Black Cake: A Novel (19 page)

W
hat would Byron think of
her if he knew the whole story?

Eleanor hugged her son before he walked down the driveway toward the car. She looked at him, bright-eyed and straight-backed like his father, and knew that nothing else she did would ever be as important as this, this raising up of a decent young person and sending them into the world. Because the world needed
decent,
even more than it needed
brilliant,
which her son also happened to be.

But this beautiful man had a weakness. He could be obstinate. With Benny, for example. He’d had an attachment so great to his baby sister that he had never really seen Benny for the young woman that she had turned out to be. Benny had grown up and asserted herself and Byron had resisted her evolution, just as, admittedly, Eleanor and Bert had. He had grown cooler to Benny over the years, though Benny had continued to follow him around the room with that puppy-dog look. Byron was like his father in that way. When he couldn’t control or understand something, he would distance himself from it.

Would Eleanor lose her son’s esteem if she told him the truth?

Eleanor’s husband had always known part of the truth, but not all of it. Bert had covered for Eleanor for years because he believed that he was protecting their family, because he understood that the woman he loved had been robbed of her destiny. But he never did learn how much
she had lost. He never knew about her first child. Eleanor had lied to her husband for all those years because she understood that if you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn’t ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn’t risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well.

Unless, of course, a person could say,
See? Here she is, my long-lost baby girl. I’ve found her. I’ve made everything all right.

While her arms were wrapped around her son’s rib cage, Eleanor felt his heartbeat
tap-tap-tapping
at her through the weave of his shirt. She felt this life-of-her-life in her arms and thought of her first child, a pale, wailing baby calmed by her breast, then pulled out of her arms at six weeks. Eleanor now felt that other child’s heartbeat murmuring under her skin, rapping at the inside of her head.

Byron made a U-turn in the cul-de-sac and was waving slowly, one muscular, brown arm held out the window.
Look at that smile!
Eleanor wanted to run after the car, shout to Byron, call him back, explain to him that no, raising him and his baby sister was not the most important thing that she had ever done. What defined Eleanor most was not what, or whom, she had held close but what she had allowed herself to let go of.

Why hadn’t she torn up the paper they’d made her sign the day they took her baby girl away? Why hadn’t she bolted from the taxi while she still had the baby in her arms? Why hadn’t she pounded on doors, robbed a bank, sold herself, done anything to keep her child? Had her daughter, in all these years, ever lain awake at night wondering, like Eleanor, about the mother who had left her behind? Had the questions burrowed into her bones like a woodworm, the way they did every time Eleanor thought about her own mummy?

In fifty years, times had changed. The forced adoptions had been in the news. Graying women like Eleanor were shown embracing their biological children, faces shiny with tears. The government was being asked to apologize. Someone had even made a movie. Elly had thought of renewing her search for her daughter, of asking the authorities for
help. But each time, she’d hesitated. Her baby girl, now a middle-aged woman, would want to know about her father. And Eleanor’s other children would want to know, too.

She tried to imagine what her daughter would prefer. Eleanor thought of her own mother, who had gone away and never come back for her. What would Eleanor really want to know about her mother’s reasons? What if knowing the truth were to hurt more than the longing? Eleanor could tell her firstborn child that she’d met a handsome boy all those years ago and had yielded to temptation. People talked about these things nowadays. But she was afraid that her daughter would look her in the eye and know that she was lying.

Would her daughter hate her more, then, for having given her up or for having failed to stay out of her life?

And then there was that other matter, which was no small matter. If Eleanor Douglas were to resurface in England today, someone might note her connection to one Coventina Brown, born Coventina Lyncook, who had been reported killed in a train accident in 1967, who had suddenly disappeared from another country while under suspicion of having committed murder. A murder that remained unsolved.

The false narrative that Eleanor had woven for the benefit of her loved ones had become a net that had trapped her. And as if that weren’t enough, Eleanor had also let go of her youngest daughter. She had allowed Benny to walk away from her and Bert when, perhaps, she’d needed them most. Only Eleanor hadn’t seen it that way at the time.

