The Four Ms. Bradwells (37 page)

“My dad will hear my name on the evening news while he’s cooking a sausage for dinner,” she says. “Maybe while he’s cooking for a whole other family. I wouldn’t even mind that. I think I’d like to know I had siblings somewhere. He’ll hear ‘Elsbieta Zhukovski.’ He’ll focus on the television screen. He’ll see my face. He’ll say to my brother or sister or both, ‘That’s my daughter. Sweet Lord, that’s my daughter. She looks just like her
matka.
’ And then somehow we’ll be reconnected. Izzy will have a grandfather. I’ll have a dad. We’ll be a family. Instead of just the two of us.”

Outside, a journalist swears. They, too, are getting tired and cranky. At least we’re comfortable and warm.

“Two is family,” I say quietly, though I’m embarrassed to say it with Max here. A family of two is what my brother, Bobby, and I are going to be soon, with my dad failing physically, my mom disappearing into Alzheimer’s. A family of two who don’t even see each other much. I’m not unlike Izzy, I realize, or not unlike how Betts thinks Izzy is: part of my attraction to Doug was the fact that he had kids. I know so many women who don’t like children, but I’m not one of them.

“Two is family,” Max agrees, and something in his voice makes me imagine he must understand what I’m feeling, the longing I feel every time I see the Baby Bradwells. I’ve thought about adopting a child, raising her on my own like Mrs. Z raised Betts. But I’m not Mrs. Z. I’m not settled. I can’t imagine myself with a lawn, much less a fence and a swing set. How could I give up the life I have for a life I might forever long to flee, the way my mother had?

“Don’t doubt yourself, Ms. Professor Drug-Lord-Bradwell,” Ginger says to Betts. “Wanting to find your father isn’t why you’ve led the life
you’ve led, any more than Laney’s mother’s dreams are the reason Laney is running for office. Don’t talk yourself into thinking what you’re doing isn’t real. Would your mother be proud of you now? You know she would. Just like Laney’s mother would be proud of her. And your daddy would be proud of you, too. Just like you busted your damned chest open when Izzy was accepted at Yale, this little girl of yours who was making her own way in the world. It’s important to you because of who
you
are. Because you’re kind and thoughtful. Because you’re generous with your talents. Because you care.”

I look from Ginger to the widow, realizing Max is right about Ginger’s heart being bigger than she knows.

The red tips of two cigarettes move toward the end of the pier, the way Ginger’s and Trey’s had that first night when they left to steal Max’s skiff, the path Beau and I took toward his mother’s boat that Friday night.

“And what about you, then, Ginger?” Laney asks. “If we’ve made our choices for ourselves, then haven’t you, too?”

“Who the hell have I chosen to become?” Ginger says. “A ‘wet brown bag of a woman / who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia.’ ”

“Georgia?” Knocked off center by my mother’s lover’s name.

“A poet,” a soft voice says from the direction of the arched doorway.

How long has Annie stood there? How much has she overheard?

“It’s from a poem, Aunt Mia,” she says. Then to Ginger, “You’re a poet, Mom. You are.”

As Ginger looks away to the rolltop desk and the little door behind it, connecting this room to Emma’s Peek, it strikes me that Annie calls Ginger “Mom,” where Ginger always called Faith “Mother.” It strikes me that Izzy calls Betts “Mom,” too, where Betts always called Mrs. Z “Matka,” which means “Mother,” not “Mom.”
It strikes me how different Faith and Mrs. Z were, and yet how similar. How different Ginger’s and Betts’s relationships with their mothers were, and how similar, too. Were Laney and I luckier, to have mothers who wanted for us but didn’t expect? Wanted us to have whatever we wanted, to be happy. Even my mom’s idea that I should go to law school was rooted in her believing she would have been happier if she had, and so maybe I would be.

“If literature and art can’t change the world, then we’re all lost, aren’t we?” Annie says.

She smiles sleepily, looking so like a twelve-year-old that it leaves me
reconsidering her words, thinking how untrite they are when they come from someone so young and lacking in cynicism, thinking that she’s right, that the arts
can
expose the truth sometimes in ways that make people notice, that move people beyond what a headline and a few columns of newspaper print ever can.

