Black Cake: A Novel (33 page)

T
hey don’t tell you how
to live with this kind of anger, this prickly feeling under your skin. That’s the thing about false narratives that ultimately define your life. When you finally learn that you’ve been lied to for years by the people you’ve trusted the most, even when you can see why they might have done it, that awareness contaminates every other relationship you have.

You begin to revisit all those actions and comments you never fully understood, the things people never said, the times you were sure that someone acted a certain way for a certain reason, only you couldn’t prove it. And then you get to thinking about all the lies you’ve been telling yourself over the years. About how good everything’s been, about how much you’ve been appreciated, about how much people have cared. About being friends, about being one big team, about how certain things were
just business, Byron, nothing personal at all.

Then everything shifts.

And you can’t push it back.

One day, you wake up and you find yourself standing at the mouth of something wide and howling, like the open door of an airplane, the kind you jump out of with a parachute for fun, only it’s not any fun, you can’t see the ground, you don’t know what you’re doing, but you know you’re going to have to fling yourself out there and you don’t
know exactly where Out There is, you only know that it’s where your life is going to be from now on.

Byron fishes his phone out of his jeans pocket and dials Lynette’s number for the umpteenth time. This time, Lynette answers.

B
yron needs the name of
a lawyer, he tells Mr. Mitch. A good lawyer, someone who understands workplace discrimination issues. Someone who understands issues of persistent, ingrained, institutional barriers, racial or gender or otherwise. Byron needs someone who believes that such issues should be resolved, ideally, through open dialogue but who, if absolutely necessary, is capable of landing a well-placed, legal kick in the butt.

“I need someone like you,” he tells Mr. Mitch. “I need someone like my dad.”

He tells Mr. Mitch how he’s just been passed over for the director’s position a second time. How even Marc, the colleague who’s gotten the job, said Byron was the better man, hands down. Mr. Mitch listens for a long time without saying anything. Byron has noticed he’s good at that.

“I’m not your man but I know someone,” Mr. Mitch says, finally. “You might be able to win this. But Byron, do you really want that job?”

Byron tips his head. “I deserve that job.”

Mr. Mitch nods. “You know, your colleagues are going to give you hell.”

“No, they’re not,” Byron says. “We have our disagreements but we’re a community. We’re scientists. We mostly love the same things. And every scientist knows that every once in a while, if an experiment
or calculation isn’t giving you the result it should, you need to be willing to adjust the process, you have to be willing to take a step back and correct your mistakes.” Byron puts on his best TV smile, confident with a tinge of coy. He straightens his shoulders as he leaves Mr. Mitch’s office. Later, he will practice that stance in front of the mirror to convince himself.

T
his one’s a biggie, the
weather gal says.
STAY OFF THE ROADS
if you can help it.
Byron looks out at the driveway. The trees are bending in the wind. The rain is coming down in leaden sheets. He nods at the window.

Perfect.

Byron grabs a shortboard and his helmet and plunks them into the back of his Jeep, turns on a Black Eyed Peas album and heads for Cable’s house. They sit at the end of Cable’s driveway discussing the pros and cons. It’s a nasty storm, all right, but they’ve seen worse. They are, after all, SoCal guys. Byron shifts the car into drive and they head for the shore.

Byron swerves as the frond of a palm tree breaks off and flies across his windshield.

“Whoa, Byron, good save!” Cable says.

When he gets to the beach, they’re all there, all the regulars, wetsuited and shiny and yelping like a pod of sea lions. One of the middle-aged guys throws a shaka at Byron and Cable, shaking his hand in the air, thumb and pinkie extended. When they were kids, it wasn’t this easy to be around the others. They would get ignored. They would get threatened. Unless, of course, Byron’s bombshell mother was there with them, in which case, the guys were mostly focused on her, only pretending they weren’t. But time passes. And that can be a good thing.

“Oh, no, Byron,” Cable says. “Not the helmet.”

