Covey said nothing, just nodded.
Elly, Elly
Someone is calling for Elly but she is very tired. She slips into a dream. She is digging cockle shells in the garden. A swallowtail dips low and flutters past her face. It is a land of miracles. There is no smell of burned metal in this garden, there is no pain, only someone who is calling Elly, Elly, holding her hand, pulling, pulling. Someone who has come to take Elly back home.
Eleanor Douglas
In the summer of 1967, the newspapers reported that an express train traveling at high speed through the north of England had plowed into a derailed freight car. One of those killed was a young West Indian woman identified through documents found at the scene as Coventina Brown, nearly twenty years of age. Miss Brown had been on her way to Edinburgh to assume clerical duties at a company there.
The trading company didn’t hesitate to confirm its original offer of employment to one of the survivors of that crash, Eleanor Douglas, aged twenty-two, when Miss Douglas showed up alone at their offices several weeks later. At first, the young woman seemed a bit disoriented, wouldn’t always answer when called, but she was courteous and caught on quickly. She turned out to be very good with numbers, though she never used the office calculating machine, and at first, her supervisor was quite satisfied that he had made the right decision.
Loss
Byron and Benny hear their mother asking Mr. Mitch, once again, to stop recording.
“Your mother was very upset at this point,” says Mr. Mitch. “Losing her friend Elly was devastating, and taking on her identity felt like the point of no return.”
Byron and Benny are both staring down at their hands.
“Should I go on?”
Byron and Benny nod. Neither of them can speak.
This is the thing about people, Benny thinks. You can look at a person and truly have no idea what they are holding inside. She wonders, did their father know any of this? Ma had lied to her and Byron about so many things that Benny can’t even begin to guess how her mother’s story is going to bring them to the sister they never knew about, much less the life they have now. Has Benny told that many lies about her own life? No, not like these. Not even close.
Benny realizes now that she had known that her mother was being deceptive about at least one thing. Those headaches she would get from time to time. Headaches so bad that she would lie in bed all weekend. Even then, Benny sensed that they weren’t so much physical aches as something that was making her mother feel low. Very low.
Her ma had always been the exuberant one in the family, the most persistent one, the one who once waited and waited with Benny in the water until Benny learned to catch the swell of a wave and stand up on a surfboard for the first time.
“Don’t rush it, Benny,” her ma would say. “Pay attention, you’ll know when.”
Benny never was much of a surfer but the feeling of having timed it right, of having gotten up on the board that first time, was something that had stayed with her, that had left Benny feeling, even in her own low moments, that sooner or later life would lift her up again. Until she finally admitted that she might need a little help.
When Benny’s therapist asked her last year if she had a history of depression in the family, Benny thought of her mother and said, Maybe. Because she could remember those times when Ma would grow very quiet at the dinner table, or skip dinner altogether, telling the rest of them that she had a headache and needed to lie down.
On some mornings, when she was little, Dad would shoo Benny out of her parents’ bedroom and say, “Your ma needs to sleep in,” only Ma would stay in bed all day. Once, Benny’s father had left the bedroom door slightly ajar and Benny had peered through the opening to see her mother lying awake, staring at the ceiling.
Benny wonders now if it had been her mother’s physiology alone to trigger those low periods or if they might have been brought on by everything she had lived through. Surely her mother must have felt, sometimes, that her past, and the effort it was taking to conceal it, had been too much to bear. How much, exactly, had she hidden? And how much more was left for her mother to reveal?
Mrs. Bennett
The second time I died, it was easier. I was devastated by Elly’s death, but a door had opened up and I walked through it. I had all the papers I needed in Elly’s purse. Remember, B and B, Elly had been an orphan and the people who had jobs waiting for the two of us in Scotland didn’t know either of us personally, they only knew that one of us had been killed and the other still needed a job.
My colleagues and neighbors in Edinburgh were friendly enough and I was learning to relax. Two years had passed since my disappearance from the island and I was growing used to the idea that no one would be coming to look for me. Eleanor Douglas was an orphan from a remote part of the island and, whether you knew me as Coventina Brown or Coventina Lyncook, I was, now, officially dead. There was no one to ask if things were going all right for me. There was no one who cared enough to ask the right questions when I disappeared for the third time. Because, yes, B and B, there would be a third time.