Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  It is these unseen visitors, the ones who use my conscience as a stage, who point to such things as murder and blame. The hobo who had once hobbled up to the mike that Sunday morning confessing to murder and how the Man had, as Ezekiel had prophesied, put flesh on his bones and breathed new life—he revisits me with his words: “You take away someone’s life, whether you’re thinking about it or not, and your own life goes with it too.” I know what he means now. With Boss has gone what was left of my old life. The Abbe who had given up, perhaps in part even before Cleo died. The Abbe whose only act of being was to wish for death. And in her stead is this other Abbe. Can’t say I know her very well, but she has long hair and an idea that being alive is something good. Her old bones are being patched together and padded with flesh that feels like it can put up one more fight. And with a sudden huff and a puff her lungs are filled as though they might, someday, give out a whoop.

  THEY STAND and eat Mrs. du Toit’s apricots by my bedside, the visitors and the staff, at various times throughout the day. These moments of communion where nothing much happens except the savoring of leftover summer. The nice policeman who took my statement ate one when I insisted, as did Piet Slabbert, who ambled in last night. “If you want to talk to me, you have to try one,” I said.

  “Didn’t know you could get them so late in the season,” he replied, selecting the ruddiest. After he was done, he pocketed the pit and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. “Don’t suppose they allow smoking in here anymore.”

  “They don’t allow anything much more than a grueling regimen of something called ‘health care.’ ”

  “Sounds too exhausting for me.” He chuckled. “And speaking of exhausting . . .” The deal is still on, he told me. The developers, eager to move ahead with their plans, are still waiting for the papers to be signed.

  “They are letting me out of here in another week,” I told him. “But Rhiaan arrives tomorrow; maybe he can sign them.”

  “They can wait another week; it’s not going to kill them.” He cringed at the word. “Sorry!”

  “What about the kids? Have you found them a place?”

  “We are still working on it. But you leave that up to me and get on with the business of ‘health care.’ ” I waved at his suggestion as though it were a fly about to settle on something rather perfect.

  “YOU LOOK GOOD, sis,” is the first thing Rhiaan says, his face spelled out in relief.

  “For a mummy, you mean?”

  “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of a Mary Shelley character.”

  Cicely knocks his forearm with the back of her hand. “Stop it,” she says, and bends down to give me a gentle hug. “I am so sorry for what you have had to go through.”

  Rhiaan ignores his wife’s sentimentality. “It’s the nurses I feel sorry for; from what I understand, you are giving them a lot of uphill. Nurses make terrible adversaries, didn’t anybody tell you that? They have access to some really long needles.”

  “It’s not the needles you have to worry about; it’s the sandpaper they call ‘sponges.’ ”

  “I brought you a quilt,” interjects Cicely. “A little one for the airplane.” She spreads it out on the bed.

  “Now you not only feel like a granny, you will be equipped with the quintessential granny accessory!” says Rhiaan.

  “Did you fly ten thousand miles to torture me, or did you have some other objective in mind?” I ask my brother.

  He scratches his head, eyes scanning the ceiling. “Was there something else?” he mutters. “No, just torture,” he says finally.

  After Rhiaan returns with an extra chair, they sit next to my bed while Cicely catches me up on the news. Jenny would like for me to call her—she has tried the hospital several times but always has the time difference wrong, so it usually ends up being in the middle of the night when only the nurses like to wake the patients. The animals are fine and Mrs. Chung is keeping an eye on the house and collecting the mail. The people at the magazine have been informed. “An awfully bossy woman by the name of Jean asked whether a travel story on Cape Town might be in order, and I told her it most certainly would not be—I hope you don’t mind.”

  I smile gratefully. “And you told Greg what happened, I assume,” I ask.

  Cicely looks at Rhiaan, who nods. “Right after we heard from Etienne Bredenkamp.”

  “And?”

  “He was shocked, of course. Wasn’t he, Rhiaan?” Cicely rushes.

