Come Sunday: A Novel

by Isla Morley

  On the knuckle of Ascension Day, surrounded by boxes in my hilltop house where the echoes run freely, I am unable to bear the unknowing any longer.

  THERESA AND HER CHILDREN are living now on the other side of the island with her sister, Loma, who I take to be answering the phone.

  “May I speak to Theresa, please?”

  “Who’s this?” she asks abruptly.

  “It’s Abbe.”

  A beat. “I don’t think you have anything more you need to say to my sister,” Loma hisses.

  “Please, it’s important.”

  As though she has not heard, she continues, “They are all ghosts now, okay?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Ghosts. They are gone: your daughter; Jakes. We talk now of the living.”

  “Please,” I repeat, feeling the burn of defeat. “Please, let me talk to her; it won’t take a minute.”

  After a hundred years go by, she relents. “She is almost a ghost herself, you know.”

  When I first saw the Grand Canyon I was surprised there were places where anyone could walk up to its edge and look miles down into the deep crack in the earth without the security of railings. Where the drafts billow up heat and wild taunts of jumping. At great heights, the soles of my feet tingle as if they want to sprout roots and my lungs shrink as if the merest of sighs could disturb my balance. This is what I felt at the joist of the Grand Canyon and what I now feel as I clutch the phone and listen to the pat-pat-pat of Theresa’s feet carrying her body to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Theresa.”

  And she says resignedly, “Hello, Abbe.”

  “There’s something I want to talk about and I was hoping we could meet . . . It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Okay,” she agrees. And it is as simple as that. “When?”

  “I could come now, if that’s okay.”

  She gives me the address and hangs up.

  I spend fifteen minutes looking for a pair of shoes. In the three weeks I have been back Jenny has applied first-grade pedagogy to packing so that there is a system of boxes all color-coded and labeled-in A-is-for-apple letters. Still, it does not help me in the matter of last-minute necessities like shoes, or for that matter, guts. When I at last find a pair of flip-flops in a laundry basket along with the dustpan, an extra toilet roll, and the dog leash (I have my own system of packing too!), I am no nearer to being ready. Still, I head for the garage.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat, I stare in my rearview mirror at the blank space where Cleo’s car seat used to be. It is a full five minutes before the urge to vomit passes. When I shift the gear into reverse, sweat trickles down the sides of my body though it is at least ten degrees from the midday high.

  Theresa’s sister lives in Waimanalo, which means I have to take the highway over the Pali Mountains. Along the roadside there are a few makeshift memorials for those who did not make it all the way over, conspicuous with their gaudy bouquets. I slow down near one of them—“Aloha Kanani”—to catch a glimpse of the girl’s photo. The other cars ride up to my bumper and then surge ahead. One carries a face frowning its disapproval: Why don’t you drive, lady! I pull over. Surrounding Kanani’s face, smiling as though nobody’s had the heart to break the news to her, are words of farewell and pledge: “We will always remember you”; “The world will miss you”; “Till we meet again.” Nowhere to be found are Kanani’s last words to the world.

  The house is on the old Waikupanaha Street, where the locals live and sell their produce in front of abandoned cars rusted into flowerpots. Not many haoles live in these parts, but as in Langa, they are frequently bused through in air-conditioned coaches for “a taste of old Hawaii-nei.” Just past the hand-painted sign advertising “apple-bananas” is the turn for Loma’s driveway, and as I approach the Hawaiian ranch house I notice half a dozen wild-haired children piled like puppies in a stained old bathtub in the middle of the front yard. Tess, at the top of the heap, is laughing and brushing her long hair out from the corners of her mouth.

  I pull up to the house and nobody is outside, just two half-starved mongrels too hot to bark. Before I get out, my mind announces what my loosening bowels already know: it is too late for second thoughts. For one horrible minute I think I will have to knock on their door just to use their toilet. Suddenly there is a thump against my door and I see little Tess shouting at me with excitement, “ABBE! ABBE! ABBE!”

