Black Cake: A Novel (15 page)

A
t first, Covey remembered very
little. The blare of a horn, the cry of metal wheels against the tracks, the tumbling, tumbling, tumbling.

When she came to, she grabbed the strap of her friend’s handbag, the first thing she was able to recognize through the cloud of dust and smoke. Much later, she would remember the screams, the smells, her body hurting everywhere, the burn of hot metal against her knees as she crawled, calling for Elly. Covey caught a glimpse of Elly’s arm and the watch that she had proudly purchased at the emporium. She grabbed hold of her friend’s arm.
Elly, Elly!
she cried. Then she saw the rest of Elly and the sight of her friend caused Covey to faint.

When Covey woke up, she was in the hospital with a tube in her arm and a pounding in her head. She could smell her own hair on the pillow, burnt oil and smoke mingling with the scents of cotton sheets and rubbing alcohol and the faint whiff of a bedpan. She saw Elly’s handbag, sitting on the chair near her hospital bed. Where was her own purse? Where was her hat?

She looked under her blanket. She was wearing a cotton gown. Where were her clothes? She had been carrying her mother’s wooden box in her jacket. She had stuffed it with pound notes and pushed it into a pocket that she’d sewn onto the lining of the jacket for the trip, touching the area around her waist periodically to feel for the bulk of the box. Covey swiveled her head further, despite the pain. There it was.
The jacket was gone but someone had removed the box and placed it on a wheeled tray. She stretched out her hands, trying to reach it.

A nurse, seeing what she was doing, picked up the box and handed it to her. Covey put the box on her stomach and held it there, arms trembling.

“How are you doing there, Eleanor?” a nurse said.

“Covey,” said Covey.

The nurse frowned. “Pardon me?”

“Coventina,” Covey said. The nurse hurried away, then came back with a second woman.

“Coventina Brown?” they asked. Covey nodded. “Was Coventina your friend?” Covey opened her mouth to speak. “We’re so sorry, Eleanor.” They were shaking their heads. “Coventina didn’t make it. She didn’t survive the accident.” They meant Elly, didn’t they? Covey closed her mouth, its parched corners stung by the salt of her tears. She thought of her friend’s limp hand. Poor Elly. She felt a wave of nausea and leaned toward the edge of the bed.

One of the nurses coaxed Covey back toward her pillow and patted her wet face with a towel. Covey turned her head away and tried to shift her body but cried out at the pain in one leg.

“Careful, now, Eleanor,” the nurse said. “You’ll be all right but you’re rather badly banged up there.”

“Covey,” Covey said.

“I know, Eleanor, we’re so sorry. It’s a terrible thing.”

Covey was sobbing openly now. She replayed the last moments she could remember from after the crash. Elly was still alive when Covey found her, she was sure of it. Elly had made a kind of mewing sound as Covey tried to pull her up, as she tried to pull her out from under something heavy. If Covey hadn’t blacked out, could she have saved her friend? Then she remembered what Elly had looked like under all that metal. Probably not. Elly really was gone, wasn’t she?

Elly had always filled a room with light. How could that light be gone for good?

Covey drifted in and out of sleep, waking sometimes to find the
room dark and filled with the snuffling and wheezing of other women on the ward. How many days had gone by?

“Is there anyone we can contact for you?” the nurse asked one morning. “Do you have any kin? Any friends?”

“Elly.”

“Elly? Is that a relative?”

“Eleanor.”

“Oh, Elly for Eleanor,” the nurse said. “Of course. Is that what you prefer? Shall we call you Elly, then?”

Covey was too tired to argue, but her head was beginning to clear. Next of kin? She couldn’t afford to have next of kin or friends notified, and Elly had no family. Covey thought that maybe some of their mates at the boardinghouse would have wanted to know, or maybe even that nun back on the island that Elly liked to talk about. But what about Covey? Would there be announcements in the papers? Would she be named as one of the survivors?