  Perhaps part of me was hoping Greg would hurry to my bedside, read from a stack of my favorite books, dispel the hours of boredom. By the looks on Rhiaan’s and Cicely’s faces, perhaps they were expecting this too. But it is too late for white horses and on-call knights.

  “He has called a couple of times to find out how you are doing,” Rhiaan answers, his banter and chattiness having stalled. “And he sends his best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

  “It’s funny,” I say. “They all call me Mrs. Deighton in here. But I haven’t been Mrs. Deighton for a very long time.” Cicely leans over to pat my hand. “It’s my own fault. I stopped making the effort long before it even occurred to Greg that he needed to make more of one. He’s not going to now, and who can blame him?”

  Blame. I had such high hopes for Blame. Wasn’t it going to sort out the good guys from the bad, and then dole out to each their just desserts? A stand-in for God, really. But Blame has been scrambled now. Who can tell one yoke from another? It’s good only as a serving to a world with no teeth.

  Cicely tells me they are staying at “a darling little inn” just around the corner, which makes Rhiaan clear his throat. “The Biltmore,” he corrects. They will be here to visit every day, she says, but Rhiaan has promised her a couple of excursions.

  “There are the papers to sign—maybe that can be one of your outings,” I suggest.

  Rhiaan shakes his head. “You and I will do that when you get out of here.”

  “I went to see the old house, maybe you can put that on your list.”

  “How was it?” Rhiaan asks.

  “Small,” I tell him. “I didn’t remember it being so small.”

  “What about the farm?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t go there.” When Rhiaan raises his eyebrows, I say, “The truth is, I have been avoiding it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t want to face what happened all those years ago. Maybe I didn’t want to be reminded of Mom leaving me there.”

  Rhiaan is thoughtful for a while. “I think we should go—you and I,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  Rhiaan leaves the room to answer his cell phone. “When he’s not in New York, he’s on the phone to New York,” explains Cicely.

  “But that’s good, right?”

  She shrugs. “Don’t tell him this, but I can’t see what all the fuss is about with the new poems. Not that they are bad; they are just such a departure from his other work.”

  “Maybe he needed a departure.”

  “Maybe.” She smiles.

  “Things seem better.” Between you, is what I have not said, but she gets my drift.

  “Better, yes.”

  THE NURSE COMES IN to take my blood pressure and temperature, and announces that the doctor will be in soon to take off my face bandage. “How many fingers do you see?” she asks, and I roll my eyes. “Okay, bad joke!” she says. “What are you going to do without someone asking you what day of the week it is and how many fingers you see?”

  “Right. How am I going to know who I am if I don’t have someone asking me my name every five minutes?”

  “You will just have to look at that fancy plaque of yours, won’t you?” she replies, glancing at the little frame with the mayor’s seal propped up against a vase of wilting flowers.

  “You’re going home today,” the doctor announces, scurrying into the room with his clippity-clop shoes.

  “Technically, I only go home on Tuesday, but yes,
I am leaving here today.”

  He peers over my chart. “Right,” he says, snapping back the cover. “I expect you will want to leave your bandages behind, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “The moment of truth,” he says, speaking as though in capital letters. “You ready?”

  I nod.

  The nurse hands me the mirror. Steadying it in front of my head with both hands, I wait while the bandage is peeled away.

  CLEO’S FIRST GAME, her favorite game, from the time she was an infant till the day she died, was peek-a-boo. Hands down. It beat ring-around-the-rosy, hide-’n’-seek, follow-the-leader. She would even drop the cat for a game. And every time I closeted my face behind my palms, peeking through the cracks, her face would turn from glee to concentrated expectation. Pursed mouth, saucepan eyes, breathing barely at all, Cleo waited for however long it took. And when the moment did come, her face registered as much surprise as the very first time we played. “Peek-a-BOO!” I would shout, and she would answer with a grin that would split her face in two. “Aden!” she would insist. Each time my face retreated behind its doors, it was as if she feared it had gone for good. Added to that was the possibility that if it were to reappear, it could just as easily be a monster as her mommy. Which made the delight even more acute when it turned out to be the latter.

