Black Cake(80)

Again, Marble nods. She cannot speak. She has a lump in her throat.

Benny places a hand on Marble’s arm.





Byron





Byron’s hands are still shaking. He is still trying to get used to this ghost of a woman who is walking through the rooms of the house where he grew up, this British-talking, beechwood-colored version of his mother. When she walked into the arrivals area, Mitch and Byron shook Marble Martin’s hand but Benny embraced her. On the way to the airport, Benny looked happy.

Byron is opening and closing kitchen cupboards when he sees a large glass jar tucked into a back corner of a lower cupboard behind the rice and sugar. The fruits. He’d forgotten about the fruits for the black cake. What to do? Before hearing his mother’s recording, he might have gotten up the courage to wash the mixture down the garbage disposal, perhaps once his ma’s clothes and books and furniture had been cleared out and the stake of the For Sale sign had been driven into the front lawn of their childhood home.

He puts the jar on the counter and keeps a hand on either side, as if steadying an infant. This is your heritage, his mother had told him many times, but he’d never appreciated that. Now he sees. When she fled the island, his mother lost everything but she carried this recipe in her head wherever she went. That, and the stories she’d spent a lifetime concealing from her children, the untold narrative of their family. Every time his mother made a black cake, it must have been like reciting an incantation, calling up a line from her true past, taking herself back to the island.

Five years ago, Byron was staying over with his mother while she recovered from a routine operation that nevertheless had left her in some pain. Byron had just finished washing the supper dishes when he heard it, that certain kind of creak in the house frame, then a rattling of something brittle, probably the glass in his mother’s small china cabinet, the one she’d received as a belated wedding gift from their father four decades earlier, and which had signaled the arrival of every earthquake since.

Most of the tremors in Southern California were just that, tremors, followed by speculation among neighbors, office mates, and shoppers at the supermarket checkout about when and how the Big One would hit, followed by discussion of the efficacy of building codes or the threat of dormant spores released by the shaking of dry hillsides.

These conversations typically led down a slippery slope toward accounts of other natural threats, of soil erosion, winter flooding, and the relationship between these happenings and human activity. The stripping of land for housing, for agriculture, for oil and gas drilling. A psychotherapist with a pallet of bottled water in her shopping cart once told him her clients, all children, were starting to display anxiety over the environment. She was writing an article about it. She said it was becoming a thing, though Byron wondered if it was a real thing or just a marketing thing.

But this tremor felt different. Ended with a good jolt. Could be a sign of a biggie on the way. Byron opened the front door wide and left it open, pulling the emergency bag out of the hallway closet, the wheeled suitcase already stuffed with a change of clothes and medicines and water and copies of documents. He could hear voices down the road, neighbors trying to decide what to do next. He turned back to get his ma but she was already coming down the hallway, though slowly. She had managed to put on her street shoes.

By the time the next quake arrived and hit the house with a huh sound, Byron and his ma had already gone back indoors and started settling into bed. A couple of car alarms went off.

“Here we go again,” Byron called. Down the hallway, his mother was hoisting herself off the mattress. He grabbed the handle of the emergency bag and took his mother’s hand as they walked down the driveway toward the street. He raised his hand in salute to a couple of the neighbors, then ran back inside the house, grabbed his mother’s purse and an extra blanket for sleeping in the car, and pulled hard at the front door, which was sticking more than usual.

“No, Byron, no!” his mother called. She was leaning against the side of the car, her hand pressed over her wound.

Byron stopped and frowned at his mother. “What? What’s wrong?”

“The fruits, Byron, the fruits!”

The fruits? She wasn’t serious, was she? Byron looked at his mother for a good long second. Oh, she was serious, all right. Goddamned fruits, a reminder to Byron that he was not only a California man but also a Caribbean American and would be plagued for the rest of his life by his mother’s inordinate attachment to black cake. But this was going too far. Now his mother was expecting her only son to risk his life by going back into their kitchen to pull a two-liter glass jar, sixty-eight ounces of ebony-colored slosh, out from behind the dried beans and rice and sugar and peppercorns, while a seismic event was in process, no less. Surely no good could come of this.

Byron is smiling now at the memory. He is still standing there with the jar of fruit and rum when Benny and Marble walk into the kitchen. One sister looks like their father, the other is the spitting image of their mother, but the expressions on their faces are identical as their eyes rest on the jar. The two half sisters turn their heads toward each other and when they turn back to look at Byron, their mouths are open in twin smiles. And he starts to talk about Ma.

Later, Byron will find the women with the jar open and a tablespoon of the mixture poured into a saucer. They will be taking turns scribbling on the same piece of paper. When Byron walks over to them, they will not look up at him, they will not seem to notice him standing there until he puts an arm around Benny’s shoulders.