  I roll down the window and smile. “Hello, Tess.”

  “Abbe! I remember you!”

  “I remember you too.” Gone from her features is the poodle-cuteness of a preschooler, and in a glance I can see all the promise of her becoming.

  “Did you come from your house?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you coming to my house?”

  “Yes, I am; I have come to see your mom.”

  “Is Cleo coming?”

  She has forgotten, then remembered all at the same time, and I reach down out of the window to rub her head. “No, love, Cleo isn’t coming.”

  She whisks around as she hears her mother call. “Go on in the house, Auntie Loma has haupia pie for you,” Theresa says, and Tess dashes off, but not before waving. “Bye-bye, Abbe.”

  “She’s grown so much,” I tell Theresa as she approaches my window. But here is a woman who needs no reminding of how time is fashioning one daughter and not another.

  “Yes, she has. Are you going to come in?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t think I can. Would it be all right if we talk in the car?”

  “Okay.” She shrugs and heads around to the passenger side as I stretch over to unlock the door. Her heavy frame eases into the seat.

  “This may turn out to be a mistake,” I say, finding the equilibrium between words. “I haven’t rehearsed—no, that’s not true; I haven’t rehearsed as much as I would have liked.”

  Theresa responds with a smile and we sit quietly side by side.

  I look over at her. “I am sorry about Jakes.”

  “Thank you,” she says politely.

  “He was a good man. I should have said that at the funeral.”

  “Yes, he was. And yes, you should have.”

  My mouth has gone dry and I think about Kanani’s poster board. “The world will miss him.”

  “Jenny told me what happened to you,” Theresa interjects, and I know she has seen the scar.

  “Other than the heads of states in a few backwater nations, I think she told everyone.”

  It is not her body that is a ghost but her smile, so faint I want to rub my eyes to make sure it is there. “I was sorry to hear about it.”

  “Don’t be. It all turned out for the best, I think.”

  We are quiet again. I catch myself praying for a way forward.

  “Today is Ascension Day,” I say.

  “Is it? I haven’t been going to church lately, so I’ve not really kept up on all that stuff.”

  “Well, I haven’t either. But Jenny’s asked me to go to the service on Sunday, and I thought it might be a good time to say goodbye to some of the folks.”

  “She told me you are moving back to South Africa. Are you going for good?”

  “I don’t know about ‘for good’ anymore. ‘For now’ is as far as I plan these days.”

  She nods. “I know what you mean.”

  To the eavesdropping ladies of the women’s auxiliary this might well be quaint afternoon chitchat, no need for a teapot even, but to two mourners this is a truce creeping up on no-man’s-land.

  “The thing about Ascension Day, if you think about it, is that it’s about last words.” I might as well have pulled out a revolver and aimed it at Theresa’s head. At first her eyes dart madly, as mine must have done, looking for a way out. Finding none, they spray with tears.

  There is a packet of tissues in my handbag, but I am afraid to reach for them and give her one, afraid the smallest gesture will make her bolt from the car. “I am so sorry to do this to
you; I know you have been through a lot. It’s just that I can’t go to a service about Jesus’ last words and not know the last words of my own daughter.”

  Theresa lifts the bottom of her T-shirt and wipes her face as a small child might do. She takes a few great gulps of air and then turns to face me for the first time. I look at her, at her black eyes rimmed with red veins. “She was singing,” she says.

  Out of all the sentences and words I have imagined Cleo saying, in all the possible ways she might have uttered them—a shout, a screech, a whisper, a yell—I have not imagined a song. And it seems that I did not know my child as well as I should have. Tess walks out on the porch, the corners of her mouth bearing the remnants of pie. Behind her, in the doorway, Loma glares out at the car.

  “Do you remember what she was singing?” I ask.

  And she nods. “The mommies on the bus go ‘shh-shh-shh.’ I remember because at the hospital, when I could hear you crying way down the hall, that’s all I could think about.”