Eleanor loved her children more than anything, but Bert had given up so much for her. He had risked his career by concealing the truth. She owed her loyalty to the man who had loved and protected her and their children all these years. When Bert had been stubborn, Eleanor had stuck by his side. You couldn’t explain something like this to your child. You couldn’t be honest with her about the way things were, not when it meant having to reveal that your life was resting on a web of lies. Eleanor’s husband had been gone five years, but Benny still hadn’t come back home.

The world couldn’t be an easy place for a girl like Benny. So every
once in a while, Eleanor would reach out to her younger daughter. She would leave phone messages. She wanted Benny to know that her mother still thought of her, still cared for her, despite the misunderstandings. But Benny hadn’t called, hadn’t come to see her.

Apparently, Benedetta had decided to keep living her life without Eleanor. And where did that leave Eleanor? Who was she now, without her girls, and without her husband, the only person who, all her life, had truly known her for who she was? It was as if she had never existed.

After Byron drove off, Eleanor stepped inside her home of forty-five years, the house that her husband had bought just in time for little Byron’s birth. She was feeling tired. Tired of everything. She closed the front door, leaned her back against it, and made a decision.

F
ive years after her husband
died, Eleanor Bennett went into the garage, pulled out her longboard, and drove south along the coast, looking for the right kind of wave and hoping for an accident. Her widowed friends had warned her it might be this way. They’d told her to just ride out the feelings and keep on going and she had. She’d even started to date again. But a huge part of her had crumbled. Bert was gone, which meant that Gibbs was gone. And if Gibbs was gone, then so was Covey.

Eleanor had always taken pride in being a survivor. She’d been raised to be strong. She’d been strong enough to run, strong enough to give up her past, strong enough to raise her head and move forward. And for years, so much of what she had received in return, her family, her home, her days of laughter, had felt like an affirmation. Very often, in her life, Eleanor had thought that what she’d gone through had been worth it. But not everything. Not the most important thing. She’d always hoped that things would work out in the end, that she’d find her first daughter, that she’d explain everything to her other children, that she wouldn’t feel the way she does now.

No longer hopeful.

Enough, enough, enough.
The conditions were right, a good southern swell. When the authorities spoke to her children, perhaps they would be kind, perhaps they would say that Eleanor’s last breaths had
been filled with sun and salt air, that she had been living life to the fullest in the moments before the end.

The thing is, a busty, sixty-something black woman on a surfboard in winter, without a wetsuit, no less, simply could not go unnoticed in Southern California. The lifeguard on duty had been keeping an eye on Eleanor and raised the alarm. By the time he and his colleague got to her, she was in pretty bad shape. The board had flown up and hit her in the head before she slammed into the ground and cracked her shin bone. Later, she would not remember being pulled out of the water.

Eleanor ended up in the hospital with pins in her leg and cracked ribs and a nasty-looking head wound, but otherwise fine. After her son had gone home for the evening, she lay drugged but awake, staring at the glow of the television and hoping that the sedatives would continue to mask the full depth of her sorrow. She wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, knowing that she’d survived or knowing that she’d gone out there in the first place.

B
yron’s friend Cable was nicknamed
Cable because, when he and Byron were kids, he used to love the pay-TV station with all the old classic films from when their parents were children. He knew all the ones where the black folks had good roles, though he loved all the classics, really, as long as the black maids or porters weren’t portrayed in that bug-eyed fashion that could get a person riled up. And even then, he might still watch. He and Byron had gotten into their worst arguments over that.

Cable loved the old movies because they tended to have a clear attitude about life. The good guys made out good in the end. Or else they died heroes. Cable believed in the goodness of people, believed in making sacrifices for others, believed in redemption. He believed that things could work out decently, even in the worst of times. Cable was the kind of friend that every man needed in his life.

