Black Cake: A Novel (27 page)

Benedetta, in that letter you sent me, you said that you thought I wouldn’t understand why you’d kept quiet about your troubles, but of course I understand. More people’s lives have been shaped by violence than we like to think. And more people’s lives have been shaped by silence than we think. When I ended up pregnant with your sister, it was all against my will and no one close to me ever knew about it, until now. And I had to keep her from knowing. That was part of why I let them talk me into giving her up.

And I was ashamed, too. What happened to me had come as a complete surprise. I’d thought I was in a good place with a generous employer. I’d thought that I was safe. Afterward, I kept thinking, what did I do wrong? What did I do to bring that on myself? But these questions had no relevance. Such questions never have any relevance when someone else decides to hurt us. But we ask them, all the same, and they weigh us down. They can crush us. Fortunately, I realized that I simply had to get away from that office.

Benny, this is what I wanted to say to you in person, only I can’t afford to wait anymore. When your father and I hesitated to embrace you as you were, to show you immediate acceptance, you ran. Of course, I wish that you had been more patient with us, but you were hurt and you were willing to walk away in order to protect yourself. I was deeply disappointed but over time, I realized that I could identify with what you’d done. I hope that you won’t be afraid to make the same kind of choice again, if you feel that this is what you need to do to survive. Question yourself, yes, but don’t doubt yourself. There’s a difference.

Just don’t go thinking that this is all there is to succeeding in life, this picking up and walking away from people. It should never be an easy answer to your troubles. I have lived long enough to see that my life has been determined not only by the meanness of others but also by the kindness of others, and their willingness to listen. And this is where your father and I failed you. You didn’t find enough reassurance of that, in our own home, to dare to stick around.

E
ach time there has come
a moment when, against her better judgment, Benny has answered Steve’s phone calls, when he has made her laugh, when she has agreed to meet him. But this time, as Benny feels her phone buzzing inside her handbag, as she looks down to see that it’s Steve calling again, she decides that she won’t answer. Not this time. Or the next.

“I think that’s your phone,” Byron says.

“Yes, it is,” Benny says. She taps on the screen to end the call and looks at the time. Mr. Mitch is talking to someone on his laptop, out on the patio. Benny still has time to speak to Byron. She turns to face him.

“Byron, there’s something I need to tell you,” she says.

Benny talks. She tells Byron about being bullied in college. She tells him about Steve. How Steve was good with everything, at first, until they ran into a former girlfriend of Benny’s.

“But we’ve already talked about this, Steve,” Benny said, as they argued afterward.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “But I just can’t get used to this.”
This,
apparently, being Benny, the way Benny was.
Confused
is what Steve called her, but Benny couldn’t recall the last time she’d felt particularly confused. She could only remember feeling rejected.

They argued. Benny yelled. Steve hit her. Said he was sorry, begged her not to leave.

“We kept trying,” Benny says, now. “I kept seeing Steve, on and
off,” Benny says. “But it wasn’t working. And Steve was getting more aggressive.” She bows her head, puts a hand on her forehead. “Byron, Steve was the reason why you didn’t see me at Daddy’s funeral.” She feels Byron take her hand and exhale slowly as she tells him about that night, six years ago.

What Steve said to her that night, before he pushed her against the pine table, was an ugly thing. What he said—before she grabbed at the tablecloth, dragging dishes and silverware and glasses and candles to the ground, before he shoved her face against the floor and into a shard of blue pottery, before she heard the snap of her left arm—was a word she never thought she’d hear from a man who had made love to her.

Because it was love they had made, she was sure of it, and Leonard Cohen was singing on the speakers as she tried to get up from the floor, and they both loved Leonard Cohen and Mary J. Blige and René Pape at the opera, they were both eclectic with music that way, and even though she had explained herself to Steve, over and over again, how she was with him because she wanted to be with him, simple as that, he still
freaked,
because, once again, they had run into Joanie. What was Benny supposed to do, she asked Steve, if Joanie happened to live in the same neighborhood?

At first, Steve was just irritable. He wouldn’t finish the dinner that Benny had chopped and sautéed for him, he wouldn’t even taste the sweet potato pie. It was her new recipe, she told him. He was supposed to be her taste tester, she said, forcing a smile. But then Steve raised his voice and said that word, and Benny was still trying to recover from the sound of it in his throat when he yanked her by the hair until the clip in her braids popped out.

Then the table.

Then the floor.

Then the blood.

And that was it. Benny decided to end the relationship then and there, only she needed an ambulance to do it. She had just gotten back from spending the night in the ER when Byron called to tell her that their father had died.