What if someone from the island found out that she was still alive and came looking for her? And if they found her, would they figure out Pearl’s role in her escape? Or Bunny’s? And what about the family she’d traveled with? Their children were still small but Covey knew this would make little difference to Little Man’s family if they decided to seek retribution. No, even now, she still owed it to everyone who had helped her to stay hidden.

Early the next morning, when the others were still asleep, Covey reached for Elly’s purse, rested it on the bed beside her, and pushed a hand inside, pulling out its contents, one at a time. Lip rouge. Pound notes. Train ticket. Passport. Tucked into the passport was a photograph showing a row of smiling young women, Covey and Elly included. Covey smiled, even as a tear rolled over her mouth. People used to ask Covey and Elly if they were sisters and they would laugh. But looking at this photograph now, Covey sees, in their smiles, in the tone of their skin, in the way they both tipped back their chins, why people might say that.

Elly.

Covey reached further into Elly’s purse and pulled out a small sack with Elly’s shells and coins and tortoiseshell hair comb. Elly’s bag of treasures. Covey put one of the shells up to her nose, searching for the smell of the earth. Elly had never let anyone convince her to give up her dreams. They had been on that train to Edinburgh because of Elly’s determination. Now that Elly was gone, Covey was back to being a person without a plan. Without a friend. What would become of her?

Covey wished she could have talked to Elly about Gibbs and the plans they’d made. She wished she could have explained how she was trying to let go of that dream and what it was doing to her.

Later, Covey took Elly’s purse again and fished for the photograph of the women. She lay there looking at it for a long time, running a finger over the tiny, smiling faces, held the photograph to her chest for a moment, then tore it into bits and pushed the pieces down into a corner of the purse. Her hand found an air mail envelope, flattened against the bottom of the bag. Inside was a letter from Sister Mary. Covey read through the letter twice, then ripped the soft blue paper into strips and stuffed the pieces back into the purse with the remains of the photograph.

“Eleanor Douglas,” she mumbled to herself. “Eleanor Douglas.” She said the name over and over again. Elly had been her friend, but there was nothing that she could do for Elly now. For the second time in two years, Covey had nearly died. For the second time in two years, she’d been given a second chance. For the second time in two years, she was going to seize the opportunity.

The evening nurse walked over to her bed. “How are you doing, there, Elly?” she asked.

Covey said nothing, just nodded.

S
omeone is calling for Elly
but she is very tired. She slips into a dream. She is digging cockle shells in the garden. A swallowtail dips low and flutters past her face. It is a land of miracles. There is no smell of burned metal in this garden, there is no pain, only someone who is calling
Elly, Elly,
holding her hand, pulling, pulling. Someone who has come to take Elly back home.

I
n the summer of 1967,
the newspapers reported that an express train traveling at high speed through the north of England had plowed into a derailed freight car. One of those killed was a young West Indian woman identified through documents found at the scene as Coventina Brown, nearly twenty years of age. Miss Brown had been on her way to Edinburgh to assume clerical duties at a company there.

The trading company didn’t hesitate to confirm its original offer of employment to one of the survivors of that crash, Eleanor Douglas, aged twenty-two, when Miss Douglas showed up alone at their offices several weeks later. At first, the young woman seemed a bit disoriented, wouldn’t always answer when called, but she was courteous and caught on quickly. She turned out to be very good with numbers, though she never used the office calculating machine, and at first, her supervisor was quite satisfied that he had made the right decision.

B
yron and Benny hear their
mother asking Mr. Mitch, once again, to stop recording.

“Your mother was very upset at this point,” says Mr. Mitch. “Losing her friend Elly was devastating, and taking on her identity felt like the point of no return.”

Byron and Benny are both staring down at their hands.

“Should I go on?”

Byron and Benny nod. Neither of them can speak.

This is the thing about people, Benny thinks. You can look at a person and truly have no idea what they are holding inside. She wonders, did their father know any of this? Ma had lied to her and Byron about so many things that Benny can’t even begin to guess how her mother’s story is going to bring them to the sister they never knew about, much less the life they have now. Has Benny told that many lies about her own life? No, not like these. Not even close.

