Byron is shaking his head.
“I know, Byron, I know. I should have known better. It was never about me, not really. I did know better, but when you’re in the middle of something, you don’t see it that way, you know? You don’t see what’s obvious to other people.”
Byron is nodding.
“And now, I’m thinking about Ma and everything she went through and how she used to say, What are you willing to do? Remember that, Byron? And what she said in her recording. That sometimes it’s all right to walk away. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to walk away from you all, but I should have closed the door to Steve long before this.”
Byron looks at Benny, nearly six feet tall and thirty-six years old, and sees, in the curve of her mouth and the slope of her shoulders, the little girl who used to follow him everywhere. He wants to lean over and put his arms around her, but something in the tilt of her chin, in the glint of the small scar on her cheek, stops him. Instead, he stands up and reaches out one hand to pull her to her feet.
“Benny, I’m sorry,” he says.
Benny nods, mouth tight.
“I mean it, I’m really sorry, I’ve been a bit of a shit.”
She nods again. She is still holding his hand.
“Me, too,” Benny says.
“Yeah,” Byron says, raising his eyebrows.
And they start to laugh.
Beautiful Girl
Benny is six years old and zigzagging down the supermarket aisle while her mother squints at the food cans. She runs into a nice lady who tells her how cute she is, how sweet she is. And how old is she? And what’s her name? Look at all that beautiful hair, says the lady, patting her curls. Benny feels fuzzy and happy. Until her big brother comes along to get her, saying, there you are, let’s go back to Ma, and the nice lady gives Byron a good, long look up and down his tall, dark frame, and looks back at Benny and makes a flat kind of mouth before turning away. Benny feels the fuzziness going away, that lady doesn’t like her anymore, but no matter, Benny’s brother is holding her hand tight, her small, pale fingers nestled in his long, brown ones, and Benny knows that as long as she’s with Byron, she will always be safe and happy.
Benny
Benny is sitting on her mother’s bed. Her parents’ bed. She should have understood this thing about her parents, her high-achieving, picture-perfect mother and father, who had demanded excellence from their children to the point that it had nearly crushed Benny. She should have realized earlier that their demands and their resistance to her orientation might have been born, in part, out of fear.
Benny is leafing through a National Geographic issue she’s found on her mother’s nightstand. There’s an article on a guy who climbed El Capitan without a rope. Jeez. Her ma was really into that kind of stuff. The folks who climbed mountains, who trekked the Antarctic, who sailed the oceans solo, who swam the most notorious crossings. Benny, who only wanted to find warmth and comfort in this world, had been birthed by a closet adventure freak.
No, not so closet. Sometimes, after bringing her and Byron in from the water, their ma would go back out there on her own. She was always taking the surfboard farther out than before, always taking on waves that were just beyond her competence. Sometimes, on the way in, her mother would wipe out pretty badly and stagger ashore like a toddler. When Benny was small, those moments when her mother disappeared inside a wave would terrify her. But her father never seemed concerned, he would only laugh and lean back against his towel. And her mother, too, would laugh as she trudged across the sand.
Her parents had always behaved as if nothing could happen that could really shake them, as if they’d seen it all. Benny had seen her parents angry, she’d seen them worried, but she’d never seen them truly afraid, not until the day she sat them down to tell them about herself, about the kind of life she thought she’d be living, and saw that new look in their eyes. She should have realized then that it wasn’t as simple as disapproval. Eleanor and Bert Bennett were afraid that their children might not manage to live as easily in the world as they had hoped, after everything they had done to make it so. And so, they became part of the problem.
Benny picks up the envelope that Mr. Mitch has given to her. Inside, there are receipts that her mother had saved from her father’s files. Airlines, hotels, restaurants, plus a page torn from his calendar from 2011. Benny looks again at the locations and dates, each one like a dab of salve on a wound. Her father had been to New York more than once. He’d scribbled various addresses on the calendar page. Benny’s apartment, the restaurant where she’d been working, the studio where she’d taken art classes on Saturday afternoons.