After that miserable Thanksgiving Day in 2010, Benny and her father never did speak again, but now she knows he never let her out of his sight.
Mrs. Bennett
Byron, my son. On the day that you were born, your father took your tiny foot in his hand and closed his fingers around it and just looked at me. There are no words for that kind of feeling. Then you came along, Benny, smiling from day one, and thanks to you children and your father, I had love in my life again. But not a day went by when I didn’t think about your sister. It was like a huge hole in my life, like the death of someone I loved, over and over again. But I was not the first person to go through the world living two separate lives, one out in the open and the other locked up inside a box.
In all those years, your father never knew about the baby that had been given up for adoption. I never did tell him what had happened to me at the trading company. I couldn’t. I was so ashamed. He only knew that the supervisor had been making unwanted advances and that I’d decided it was time to move on. Nothing unusual about that. Women have always had to do that sort of thing. Move on, under that kind of pressure. Act like it was nothing, their lives turned upside down.
I kept telling myself that if I could find a way to track down my daughter, I would tell Bert about her and he would understand, he would accept her, he would forgive me for not telling him right away. But I couldn’t find her, and I kept my secret. As the years went by, I felt I could no longer tell your father.
I knew that Bert wouldn’t blame me for what my employer had done to me, but what about the rest? He might wonder about everything that I’d done which had led me to that point. How I’d gone to Scotland alone, even after Elly had died. How I’d stayed on the island with my father, four years earlier, instead of leaving right away when your dad had begged me to go. How, in the end, I hadn’t been able to stop that agency from taking away my baby. I worried that he would think these things because I had, too.
Once your dad died, I didn’t have to worry anymore about what he would think, but I did have to face myself in the mirror every morning and acknowledge my own doubts. A part of me felt that I had brought it all on myself by wanting to do things my way, for refusing to accept the life that others had expected me to live. It took me a long time to get past some of those feelings.
Which brings me to you, Benedetta. I see, now, that your father and I may have made you feel that way, too, made you feel that you had to choose between being yourself and having our support. And you, Byron? Did we make you feel that the only way to have our approval was to do things our way, even if it meant leaving your sister out there on her own? This was never our intention. We loved you both so much and held you both in such high regard that it never occurred to us that you might truly doubt it.
Fish Story
Byron is chuckling. He feels strangely light, now that their mother’s memorial service is behind them. After yesterday’s full house, he and Benny are finally alone in the kitchen, and he feels that he can slip from sorrow to laughter and back without embarrassment.
“What?” says Benny. “What?”
Byron lifts a casserole dish out of the sink, the one with the fish design on the bottom. After listening to the rest of their mother’s recording, Byron and Benny have prepared a late breakfast for Mr. Mitch, spooning a few leftovers into the one dish. Mr. Mitch is now in the living room, laying out papers for the next phase of their discussion. He says he’s already sent an email to their sister.
They need to learn to say it out loud. Our sister.
“The fish,” Byron says. He can barely spit out the words through his laughter. He turns the inside of the stoneware dish so that Benny can see it. It has the design of a fish painted on the bottom. “The fish, remember?”
“The fish,” Benny says, and doubles over.
Castaic Lake. Benny was eight, Byron seventeen. They, children of the Pacific shoreline, had been taken inland to fish at an artificial lake. Their mother had called the plan ridiculous but they’d ended up loving it. The shrubby hills all around, the water so calm. They hadn’t known until that day that water could be so easy.
They had two lines in the water when their father started shouting, “I got him, I got him!” and yanked upward. A largemouth bass came flying out of the water, catching the sunlight on its flank and slamming right into their mother’s face.
“Eeeuw!” Eleanor Bennett squealed, waving her hands and pushing her husband away.
“Oh! You afraid of a little fish?” Bert Bennett said. He pulled the fish off the hook and put it in a bucket. He was laughing. “Come on, now, lovey, don’t be mad.”