  The day before the roof leaked, the day she caught me in the laundry room sealing Hershey’s kisses into plastic Easter eggs for Sunday’s hunt, we played peek-a-boo for what turned out to be the last time.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, tiptoeing to see the contents on top of the washing machine.

  “I’m getting ready for Easter, now go and play.”

  “Can I have one?” she asked, puppy eyes on her prize.

  “No, they’re for Easter. Now please: go and play; I’ll be done in a minute.”

  “Mommy, what’s Easter?” Stall tactics. I was about to say, Go ask your father, because if, in fact, it was an explanation she wanted, I could not think of any easy answer that wouldn’t make the Lord sound like a lemming.

  But instead, I put the eggs down and sat on my haunches so that we were eye-to-eye. “Easter is the day Jesus came back to life,” I said. And then I told her how Jesus had died, how his friends wrapped him up in blankets and put him in a cave and rolled a big stone in front of it. I told her they were sad because they were never going to see him again. But then one morning, his best friend Mary went to the cave and she saw the stone had been rolled away, and instead of Jesus, there were only those dusty old blankets on the ground, and an angel. The angel told her that Jesus wasn’t dead anymore. And then Mary saw Jesus, hiding behind the bushes.

  I could tell I was losing her attention with too much explanation. “It’s like this . . . Watch.” I covered my face with my hands. “See, the stone is rolled in front of Jesus. Jesus is gone.” Her face dropped into low gear. “ ‘Where’s Jesus?’ says Mary. ‘Where’s Jesus?’ ” And then I opened my hands. “ ‘Here I am!’ says Jesus. ‘Here I am!’ ” Cleo clapped in delight. “See? Easter is like playing peek-a-boo with Jesus.”

  “Aden!” she said. And we played three or four more times till I gave her a Hershey’s kiss and told her to run along.

  “EASY DOES IT,” the doctor mutters to himself. And suddenly there is a chin and a cheekbone peeking between the peels. “Easy does it.” The soft cotton pads are coaxed from their obstinate surfaces. And all at once, there I am: peek-a-BOO! Not Mommy, but not a monster, either.

  “The scar will fade after a few weeks,” he says, “but the wound has healed beautifully, even if I do say so myself.” He admires my face as though he were preening in front of his own reflection. There are other pronouncements, and when they have all been made and acknowledged with my nods, he and the nurse leave me, my mirror and my face with its perfect X.

  Across my brow, originating where a left eyebrow once demanded plucking into a neat bow and escalating into my hairline, is the visible reminder of that night. The point of impact etched across my forehead; the intent and the result written in the same decisive stroke. Crosshairs. As if I would ever forget who and what had been set in them that night. Or what, in a shattering moment, I had become. And what I had un-become.

  I stare at my purple scar. It is the taking of someone’s life, plucked as easily as low-hanging fruit, that dials you into the life coursing through your own veins, animating your own heart. I scarcely can admit it to myself, but there it is, staring at me in the mirror: only in those brief moments, hell-bent on sending two men to their graves, did I feel as though I were resurrected from one myself. A more truly alive instant I cannot recall. Nor one for which I am more sorry.

  It is not just my face peering back at me from the mirror, but that of my mother, the warrior.

  There is a voice outside my door, and I tilt my head to listen carefully. It belongs to Cicely. I look at the mirror one last time. This time, with my head still cocked at an angle, the purple scar is a cross.

  RHIAAN HAS MY BELONGINGS slung over his shoulder in the hospital-issue drawstring bag. Cicely wants to take the flowers, but I tell her to leave them. Only one apricot is left in the bowl on my bedside table. I pick it up and follow my family out the door. The nurse is writing the name of a new patient on the board, no doubt in the vacant space where my own has been erased.

  “Well, would you look at you,” she says, turning to me.

