The Four Ms. Bradwells (38 page)

THE PAINTER’S STUDIO, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

T
HE GRANDFATHER CLOCK
is striking three in the morning when I slip out from under the sheets in the bedroom Laney and I share; she’s not snoring her light snore, so maybe she’s only pretending sleep. I head down the dark stairway into the dark kitchen, and pour wine from the bottle we didn’t finish at dinner into the first glass my fingers find, a coffee cup. In the Painter’s Studio, the blinds are open to a huddle of journalists in the electric light of film equipment outside, but that isn’t what stops me in the doorway. The shadow of a man sits at the window inside, where I posed when Beau sketched me, when the light made my eyes laugh, or that’s what he’d claimed. For a moment, I’m sure it’s Ginger’s brother there again even though it can’t be, of course: Beau is in Chicago with Laura, his wife of twenty-some years.

“They’re not sleeping, but they look like they want to.” It’s Max’s whisper, of course. “It’s too dark for them to see inside.” He pats the window seat. “Come enjoy the show. They’re sharing now, at least there’s that.”

He means the light: the journalists are dealing cards under a single filming light, taking turns providing the light so no one runs out of juice to film us in the unlikely event we should emerge to make a statement in the middle of the night. I watch Fran Halpern for a moment. She manages to stay professional even around a journalists’ film-light campfire in the middle of the night. She’s one of my favorite television journalists, actually. A stand-up person who stays after the truth when others settle for the cheap headline and move on. If it were only Fran out there, I might open the door and invite her in.

“So often as a kid I hoped to be asked to a sleepover at the big house,” Max says. “Used to watch Ginger and Trey steal my skiff, and I’d let them. Didn’t want to be a snitch, just wanted to be invited to the parties here. Even after I was down to New York for architecture school, old enough to know better, still I sat watching out the window while they took my skiff.”

I smile at the funny syntax: down
to
New York. This island has a language all its own.

“Who knew it would be the last time?” He says, and he stares out at the journalists, who are laughing. “So now here I am—in Governor Waller’s Room, no less—and I can’t sleep a wink.”

“The week Trey Humphrey died?” I say, the journalist in me.

“Can’t tell you how many islanders breathed a sigh of relief when that asshole shot himself.” He blinks back at me through his geeky glasses. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” A small note of alarm, quickly reined in. “We weren’t glad he was dead, just glad it was by his own hand. Enough folks around here didn’t care too much for Trey Humphrey.”

He’s talking about himself or I haven’t been a journalist for twenty-some years. That “asshole”? Maybe he knows what they said about his sister, Tessie McKee.

I sit next to him, wanting to kiss him as surely as I wanted to kiss Beau the first time I sat in this room. Am I drawn to him because he hates Trey Humphrey as much as I do? How sick a reason would that be to fall for a guy? But no, I already made the first move earlier, kissing Max in the kitchen. And I’ve never been one to make the first move, really. It’s one of the many ways I cling to the good girl I once was, the girl I left behind long ago.

Where was the turning point, the moment I crossed the line? Was it when I slept with Beau when I was engaged to Andy? When I lied to Andy afterward? When I told Andy the truth—or some version of the truth—after our marriage was through? Was it that first one-night stand in the chaos of my divorce? The first time I woke in the bed of a man whose name I didn’t know? The moment I told Doug Pemberley more than I should have in an effort to shake off my past mistakes?

The night after I called Laney from the Cook Island pay phone, Doug and I sat on our balcony at the Pointway Inn, overlooking the sand he’d proposed in and sipping champagne even though the engagement ring still sat in its little velvet box. Not our first bottle that night, and still
we’d just poured the last of it, drinking champagne in abundance as if I might still say yes, I’d marry Doug.

He’d married Sharon six months after Trey died, he was telling me. “When Trey was no longer around to tell me I was making a mistake.” He smiled a little, his crooked smile in his charmingly crooked face. “Sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone.