“The worst part is,” she tells Byron, “I swore that it would be the last time I’d see Steve, only it wasn’t. I kept thinking, he’ll come around, he just needs time, he’ll accept me for who I am.”

Byron is shaking his head.

“I know, Byron, I know. I should have known better. It was never about me, not really. I
did
know better, but when you’re in the middle of something, you don’t see it that way, you know? You don’t see what’s obvious to other people.”

Byron is nodding.

“And now, I’m thinking about Ma and everything she went through and how she used to say,
What are you willing to do?
Remember that, Byron? And what she said in her recording. That sometimes it’s all right to walk away. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to walk away from you all, but I should have closed the door to Steve long before this.”

Byron looks at Benny, nearly six feet tall and thirty-six years old, and sees, in the curve of her mouth and the slope of her shoulders, the little girl who used to follow him everywhere. He wants to lean over and put his arms around her, but something in the tilt of her chin, in the glint of the small scar on her cheek, stops him. Instead, he stands up and reaches out one hand to pull her to her feet.

“Benny, I’m sorry,” he says.

Benny nods, mouth tight.

“I mean it, I’m really sorry, I’ve been a bit of a shit.”

She nods again. She is still holding his hand.

“Me, too,” Benny says.

“Yeah,” Byron says, raising his eyebrows.

And they start to laugh.

B
enny is six years old
and zigzagging down the supermarket aisle while her mother squints at the food cans. She runs into a nice lady who tells her how cute she is, how sweet she is. And how old is she? And what’s her name? Look at all that beautiful hair, says the lady, patting her curls. Benny feels fuzzy and happy. Until her big brother comes along to get her, saying, there you are, let’s go back to Ma, and the nice lady gives Byron a good, long look up and down his tall, dark frame, and looks back at Benny and makes a flat kind of mouth before turning away. Benny feels the fuzziness going away, that lady doesn’t like her anymore, but no matter, Benny’s brother is holding her hand tight, her small, pale fingers nestled in his long, brown ones, and Benny knows that as long as she’s with Byron, she will always be safe and happy.

B
enny is sitting on her
mother’s bed. Her parents’ bed. She should have understood this thing about her parents, her high-achieving, picture-perfect mother and father, who had demanded excellence from their children to the point that it had nearly crushed Benny. She should have realized earlier that their demands and their resistance to her orientation might have been born, in part, out of fear.

Benny is leafing through a
National Geographic
issue she’s found on her mother’s nightstand. There’s an article on a guy who climbed El Capitan without a rope.
Jeez.
Her ma was really into that kind of stuff. The folks who climbed mountains, who trekked the Antarctic, who sailed the oceans solo, who swam the most notorious crossings. Benny, who only wanted to find warmth and comfort in this world, had been birthed by a closet adventure freak.

No, not so
closet.
Sometimes, after bringing her and Byron in from the water, their ma would go back out there on her own. She was always taking the surfboard farther out than before, always taking on waves that were just beyond her competence. Sometimes, on the way in, her mother would wipe out pretty badly and stagger ashore like a toddler. When Benny was small, those moments when her mother disappeared inside a wave would terrify her. But her father never seemed concerned, he would only laugh and lean back against his towel. And her mother, too, would laugh as she trudged across the sand.

Her parents had always behaved as if nothing could happen that
could really shake them, as if they’d seen it all. Benny had seen her parents angry, she’d seen them worried, but she’d never seen them truly afraid, not until the day she sat them down to tell them about herself, about the kind of life she thought she’d be living, and saw that new look in their eyes. She should have realized then that it wasn’t as simple as disapproval. Eleanor and Bert Bennett were afraid that their children might not manage to live as easily in the world as they had hoped, after everything they had done to make it so. And so, they became part of the problem.

Benny picks up the envelope that Mr. Mitch has given to her. Inside, there are receipts that her mother had saved from her father’s files. Airlines, hotels, restaurants, plus a page torn from his calendar from 2011. Benny looks again at the locations and dates, each one like a dab of salve on a wound. Her father had been to New York more than once. He’d scribbled various addresses on the calendar page. Benny’s apartment, the restaurant where she’d been working, the studio where she’d taken art classes on Saturday afternoons.

After that miserable Thanksgiving Day in 2010, Benny and her father never did speak again, but now she knows he never let her out of his sight.

Byron, my son. On the day that you were born, your father took your tiny foot in his hand and closed his fingers around it and just looked at me. There are no words for that kind of feeling. Then you came along, Benny, smiling from day one, and thanks to you children and your father, I had love in my life again. But not a day went by when I didn’t think about your sister. It was like a huge hole in my life, like the death of someone I loved, over and over again. But I was not the first person to go through the world living two separate lives, one out in the open and the other locked up inside a box.