Cable called about meeting up for a beer but Byron begged off, told him his mother was in the hospital.

“A surfing accident? Mrs. Bennett? And you didn’t tell me?”

“Sorry, man, it just happened yesterday morning,” Byron said. “Banged up her forehead. Smashed up her leg pretty bad. They had to operate. But she’ll be okay.”

Cable was at the hospital twenty minutes later. “Surfing, huh?” he said, sipping from a cup of cafeteria coffee. “Where did this happen?”

“Balboa,” Byron said.

“Newport Beach?”

Byron nodded.

“The Wedge?”

Byron nodded again. They sat for a while, silently, while Byron listened to the click of Cable’s brain. Byron knew what Cable was thinking. Byron was thinking it, too. He had managed to surf the Wedge, but his mother had only watched from the shore and cheered him on. It was a haven for boarders and bodysurfers, but with the biggest swell in Southern California, it could also be a dangerous place.

“What was she doing over there?” Cable asked.

Byron turned his head slowly from side to side.

“You sure your mom hasn’t got some kind of death wish, Byron? My mom did, after Dad died.”

“Your mother? But she seems fine.”

“She’s better now. But you need to keep an eye on that old girl, Byron. Your mom is a good surfer, good enough to know that she’s not
that
good.”

Byron took off his glasses and stared hard at his childhood friend.

“I hear you, Cable. But it’s been five years since my dad died. I think my mother’s been a little bored, I’ll give you that. So, she thought she could give it a try, and she made a bad call.”

Cable said nothing, raised his eyebrows, took another sip of coffee. Byron looked away and sighed.

“Shhhi-it,” he said.

“Either way, we need to do something. We need to find her a man, Byron. I mean, no disrespect to Mr. Bennett, you know I loved that man like an uncle but no, this is not good. We need to find her a man, someone who can keep up with her. He’s got to be at least fifteen years younger. At least.”

Byron shook his head and laughed.

“Why are you laughing? Don’t laugh.”

Everyone needed a friend like Cable. He could make Byron laugh in the worst of times. But later, Byron lay awake in the middle of the night, thinking about what Cable had said about his mother.

Death wish?

There was a feeling up under his rib cage, a kind of panic. He picked up his cellphone to call Benny, then put the phone back on the nightstand. He thought Benny should know, Benny should be here. Their mother needed to have her children with her. But his ma had to be the one to make that call. Either that, or Benny needed to get off her selfish rear end and get in touch. Of her own volition. Otherwise, they would just have to go on the way they had since before his dad died.

Without Benny.

With his sister’s absence seeping into the cracks in their lives.

Much later, Byron would see that his mother’s surfing incident was a turning point in their lives. After his ma left the hospital, Byron canceled a couple of work trips and went back to sleeping in his childhood home. His mother, still unable to drive or volunteer at the community garden, rented a wheelchair for a couple of weeks and planned some
playdates,
as she liked to call them. Byron drove her to one of the old film studios, to a museum, to a concert. Then he took her to see that famous black swimmer at the convention center. By then, she was fairly agile on the crutches and seemed happier than she’d been in months.

It was during that period that Byron first saw Mr. Mitch, the lawyer who apparently knew much more about Byron and Benny than they did about themselves. He should have guessed that his mother was up to something and that Mr. Mitch, like others before him, had already fallen under his mother’s spell.

T
he weather folks said 2017
was turning out to be one of the hottest on record for California, and it didn’t surprise Byron one bit. The whole year had been a bit
off,
as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know yet that the coming year would be his mother’s last. He only knew he was ready for it to end. All these brush fires. His mother’s accident. Being turned down for that promotion. All the things that were not going well with Lynette. They were constantly arguing and half the time, he couldn’t figure out about what, exactly.

“Ma?” he called, stamping his feet on the rug in the entryway. His boots released a chalky dust mixed with ash that had floated down from the brush fires up north.

“Hello, son,” came his mother’s voice from down the hallway. “How was your day?” His mother’s mood seemed to be improving as her injuries healed.