“Frankie was my best man. Frankie stood where Trey should have,” he said. “I think I won’t have a best man this time. I think I’ll stand by myself, knowing Trey is beside me.”

He set his hand on mine, caressing my ringless finger. “Not that I’m taking anything for granted. Not that I’m trying to pressure you.”

He touched my forehead, my cowlick. “Trey would have approved of my marrying you. Even he was taken with the four Ms. Bradwells.”

“Taken,” I said, thinking Trey was a taker, and flashing rage and disgust and grief at all he’d taken from us. Thinking even if I could marry Doug—even if Laney could bear that—I couldn’t bear the thought of Trey standing beside my happily-ever-after-to-be.

“Trey made me uncomfortable,” I said. “I thought he wasn’t … that maybe he wasn’t who he seemed to be.”

“He wasn’t,” Doug agreed. “He acted the hardass, but he was a nice guy, really. It was just that everyone always expected so much of him. And there was his dad killing himself over some woman, some black woman. I don’t think he ever got over that.”

I looked away, to the light sweeping across the water, the new lighthouse.

“That was weird, wasn’t it,” he said. “His attraction to your black friend? Do you think they slept together?”

“No.” The one word all I could manage.

“I think they did,” Doug said almost gleefully. “Not that he ever said that. Trey was nothing if not a gentleman.”

“No!” I said. “I’m sure Laney never—”

“Hey, hey. I didn’t mean to … I
liked
her. Helen. Laney. I didn’t mean to disparage her. I just thought Trey was …” He laughed. “Well, I thought maybe you and Beau, too, but that was ridiculous, you were
engaged
to some guy back at school, right?”

The bubbles in my champagne surfaced and popped, and surfaced again.

“That was ridiculous,” he repeated.

When I didn’t respond, he drained his glass and stood and opened another bottle, poured a fresh glass, drank half of it, and topped it off again. His narrow face looked at me as if I’d slept with my cousin like Ginger had. He went to the balcony rail, looked out at the water, the light circling again and again.

“You didn’t sleep with Trey, too?”

“Me?” I said, unsure whether he meant “too” as in he knew Trey had sex with Ginger or Laney that spring break, or “too” as in he understood from my silence that I’d slept with Beau. “No! Of course not!” Pushing back the memory of Trey’s hand on mine in the skiff as we sped through the guts. “I’d never have slept with that asshole.” Knowing the moment I said the word that I couldn’t call his dead childhood hero-friend an asshole, but not knowing what to say to take it back. Not wanting to take it back.

Whatever I meant to happen, the words we said to each other only got more hurtful, the way they do when you rip apart someone somebody loves, when you are both angry and one of you has no idea where the anger is coming from and the other can’t explain without making the hurt worse. When one person wants a relationship to last forever and the other doesn’t know how to love like that. When one person has been expecting every moment for days that the other will say yes, she wants to spend the rest of her life with him, while she’s been counting the minutes left in their week together, wanting to escape to a place where the men she might sleep with are journalists like her who don’t expect anything more.

When that argument was over, so was our relationship. At least I understood it was. Doug spent the night in the sailboat we’d come over in, and I lay awake in our bed at the inn until the light came up and I could pack and catch the early morning ferry back to the mainland. Somewhere in the process, one truly lovely engagement ring found its way to the bottom of the Chesapeake, joining Beau’s old sleeping bag.

I see now that I’d wanted him to be angry, because what else could I do? I’d called Laney. I’d told her I wanted to marry Doug Pemberley. I’d said his name, “Remember Doug Pemberley from Cook Island,” so she would know exactly who I was engaged to. I’d said it was a bad idea, knowing if there was any chance she could stand to see Trey Humphrey’s best friend every time she saw me, she would disagree with me, she would say she thought I should marry Doug. Because Laney does love me.
Laney does want me to be happy. She would have given me that if she could.

She hadn’t answered, though. She’d let her silence be her answer. And I couldn’t bear to cash in a thirty-year friendship for a marriage that probably wouldn’t last anyway.

