The man steps closer to Benny now, and she feels a buzz run up both sides of her face. His cologne is a smoky kind of thing that triggers a slight churning below her navel. Benny has never understood what draws her to a person. She only knows it when an individual who crosses her radar sets off a ping.
Ping.
“You are a girl, right?” the man asks.
“Woman.”
“Oh, right, sorry.”
Inside her costume, Benny smiles.
“Did you know,” Benny says, “that a gang of meerkats is led by an alpha pair, and that the dominant member of that pair is the female?”
He is peering at her through the costume’s eye holes. A smile crinkles the skin around his eyes.
“Do meerkats drink coffee?” he says.
The head of Benny’s costume tips to the side. This man has never seen Benny. He does not even know the shape of her. And yet he is interested.
Ping.
How it will end: Benny doesn’t know yet, but already this is a gift, this openness to try love again.
More Than Life
The sound of metal clicking over metal pulls Marble out of her stupor. She is sitting alone in the half light, holding a cold cup of tea in her lap. She hasn’t told her parents she’s back in the UK, that she’s been sitting alone in the apartment here for two days. They’ve already had that long, painful conversation with her about her adoption, their voices muddied with tears, and they have been largely silent since then, getting in touch only to be sure that she’d arrived safely in California, and that she’d flown back to Italy all right. They didn’t ask how things went. She knew they wouldn’t. They would be waiting for her to say something first.
Marble’s attitude toward her parents has already softened since then. She has learned from Eleanor Bennett’s message that her parents kept the name that had been chosen by her birth mother. Baby Mathilda became Mabel Mathilda and, even when she changed her first name to Marble, her longtime nickname, she unwittingly held on to the name of her biological grandmother. Her parents may not have wanted to admit that she was adopted but they hadn’t erased every trace of her birth mother, either.
When Marble hears the key turning in the lock, she worries about a break-in, but then she remembers the orchids. Her mother always comes to water the plants, which Marble insists on keeping, despite the fact that she spends most of her time elsewhere. Her mum is perennially worried about opening the door and finding the orchids dead, but Marble reminds her that orchids are hardy creatures, that orchids grow naturally on every continent, that there is an orchid in someone’s garden in Singapore that has been blooming for well over a century.
“Marble!” her mother says.
Marble doesn’t get up, doesn’t feel she can. She looks at this petite woman standing before her. Her mum’s hair, originally a dark blond, has taken on brilliant streaks in recent years, the hairdresser’s artistry mixing in with her natural white. She gives Marble one long look, walks over to the sofa, takes the cup and saucer from her, and places it on the coffee table. Then she sits down next to her and takes one of Marble’s hands in hers.
Marble plays the recording for her mother. She waits until her mother has finished shedding tears. Later, they will share it with Marble’s father. They will let him listen to the voice of this woman who sounds so much like his own daughter. They will let him hear the part where Eleanor Bennett says what a beautiful, accomplished woman Baby Mathilda has turned out to be and that it is all to their credit.
They will let Marble’s father read the letter where Eleanor says she is forever grateful to him and his wife for giving her baby a safe and loving home and, if they have felt for Marble even a fraction of what she felt the first time she nursed her baby, then she knows that they must love her more than anything in the world, they must love her more than life itself.
Reunion
A cool vapor rises from the aluminum foil as Benny pulls the black cake out of the freezer. This is what Eleanor Bennett wanted, all three of her children together. Marble has come back. It took her a full month since her last message to get in touch but here they are again, in the kitchen where Benny used to spend entire days baking with her mother, at the table where Benny and Byron ate most of their meals growing up. In the house where their mother nursed a yearning for her firstborn daughter who was lost but who finally has been found.
Byron and Benny take some solace in knowing that their mother didn’t die before learning where her eldest daughter was and who she had become. Their mother left this world believing that one day all three of her children would be here in this room together to fulfill her dying request. When Marble ran back to England after hearing their mother’s private message for her, Byron thought they might never see her again, but Benny never doubted that they would. Nor did Mr. Mitch, who continued to make arrangements according to their mother’s wishes. There are trips to be made, he tells them, people their mother wanted them to see.