Come Sunday: A Novel (41 page)

I shook my head, rearranging her knitting on my lap.

“It’s a hard thing to lose someone you love,” she said. For a while the only sound was the motor straining for fourth. “Your mother had a sister, you know,” she announced.

There are things, I had come to realize, I would never know about my mother. That she had a sibling is one thing for which I am completely unprepared. “I thought she was an only child.”

“No.” My grandmother shook her head. “There was a baby who came after her—six years after her. We named her Rebecca. The sweetest little angel you ever laid your eyes on. And good. Oh my, she never so much as made a peep.”

“What happened to her?”

Recited was how her answer sounded. “She died one night in her sleep—cot death, is what they called it. She wasn’t even six months old, but I might as well have loved her all my life.”

“Why didn’t Mom ever tell me about her?”

“People deal with difficult circumstances in different ways. Your mother was always one for keeping things close to her chest. Like her father, that way. I think she always felt responsible, that Rebecca’s death was some sort of secret she had to keep. To your mother, keeping secrets was a form of survival, not betrayal.”

“But you’ve never said anything before either!”

“Quite right. Quite right.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Well, for a while I wasn’t able to face the world. I thought I was never going to get over losing my baby. And I was right. I didn’t get over it, I just got past it. But it took another child to help me find my way.”

“My mom,” I said.

She nodded. “She came to my bedroom door one day—oh, maybe four or five months after Rebecca had died. She had her doll with her and one of its arms was missing. ‘Can you help me fix her, Mama? She’s
broken,’ she said. I got out of bed and helped her mend the doll, and from that day forward I realized what I was called to do—what we are all called to do.” Without glancing at me, she said, “You, me, everyone. We’re menders. Mending the world is the only way we are mended ourselves.”

She stopped the car on the road between Paarl and Franschhoek, where the mountain stretched out like a lady’s ballroom slipper, and got out. “Your turn,” she instructed. “It’s about time you learned.” And over the fifty kilometers that we sputtered and jerked and stalled home, she took up her knitting and never once glanced at the road to see how I was doing.

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.

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 my 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?”