Black Cake(44)

Bunny walked into the sea, still in her street clothes, and swam straight for the horizon, pull, pull, pull. She imagined Covey just ahead of her, told herself that nothing had changed, but after two hours, she was forced to come back to shore and face the truth. She ran all the way home, weeping, her wet clothes clinging to her like long strands of seaweed, and climbed into bed.

The following year, Bunny was sitting on a bench at the swim club, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, scrunching and stretching her toes in her rubber sandals and waiting for the coach. She moved her head to a rocksteady hit by Johnny Nash that was coming out of a radio on the coach’s table. After a year of grieving for Covey, Bunny had come to understand that she needed to go on without her friend, and if she truly wished to honor her memory, she had to walk through the door that Covey had pried open for her. Bunny had a gift for swimming in the sea, her coach told her. One day, she could be famous, he said.

Another woman, a few years older than Bunny, walked into the pool area. It was that police girl the newspaper had been talking about, the first in their town. Patsy something. She’d been down at the beach with Covey’s father on the day that Covey disappeared. Bunny’s brother, who was also on the police force, said this Patsy girl was all right. The police girl looked at Bunny and nodded. Bunny nodded in return and the warmth spreading up the back of her neck made her think of Covey.

Bunny would continue to think of Covey every time she pulled her goggles over her face and set out on a swim. Bunny belonged in the sea, where Covey had first led her. In the sea, despite her fears. Her swim coach had found her a second instructor for the distance swimming and it had been a revelation. Bunny understood, now, what she might be able to accomplish.

In the worst hours, she would draw courage from imagining her friend just ahead of her in the water and in time, it would no longer bother her so much that Covey had looked happiest not when she was with Bunny but when she was with Gibbs Grant. In time, it would comfort her, simply, to remember that Covey had once been happy.

Bunny herself had struggled after Covey’s departure. Only the swimming had helped. The swimming and Jimmy, who had been fixing local boats alongside his father since his primary school days.

Later, it would be awkward to explain to Patsy how she could let a man kiss her and make love to her. Hers was not a case, as with so many women, of being coerced into her first time. No, Jimmy had been a cheerful, joking kind of man, a good worker, and a good friend. He had always encouraged Bunny’s swimming. He had never suggested, as some people had, that a woman who took to the open seas the way Bunny did was an abomination to the Lord.

“That boy has a crush on yooouuu,” Covey teased Bunny once, when Jimmy agreed to use his motorized canoe as a safety boat for one of their swims. Bunny had cut her eyes at Covey but she’d known it was true.

Jimmy had never questioned Bunny’s dreams, and since it was the normal thing to do, Bunny didn’t resist when Jimmy wanted to court her, wanted to hold her in that way. The heat of adolescence made it easier for Bunny to behave like other women, and Bunny felt comforted with Jimmy’s arms around her. She assumed that it was only the absence of Covey, the loss of Covey, that made all sentiment, all desire, pale in comparison. It was only when she met Patsy that she realized she’d been wrong. And Jimmy realized it, too.

They had just stopped seeing each other when Jimmy was killed in a country bus accident. Jimmy and some other lads had been clinging to the outside of the bus as it drove off. As the vehicle barreled along a pocked and dusty road flanked by sugar cane fields, Jimmy lost his grip and fell. Bunny understood then that she had felt a kind of love for Jimmy, even though she could never have been his wife. There were different ways to love a person, and losing someone you cared for still hurt. That hurt made her more certain of how she needed to live.

By the time Bunny realized that the problem with her thickening middle was not the food she was eating but an advancing pregnancy, she and Patsy were preparing to leave for England together and arranging for Patsy’s brother, still a young child, to join them when the time came. Patsy had made it clear from the start that she had promised her pops, the only parent left, that she would take care of him, and Patsy’s loyalty had drawn Bunny even closer.

Back then, it was normal for two single women to live together. Back then, it was even expected. Back then, it was easy to let neighborly gossip spread the word that your new baby’s father had died back in the islands. And here you were now, faced with navigating a new life abroad on your own. And wasn’t it fortunate that you, at least, had a roommate from the same country to keep an eye on you?

“You what?” Bunny’s new coach said, when she told him. He had been the one to arrange her move to England.

“How do you think you’re going to manage to train, between a child and a job?” Coach said. His face softened now. “You’re not going to let me down, are you, Bunny?” He was staking his reputation on this young talent he’d brought over.

“No, sir,” Bunny said.

“And pick up your head, young lady. What kind of champion lets her head hang down like a piece of fruit?”

Bunny laughed.

“That’s more like it.” Coach stepped in closer so that Bunny, tall as she was, had to tilt her face down again to look him in the eyes.

“There are a lot of people counting on you, Bunny, you hear? But the only thing that really matters is you, and whether you can count on yourself when you’re out there. This is no joke. That Channel will shred you to pieces if you don’t treat it with respect.”