“The usual,” Byron said. The worst of the California brush fires had claimed lives and burned homes. All of them had stripped the hillsides of plant life, which would leave them more vulnerable to mudslides when it rained. Which would further erode the soil, pollute water sources, slow seedling growth, and, once again, destabilize hillsides. Each year, Byron was called on by local journalists to comment on stormwater flows into the ocean and polluted runoff, even though his work actually focused on other areas of research.

Byron was popular with the schools. It helped that he had a
gargantuan social media following and was a brainy athlete. This last characteristic was especially appealing to educators, who invited Byron to their public schools to drive home the message that athletics and scholastic excellence could go together and that one should not be an excuse to eschew the other.

Byron was happy to be served up as a role model for students, especially those whose demographics continued to be underrepresented in science and tech careers. But in wanting students to break free of thinking that might keep them from going into certain careers, the schools were often guilty of reinforcing, rather than shattering, stereotypes.

The whole sports thing was an example. Everyone wanted Byron to highlight his track-and-field wins in college, everyone asked him if he’d ever played basketball. These were the sports he was expected to mention when talking with inner-city kids. No one had ever asked Byron about the sport that most clearly defined him as a California man: his surfing.

His mother had been the one to teach Byron how to surf. They had always gotten stares, the little black kid and his towering mother, leaning into their surfboards in an era when many Angelenos believed the sport had been invented by blond men. Sometimes she would bring him back to the sand and head out on her own with the board, drawing shouts of approval as she staggered back ashore.

“Some people think surfing is a relationship with the sea,” his mother said one day, when Byron was struggling in the water, “but surfing is really a relationship between you and yourself. The sea is going to do whatever it wants.” She winked.

“What you need to do, Byron, is know who you are, and where you are, at all times. This is about you, finding and keeping your center. This is how you take on a wave. Then you might find that you need to practice more, or there’s a storm swell coming in, or the wave is simply too much for you. You might even decide that you’re just not cut out for the surfing and that’s all right, too. But you cannot know which of these is true unless you go out there with your head in the right place.” This was true of surfing and it was true of life, his ma said.

Earlier today, as Byron got himself organized to visit two middle schools, he did something a little different. He placed his backpack and laptop on the passenger seat of his Jeep then turned back to grab one of his surfboards. Why hadn’t he done this sooner, he thought, as he loaded the board into the back of the vehicle.

“How many of you have one of these?” Byron said, holding the longboard upright as he faced an assembly of students from several classrooms. Only two hands went up but Byron caught the wave, climbing through the connections between surfing and physics and his professional studies of the seafloor.

The idea to talk about surfing had come to Byron the evening before, as he sat in his car waiting for a highway cop to run a check on his driver’s license. It was the fourth time this year that he’d been pulled over by police, and to keep his nerves under control, Byron had breathed deeply and slowly and imagined himself running toward the water with a board under his arm. That was when he decided to make a little change to his usual Career Day presentation.

“Like most of you, I was born right here in Southern California,” Byron said as he faced a thousand students sitting on bleachers in the gym. “And I went to grade school, high school, and both of my universities in this state, always near the coast.” He held the surfboard in place with one hand and tapped it three times with the other.

“As you know, California is famous for its surfing. And I like to surf, but in all my years growing up in Orange County, I rarely saw another black guy on a surfboard. Now, why do you think that is?”

One kid put up his hand. “Tradition?” he said.

“Tradition,” Byron said. “I can see why you might think that. But whose tradition are we talking about?” He leans the board against the lectern and walks back to the kids.

“Black people surf in the Caribbean, where my parents were born. In fact, it was my mother who taught me how to surf. And folks surf in African countries, where more than a billion people live and where, as you know, most people happen to be black- or brown-skinned. And what about Asia? Long surfing history there. So why not here, in the
surfing capital of the world?” Some of the kids were leaning forward now.

