An unlisted number.
“Hello?” Marble answered. No one spoke but she heard an intake of breath.
“Hello-o?”
Nothing. The signal was gone.
She waited for a while before putting her phone away. She knew that if it was important, whoever had called her would call again.
But they didn’t.
Benny is in the bathroom, washing her hands and looking at herself in the mirror. She has only ever seen her father’s features in her face, plus her mother’s lopsided smile. Now she knows what else she’s inherited from her mother’s side of the family. Her skin, for one. Benny is so pale in comparison to her brother and parents that if she didn’t look so much like her brother, she might have doubted her origins. This must have come from her mother’s father.
It has never really bothered her before, not knowing everything about her family. Benny and Byron were raised to believe that their parents were both orphans. Unanswered questions came with the territory. This is who they have always been, an African American family of Caribbean origin, a clan of untold stories and half-charted cultures.
Now Benny finds herself wondering more specifically about the generations that came before her parents, the arrivals from distant regions, the lives they lived, the different cultural influences. Benny is thinking, too, about another kind of inheritance, a spirit of defiance that she sees, now, comes from her mother. Her mother, too, struggled to find her way despite other people’s expectations, other people’s definitions of the kind of woman she was supposed to be. Her mother, too, kept closing doors and moving on.
If only she had said something sooner.
In her recording, Eleanor says that Benny’s dad really did lose both of his parents, though by then he was already a young adult. After Gibbs Grant moved to Britain to study and then dropped off the radar, folks back home must have assumed that Gibbs, like others before him, had simply drifted away on the current of his new, immigrant life. His mother’s relatives might have tried to find him, but surely they could not have imagined that he would be hiding in plain sight under an altered name with a woman who was believed to be dead.
Benny’s mother talks about feeling like a ghost after the death of Benny’s father, feeling like there was no one around anymore to recognize her for who she really was. The reality of her mother’s situation is beginning to sink in. Over time, Eleanor Bennett had given up parts of herself until most of who she had been was gone. Family, country, name, even a child. And she hadn’t felt free to name her losses. Benny and Byron would never have been enough to fill the gaps that remained, would they?
Benny and Byron had never been enough.
Benny pulls a towel off a rack, sits down on the toilet lid, and buries her face in the mound of terry cloth, taking care not to let her brother and Mr. Mitch hear her crying.
Down the hall, Byron is in the kitchen grinding more coffee, looking down at his hands. He and Benny look so much alike, they could be twins, were it not for the nine years and several shades of color between them. Apparently, Benny takes after their mother’s father, that Lyncook guy, the man whose mistakes drove their mother away from the island.
Being the children of people from the Caribbean, Byron and Benny have always taken for granted that they might have ancestors from various backgrounds. But in his heart, Byron is a California kid and a black man first. This is his identity. Of course, in the minds of others, he is a black man, first, second, and always, which would be fine if it weren’t to the exclusion of everything else.
If Byron ever has any doubt about the weight of color in his world, he only has to look at Benny. His sister was always a sloppy driver, capable of putting the fear of God in you on the freeway, but Benedetta Bennett, with her sand-colored skin, has never been pulled over by the police, while Byron averages three or four times a year.
It’s getting to the point where Byron is afraid to drive at night. It’s getting to the point where he’s declined to visit certain friends in certain neighborhoods after a certain hour, not out of a fear of crime but out of fear of being stopped by police. It has gotten to the point where the last time he needed a new car, he bought a less sleek model, one that wouldn’t catch the eye of someone who didn’t think a black man should own a certain kind of vehicle. Because there’s that, too. But he would never admit this to anyone, except Cable.
What does his British sister look like? he wonders. How does she navigate her world? Byron can’t resist. He gets online and searches Marble Martin on his phone. Apparently, she has a huge following in the UK. He swipes and clicks until he finds a photo. He is stunned. Does this Marble person know, Byron wonders, how much she looks like their mother? The woman is as pale as Benny is, but there is no mistaking those eyes and that nose and that mouth. Those are his mother’s eyes and nose and mouth, the sight of which fills Byron with a longing that he can only describe as a kind of homesickness.