  In Cleo’s version of the song, the bus driver goes “move on back,” the children go “up and down,” the daddies go “I love you,” and the mommies go “shh, shh, shh.” The actions accompanying the mommy verse involve staking a sharp finger to pursed lips and potting atop an equally uncompromising scowl. Daddy, the melody of unsung adoration; Mommy, the rigid rule. Sometimes I would sing it, shuffling the words so Daddy ended up the disciplinarian. But it never worked. Cleo would stop me immediately. “Nononono, the mommies go shh-shh-shh.” Just once I argued, “But the mommies can go ‘I love you’ too, can’t they?” Who could forget Cleo’s perfect mimicry of her mother’s exasperated tone? “Mo-ohm!” she said, and I relented, but perhaps I shouldn’t have.

  “She knew I loved her, didn’t she?” I quaver. Can it be that this is what the blame has been about?

  It is a priestly hand that finds mine. “Yes,” my friend says. “Yes, she did.” To her emphatic squeeze, I echo back my thanks, and in that fleshy Morse, forgiveness offered and accepted has traveled unnoticed by anyone but us.

  “I’m going now,” she says, drawing away.

  What I want to say is, Don’t, and she is halfway out when I remember. “Wait!” I fumble for my handbag, rummaging through a warehouse till my fingers find the folded envelope. “I want you to have this.”

  Taking the envelope, she nods, thinking perhaps it is one of my silly letters, a poem, a photograph. She lifts the flap and, seeing nothing, peers in. What she sees resting at the bottom like alluvial gold is the weight of the world: a blond curl tied with a cerulean bow.

  EVEN BEFORE CLEO DIED, I began to think of life as a rather long procession of goodbyes. What started it was a traffic jam on Alakea Street when I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror and saw that a net of wrinkles had been cast over each eye. “Up until yesterday I was young,” I told Greg, who called it vanity at first, then melancholy when I pressed the matter. (Greg was the only person I ever knew, besides dead Greek philosophers, who used the world “melancholy,” as though a cupful of bloodletting leeches would do the trick.) But I believe it more than ever. No sooner have you met the love of your life than he is headed for the door, or you are wishing he would. Friends betray, disappoint, or move to someplace cold, and you are back at the window, waving away. Children come as seeds and just as flighty, dandelion-like, flit away with the first big puff. A beloved tomcat, the only show worth watching on TV, the last empty lot in town: valedictories to all of them. Goodbye to the neighbor who never waved, the house you swore you would die in, the memories you rehearse like times tables; hope the gerontologists are right: that they will return one day when all anybody requires you to recall is whether you had a bowel movement. Hope to God you will remember, instead, the precise smell of your mother’s eau de cologne and the words she spoke when she daubed it behind your ears one night, or your little girl’s squeal of delight when she found the first hidden Easter egg.

  The house still has relics of parting even though the movers have taken away all the boxes. The FOR SALE sign is still on the curb, and Solly keeps one eye on me and the other on the pet carrier he hopes isn’t for him. Mrs. Chung and Gillian Beech’s entirely impractical yet tender gesture at goodbye is already dotted with mold even though there is only one perfunctory slice missing from it. Can’t pack cake, but I haven’t the heart to throw it out either.

  Even the answering machine, once so adept at hanging up on people, now insists I call everyone back with detailed goodbyes. Greg I do, even though it is mostly to talk about when the pets will be arriving and to give him the details on the portable storage unit. “Take anything you want,” I offer, and though I mean it to be kind, he bristles. “I will write,” I tell him—it is an easy promise, easier than “Goodbye,” easier still than “Forgive me.” But those will come. I rub Solly’s ears. “Not yet, boy,” I assure him, and head for the front door. As I glance back, the house seems gone already.