“I can’t sleep,” she says. “I just keep thinking about that guy shooting himself in the lighthouse. I mean, I’ve heard about Trey Humphrey’s Ghost from the island kids, but I never thought he was a real guy. Have you seen the blog they’re talking about?”

They
, meaning pretty much everyone.

“We haven’t, honey,” Ginger says. “We came straight here.”

I don’t contradict her.

Annie sits beside me and hugs me as if she sees the guilt on my face and wants to wash it away. She smells of soap and salt air and just the faintest trace of sweat, and she leaves me thinking this is why I sometimes imagine I want children, for the hugs.

“Grammie has an Internet connection,” she says. “She couldn’t get cable or DSL out here, but she has dial-up.”

The sounds of the journalists and the sea again fill the silence.

“Not anymore,” Betts says gently.

“Well, the blog doesn’t really say anything,” Annie says. “I get how you could think after you read it that maybe Uncle Frank or Uncle Beau or Mom killed this guy, but it doesn’t even mention you.” She twists her long neck toward Betts. “Like you would ever hurt
anyone
, Aunt Betts, much less kill someone.”

Ginger says, “I, on the other hand …”

“Oh!” Annie laughs. “I didn’t mean
that
, Mom.”

“It was an accident,” Ginger says. “He was cleaning his gun.”

“After he’d been drinking,” Annie says.

“After he’d been drinking,” Ginger agrees.

Annie yawns, then turns to Max. “Will you make something good for breakfast, Max? I haven’t eaten anything half as good as that pasta since I left for school.”

“Cinnamon apple crêpes or eggs Benedict?” Max asks. “Eggs Benedict without the meat, I’m afraid.”

“Eggs Benedict,” Ginger answers just as her daughter says, “Cinnamon apple crêpes.”

“Eggs Benedict is your favorite,” Ginger says to Annie.

“How about both?” Max says. “Tomorrow is Sunday. What kind of Sunday brunch doesn’t offer a choice of what to eat?”

The clock in the front foyer begins to chime, twelve calm gongs.

Annie kisses first me and then her mother, then heads back to bed, leaving us no further along on deciding a course of action than we had been before. We should talk, but we decide instead to play Scrabble, and Max fetches the game from the Sun Room for us before saying he thinks he’ll catch some shut-eye himself. That’s the way he says it, “catch some shut-eye.” The cliché seems to go with his goofy glasses and baggy jeans, if not with the fancy pasta and eggs Benedict and crêpes.

“Don’t concern yourselves too much about those reporters: they won’t be staying overlong,” he says as he hands Ginger the Scrabble box. “Isn’t a soul on this whole island who’ll rent them a room. Rose down to the café will burn their toast and tell them she’s out of breakfast meat, and when old Mr. Dodie comes in for his usual two eggs over easy and six pieces of bacon, she’ll fry it up and insist that’s all she’s got. ‘I cain’t be givin’ Mr. Dodie’s bacon to a bunch of mainlanders,’ she’ll tell them, ‘much less a slimy bunch of lie-spewing reporters.’ ” Max laughs, then. He has a lovely laugh. “Rose, she doesn’t ever mince her words,” he says. “Well, g’night.”

He leaves, and we huddle around the Scrabble board in the Captain’s Office, and we draw tiles. Laney, who draws an
X
and so gets to play first, looks at her tiles and then up at us. “The truth,” she says, and as I’m trying to make sense of this—is she asking how to spell the word?—she says, “It’s time I tell the truth. I need to tell the truth.”

“What is the truth, exactly?” Betts asks. “Do we even know anymore?”

“Did we ever?” I ask.

Ginger says, “ ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—’ ”

“Stop it, Ginger!” Laney insists. “For the Good Lord’s sake, stop with the poetry. Stop shoving all the bad things you feel into someone else’s words and disowning them. Or don’t. I don’t care. But quit disposing of my hurt along with yours. What happened to me happened to
me
and I’m sorry it dug up your own mess but what I say about it is
my
decision, not yours. I’ll say what I need to say in my own words.”