Benny realizes now that she had known that her mother was being deceptive about at least one thing. Those headaches she would get from time to time. Headaches so bad that she would lie in bed all weekend. Even then, Benny sensed that they weren’t so much physical aches as something that was making her mother feel low. Very low.

Her ma had always been the exuberant one in the family, the most persistent one, the one who once waited and waited with Benny in the
water until Benny learned to catch the swell of a wave and stand up on a surfboard for the first time.

“Don’t rush it, Benny,” her ma would say. “Pay attention, you’ll know when.”

Benny never was much of a surfer but the feeling of having timed it right, of having gotten up on the board that first time, was something that had stayed with her, that had left Benny feeling, even in her own low moments, that sooner or later life would lift her up again. Until she finally admitted that she might need a little help.

When Benny’s therapist asked her last year if she had a history of depression in the family, Benny thought of her mother and said,
Maybe.
Because she could remember those times when Ma would grow very quiet at the dinner table, or skip dinner altogether, telling the rest of them that she had a headache and needed to lie down.

On some mornings, when she was little, Dad would shoo Benny out of her parents’ bedroom and say, “Your ma needs to sleep in,” only Ma would stay in bed all day. Once, Benny’s father had left the bedroom door slightly ajar and Benny had peered through the opening to see her mother lying awake, staring at the ceiling.

Benny wonders now if it had been her mother’s physiology alone to trigger those low periods or if they might have been brought on by everything she had lived through. Surely her mother must have felt, sometimes, that her past, and the effort it was taking to conceal it, had been too much to bear. How much, exactly, had she hidden? And how much more was left for her mother to reveal?

The second time I died, it was easier. I was devastated by Elly’s death, but a door had opened up and I walked through it. I had all the papers I needed in Elly’s purse. Remember, B and B, Elly had been an orphan and the people who had jobs waiting for the two of us in Scotland didn’t know either of us personally, they only knew that one of us had been killed and the other still needed a job.

My colleagues and neighbors in Edinburgh were friendly enough and I was learning to relax. Two years had passed since my disappearance from the island and I was growing used to the idea that no one would be coming to look for me. Eleanor Douglas was an orphan from a remote part of the island and, whether you knew me as Coventina Brown or Coventina Lyncook, I was, now, officially dead. There was no one to ask if things were going all right for me. There was no one who cared enough to ask the right questions when I disappeared for the third time. Because, yes, B and B, there would be a third time.

J
ohnny “Lin” Lyncook looked out
onto the bay where his daughter had disappeared two years earlier and asked himself what he could have done differently. Lodged in the sand next to him was a piece of driftwood so large that no one had ever tried to move it from the beach. Over the years, it grew roots into the hearts of the islanders who lived on the bay, who strolled by it daily, who embraced in its shadow, who could see it from way out on the water. Once in a while, a small piece of it would disappear overnight and show up in someone’s garden or on their veranda or on a glass-topped table. The beauty of a thing justified its plunder.

The monster driftwood still retained the shape of the tree base that it had been years before, only it had been washed and polished by the sea and beaten by storms and slow-cooked in the sun. It was already there when Lin arrived on the island with his parents and it was still there on the day that his daughter disappeared just shy of her eighteenth birthday. Lin’s daughter had been the color of that driftwood, her limbs strong like those of a tree, her face the kind that Little Man Henry had wanted to own.

The beauty of a thing justified its plunder.

Lin stood beside the driftwood now, his head clearer than it had been in years. He pulled off his sandals and walked to the water’s edge. He had never been the kind of man to doubt himself but now, that was all he did. He’d thought the passing of time would have helped, but
still, he kept asking himself, what if he had done things differently? First, his girl’s mother had left him, and now his only child was dead. She had run off into the sea and drowned hardly four hours after being married to Little Man.

