Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  PEPSI DOESN’T watch the road either, but stares at the side of my head where his gun is aimed. Only when I turn right into the store’s parking lot does he look forward and instruct me to park on the left side of the building, in front of the ramp leading to the loading entrance. He tells me to keep the car running but to kill the lights. At the word, we all stiffen. Susannah is out of the car first, then Etienne with Boss pointing his gun and ordering them to the side door where the alarm keypad is located behind the security gate. Pepsi calls out the window to Boss to come retrieve the keys. For a moment I can see what Etienne is thinking—can he make it to the bushes, ten yards away? Is this our only chance? But the answer is too late in coming and his captor is back to untie his hands. Etienne fumbles with the keys, drops them, picks them up, and sifts through them till he finds one for the gate. Is he stalling? Does he have a plan? Please, God, tell me he has a plan. Boss takes several paces to the side, gun still leveled at the couple in their pajamas, so he can scan the back alley for late-night revelers on their way home. “Hurry the fuck up!”

  It is not the casualness with which Pepsi whistles that gets me—as though he has done this a thousand times before: watched people soil themselves, listened to the pitiful pleas, relished the indisputable power that a gun affords—it’s the tune. What is that tune? I know that tune . . . There seems little room for anything but the sharp edge of fear, but bidden, like a well-trained Labrador, come the words Pepsi could only have learned in a church:

  Ooh, ooh, come Sunday,

  Oh, come Sunday, that’s the day.

  Lord, dear Lord above,

  God Almighty, God of love,

  Please look down and see my people through.

  “I know that song!” I tell Pepsi.

  “Shut up!”

  “No, I know that song—I do. Duke Ellington: I believe that God put sun and moon up in the sky. / I don’t mind the gray skies, /’cause they’re just clouds passing by . . . That’s the one, isn’t it?” But he is watching Etienne swing open the security gate, taking the final step to the alarm box.

  Boss yells at him to hurry up.

  “What?” Pepsi says, turning to me with a sneer. “You think your gray clouds are going to pass by?”

  “Aren’t they?”

  For a moment Pepsi seems to forget he is a gangster, which makes me forget about giving up. “Please. Please don’t hurt those people. They are good people, Pepsi.”

  He considers this, then looks at Boss, who is shooting a menacing look in our direction. “People don’t get breaks just because they are good,” he declares, and I know suddenly our fates are to be issued with the speed of nine-millimeter bullets. It must register in some noticeable way, because Pepsi says quietly, “I’m sorry; at least you will see your daughter again.”

  They say your life goes flashing by the moment it is about to end. They say from childhood through adolescence into adulthood, it flicks by one frame after the next like a slide show, carrying with it perfect detail you thought you had forgotten: how your mother’s face looked the time you fell off the bunk bed, your arm hanging at a funny angle; your boyfriend’s groan of delight the first time he reached in your blouse; how tight the wedding band felt when it had to be shoved on your swollen finger; what your baby’s face did the first time she tasted solid food; how it felt when the old maid told you your mother had poisoned your father. What they don’t tell you is that it gets stuck on one particular frame and keeps replaying that same scene over and over. For me, it is not the scene when Greg held up Cleo’s newborn face to greet me. Nor is it the one where I held Cleo’s stiffening body on the hospital floor, although it should have been—God knows that’s when I thought life had ended. The frame that sticks with me is of the spectral woman in Beauty’s kaia, her arm raised in a fist. Her voice a call to arms: Do something! Don’t just let it all happen to you! To hell with dying! Act! Live!

  To let the events, now certain, take their course without hindrance is to chance seeing Cleo again. Haven’t I traveled a liturgical year to the brink of this moment? Is this not truly the kind of Easter for which I have been waiting? Let it happen, I tell myself. But my mother’s command is a sharp stick poking at my ribs. I have wanted to die for more than a year, wished it, and now the hour is at hand and I want it no more.

  Susannah has collapsed in a puddle of disarray beside the gaping security gate, and Etienne, with resigned shoulders, pushes open the unlocked door. Boss orders him then to kneel next to his wife and exchanges a look with Pepsi, a conclusion at which each of us has already arrived—dead people don’t point fingers. Etienne reaches for his wife’s hand, a gesture so tender, so brave. Not a deathbed gesture but a proposal, a promise of a happily-ever-after.

