But first, this.
Their mother wanted her children to sit down together and share the black cake she’d made for them. You will know when, she wrote in her note to Byron and Benny. And this is the when. Benny picks up a knife and gestures to Marble.
“You’re the firstborn,” Benny says.
“No, you do it,” Marble says.
Benny looks at Byron. They hold the knife together, as their parents used to do, and they sink it into the cake. We never did have a wedding cake is what their mother told them toward the end of her recording. There wasn’t time. And who would have been there to celebrate with us? But once her parents had moved from London to New York to California, once they felt they were settling into their new lives, Ma filled a jar with fruits and made the first in a series of anniversary cakes.
“Oh!” Benny says. The knife hits something hard. They cut open the cake to find a small glass jar inside, wide and squat. Their mother had cut the cake on the horizontal and dug out the middle to fit the jar in there.
Benny wipes off the jar and taps the side of the lid on the table to unseal it. The first thing they fish out is a piece of paper, folded and cracked. It is a black-and-white photograph of three young swimmers standing on the sand, the sea at their backs. Byron and Benny recognize the teenaged faces of their parents. The third person still has her swim cap on and is clasping Covey’s hand in a kind of silent cheer. They’ve never met her but she’s easy to recognize because she is famous, the only black woman in the world to have done exactly what she has done. The distance swimmer Etta Pringle.
Byron turns the photo over and on the back, they find three names written out in their father’s handwriting.
“Gilbert Grant,” he reads, “Coventina Lyncook, Benedetta Pringle.” He looks at Benny.
“Benedetta?” he says.
“Etta was short for Benedetta!” Benny says. Benny must have been named after her mother’s childhood friend. The one who helped their mother escape from the beach on the night that she was believed drowned. The three of them sit there silently for a moment, thinking of small but profound inheritances. Of how untold stories shape people’s lives, both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.
In the bottom of the jar they find their parents’ wedding rings, both with the same inscription inside, C and G. Benny remembers seeing the inscription once and asking her mother about it. Her mother told her the letters stood for comprehension and generosity, two qualities that she said were essential in a good marriage. Now she knows that they are the initials of her parents’ original names. Coventina and Gilbert, Covey and Gibbs. All this time, their parents’ true identities have been hidden right here in this house, in these rings, in this photograph.
Finally, they turn the jar over and let the rest of its contents fall onto the kitchen table. Three cockle shells, whitish on the outside, pinkish beige on the inside. Their mother must have found these in the purse that belonged to Elly, the original Eleanor Douglas, the girl who befriended their mother and who, unwittingly, gave her a chance at a whole new life.
Byron feels a hum of excitement. He’s past some of the shock now, he’s ready to learn more. He wants to go to the island. He wants to see where his parents grew up. He wants to see the part of himself that he never knew. He has to. How will he manage this, otherwise? This disappearing of the life he once thought he had.
There is one more thing, jammed against the curve of the jar. A narrow slip of paper that says THE BOX. Byron and Benny look at each other and nod. They have already found the wooden box, the hinged ebony container that once belonged to their mother’s mother, Mathilda. Their ma kept it on a shelf in her closet. Inside are four medallions, yellow-gold disks stamped with crosses that they both used to play with, and the old hair comb that their mother let Benny wear one Halloween, wedged into her braids and covered with an old veil like a Spanish lady.
They know these items by heart. As children, they both ran their hands over the fine curves etched into the surface of the comb, over the browns and golds and grays of the tortoiseshell, over the cross on the face of each coin. Benny goes to her parents’ bedroom and comes back with the wooden box, hugging it to her middle.
Benny and Byron have already talked about the box. Their mother wanted them to give it to Marble, to give her a chance to fiddle with its contents, just as they had in their younger years. They will give Baby Mathilda a piece of the childhood that she might have experienced had she grown up in their family. They will give Marble the only objects left from their mother’s former life.