As Bunny hugged Covey, as Covey wept and started to talk, Bunny felt the full weight of their girlhood crashing down on them. Bunny and Covey had grown up believing that anything was possible, even for them. But when you were a girl, people could tell you how to walk, how to sit, how to talk, what to do, where to go, how to think, who to love.
And who to obey.
Pearl, 1965
On his daughter’s wedding day, Mister Lin had gotten drunk even quicker than usual.
“You still in the kitchen, Pearl?” he said. He gestured vaguely toward the table in the reception hall where Pearl had been seated, on and off, unable to take more than the obligatory bite of food. “Come, sit down and have some cake with us. It’s your cake.”
“Just a moment, Mister Lin, I’ll be right there,” Pearl said, turning back to the kitchen. “There’s something I need to take care of first.” There was something that Pearl needed to find.
Glancing this way and that at the hotel staff, Pearl hurried toward the counter, where the cake had been resting before being wheeled into the reception hall. Nothing. She reached down to the shelf below where her apron lay and lifted to check underneath. Nothing. She crouched down to take a better look but still couldn’t find what she was looking for, the small bottle she’d shoved behind a mixing bowl earlier that day. It needed to be kept far away from the food. This was not her kitchen, nor Mister Lin’s, she was merely a guest here. Any number of people could have come along and moved things around.
The sound of a fork going ting-ting-ting against a glass and the clearing of a throat against a microphone brought Pearl back to her feet. She smoothed her dress and moved toward the reception hall with what she hoped would look like a confident stride. Someone must have found the container and moved it into a cupboard or locker, wherever they kept things like that. Things like laundry soap, bleach, rat poison. The container was clearly marked. Pearl told herself not to worry.
But, later, Pearl would indeed find herself worrying. For years, she would ask herself what had happened to that bottle of poison. Surely, someone there had seen it, someone had moved it. And, probably, someone had used it. But who? The police had found something in Little Man’s champagne glass. Thank goodness they hadn’t found anything in the cake or Pearl would have ended up in prison for something she hadn’t even had the courage to do.
Pearl had thought so long and hard about harming Little Man that she would go on to spend the rest of her life feeling some measure of guilt about his death.
But never sorrow.
The Moment
The biggest moments in our lives are often just that, a matter of seconds when something shifts and we react and everything changes. Covey had been going through the wedding reception in a kind of stupor, but when she saw Little Man collapse on the floor of the reception hall on the day that she’d been made to marry him, her head began to clear. Covey looked up in four directions, and this became her decisive moment.
First, Covey looked for her father. There he was, just behind her, mouth open. Then she searched for Pearl, who was on the far side of the room, moving quickly toward the commotion. Now she looked at Bunny, who was only a few paces away. Of these three people, only one of them was looking back at Covey as Little Man took his final breaths. Only one of them held her gaze while everyone else focused on the dying man. And that was when Covey knew. Covey had seen what had happened, she just hadn’t understood its significance. Now she turned in a fourth direction, toward the sliding glass door that opened out onto the back lawn of the hotel.
The door was just a few feet away. The lawn sloped off onto a path that led down to the shore, at one point running alongside a series of broad, stone steps where tadpoles were hatching and growing in pools of water that had gathered there. Covey’s mummy used to stop at these steps to show her the tadpoles. They matured at different rates, so that some were still wriggling around like tiny fish, while others were already sprouting the first stubs of their little frog legs and taking on a boxy look about their bodies until, soon, they would be ready to leap into the bushes and lunge toward the rest of their lives.
As Covey ran through the door, as she stumbled and lost her shoes on the lawn, as she pulled her wedding dress away from her body and left it on the sand, she vowed that she would go to her grave without revealing what she had seen. As a child, she had been taught right from wrong, but even then, she had understood that you couldn’t always separate the two.
Covey never did tell the truth, not in the letters and recordings she’d left for her children at the end of her life, not in her conversations with her lawyer and lover, not in the muggy comfort of her marital bed. Even when she’d dreamed of returning to the island to show her children where she had come from, she knew in her heart that she could never go back because she would never be able to clear her name.