I can still remember those days after she’d been taken away and how, wherever I walked, I would move slowly, looking at every mother with a pram, straining to see if my baby girl was in there, stopping to compliment and coo, just to get a look at the infant. The curling fingers, the tiny mouth, always searching, always hungry. And me, alone, always searching, always hungry.
Reunion
Eleanor had taken to telling herself that her life was like one long swim. Breathe deep and wide, take it one stroke at a time. When you were several miles into a swim, the world could feel like an endless place. But when you were trying to stay invisible in a city where people once knew you, the streets and high-rises and bus lines and shops could squeeze in on you like a tightening net, until the inevitable—inevitably—happened.
“Well, I just didn’t know what to say,” she heard a familiar voice saying. Eleanor was standing in a queue to pay at the grocer’s near her office. She looked over at two women in another queue, who had their heads bent together now, laughing, and saw a face she knew. It was Edwina from the boardinghouse where she and Elly used to live. Edwina, from the days when Eleanor was still Covey.
Edwina was wearing her nurse’s cap and she looked so well. Eleanor had to fight the urge to cry out, to run up to Edwina, to hug her. She and Elly had spent some good times with Edwina and the other girls. But all that had to remain in the past. At any moment now, Edwina might look around and see Eleanor. Turning her face away, Eleanor set her basket of groceries on the ground and walked quickly in the opposite direction.
That was when she began to consider leaving Britain altogether. Canada and the United States were still open to immigration of educated young women from the West Indies. Eleanor had Elly’s nursing degree and North America, after all, had been part of Elly’s plan. But Eleanor’s baby girl was somewhere in this country. And so was Gibbs. How could she bring herself to go so far away?
As the months passed, Eleanor admitted to herself that even if she could find her daughter, there was a difference between what she would be able to do for her child and the life that someone else might be able to give her. A difference as wide and deep as a canyon. She began to steel herself to accept a bitter reality, the likelihood that the path chosen for her baby, though it was killing Eleanor, might indeed have been the best for her child.
Eleanor opened her umbrella and ducked out into the rain, dragging her feet through the punishing, gray day. Closer to home, she heard a buzz of Caribbean accents, looked up, and saw a small crew of lads across the street. They were standing under the eaves of a building, apparently waiting for the rain to abate. Good luck, she muttered under her breath. Then she stopped and looked again.
One of the men looked back across the street at her. There was no mistaking it. She knew that man. That man was Gibbs and in a moment, she was Covey all over again. Here was the boy she’d been forced to give up when her father had married her off to Little Man. Here was the love she was meant to marry. Here was the man she had feared she might never see again.
“Gibbs!” Covey tried to shout but her voice wouldn’t come out. She stepped off the curb to cross the street but her legs wouldn’t hold her.
Gibbs had been through this before. Certain he’d seen Covey when he knew that she was dead. It would happen every once in a while. He would see her on a bus, on a bridge, in a store. Missing someone could have that kind of power over you.
After Gibbs learned that Covey had disappeared off the coast back home, he felt like giving up. He didn’t know anymore what he was doing all the way over here. He hadn’t found the mother country as welcoming as he’d expected, nor all his professors as supportive as he’d hoped. It was only his determination to prove them wrong in their doubt of him that kept him going. What would he do if he went back, anyway, knowing that he wouldn’t find Covey there? His parents were already gone. Gibbs’s mother had been ill for a while and soon after she’d passed on, so had his father. Dead of a broken heart, his uncle said.
And then Bunny called. She reached him by long-distance operator to tell him the whole story. How Covey had survived, how Covey had escaped to England and why Bunny and Pearl hadn’t told him. So close, she had been so close, but this time, she really was gone. Covey had been killed in that terrible rail accident up north, and this time they had the documents to prove it, the authorities had her photo.
Gibbs hadn’t known until that moment that he’d had any heart left to break. First, his parents, and now this. How did a man survive something like this? He went to bed and stayed there for weeks until one of his professors, one of the kind ones, offered to help him pull his studies back together. Gibbs was exceptional, his professor said, he could do it, and Gibbs let himself be pulled along.