Everyone had seen how suddenly Little Man Henry began to wheeze and stagger before dropping his champagne flute and falling, facedown, onto the splintered glass, a line of froth issuing from his mouth. If he hadn’t been such a hateful man, people might have believed that he’d died of heart trouble at a precocious age, but no one doubted that Little Man had been murdered. So many people had wished so fervently for it. Lin wasn’t sorry to see Little Man go, but he didn’t want to believe that his daughter was responsible.

And yet Covey had fled the wedding hall as soon as her new husband had fallen to the ground. This, Lin recognized, seemed as good an admission of guilt as any. Two years had passed since Covey’s wedding dress had been found abandoned on the beach. In the first few days, the lack of a body had given Lin hope. Covey could have washed up unconscious on another shore, could have been trapped in an air pocket in a cave until low tide. But at this point, even Lin had to accept that he would never see his daughter again.

For all Lin knew it might only be a matter of time before Little Man Henry’s brother had him killed, but for now, he seemed to be more useful to the Henry family alive. Lin still owed money to them and he was still the best person to handle the shops, which now belonged to them. Lin had lost his businesses and his daughter and this suffering of his must have brought some measure of satisfaction to the Henrys.

Like it or not, many people believed that Covey had poisoned Little Man, and most people still avoided being too friendly with Lin. Only Pearl seemed not to worry how Little Man’s family would react. She still came to the house on Sunday afternoons and cooked for Lin, even though she had a job at the villa up on the hill.

Pearl barely spoke to Lin when she came to the house, but she’d walk into the kitchen as if nothing had changed. She always left him with oxtail stew or a pot of rice and peas and a bit of fried plantain,
maybe callaloo, something that would last for a couple of days, since he never ate much. Lin realized that he’d known Pearl for as long as he’d known his own daughter, and while he knew little about her personal life, her absence from his daily routine deepened his sense of loss over Covey, if such a thing was possible.

If Lin had been a better man, he would have refused to let Covey marry Clarence Henry. But at what price, he wondered. He suspected that Little Man would have taken Covey anyway, and that would have been worse. His only child, defiled and left without a penny to her name. Maybe she was better off dead, after all. Maybe Lin, too, was better off dead. The sad truth was, if Lin had been a better man, he wouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with.

Lin took a deep breath and walked into the sea. He would go the way his daughter had gone. And if there was anything on the other side of this life, as so many people believed, Lin might even find his daughter there. He felt the sand under his feet, tasted the salt in his mouth. He tried to hold on to the image of his daughter as she might have been on one of her best days, so happy to be in the water that she would have done anything to get there. He tried to make this his last thought before he died.

Later, Lin would not be able to recall the exact moment at which he was grabbed by the collar. Things had gone gray. He remembered two malnourished boys standing over him on the sand, their bellies sticking out like brown gourds over pinlike legs. They were probably from one of those families that lived in the wooden shacks just inland from there. He used to sell things to some of those families on credit until Little Man’s brother put a stop to it.

The boys had managed to drag Lin all the way up to the dry part of the sand. He lay there, spent and ashamed. He hadn’t even been able to kill himself properly. Soon after he got home, Pearl came running toward the house, wagging her arms in front of her, oblivious to what he had just gone through.

What was she saying? She was blabbing on about a local fellow, the
one they called Short Shirt. Did the woman not see that Lin was soaking wet?

“He used to work for Little Man, remember?” Pearl was saying. The young man, she said, had been caught trying to poison Little Man’s brother by putting something in his drink, and police now were accusing him of murdering Little Man two years earlier. Didn’t Mister Lin see? Covey was no longer the main suspect.

So that was that. With any luck, this would mean no more threats from Clarence Henry’s family, no more wondering if someone might hit Lin over the head and drop him downriver where the crocodiles liked to feed. But all of this had come too late to save his daughter. And Lin would still be forced to work like a coolie in his own shops.

A more honorable man might have headed back to the shore for another attempt at killing himself. But Lin was, fundamentally, a cowardly man. He was also a gambling man. He couldn’t help but think that one day, he would find a way to win back everything. Everything, that is, except his daughter, Covey.