She didn’t want me enough.
All this thinking about her birth mother makes Marble miss her son terribly. Her Giovanni, her boy Giò. She wants to tell Byron and Benny that she, Marble, never had any doubts about wanting to be his mother, not even when she found herself widowed and pregnant at a young age and without warning, with all her visions of the future dashed. She wants someone to ask her, right now, What is he like? so that she can take out her mobile phone and show them the photos of her son.
Marble wants to say that she would trade being here with Byron and Benny, trade the chance to learn anything about her biological mother, for knowing that her son would be back in his own room when she returned home, and not tucked away in a boarding school. Giò is her real family, not these two people sitting at this table with her.
Byron is a funny sort. The man looks like a movie star but he is gaping at Marble as though she’s stolen his favorite teddy bear. She doesn’t think he likes her very much. Benny is sweet, but a bit needy. Marble notices that Benny is shifting her seat closer to her. Inching, inching. Marble is not sure what to make of this.
“About your son,” Benny says.
Marble takes a breath.
“So, he goes to school in England?”
Marble nods.
“But you live in Italy.”
“I go back and forth. I started Giò in the Italian schools but then I wanted him to get exposure to the UK system. After this, he’ll be able to live and work wherever he wishes.”
“So your son won’t really be Italian and he won’t really be British?”
“He’ll be both, I suppose. Like many people, he isn’t any one thing.” Though right now, Marble is feeling that she is indeed one thing, more than any other. She is Giovanni’s mum, and she has been letting her son grow up out of her sight. What in the world was she thinking?
Five years have passed and Marble has mourned every single month that her son has lived away from her, gone to school with kids she doesn’t know, rested his head at night in a room under a different roof, come back home for the holidays looking and sounding different from the child she sent away. She doesn’t understand how so many other parents like her have done the same thing, generation after generation, sent their eleven-year-olds away to school because they could afford to do it, because they’d convinced themselves that this was the way to guarantee their children the best future possible.
At one point, Marble thought of taking her son out of the boarding school, but he seemed to have adjusted so well. Now it’s too late. Exams to finish, university to plan for. What Marble doesn’t understand is how all this time, not a single boarding school mum has ever taken her aside at a dinner, at the supermarket, in a doctor’s office, to say I hate this, I want my child back home. Surely she is not the only one who feels this way.
“Do you have pictures?” Benny asks. Marble feels her neck relax. She picks up her mobile phone and swipes through to the photo gallery and hands the phone to Benny.
“Oh, look at him, he’s gorgeous!”
Marble nods.
“And he’s doing well in school?”
Again, Marble nods. She cannot speak. She has a lump in her throat.
Benny places a hand on Marble’s arm.
Byron
Byron’s hands are still shaking. He is still trying to get used to this ghost of a woman who is walking through the rooms of the house where he grew up, this British-talking, beechwood-colored version of his mother. When she walked into the arrivals area, Mitch and Byron shook Marble Martin’s hand but Benny embraced her. On the way to the airport, Benny looked happy.
Byron is opening and closing kitchen cupboards when he sees a large glass jar tucked into a back corner of a lower cupboard behind the rice and sugar. The fruits. He’d forgotten about the fruits for the black cake. What to do? Before hearing his mother’s recording, he might have gotten up the courage to wash the mixture down the garbage disposal, perhaps once his ma’s clothes and books and furniture had been cleared out and the stake of the For Sale sign had been driven into the front lawn of their childhood home.
He puts the jar on the counter and keeps a hand on either side, as if steadying an infant. This is your heritage, his mother had told him many times, but he’d never appreciated that. Now he sees. When she fled the island, his mother lost everything but she carried this recipe in her head wherever she went. That, and the stories she’d spent a lifetime concealing from her children, the untold narrative of their family. Every time his mother made a black cake, it must have been like reciting an incantation, calling up a line from her true past, taking herself back to the island.