If I hadn’t ended up in the hospital and needed those follow-up tests afterward, I might not have found out so soon that I was sick. I was feeling fine at the time of the diagnosis. So if they hadn’t started the chemo, if I hadn’t been sitting at home one day with two bottles of pills in front of me, too tired to do much else but watch videos on the computer, I might not be here today, telling you the whole story.
B and B, you know that I’m making this recording because I don’t think I’m going to live much longer. I won’t lie to you, I’m sorry to go so soon. But in this short period of time, since that day when I came up with that stupid idea to kill myself, I have lived a lifetime’s worth of happiness. And now, I get to share it with you.
Chayote
Eleanor Bennett had just finished replenishing her seven-day pill organizer and was sitting at her laptop looking up the nutritional values of various foods, having decided that the only way to slow the progress of her disease, if at all, was through diet. She could feel the medication leaching the good right out of her seventy-year-old bones. As she read through an online article, one of those annoying onscreen ads popped up with an image of a chayote. The sight of the chayote’s spiny, green skin took her back to her early years on the island.
In the years that followed her mother’s disappearance, Pearl’s maternal presence, with her daily, talcum-dusted hug, would be a source of great comfort to her. Except on Mondays, because Monday night was soup night. Not bouillabaisse night, not pepper-pot night, but beef-and-vegetable night, which involved the dreaded chocho.
In California, she had learned to call the vegetable chayote. She had discovered that chocho, the local word for the Sechium edule, sounded like the term some Spanish-speaking people used for a woman’s nether regions. It was an association that, after all those years of resistance to the bulbous, lizard-green, dishwater-flavored squash, had brought her a perverse sense of satisfaction. She liked to believe that the chocho, were it a person, might be made to feel a bit awkward. She could never have imagined that one day it might deliver the surprise of her life.
Just the sight of the chayote on her computer screen was enough to make Eleanor’s mouth turn down at the sides, but she clicked on the video box anyway. A narrator explained that the chayote had been spotted at a rural market in Italy.
“Not in the Caribbean,” the speaker said, “not in Asia, but right here in southern Europe.” She knew this narrator. There was something familiar about the woman’s voice. Just then, the camera moved up from the chayote and past the presenter’s fleshy throat and Mrs. Bennett found herself looking into the eyes of a middle-aged woman who looked just like her, only with lighter skin and darker hair, and whose voice, Eleanor now realized, was a close variation of her own.
It was there, right in front of her eyes, but Eleanor kept telling herself that it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible that Eleanor had searched for her daughter in vain, only to have her appear, just like that, on her computer screen. Her baby, Mathilda. It wasn’t possible. Or was it? There was a name written on the video. Eleanor opened a search window on the Internet and typed it in. Marble Martin. There was her photo. And there was her bio. She’d been born in London in 1969. This woman was Eleanor’s baby Mathilda, she knew it, now, from the way she felt her heart swell inside her to fill the hole that had always been there.
Despite her shock, Eleanor was able to register the irony of the moment. On the worst nights of the past fifty years, as she lay limp from the sorrow of having had her firstborn taken away, as she searched in vain for her daughter, as she closeted her anguish from her husband and other children, she would reach way back to the Monday evenings of her childhood, when shunning the chayote had been her chief concern, when she still believed that her mother would be coming back home, and before she learned that you could love a child even when it had been forced into your womb.
And it would be the memory of being pestered to eat that steaming bowl of soup, then being wrapped in the quilt of Pearl’s embrace, that would turn out to be her greatest source of comfort.
Prognosis
Prognosis. Prognosis. Prognosis.
All these years, Eleanor had only wanted to find her firstborn daughter. Now that she knew who she was and how to contact her, she realized that she couldn’t do it. It was too late. It wouldn’t be right, not with this prognosis, for her, essentially a stranger, to walk unbidden into her daughter’s life, only to tell her that her birth mother was about to die.