Marble already knows that later that summer, after she and Giò get back to Italy, she will let the dog out and follow him down to the next giardinetto and bang on the door of the neighbor boy who watches him for her. And she will finally be able to say his name, which is the same as her son’s. And he will kiss her son on both cheeks and say, “Ciao, Giò,” and her son will say, “Ehi,” and they will stand there, saying nothing, really, in that wonderful way that teenagers have of not making conversation.
Answers
Charles Mitch opens the report and reads it. Thanks to new information provided by Pearl, Charles has been able to look into the whereabouts of Eleanor’s mother, Mathilda Brown.
Covey’s Mummy.
Pearl insists that Mathilda had always intended to go back for her daughter. She says something must have gone wrong. And now Charles is pretty sure he knows what happened.
Mathilda, 1961
It was a beautiful thing, deeper and broader than anything Mathilda had ever seen. She stood at the edge of the thundering falls and breathed in the cool air, felt the light spray on her skin, drew courage from the power of this place. She had read that this waterfall was one of the wonders of the world. But nothing had prepared her for being here. Nothing had prepared her for the wide open spaces of North America. The bigness of it all.
Mathilda leaned over the railing, smelling the moist wood, the silty earth, the sun on her skin. She had made it this far. She would challenge Lin, she would find a way to get Covey from him and bring her daughter up here to live. She’d come over as a domestic worker, it was the only way, and the wages were low. But it was a start.
She needed to get a message to Pearl, let her know that things were going well, find out how Covey was doing. They couldn’t afford to tell Covey that they were in contact. Covey was too young, she couldn’t be expected to keep a secret like that to herself. Give Covey a hug for me every day, she’d said to Pearl the day before she left.
It would be a long time before they found Mathilda, years after she’d slipped and fallen. By then, her wallet would have been pulled from her purse by the currents under the rush of the falls. By then, her employer, unable to locate her, would have given her job to someone else. By then, the police would have filed away the case. A missing colored girl? They had more important things to deal with.
Back then, things were different. Less sophisticated tissue testing. No computerized searches. It was easy for the case of a Jane Doe skeleton, found in the mud near a bend in the river, to go unresolved until decades later, when a California lawyer renewed the search for a certain Mathilda Brown, a young immigrant from the islands last seen in an American city near the Canadian border in the spring of 1961.
Etta Pringle
The audience applauds as Etta Pringle kicks off her shoes and strides across the stage. It’s actually become a meme on the Internet, this trademark move of hers. She laughed the first time she saw that snippet of video repeated over and over again, an image of her feet, flinging off her shoes. The things people think of.
This is her last public appearance before the fundraising swim tomorrow. This one will be ten or so miles, depending on the currents, not much of a distance for her, even at her age. Even with all that medicine in her body. But it’s a challenging crossing for other reasons. Poisonous jellies, for starters.
The news reports and social media will talk about jellyfish, they will mention her age, they will talk about the advantages that mature women have in endurance sports. They will mention her color. They still do, after all these years, even in 2019, and that’s fine with Etta. Let them see her. Let them see her! No one will talk about Etta’s illness, they don’t know about that yet. With any luck, they won’t, ever.
Etta will have to work to keep the focus on broader concerns. This is why she is here tonight, to talk about the environment. She fears an easy narrative, one in which the responsibility for environmental degradation is placed solely on the shoulders of private industry without driving home the direct connection to consumer demand for minerals and other resources. She will talk about sustainability. About the need to hold on to some sort of balance in nature. She will urge people to insist on a more circular economy.
Byron Bennett is already on stage. As the head of a new consulting firm, Byron will talk about the importance of mapping the seafloor. He will explain how countries, industry, and international bodies work together to share information. He will talk about his own love of the sea and his childhood on the California coast. Byron will say that knowledge is power and Etta will say, “My point, exactly, but what kind of power?”