Or maybe that’s not the way it was at all. Maybe I never wanted to marry Doug Pemberley. Maybe Laney was just my excuse for hurting him. Maybe I’d been looking for a wedge to free me from him when I went out to that public phone.

I hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but he was hurt. After he got over the anger, he was hurt. He called me and apologized, and told me about pitching the ring in the bay. He didn’t say anything about Beau or Trey or Laney.

“Let’s try this again,” he suggested. “Can’t we try this again?”

I hadn’t said yes, but I hadn’t exactly said no either. I’d been on the other side of the world by then, with the excuse of never quite knowing where I’d be next. But there was no getting around that I would be in D.C. for Betts’s confirmation.

“Just have dinner with me, Mia?” he’d asked the last time we’d spoken, just a few days ago, when I was in Madagascar to hear the Indri love song.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I said I was sorry, Mia. What more do you want from me? I said I was sorry.”

“I know, Doug.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Trey’s death, Mia. Is that what this is about? This sudden change in how you feel? Did something I said make you think that?”

Outside my hotel room window, the thrum of insects. Inside, a tidy, impersonal room. Generic art. No books.

“No, of course not.”

“The police only questioned me because I was the last one to see him.”

“I know, Doug. I know that.”

“I was such a mess after that. I thought it was my fault. I was his best friend. I knew he had moods. I should have stopped him. I should have seen it coming.”

“Doug, you can’t … He didn’t … You don’t believe he killed himself. You don’t.”

“I sure don’t believe he took his gun up to the top of that fucking lighthouse to clean it.”

“No,” I said. “No. I don’t either, Doug.”

“But you don’t think I—”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why—”

“I
can’t
, Doug. I can’t marry you.”

“I get that,” he said gently. “I understand that. I’m, you know, old-fashioned. I think every woman wants to be married. But I know you’re not every woman.”

“I can’t, Doug.”

“I don’t
care
who you slept with back then, Mia. Trey. Beau. Fucking both of them! I don’t care.”

“I can’t.”

“But you
love
me. You do love me, Mia.”

In the silence, I remembered the call of the Indri I’d heard in the forest, that love song till death do them part. But I didn’t call out. I let the silence cut the tie for me.

“M
AX?”
I
SAY
now, and some part of me knows this is just another mistake in a long line of them, but I do it anyway: I kiss him. With the window ajar and the view of the press huddled out in the darkness together, enjoying the same kind of noncommittal friendship I’ve spent so many nights sharing, I kiss him. I don’t know why it surprises me when he kisses me back this time, but it does. Maybe because I know he doesn’t approach this the way I do. He’s not a one-night-stand kind of guy. He’s a guy who would still be with his wife if she hadn’t left him. He won’t be someplace else tomorrow. He can be hurt as easily as Doug was.

With the kiss comes the memory of the night Beau kissed me here: the same ocean smell and faint overhang of turpentine, though staler now. So much has gone stale.

And I think of Andy then, of how everyone thought it must be easier for me that he was gay, that his leaving wasn’t a rejection of me. But it wasn’t any easier. It left me feeling I’d driven him away not just from me
but from all women. It left me feeling he’d seen how I’d betrayed his trust, and thrown out all women with me. I know it isn’t true. Andy was gay the day I met him; he just didn’t know it yet. I do know that. What I know and what I feel are so often two different things, though. What I feel doesn’t always make sense.

Betts

THE TEA PARLOR, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

I
F THE IDYLLIC
-weekend-with-Iz-and-Annie idea wasn’t shattered before we went to bed last night, it is by the time we finish Sunday brunch. There were no English muffins for eggs Benedict. The sad remains of Max’s cinnamon apple crêpes lie scattered before us. The chef himself declined to join us for breakfast on the excuse of not wanting to intrude on our time with the girls. But the truth is the bickering started before we sat down. Bickering and worse. Laney and Ginger are each acting like the other simply is not here.