Black Cake(74)

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.





Mrs. Bennett





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.





Fish Story





Byron 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.