“I think she’d want to hear from you, anyway,” Charles said. “I think she’d appreciate being given the chance to hear you say that you have always wanted to find her, that you never really wanted to give her up. Imagine what a gift that could be.”
Charles was good. He had this way of convincing a person. But by the next morning, Eleanor had already changed her mind.
“Things are moving too fast,” Eleanor told Charles. “My other children need to know first. Then we can call her.”
Eleanor took Charles’s hand. “I’m sorry things have turned out this way for us,” she said. “This stupid illness.” Charles leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, then on the cheek, then in the crook of her neck, pushing his nose into her skin until she laughed.
Her Baby Girl
She called her once but didn’t have the courage to speak.
Eleanor had a UK mobile number for Marble Martin. It didn’t seem possible, but that was what investigators were for, Charles had said. From what she’d read in the pile of papers that Charles had given her, Marble was a long-distance commuter, living between London and Rome. Eleanor read that Marble was a sort of stage name and that she’d actually been christened Mabel Mathilda. Her heart did a thump when she first read her daughter’s middle name. Mathilda, her own mother’s name. The people who’d adopted Eleanor’s baby had kept the name that she had given her.
Eleanor could call back another time, when she felt ready. She didn’t want to frighten the child, to shock her, to betray the people who had spent fifty years of their lives raising her and loving her. This needed to be handled with tact. Plus, her daughter might not want to talk to her. Eleanor had to be prepared for that, too.
For now, it was enough to have heard her daughter saying Hello? Hello-o? What a thing that was, to hear her own voice coming back at her. It was confirmation that after all these years of separation, Eleanor’s baby girl was still part of her, had taken something with her when she was pulled away from her mother’s nipple for the last time.
Iguana
When the phone rang, Marble had been lying on her back watching an iguana. She was thinking that she’d been right all along to come to this beach so far away from everything. As much as she had tried, she hadn’t been able to make peace with her doubts about her parents and her origins. She needed to think. She needed to be in a place where no one had any expectations of her. And this was the place. She knew it the minute she saw that gleaming black eye fixed on her from above. As she watched, the iguana did its thing on the sand right near her face, but Marble didn’t mind the poop.
It was a work of art, the stillness of this creature, its spidery digits clinging to the tree limb, the fringy ridge along its back. Marble shifted her eyes to the turquoise waves crawling up shell-white sands, breathed in the nutty scent of her own skin warming in the sun, then checked the news headlines on her tablet.
There’d been a fire at a nuclear power plant in France, another massive earthquake in Italy, more refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. And fighting, just about everywhere else. People had troubles, big troubles, but for these few days, Marble wanted to focus only on her own, far from the photo shoots and microphones and meeting rooms, where she could let her feelings float up and hover, unabashed, above her body, and do nothing but gaze up at a mottled lizard as big as her dog. She thought of her dog at home and hoped the neighbor boy wasn’t giving him too much to eat.
How are you, Puppy-Man? the boy always asked her dog, and Bobby always answered the boy with a little leap. That boy, now almost a man, used to go to school with her son, used to clamber up trees with her son, kept coming back to see her son when he was home on holiday from school. When Giò first left for boarding school, the neighbor boy would sit on the front steps of Marble’s building, running a stick along the ground until Marble would open the door. Over the years, she struggled to look at his broadening shoulders, at his downy, new mustache, at this child who kept on growing right before her eyes while her son was so far away. But this kid had known her son since the two of them were in diapers, so finally one day she said to him, Want to watch the dog for me?
The iguana shifted its neck, then settled back into its gray-and-white stillness. Marble closed her eyes and imagined herself as the lizard, morphing into a lichen-covered mass of stone, sleeping through the long, chilly hours of the night and coming to life only in the warmth of the sun. She was holding on to this thought when her mobile phone started to vibrate.