“Rather have fun than be toast, my man,” Byron says, pulling the straps of the helmet into place. He stretches, takes a couple of deep breaths, and runs until he hits the water. He and Cable are laughing as they run, but inside, Byron is burning up. He doesn’t know what else to do with all of this anger. It’s as if everything that has been bugging him for years has been piling up inside like tinder, and his mother’s death, and everything else that’s happened in the past couple of months, has just struck a match.

It’s a little dicey out here but he’ll work with the waves until he begins to feel more like his old self again. Because this is who he is. He was born to surf the waves. He was born to listen to the ocean. This, more than anything, is what he has inherited from his mother, this visceral connection to the sea.

There it is, he’s in the zone. Back to the top of the wave and then down. Back and then down. Byron slips into a long, still moment in his head where he sees that whoever else his mother was in her lifetime, no matter her name or address, she has always been part of this world and always will be. And this is the one place where he knows he can always come to find her.

B
yron raps on the open
door of the new director’s office. The two of them have been colleagues for fifteen years now. Of the two, Byron has the higher qualifications by far, a sounder track record and better people skills, but Marc is very good at political maneuvering, which Byron admits is a necessary skill in this job.

“I need to let you know something, for the record,” Byron begins.

“If you’re here about the failure-to-promote claim,” Marc says, “I already know that you went to see a lawyer.” He jabs a finger at Byron. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Byron?”

“Hey, Marc, it’s nothing personal.”

“Nothing personal?” Marc walks out from behind his desk and comes up to Byron. “Nothing personal? You don’t get to go after a job that I’ve been given and say it’s not personal.”

“I’m sorry you feel this way, Marcus. In fact, I wanted to acknowledge what was happening, out of professional respect, out of appreciation for our years of work together. Why don’t we just carry on, business as usual, and let the bureaucratic process play itself out. Then we’ll see what happens.”

“Fuck you, Byron,” Marc says.

“Whoa! Hold on, there.”

Marc lunges for Byron but someone is rapping on the door. He
straightens up and pulls the door open. Byron’s assistant is holding his cellphone in her hand. He must have left it on his desk.

“Sorry, Byron, but someone keeps calling and calling,” she says.

It’s Lynette’s sister, Jackson’s mother.

“Hurry, Byron,” she says. “It’s Lynette. We’re at the hospital.”

T
he sound of the baby’s
wail cuts through the murmurs in the hospital room. A nurse wheels the infant into the room.

Lynette reaches out her arms. “There you are, little one,” she says.

The baby is still easing out of his peevishness, his mouth turned down in a way that reminds Byron of Benny when she was a newborn. The first time he held his little sister, she twitched and snuffled and latched on to one of his knuckles with her mouth. Then, at the sound of his voice, her mouth pulled to the side in that way that both she and Byron had inherited from their mother.

Byron watches the boy now, his face half-hidden under Lynette’s smock as he feeds.

“Who’s my little one?” Lynette says, nuzzling her face against his head. “Who’s my Baby By?” She says she’s decided to name the baby after Byron. Byron isn’t sure how things will work out between Lynette and him, but when she told him about the baby’s name, Byron felt a click, the unlatching of something small inside, the swinging open of a door.

He watches Lynette and thinks of his ma, of the last words on her recording.

Who I am is your mother. This is the truest part of me.

Byron and Lynette will have to talk some more. Then they’ll see. Lynette calls Byron over and holds the baby up to him. Nothing in his
life has quite prepared him for this kind of feeling, not even holding little Benny in his arms when he was nine years old.

“Hey, you,” Byron says. He lifts the baby up to his face and puts his lips against his forehead. His son releases a hiccuppy sound filled with milk.
His son!
Then Baby By follows his voice with his head, eyes scrunched shut, and a tiny, lopsided mouth, the sight of which causes Byron to catch his breath.

