolly socks your mother sent you for your birthday—they’ll finally get some use.”

  Kapiolani Hospital is wide awake by the time we arrive—nurses bustling in and out of rooms with blood pressure monitors, bothering groggy-eyed patients with thermometers and the spryness of a clambake. A chirpy nurse at the maternity ward station points us down the hall to Petal’s room just as Kelsey and Fay walk out of it. He nods a hard-boiled greeting in Greg’s direction and tells the nurse that he and his wife will be back at lunchtime.

  “Miserable bastard,” I murmur, and try to paste on an elastic smile when we enter her room.

  Petal is wide-eyed with fright. Her skin is flushed and her brow prickled with sweat.

  “It’s too early,” she says, clutching my hand. “Something’s going wrong.”

  I look over at the nurse who is reading the printout of her contractions as though she were scanning the NASDAQ composite. She shakes her head and smiles.

  “No,” I tell Petal. “No, everything is fine. Babies aren’t like trains, Petal. They don’t care about our schedules. They come when they’re ready.”

  The force of an unseen entity seems to strike her with such vigor that she bolts forward, eyes bulging, her hand suddenly a vise.

  “It’s all wrong,” she wheezes through the contraction.

  “Don’t push,” the nurse instructs her. “Breathe deep breaths. That’s it. That’s it.”

  Slowly she releases her grip, eases back against her pillow, panting.

  “I wish my mum were here,” she whimpers. “It’s not right that Blossom will be born with no family.”

  “We’ll be her family,” says Greg, as easily as oil poured on troubled waters.

  Feeling the surprising flood of sympathy, I say, “You just worry about delivering that baby and we’ll figure the rest out later.”

  I send Greg on a mission of gathering ice chips for Petal and a caffeinated soda for me before he makes any more promises, and sit at the edge of the chair holding her hand, waiting for the baby-train to arrive.

  CLEO NEVER DROPPED, and a week after she was due Dr. Urukawa announced that he was going to induce labor. It was not at all what Greg and I had imagined, what we had prepared for: my water breaking in the middle of the night; Greg scrambling for the overnight bag, patting himself on the back for keeping the gas tank full even though it was only four miles to the hospital, rushing back inside to put out some dog food for Solly before driving with cautious haste, hazard lights on, to the hospital. That was how it was supposed to go. Instead, we were marched from the doctor’s office to the ultrasound department to the registration desk, where we were ordered to sit down and sign papers in triplicate while the registrar clickety-clacked our insurance details into the computer, her squirrel cheeks bobbing in time with her gum-chewing.

  The African way is to have a midwife, relegating the husband to the outside corridor where his job is clear: pace until further notice. Pacing, then, goes on for a few hours if the expectant father is lucky, days if he isn’t. But a continent away, Greg, ill equipped to deal with my birthing fears, was up to the task of being a makeshift doula and a stand-in for the matriarchs in my family. “She’s not ready,” I kept telling him, but all he did was wipe my forehead till I feared it gleamed like alabaster, breathing on my behalf through each contraction. There was an order to the universe, an order knotted together by delicate threads of timing. Who could know the effects of disrupting that, of imposing a man-made schedule on an infant’s introduction to the world? What if our baby was somehow altered by doctor’s orders? What if she was meant to be the Sabbath child but sentenced to the woe of a Wednesday’s child? And then I heard those first mewing sounds, and the panic drifted away like the smoke of freshly lit cigars.

  “I’ll never let anyone hurt you,” I whispered. “I promise.”

  BLOSSOM IS BORN, as her mother predicted, without any family present, just after her great-grandparents leave for supper at five, and twenty minutes before Greg and I return with one of Cleo’s quilted baby blankets.

  “Isn’t she lovely,” Petal cries when we enter the room. “I did it, all by myself.” It seems that we have made her an impossible promise—to be her family—one we have already broken.

  We nod and stare at this new child from the void left by another.

  “See, there was nothing to worry about,” Greg says. “Here, let me hold her.” He scoops up Blossom with the nervousness of a new father and blinks back the tears.

  “Well done, Petal. You’re a brave and clever girl,” I say, watching Greg fan out the baby’s fingers.

  “Mum would think so, wouldn’t she?”

  I nod and hand her the blanket. “Most definitely.”

  Greg offers me the baby, but I shake my head quickly and he passes her back to Petal. “She looks just like you,” he says kindly.

  When he leaves to buy flowers and balloons, I put on a CD. “What do you think—is it too soon to introduce Blossom to Enya?”

  “Abbe?” says Petal when I sit down again, a pale tremor on her lower lip.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  MY GRANDMOTHER told me once that a secret shared was as a sorrow spared. I suppose she told me that because she knew I was keeping secrets, secrets about what had been happening in our house. But even before my mother’s hair started to grow out white, my grandmother could tell for herself that things were bad. She didn’t need me to give her a précis. All you had to do was take a good look at Louise Spenser and you would know it was no secret that she was digging her own grave. It amazed me then how grown-ups can look and look at a thing till their eyes go buggy, and still not see.