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” Byron said. “There’s actually a whole group of black surfers farther up the coast. They even give lessons on weekends. But when I was growing up in my area, it just wasn’t a thing. There are various reasons why surfing tended to be limited to only certain groups of people in California.”

Byron loves this. A whole room full of adolescents, listening.

“But I’m not going to get into all of that here, that’s a whole other story. What I want to say is this. The same thing is true for the work that I do. When I was still studying at university, I was the only black guy in my doctorate program.”

Byron raised his hands. “Now, I know you think we’re talking, like, the Neolithic Age.”

Laughter.

“But it wasn’t all that long ago. I’m happy to say that I finished my studies and I do useful work and I love my job. And now I see university students of different stripes getting into my line of research. Times have changed, it’s true. But the numbers of students going for the sciences and following that all the way through to the doctorate level, or to jobs that offer real opportunities for promotion, have not been keeping up as they should. So, what’s my point?”

Hands up, waving.

“Good, I want to hear your questions in just a minute, but let me just conclude by saying this: If you want to surf, don’t wait to find someone out there who looks just like you before you go surfing. And if you’re interested in my field, ocean sciences, remote sensing, or something like chemistry or biology or information technology, don’t wait for someone to give you permission. Just go ahead and study and apply for programs everywhere you can, because we need more talented young people, of all kinds, and you can’t win if you don’t play.”

Byron looked back at the kid who said tradition. “So, tradition. Yeah, tradition has sometimes told us that only certain kinds of people should study certain subjects, or engage in certain sports, or play in an
orchestra, or what have you, but tradition is only about what people have or have not done; it’s not about what they are capable of doing. And it’s not about what they will be doing in the future.”

A stand-alone blackboard had been set up in the gym. Byron walked over to it, picked up a piece of chalk, and started writing.

“I’m honored that the principal has invited me here to speak to you all today, as a kind of role model. But let me repeat myself. If you don’t see someone out there who looks like you, you need to go for it, anyway.” He turned to face the students again.

“Are you going to let someone else’s view of who you are and what you should do hold you back?” He smiled, thinking of what his mother used to say to him when he was still in school.

“Now, I’m not going to get all Pollyanna on you here and say that there aren’t genuine obstacles to confront, including financial barriers and stereotyping. Those of us who are a generation ahead of you are supposed to be working on these things and a lot of us are trying. But do yourselves a favor and think about it first before you
don’t
think about it, okay?”

Applause.

Byron stepped aside to call attention to what he had written on the chalkboard:
RIDE THE WAVE.

“This is what I would like to be able to say to you folks, that in life, you should just catch the wave and ride it. But what if you don’t see any good waves coming your way? You need to go looking. Don’t stop looking, all right? And one of the ways to do that
looking
is to keep studying. Do not underestimate the value of applying yourselves in school. Because you cannot win…,” Byron said, cupping both ears with his hands.

“…if you don’t play,” the audience responded.

At the end of the Q&A session, some of the kids came up to him to ask about science programs and internships and the like, but he could see that a couple of them were just angling to get a closer look at the surfboard. That was all right, Byron thought, as he posed for selfies with the students. It was a start. But he knew that even if all of these
kids were to take his advice, it wouldn’t be enough. That was why he was going to start his own scholarship program someday.

“So you had a good day, son?” his mother was asking him now.

“Yeah, Ma, the usual. How’s your leg?”

“Doing better, Byron. Better every day.”

His mother was still using a cane after her surfing accident. She should have known better than to take on that wave. All of her talk about knowing who you were and where you were at all times hadn’t kept his mother from acting like a daredevil and nearly breaking her neck in the process. Unless, as Cable suggested, his ma had known exactly what she was doing.

More than anyone, even more than his father, Byron’s mother had taught him the value of strategic thinking, of calculated action. He used to think that he was most like his ma but lately, his mother had revealed herself to have a kind of reckless streak that eluded his own logic and left him feeling nervous.

Kind of like Benny.