I’m not sure which surprises me more: Laney lashing out at Ginger, or the fact that our friendship has survived so many years of this boiling under the surface, all this second-guessing about the choices we never did really agree upon.

“You’re not a failure just because a group of fellas who have never invited a woman lawyer to join their silly little club didn’t invite you, Ginge,” Laney continues. “Though why you were so hell-bent on helping rich old misers add money to their already overfull pockets, I don’t know. That’s not you any more than that Ginny character that playwright fella wrote was you.”

Her words are followed by a sharp silence. The journalists are looking up toward our window; if we can hear their outbursts, they can hear ours. Although they’re closer to the lapping water, which should help wash over the sounds of us.

I try to shush us, but Ginger won’t be shushed.

“You what? Went to see that asshole’s play?” she demands.

We did, although Laney doesn’t admit this. Laney and I went on a whim one time we both happened to be in London while it was playing, but we’ve never told Ginger that.

“Lordy, sometimes I think you
still
wonder if the whole world doesn’t see you that way,” Laney says. “As the unloved and unlovable Ginny that idiot wrote into his play.”

In Ginger’s pale eyes: devastation on top of devastation. First she fails at her career and then her best friends betray her in the worst way she can imagine, we pay money to that asshole to see the shit he’d written about her. And now we’re grinding the grit of it into her. Her face is thick with the awful thought:
But that is me, Laney. That Ginny character, she
is
me
.

“That fella delivered the worst of you, exaggerated and untempered by your strengths, Ginge,” Laney says more gently. “He delivered the surface of you without tilling up the good earth underneath.”

Her intelligence; that jerk left out how smart Ginger is. And her generosity, too, her preference for the comfort of others over her own.

“That fella is the selfish one, Ginger, not you. You aren’t as selfish as that character he wrote. You aren’t that spoiled and you aren’t that pathetic. You only think you are. You need to stop looking for a sad little pair of twos long enough to see you’re holding a flush.”

Ginger stares at her for a moment, then flips the Scrabble board. The tiles scatter in angry clicks all over the room. “Fuck you, Laney,” she says. “Fuck you. I’m not half as selfish as you are. And if you think I’m pathetic, take a look in the mirror at yourself.”

Laney and Betts and I watch as her bare heels stomp across the center hallway and disappear into the family wing. She’s long gone before
Laney says angrily, “I didn’t
say
she was pathetic. I said she
wasn’t
pathetic.”

Not
that
pathetic. Not
that
selfish. Not
that
spoiled.

We set about gathering up the game pieces together, my knees aching against the wood floor long before I find a final
N
under the Captain’s desk, up against the secret passageway into Emma’s Peek. Ginger still hasn’t returned. Laney secures the lid on the box with a firmness that suggests she has no intention of going after her.

Betts, staring at Laney’s long, dark fingers on the taped-up game box top, says, “I’ll … head to bed, I guess.”

I slip out a minute later, on the excuse of looking for something to read, and wait in the hallway for Betts.

“I knocked, but she won’t answer,” she says when she emerges from the family wing. Yes, Ginger’s door is locked.

Perhaps she just needs some time alone, to cool off, we decide.

“She’s cooling off with my contact lens solution,” Betts says.

I tell her she can borrow mine.

“You don’t think she’ll hurt herself, do you?” Betts says.

The two of us stand in the hallway, whispering. We decide, finally, that she won’t, that Ginger’s weapon of choice for hurting herself is men, and the only man here—Max—appears to have no sharp edges on which she might cut herself.

I
T ISN’T UNTIL
Laney and I are in bed with the lights out that I ask, “What about your political campaign, Lane? What if you just wait until after the election?”

Her words float up in the darkness, quiet and unsure: “If the good voters of the Georgia Forty-second want to hold against me something that was no fault of my own, they don’t deserve my representation anyway.”

I lie awake wondering if she really believes what happened was no fault of her own. She should, but I wonder if she does. Her sentence sounds as rehearsed as Betts’s did when she said she didn’t have anything to add to the public record on Trey’s death. And her words ring equally untrue.

Mia