  As if to spare us the effort of all that looking, my mother spent less and less time in the communal rooms of the house. She gave up her chair in front of the TV during my father’s standing ovation when the new state president—P. W. Botha—was elected. “About bloody time!” he said when the president declared a state of emergency. When, I wanted to know, was someone going to do the same for our household?

  My mother spent the rest of her evenings in the guest room, where she would sit for hours in front of her sewing machine, threaded and idling. I would do my homework on the bed, the bed I knew she slept in after all the lights were out, just so I could be with her, the way one might keep a stone company. Sometimes, instead of doing algebra, I would watch her pin and repin the hem of a curtain she had no intention of hanging or the lining of a dress she had no intention of wearing. It was as if even the smallest act of permanence, the act of stitching, was too great a risk, too lar
ge a commitment.

  One night, when my father was working the graveyard shift and I was supposed to be asleep, I drew near the guest room door. It was the sound of melancholy that had brought me to it, that kept me listening at its side to the awful sound of my mother’s heart breaking. And then, as though speaking to a friend, my mother prayed. “I know I shouldn’t say it, Lord,” she whispered, “but it sounds nice to be dead, to be tied to a stone at the bottom of the lake.” Apart from grace at my grandmother’s table, never had I heard my mother pray, let alone such impossible words to a God who was as remote as the man in the moon. “Deliver me from this hell,” she bargained, “before I send myself to another.”

  It was an admission of intent every bit as intractable as a suicide note. And I had no idea what to do with the hearing of it. Rather than barging into the room and getting her to reverse her words, to extract from her a reassuring promise, I crept into my cold bed and shivered long after the sheets warmed up. I did not tell my father, eating his reheated dinner at the breakfast table the following morning, and I did not ask to borrow the telephone key to call my grandmother and tell her. When my mother handed me my school lunch and money for the bus, I did not even then let on that I knew her secret. “Bye, Ma,” I said as I had a thousand other mornings, careful not to cling to her or cry. Even when my physics teacher snapped at me for not paying attention, I could only respond by imagining my mother wading, Woolf-like, into my grandmother’s wintry lake with rocks pinned neatly into the hem of her dressing gown. The secret I was really keeping was how I was failing to do something to prevent it.

  Sometimes I think it is much easier to keep a secret than a promise. As long as they are stored out of sight, secrets give the world a much better chance of making it through the day unscathed. You make a promise, on the other hand, and you are just asking for trouble.

  PETAL’S BIG SECRET is that Blossom’s daddy is not Jeff but a Sagittarian from Scotland who promised to be so much more than the onenight stand he ended up being. And, as it turns out, it is no more a secret than it is a surprise.

  “I told Sue—the nurse; she’s great. She says what matters is that I’m Blossom’s mommy.”

  “Who else knows?” I asked.

  “I told Grandma Kay last month, only because she was so sad when Jeff and I broke up.”

  “I thought he dumped you.”

  “Well, it was more of a mutual agreement.”

  “Oh.”

  “I suppose she told Granddad already, because he has been more grouchy than usual.”

  “Is there anyone who doesn’t know?”

  She shrugs.

  “It’s not really a secret, then, is it?”

  “Well, my dad doesn’t know yet, and Reverend Deighton,” she says.

  “And are you planning to tell either of them?”

  “I sort of was hoping you could help me with that.”

  IT IS DARK when Greg and I get home. In the cupboard above the refrigerator is a bottle of Johnnie Walker someone gave Greg when Cleo was born. It has never been opened. I get it down and pour it in the mug on the draining board.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  The first swallow is an antiseptic, the second an anesthetic.

  Before the third, I lift my cup to him. “A toast,” I say. “To Blossom.”

  When Greg gets in the shower and as the fragrance of his shampoo wafts through the room, I kneel down and lift the skirt of the bedcovers. It is a reach for the shoe box, but my hands locate it without me having to look. I pull it out, lift the lid, and stare at the heart-shaped koa box. My hands enfold it. “Baby,” I cry, “my sweet baby,” but all I seem to have are the ashes of a broken promise.

  LENT

  TWELVE

  Summer in Hawaii takes forever to end. By the tail end of December it becomes a terminal condition, with its smell of decay—rotting mangoes, mold, sweat—that even the fans cannot dispel. It trudged right through Advent and Christmas, its thermometer never once dipping. There is no relief from the dizzying glare; from the sticky lethargy there is no escape. Today the cloying Kona winds coat the air with grime, obscuring the view of the Waianae Range. And the hours drag on till I get bored with the clocks and their melancholic shuffle. Rinsing the few dishes in the sink, I watch Ronnie—his neck brace no apparent hindrance to the task of pruning the orange tree—and dream of brisk temperatures.

