Black Cake(68)

“Not in the Caribbean,” the speaker said, “not in Asia, but right here in southern Europe.” She knew this narrator. There was something familiar about the woman’s voice. Just then, the camera moved up from the chayote and past the presenter’s fleshy throat and Mrs. Bennett found herself looking into the eyes of a middle-aged woman who looked just like her, only with lighter skin and darker hair, and whose voice, Eleanor now realized, was a close variation of her own.

It was there, right in front of her eyes, but Eleanor kept telling herself that it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible that Eleanor had searched for her daughter in vain, only to have her appear, just like that, on her computer screen. Her baby, Mathilda. It wasn’t possible. Or was it? There was a name written on the video. Eleanor opened a search window on the Internet and typed it in. Marble Martin. There was her photo. And there was her bio. She’d been born in London in 1969. This woman was Eleanor’s baby Mathilda, she knew it, now, from the way she felt her heart swell inside her to fill the hole that had always been there.

Despite her shock, Eleanor was able to register the irony of the moment. On the worst nights of the past fifty years, as she lay limp from the sorrow of having had her firstborn taken away, as she searched in vain for her daughter, as she closeted her anguish from her husband and other children, she would reach way back to the Monday evenings of her childhood, when shunning the chayote had been her chief concern, when she still believed that her mother would be coming back home, and before she learned that you could love a child even when it had been forced into your womb.

And it would be the memory of being pestered to eat that steaming bowl of soup, then being wrapped in the quilt of Pearl’s embrace, that would turn out to be her greatest source of comfort.





Prognosis





Prognosis. Prognosis. Prognosis.

All these years, Eleanor had only wanted to find her firstborn daughter. Now that she knew who she was and how to contact her, she realized that she couldn’t do it. It was too late. It wouldn’t be right, not with this prognosis, for her, essentially a stranger, to walk unbidden into her daughter’s life, only to tell her that her birth mother was about to die.

“I think she’d want to hear from you, anyway,” Charles said. “I think she’d appreciate being given the chance to hear you say that you have always wanted to find her, that you never really wanted to give her up. Imagine what a gift that could be.”

Charles was good. He had this way of convincing a person. But by the next morning, Eleanor had already changed her mind.

“Things are moving too fast,” Eleanor told Charles. “My other children need to know first. Then we can call her.”

Eleanor took Charles’s hand. “I’m sorry things have turned out this way for us,” she said. “This stupid illness.” Charles leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then on the cheek, then in the crook of her neck, pushing his nose into her skin until she laughed.





Her Baby Girl





She called her once but didn’t have the courage to speak.

Eleanor had a UK mobile number for Marble Martin. It didn’t seem possible, but that was what investigators were for, Charles had said. From what she’d read in the pile of papers that Charles had given her, Marble was a long-distance commuter, living between London and Rome. Eleanor read that Marble was a sort of stage name and that she’d actually been christened Mabel Mathilda. Her heart did a thump when she first read her daughter’s middle name. Mathilda, her own mother’s name. The people who’d adopted Eleanor’s baby had kept the name that she had given her.

Eleanor could call back another time, when she felt ready. She didn’t want to frighten the child, to shock her, to betray the people who had spent fifty years of their lives raising her and loving her. This needed to be handled with tact. Plus, her daughter might not want to talk to her. Eleanor had to be prepared for that, too.

For now, it was enough to have heard her daughter saying Hello? Hello-o? What a thing that was, to hear her own voice coming back at her. It was confirmation that after all these years of separation, Eleanor’s baby girl was still part of her, had taken something with her when she was pulled away from her mother’s nipple for the last time.





Iguana





When the phone rang, Marble had been lying on her back watching an iguana. She was thinking that she’d been right all along to come to this beach so far away from everything. As much as she had tried, she hadn’t been able to make peace with her doubts about her parents and her origins. She needed to think. She needed to be in a place where no one had any expectations of her. And this was the place. She knew it the minute she saw that gleaming black eye fixed on her from above. As she watched, the iguana did its thing on the sand right near her face, but Marble didn’t mind the poop.

It was a work of art, the stillness of this creature, its spidery digits clinging to the tree limb, the fringy ridge along its back. Marble shifted her eyes to the turquoise waves crawling up shell-white sands, breathed in the nutty scent of her own skin warming in the sun, then checked the news headlines on her tablet.

There’d been a fire at a nuclear power plant in France, another massive earthquake in Italy, more refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. And fighting, just about everywhere else. People had troubles, big troubles, but for these few days, Marble wanted to focus only on her own, far from the photo shoots and microphones and meeting rooms, where she could let her feelings float up and hover, unabashed, above her body, and do nothing but gaze up at a mottled lizard as big as her dog. She thought of her dog at home and hoped the neighbor boy wasn’t giving him too much to eat.