T
he bad news is, Benny
has been turned down, again, for a bank loan. She won’t risk opening a café without the financing. But she won’t give up, she’ll try another bank. The good news is, she keeps getting commissions for her artwork, and the one she did of Etta Pringle has gone viral. It shows Etta swimming through boiling seas dotted with plastic parts. Not the cheeriest of material, but that was what Etta wanted. And her online followers love it. Well, some of them hate it, actually, but Etta says that’s a good thing, too. Benny’s not really into social media, but Etta says that’ll have to change.

Benny is perplexed by this turn of events in her life.

Nothing is going quite the way she expected.

But she doesn’t mind all that much.

G
iò wants to spend his
last summer before university with Marble.

“Let’s go to California,” her son says. “Didn’t you promise to take me to meet my secret aunt and uncle?” Because this is what he has called Byron and Benny, ever since Marble sat Giò down to tell him about her birth mother and the siblings she has never known.

It really is like a scene from one of those films. Marble’s mobile phone rings before she and Giò even get off the plane from London. Byron and Benny are that impatient to see them. And there they are, standing outside the Arrivals exit. Benny is holding a piece of cardboard with the words
WELCOME, GIOVANNI!
written across it and she is bouncing up and down like a schoolgirl.

Marble already knows that later that summer, after she and Giò get back to Italy, she will let the dog out and follow him down to the next
giardinetto
and bang on the door of the neighbor boy who watches him for her. And she will finally be able to say his name, which is the same as her son’s. And he will kiss her son on both cheeks and say, “
Ciao,
Giò,” and her son will say, “
Ehi,
” and they will stand there, saying nothing, really, in that wonderful way that teenagers have of not making conversation.

C
harles Mitch opens the report
and reads it. Thanks to new information provided by Pearl, Charles has been able to look into the whereabouts of Eleanor’s mother, Mathilda Brown.

Covey’s
Mummy.

Pearl insists that Mathilda had always intended to go back for her daughter. She says something must have gone wrong. And now Charles is pretty sure he knows what happened.

I
t was a beautiful thing,
deeper and broader than anything Mathilda had ever seen. She stood at the edge of the thundering falls and breathed in the cool air, felt the light spray on her skin, drew courage from the power of this place. She had read that this waterfall was one of the wonders of the world. But nothing had prepared her for being here. Nothing had prepared her for the wide open spaces of North America. The bigness of it all.

Mathilda leaned over the railing, smelling the moist wood, the silty earth, the sun on her skin. She had made it this far. She would challenge Lin, she would find a way to get Covey from him and bring her daughter up here to live. She’d come over as a domestic worker, it was the only way, and the wages were low. But it was a start.

She needed to get a message to Pearl, let her know that things were going well, find out how Covey was doing. They couldn’t afford to tell Covey that they were in contact. Covey was too young, she couldn’t be expected to keep a secret like that to herself.
Give Covey a hug for me every day,
she’d said to Pearl the day before she left.

It would be a long time before they found Mathilda, years after she’d slipped and fallen. By then, her wallet would have been pulled from her purse by the currents under the rush of the falls. By then, her employer, unable to locate her, would have given her job to someone else. By then, the police would have filed away the case. A missing colored girl? They had more important things to deal with.

Back then, things were different. Less sophisticated tissue testing. No computerized searches. It was easy for the case of a Jane Doe skeleton, found in the mud near a bend in the river, to go unresolved until decades later, when a California lawyer renewed the search for a certain Mathilda Brown, a young immigrant from the islands last seen in an American city near the Canadian border in the spring of 1961.

T
he audience applauds as Etta
Pringle kicks off her shoes and strides across the stage. It’s actually become a meme on the Internet, this trademark move of hers. She laughed the first time she saw that snippet of video repeated over and over again, an image of her feet, flinging off her shoes. The things people think of.

This is her last public appearance before the fundraising swim tomorrow. This one will be ten or so miles, depending on the currents, not much of a distance for her, even at her age. Even with all that medicine in her body. But it’s a challenging crossing for other reasons. Poisonous jellies, for starters.