  WHEN I SLIP into the pew fifteen minutes later, Jenny hands me her open hymnal while the congregation sings Isaac Watts’s beloved hymn “Jesus Shall Reign”:

  Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

  Doth his successive journeys run;

  His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

  Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

  A time when there will be no more moons—good or bad—waxing and waning is the best description of heaven I can imagine. I join in on the second verse, looking up between breaths to see the familiar heads.

  Petal, with Blossom tied to her in a sling, waves from across the aisle and mouths something incomprehensible. Jenny says it’s her last Sunday too, that she is headed back to England next week. Mrs. Scribner’s new poodle is looking over her mistress’s shoulder like a distracted child although no doubt she is expected to follow along where Mrs. Scribner’s finger keeps track of the notes. Next to her are Rita and Frank. Frank has his arm over Rita’s shoulder, a sign perhaps that a wedding is on the wind. During the next two stanzas I am able to locate Sylvia Horton in the choir loft; Althea Worthington and her great-nephew in the middle pew, pulpit-side. Carolyn Higa, who is not singing but casting around to see who’s doing what, is seated next to two people wearing military outfits and henpecked expressions. But there are also a number of heads, come to think of it, that I do not recognize. In fact, the crowd seems to have swelled since we left, a point I will omit from the letter I will one day write Greg.

  After the hymn, Pastor Penny (as she likes to be called) bounces to the Plexiglas lectern, a new addition to the chancel, below the newly erected PowerPoint screen. Tucking a few impertinent curls behind her ears and sliding her spectacles back up her ski-slope nose in one deft move, she enjoins us to greet one another in the name of Christ. Dutifully, we turn and pass the peace, some with hugs, others with handshakes no less hearty. There is a good deal of crossing the aisle, and a general chaos emerges so that the sanctuary resembles a tailgate party. Bumped along from one congregant to the next, I am suddenly face-to-face with Kelsey Oliver. His hesitation is unmistakable, but my hand, in the momentum of gripping and shaking, extends toward him. “The peace of Christ be with you, Kelsey,” I offer.

  “Um, yes. Indeed,” he stutters. “And with you.” For just a beat I don’t let go, realizing all that pomposity is nothing but a scared, sweaty palm.

  “Okay, friends,” laughs Pastor Penny. “Back to your seats, please. We do want to be out of here before Denny’s closes for lunch.”

  Flashing on the screen is today’s Scripture—the text taken from Matthew’s final chapter. I close my eyes and listen. Perhaps never before, not in the fervor of conversion or in the sit-up-straight duty as the preacher’s wife, have I been so attentive. It is the awkwardness of goodbyes that makes us do what we should have done all along: listen instead of speak. It could be Chicken Little, clucking her warning, for all I care. The ceiling could cave in under the weight of a collapsed sky and I would not care as much as I do for the grace of knowing Cleo�
��s last words. Among the rhythms of old come finally the Lord’s: Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. All through the town.

  “ARE YOU SURE you want to do this?” Jenny asks, putting on her turn signal. River Street always comes up quickly, and it is easy to miss the turn. Not something Jenny will want to do when there is a plane for me to catch and a schedule to keep. So as not to distract her, I fire out a quick “Yes,” although the truth is to the contrary. Is there a name for the fear of tight streets? Counting by the calendar, fourteen pages have flipped over since Greg and I last drove down this street. It is both yesterday and a different century.

  Someone is painting the door of 121B fire-engine red, the same someone who must have hung the geranium-filled window box in front of what used to be Theresa’s living room window. “Those aren’t going to last long,” Jenny remarks, crossly because she has to be so upbeat about my departure.

  “But they look pretty,” I say.

  “True,” she retorts, pulling over to the curb across the way. “If you have money to waste.”

  Someone else is setting out a trash can. The new door, the geraniums, the discarding of trash are small acts of hope. Before, I used to think living on River Street was like serving a prison term; now it seems more like an act of faith. All anyone can ask of a memorial, I suppose.

  “We’re not stopping here, go on down to the end,” I tell her, and when she does there is one small space slurred with an oil stain. “Park here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Park here. I’m going to see if anyone’s home.”