  There are no pauses now between heartbeats; just a single ceaseless vibration goes off in my chest. I cannot tell whether it is tears or beads of sweat blurring my eyes, or rain. Everything is tilting, the world sliding off its plate like unset Jell-O. There is a click—one ear tells me it is the hammer of Pepsi’s gun drawing back, preparing to slam the bullet forward. But the other identifies it as the sound of a Kodachrome slide dropping from the carousel into the viewfinder. It is raining hard, River Street is flooding. Suddenly a flash of yellow darts in front of me. The flash of a kite as it hurries out of the reach of a little girl. She will be following it. To avoid her, I slam the gearshift into first, stamping my foot on the accelerator and swerving sharply to the right. The van surges up the ramp, avoiding one collision and targeting another. My eyes fix on Boss, who has spun around to face me. I steady the wheel and head for the brick wall on the other side of his root-bound body.

  There is a ringing in my ears, the ringing of church bells, or an alarm clock, clanging deafeningly over Pepsi’s hysterical scream. It is still there at the first impact. I do not remember the second.

  TWENTY-ONE

  At times it feels like I am soaring, parting the clouds with each turn. Weightless, I am at last unfettered from the mangled scrapyard below and giddy with the relief of it. As though I have no body. A kite, or a feather; perhaps the detached wing of a butterfly. There is everything to see from up here; everything and nothing that stands still. Spirits, dreams like puffs from a pipe, wishes and beams of sunlight. And so quiet; it must surely be Elysium.

  But then I turn, perhaps too sharply, and the sting of it brings me back to the hard hospital bed, to its newspapery sheets and cardboard pillow. Back to the brokenness and bandages, to a stomach sick on pharmaceuticals, to the horror of what somehow was not a dream. Boss’s face, the one contorted in fear, is seared on the inside of my eyelids. I am awake. Go easy. I coach myself through the shift from back to left side. Opening my eyes is harder than flying, and when I do there are no puffy white clouds, only shapes that mutter, pressing their cold fingers along my flesh.

  I squeeze my eyes shut again till the black dots appear and my body floats up out of its pupa and takes to the skies once more.

  SOMEONE PUTS the clothespin back on my finger and tightens a band around my arm while things go beep. The annoying voice is back, the one that speaks in question marks. “How many fingers do you see, Mrs. Deighton?” I tell her not to call me Mrs. Deighton, but all I hear is a pot bubbling over.

  “Do you know where you are?” she orders.

  “Fwhumpl,” I tell her.

  “That’s right, you’re in the hospital. Do you know what day it is?”

  I shake my head, and when I do the pain is back. “Aaagh,” I moan.

  “Tell me about it! Half the time we don’t know either. It is Friday,” she announces. “Your second day. Doctor says he wants you up by this afternoon; can’t have you sleeping through your five-star stay with us, now can we?”

  My mouth is parched and I mumble for a sip of water, but nothing resembling sense issues forth.

  “Don’t try to sit up by yourself just yet, Mrs. Deighton. Your collarbone isn’t going to appreciate that.”

  To signal my request, I lift m
y hand to my mouth and it feels as though it is dragging the weight of a ship’s anchor with it.

  “Doctor said you are only to take small sips; remember what happened last night?” She inserts a straw into something that used to feel like my mouth as I try to recollect what happened last night. Did my baby just die? Did someone else’s baby just die?

  “You don’t want to start vomiting again. That’s not pleasant for anyone, is it?” She answers her own question by removing the straw before the desert has received little more than a drop. “Remember, you have this button; you just click it twice when the pain is too much. Think you can do that?”

  When she leaves she takes the light with her and all is dark again. Click, click.

  RAGE AND SORROW roll up into a wrecking ball, its swinging arc speeding down on a single black face superimposed on a brick wall. His face is sneering, not smiling. No, wait, he’s crying. “Stop!” I hear him scream. But it is too late. And now it is Cleo’s face on the wall, and still there is no time to stop. Bits of glass and brick and bone splinter and careen till the earth is raining gravel. Then I am a thousand bits of shrapnel falling, falling; from the falling there is no relief.

  It is a warm hand that beckons me this time, soft and reassuring, bidding me from my nightmare. Through slits I see two figures, fuzzy yet familiar. The paler, plumper of the two whispers, “Abbe? Abbe, dear, are you awake?”

  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 pu
nishment 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.