The news reports and social media will talk about jellyfish, they will mention her age, they will talk about the advantages that mature women have in endurance sports. They will mention her color. They still do, after all these years, even in 2019, and that’s fine with Etta. Let them see her.
Let them see her!
No one will talk about Etta’s illness, they don’t know about that yet. With any luck, they won’t, ever.

Etta will have to work to keep the focus on broader concerns. This is why she is here tonight, to talk about the environment. She fears an easy narrative, one in which the responsibility for environmental degradation is placed solely on the shoulders of private industry without driving home the direct connection to consumer demand for minerals and other resources. She will talk about sustainability. About the need
to hold on to some sort of balance in nature. She will urge people to insist on a more circular economy.

Byron Bennett is already on stage. As the head of a new consulting firm, Byron will talk about the importance of mapping the seafloor. He will explain how countries, industry, and international bodies work together to share information. He will talk about his own love of the sea and his childhood on the California coast. Byron will say that knowledge is power and Etta will say, “My point, exactly, but what kind of power?”

They will argue onstage and it will please Etta immensely to do so, to appear in public with the brilliant son of her childhood friend. She will feel proud, as if she had watched him grow up all these years when she was, instead, unaware of his existence, unaware that his mother was still alive and watching Etta’s every move. Later, Byron will explain to Etta why he left the institute he used to work with, and how the out-of-court settlement helped him start a new venture of his own and seed a scholarship fund. And Etta will think,
Well done, Covey, look at your son.

They won’t mention Byron’s mother, who helped to make Etta the champion that she is, who first introduced her to open-water swimming. He and his sisters have agreed that their public narratives must never connect them to Coventina Lyncook. Perhaps one day, when they are older, when their children are grown, they say, but Etta suspects that it is only a matter of time before someone who knew Gibbs or Covey recognizes something of them in the faces of Covey’s children. Byron and Marble are all over the Internet now, and the Internet is what the street market back on the island used to be. Sooner or later, you run into everyone.

Etta looks offstage to where Byron’s girlfriend is standing, their son snug in a carrier against her chest. She marvels that they have brought the child all the way to Polynesia from California at this tender age. Modern jet travel corrupts all reason. Etta has never been the image of prudence as an athlete but as a young mother, she was quite careful
with the kids, always insisting on keeping them close to home until a certain age. Which suited Patsy just fine.

Etta is swimming for her children now, and for their children, too, not for the records. She uses every chance she can to talk about the health of the oceans. Seafloor damage, runoff, plastics, rising water temperatures, overfishing. She calls for the designation of additional protected zones. But she also takes the time to show the audience old photos of herself as a girl in a swim cap, plus her favorite snapshots of Patsy and the boys when they were little, poking around a tide pool in Wales, their shoes clumped with wet sand. She never forgets to show the joy, to show the love. Because, otherwise, what would be the point of anything?

Survival is not enough. Survival has never been enough.

Funny to think that after more than sixty years of distance swimming, Etta is still a bit nervous about what lies under the water, still hypervigilant of the symphony of life below. But this is what she is fighting for, for the preservation of life in all its vibrant and venomous and toothy mystery.

Her doctor grumbles. She says Etta can’t afford to get stung or cut right now with her immune system being so low. But Etta isn’t aiming to get hurt. She promises she’ll do everything to avoid it, except stay out of the water, of course. This is who she is. This is how she lives.

Etta could say to herself that she has raised two kind and useful children, that she has already done the most important thing a person could do, but she knows that this is not enough for her. When she was just a girl, Etta used to think that she deserved all the good things that came her way. She didn’t see why she should have to dream smaller dreams than other people, just because she was a girl from the islands. That hasn’t changed but with every passing year, she realizes just how fortunate she’s been. Things could have gone very differently for Etta Pringle, and she still has a debt to pay back to the world.