Mr. Mitch
The thing about identity. There’s your family history, there’s how you see yourself, and then there’s what others see in you. All these elements factor into your identity, like it or not. Charles Mitch is a proud member of the state association of black lawyers, but he suspects that part of his success over the years has been owed to the fact that many people haven’t actually noticed his African heritage.
People have trouble seeing past Charles’s skin. This, despite his history in the civil rights movement （and that photo of him as a student）。 This, despite his volunteer work with young offenders of color （though he’s helped other kids, too）。 This, despite the appearance of his children （who’ve taken after their beautiful mother, may she rest in peace）。
The thing about having a white man’s nose. When your heart is breaking, everyone can see it because the nose turns red, along with the rims of your eyes. No wonder so many men in America try to hide from their feelings. Yes, Charles Mitch’s heart is breaking. Charles’s wife was the love of his life. And then he fell in love again, this time with Eleanor Bennett, the widow of a fellow attorney and a woman who would eventually reveal to Charles that she was a ghost.
Charles Mitch
Charles has known for about a year now that Eleanor wasn’t really Eleanor. They’d been dating for a while but she didn’t reveal this to him until he went to see her at the hospital after the surfing incident. It took him a while to understand what she was telling him. The accident hadn’t been an accident, she told him, except for the part where she’d actually survived.
“Only my husband really knew who I was,” Eleanor told Charles that day. “I feel like there’s no one who recognizes me anymore.”
And me? Charles wanted to say, but he didn’t.
“That’s normal,” Charles said. “You lived with Bert for more than forty years. You raised a family with him. When my wife died, I felt like I had disappeared with her. I only hung on at first because the kids were so young.”
“But this is different,” she said. And it was then that Eleanor told him what she and Bert had done. How they’d come to California, in part to move far away from the East Coast’s other British-Caribbeans.
“I see what you mean,” Charles said. But what he was really thinking was I still know who you are. Or do I?
Charles and Eleanor first met years before at a mutual acquaintance’s house, someone who, together with Charles and Bert Bennett, had volunteered his time providing free legal assistance mostly to black families who couldn’t afford it otherwise. Sometime after the death of his own wife, when Charles began to adjust to the idea of being with someone again, he came to understand that it was best to keep his distance from Eleanor. She had a certain effect on him, left a kind of buoyancy in his heart, but she was married to someone else and Charles Mitch was not the type to go poaching the woman of another man.
He recalled that Bert didn’t like to talk about his upbringing in the islands. Bert told Charles that both he and Eleanor had been orphans. Charles also recalled the way Bert and his wife looked at each other when they talked about their kids. No, Charles would never have succeeded in poaching that man’s wife, even if he’d tried.
Charles was truly sorry to see Bert go the way he did, a fairly quick decline but long enough, and it pained him to see Eleanor’s face as she stood by her husband’s grave. She would look down at his coffin, then out in the distance as if expecting Bert to come walking out from somewhere among the trees. Only much later did he realize that she was looking for Benny.
After Bert’s death, Eleanor went to consult Charles as an attorney, and their acquaintance gave way to something more personal. In time, some of the cracks in Charles’s heart began to heal.
That night in the hospital, the nurses let Charles stay in Eleanor’s room until late. He leaned forward and rested his elbow on the pillow next to her face while she talked. The next time he saw her, she smiled at him and Charles felt as though they’d both backed away from a ledge. Once Eleanor had healed enough for her son to go back to his own house, she and Charles started getting out together again. Eleanor was planning to organize a lunch for him to get acquainted with Byron when some follow-up medical tests showed that she had a problem.
In early 2018, a few months after the surfing accident, Eleanor’s clinical chart indicated that she was almost seventy-three years old when, unbeknownst to the doctors, Mrs. Bennett, born Coventina Lyncook, had just turned seventy. The rest, though, was true. Blood type, O-negative. Disease, advanced. Chances of survival past the next year, roughly fifteen percent.