In all those years, your father never knew about the baby that had been given up for adoption. I never did tell him what had happened to me at the trading company. I couldn’t. I was so ashamed. He only knew that the supervisor had been making unwanted advances and that I’d decided it was time to move on. Nothing unusual about that. Women have always had to do that sort of thing. Move on, under that kind of pressure. Act like it was nothing, their lives turned upside down.

I kept telling myself that if I could find a way to track down my daughter, I would tell Bert about her and he would understand, he would accept her, he would forgive me for not telling him right away. But I couldn’t find her, and I kept my secret. As the years went by, I felt I could no longer tell your father.

I knew that Bert wouldn’t blame me for what my employer had done to me, but what about the rest? He might wonder about everything that I’d done which had led me to that point. How I’d gone to Scotland alone, even
after Elly had died. How I’d stayed on the island with my father, four years earlier, instead of leaving right away when your dad had begged me to go. How, in the end, I hadn’t been able to stop that agency from taking away my baby. I worried that he would think these things because I had, too.

Once your dad died, I didn’t have to worry anymore about what he would think, but I did have to face myself in the mirror every morning and acknowledge my own doubts. A part of me felt that I had brought it all on myself by wanting to do things my way, for refusing to accept the life that others had expected me to live. It took me a long time to get past some of those feelings.

Which brings me to you, Benedetta. I see, now, that your father and I may have made you feel that way, too, made you feel that you had to choose between being yourself and having our support. And you, Byron? Did we make you feel that the only way to have our approval was to do things our way, even if it meant leaving your sister out there on her own? This was never our intention. We loved you both so much and held you both in such high regard that it never occurred to us that you might truly doubt it.

B
yron is chuckling. He feels
strangely light, now that their mother’s memorial service is behind them. After yesterday’s full house, he and Benny are finally alone in the kitchen, and he feels that he can slip from sorrow to laughter and back without embarrassment.

“What?” says Benny. “What?”

Byron lifts a casserole dish out of the sink, the one with the fish design on the bottom. After listening to the rest of their mother’s recording, Byron and Benny have prepared a late breakfast for Mr. Mitch, spooning a few leftovers into the one dish. Mr. Mitch is now in the living room, laying out papers for the next phase of their discussion. He says he’s already sent an email to their sister.

They need to learn to say it out loud.
Our sister.

“The fish,” Byron says. He can barely spit out the words through his laughter. He turns the inside of the stoneware dish so that Benny can see it. It has the design of a fish painted on the bottom. “The fish, remember?”

“The fish,” Benny says, and doubles over.

Castaic Lake. Benny was eight, Byron seventeen. They, children of the Pacific shoreline, had been taken inland to fish at an artificial lake. Their mother had called the plan
ridiculous
but they’d ended up loving it. The shrubby hills all around, the water so calm. They hadn’t known until that day that water could be so easy.

They had two lines in the water when their father started shouting,
“I got him, I got him!” and yanked upward. A largemouth bass came flying out of the water, catching the sunlight on its flank and slamming right into their mother’s face.

“Eeeuw!” Eleanor Bennett squealed, waving her hands and pushing her husband away.

“Oh! You afraid of a little fish?” Bert Bennett said. He pulled the fish off the hook and put it in a bucket. He was laughing. “Come on, now, lovey, don’t be mad.”

No, not
lovey.

Covey.

Byron’s dad said Covey that day, he’s sure of it now, but it’s only thirty years later that the word makes sense. Until two days ago, Byron didn’t know that Covey was the name of a person, let alone his own mother. He’d just assumed it was a flub of the tongue. He still remembers because it was funny, how the word came out.
Come on now, Covey, don’t be mad.

His ma gave their father a cloudy look, grabbed the bucket where the fish lay struggling against the air, and turned it over, dropping the fish back into the water.

“Oh!” their father yelled. “That was my fish!”

“Not anymore,” their mother said. Byron and Benny laughed until their eyes were wet.

“You two be quiet,” their mother said, and they laughed even harder. The next Christmas, their father gave the fish dish to their mother as a joke. That dish turned out to be one of her favorites. She used it to make casseroles, scalloped potatoes, sometimes even coffee cake, but never fish.

Byron and Benny are still chuckling now, wiping their eyes. Benny reaches out her hand, Byron gives her the dish, and she wipes it dry with a towel. She looks up at him with those eyes, same as his eyes, and he smiles at her, then puts an arm around her when she starts to cry.