  Cleo never knew winter, and it was difficult explaining it to her when we read her Christmas books. To Cleo, cold was swimming in the ocean at Waikiki Beach in January or the chill you get from eating shave ice too quickly. Cold never fell out of the sky like pigeon feathers or stacked up on the fence posts. One Saturday last December, when we were both bored and itchy from the heat and the candy canes had all melted into sticky gobs on our brown Christmas tree, I cut a hole in my old down pillow and ushered Cleo into the middle of the bathroom floor. To her delight, I climbed up on the bathroom counter, stretched my hands up to the ceiling, and shook out the feathers while she twirled and danced beneath them.

  “Aden!” she shrieked when the last one floated to the floor. I cut up Greg’s pillows and two old couch pillows with foamy stuffing before she had had enough. Later that night, when we read The Night Before Christmas I told her that snow was as soft as mommy kisses, as light as angels’ wings. I told her I loved her more than all the snowflakes in the world.

  Greg comes home from church soggy and tired. Heat rash streaks his neck and he walks to the freezer for the ice pack. “How was your day?” he asks.

  “Oh, the same. Jean wants me to do a travel feature for the February issue. Buella found a stray kitten she’s named Liberace that she wants to palm off on me. You?”

  “Not without a few surprises,” he says. “Mrs. Scribner took me to lunch, for one thing.”

  “Oh?” Mrs. Scribner has not invited me to attend church with her again since the incident with Carolyn, but she has dropped off two more hats with hatboxes and the calling card of her Korean hairdresser. Last week she came by to show me her new Maltese poodle, an excitable pup who peed on the carpet when Pilgrim hissed at it.

  “She’s decided about Puffy’s ashes,” he says.

  “The memorial garden?”

  “Nope. She’s going to sprinkle them at the golf course.”

  “She can’t do that, can she? Isn’t it illegal?” Mrs. Scribner and her late husband, avid golfers and members of the Honolulu Club since the day it opened, were exempt from the no-pets policy. Some said it was their money, some that it was lifetime membership. Whatever it was, their canine companions were known to travel along in the golf cart, retrieving Mr. Scribner’s ball if it wandered too far from the fairway, which was often, as Mrs. Scribner tells it.

  “She’s going to get a cart and dribble a bit of his ashes at each hole.”

  “They’re not going to let her do that!”

  “That’s why she’s not going to tell them. The plan is to do a leisurely nine holes with her pastor just before closing time.”

  I cannot get used to an uninterrupted conversation. Cleo would get so frustrated when Greg and I talked at the table, so intent on our conversation about work or church or theology. She would get louder or start playing with her food or stand up on her chair and jump. Sometimes she would just holler at us, “Stop talking!” And we would exchange a look of resignation and turn our attention to true north.

  “You said ‘a few surprises’; what else?” I ask.

  “The district superintendent called today . . . There’s a church they want me to consider.”

  “Oh?”

  “In California. Just north of Fresno. The guy there just had a heart attack. They’ve got an interim, but they need to fill the position by conference time, so Alex is suggesting we go up and take a look around. See if it’s a community we could get along with. I thought we could go visit Rhiaan and Cicely while we’re at it.”

  “I thought you were going to hold out for something here,” I say, irritated
at Greg’s obvious excitement. If California is the cool-cat state, then Fresno is its hairball. Air you can gag on, heat that makes turncoats out of shade, ninety-nine square miles of boredom. Come conference six months from now, and it will still be too soon.

  “I know,” he sighs. “I told Alex you didn’t want to move. But he’s not sure any appointments are going to open up on Oahu.” My terror must be apparent, because he says, “Tell you what, let’s not worry about the church right now, let’s just plan on a trip to Tahoe.”

  “I don’t know. I will have to take time off work . . .” Here we go again, his face seems to say. “Maybe you should go without me; maybe we could do with some time alone.”

  This time Greg is adamant. “No, Abbe! I am alone most of the time; I’m sick of being alone. I am doing my best not to lose you altogether. Please, please, let’s go. Together.” I see a drowning man before me, someone who looks vaguely like a man who was once my husband. I nod and whisper, “Okay.”

  CHRISTMAS HAS PASSED without trees and twinkle lights, carols or fuss. No magi with their morbid gifts of embalmment. Somewhere beyond my walls people celebrated the birth of a baby, forgetting it is a stone’s throw from Golgotha. Now it looks as though New Year’s Eve will go without fanfare too. Greg and I watch a foreign film about Japanese samurai and kiss chastely at ten o’clock before going to bed. “Happy New Year,” we each say sadly, and lie waiting for the old year to go quietly to its grave. After a few minutes, Greg’s hand reaches for my waist and he shifts himself into the curve of my back. We are still a long time, side by side, till I feel the small, cold lump of flesh swell against my buttocks. His hand cups my breast and only a stale sense of resignation rises up to meet it. The gesture is doubtful; a question more than a plan. If I wait long enough without moving, Greg’s straining penis will lie back down obediently and he will fall asleep holding no grudges.