  It is a spectacular performance, me shuffling along in house slippers, and I bow graciously.

  “For you,” I say, handing her Mrs. du Toit’s last apricot.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  We head for the door marked EXIT just as she says, “Goodbye, Elizabeth Spenser; don’t forget who you are.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The oak trees lining the gravel driveway look as though they have been torched by the fire of Pentecost, a startling contrast against the green and yellow patches of field on each side. Before Rhiaan’s rental car reaches the end of the driveway, the white farmhouse with its green corrugated roof is visible, and a century slips in between. Half expecting my grandmother to walk out onto her red stoep to see who has come to visit, toweling her hands on her apron, I hold my breath in anticipation.

  Rhiaan pulls up in front of the steps and turns off the ignition. We are both quiet. The place is more beautiful than I remembered. Blistering along its torso, the house has covered its face with ivy and the kopje behind it is closer, as though it girded its loins and crossed the valley to come and console it. When Rhiaan and I get out of the car, the faces of African children compete for space at the bay window where my grandmother’s parlor used to be, where my own face used to look out for my mother’s car. The sign above the front door, the one that used to hang at the entrance to the driveway, says SUNUP. Someone has written beneath it in a black marker, SKOOL. For a while all I can do is stand and smell the dust and the fields, and stare at my past miraging beneath that sign.

  To my left is Beauty’s kaia, also in need of paint and a new roof. Unlike my grandmother’s house, which is garnished with loops of flower beds, the kaia is unadorned, Leah rather than Rachel. Beside it is the now-vacant chicken coop, poles with swaths of fence missing. It is impossible to look in this direction without thinking that the kaia, if anything once an excerpt, is now the chief volume of my story, and contained within its bare walls are all the secrets and sacrifices. It keeps its silence, though, even when all has been told.

  I don’t know in what direction Rhiaan is looking when he says, “Some things never change.”

  “It’s all changed,” I counter. This is a different place, not just because it is inhabited by schoolchildren rather than relatives, but because what I know now does not line up with my memories of it. The girl I left behind has a different mother from the one she imagined deserted her. In fact, each of the women who once sat on the stoep years ago are not the ones I know today. And that cannot do anything but alter
it all.

  Still reluctant to step up to the front door, I scan the property rolling out to the west where I can be reminded how treacherous a place the past can be.

  “I don’t believe it!” I exclaim, wondering if it is possible that I have remembered wrong. Or could the orchard have switched sides?

  “What?” Rhiaan asks, following the spoor of my astonishment.

  I point to the orchard. “Those are the apricot trees, aren’t they?”

  The fruit trees, so long glabrous, rustle their boughs in the morning breeze like ladies sashaying from a hair salon. I hurry out to the field, crunching underfoot a mat of spent leaves, and watch the trees as they shake their heads and shed their curse.

  “Well, I never,” mutters Rhiaan, who grazes his hand along one of the trunks and inspects a branch.

  “They are back from the dead,” is all I can say.

  “Lazarus trees,” he muses. “Do you suppose they produced any fruit?” He crouches to the ground and cranes his neck to look under the trees. Shaking his head, he examines the leaves. “This is quite possibly new growth.”

  “What do you suppose it means?” I ask.

  “Several possible explanations. I would hazard that someone has gone to the trouble of taking care of them.” We both look around expecting to see someone step into the path to take credit, to ask, Whom do you seek? Nobody does. “Come on, let’s go ask inside; ten-to-one the teacher will know who is responsible.” Rhiaan strides along the beam of solving a conundrum while I draw back into the shade. Life has found a way to trump death. Again. It seems silly to cry now, even a little. It is sillier still to believe in curses, in curses being broken. Perhaps the tears have nothing to do with curses but the recognition of a great act of mercy: that someone cared for and took pity on these trees, and in so doing overcame disease or, worse yet, neglect. Someone who loved something not because it was theirs to love, but because it was a thing of beauty. It was a thing of beauty even when all there was to see was twisted piles of kindling.