Black Cake(51)

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.





The Accident





Five 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.





Byron





Byron’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.