The Four Ms. Bradwells (45 page)

“Well, I might be just a little,” I say. “I practically strung Izzy’s Phi Beta Kappa key from a chain and wore it around my neck.”

“There wasn’t a soul at the club in Cleveland who didn’t get a chance to congratulate me on Annie getting into Princeton,” Ginger says.

“That’s not living vicariously,” Laney says. “That’s delight at your children’s success. Or at worst, maybe a little competitive parenting, gloating over the notion that since your baby is looking more successful than your friends’, y’all must be the better mamas.”

Mia says, “On that basis, I’m the best mom here since I claim all the Baby Bradwells as mine.”

Ginger pulls Laney’s sheet over her bare legs. “It’s not too late to have a child if you want to, Mi,” she says gently. “You could adopt. These days you could probably even still have a baby. Some woman in India gave birth to twins when she was
seventy.
”

Mia laughs. “I’m not even
thinking
of running around after a two-year-old when I’m seventy.” Her eyes lack their usual confidence, though.

I wonder if she isn’t.

She says, “If I wanted to raise a child, wouldn’t I have figured out a
way to make that happen by now? But I feel like that makes me a bad person, not to want to parent.”

I set a hand on her foot under the covers. It’s as bare as Ginger’s have been all weekend.

Ginger says, “A bad
woman
? How many of the men you work with don’t have children and don’t want them, and no one thinks to frown on them.”

“The happy bachelor,” I say. “The old maid.”

“You’ll just have to let me keep borrowing your kids,” Mia says. She says “borrow” but she means love.

Laney says, “I sometimes think I’m becoming my
daddy
. Like I’m running for office because I was starting to look at my daddy in the mirror every morning, taking the safe path, living my life to keep my children out of danger.”

“We can’t keep our children out of danger,” Ginger says. “We can’t even keep them out of the press.”

“I suppose Max will be along with the morning papers any minute now,” I say.

“I suppose Max will be along with the press themselves,” Mia says. “It’s stopped raining.”

We all look to the dark windows.

Ginger says, “I would have killed Trey if I were my mother.”

She says it casually. As if she doesn’t mean it. As if she’s saying she’ll kill her son if she has to remind him to take out the garbage again. She looks to the window as she says it. Ginger never likes anyone to see her pain.

So there it is, finally. The thing I’ve wondered since the morning Trey Humphrey turned up dead in the lighthouse. Would Faith have killed her nephew? I dismissed it at the time as my own hysterical imaginings. But I wasn’t yet a mother then.

I think of Matka for a moment. I never told her it was me, not Ginger, who couldn’t afford an abortion. I thought it was because I didn’t want her to feel my shame. But now I wonder. Maybe I didn’t tell her because I knew she would have done what I asked. That she’d have gone against her every principle for my sake.

I wonder sometimes if she can see all my life from heaven, where she must be now. But would that be heaven? To know all there is to know about the people you loved most in life? Or would that be hell?

“I think it’s time for a swim,” Ginger says, still looking to the darkness
outside the window. “If we go now, we can get in a quick dip before the sun rises and the press arrive.”

“So would I have, Ginge,” I say quietly.

When Ginger turns to me I plunge ahead before I lose my nerve. “I would have killed Trey if it had been Isabelle. I wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing him walk free. But I couldn’t have borne for Isabelle to have endured what it would take to put him away.”

“God, you’re not serious,” Mia whispers.

The long silence is brutal. No wind. No rain. No hint of early morning life. Not even the sound of a heater kicking in or a daughter stirring elsewhere in the house. Only our own breathing as we sit here on the two beds much as we sat on the lower mattresses in the bunkroom all those years ago. I don’t think Ginger even breathes.

The silence is broken finally by a fresh gust of wind blowing across the chimney top. The plaintive howl of the Captain’s Ghost. Or Faith’s Ghost. Or perhaps Trey’s.

“I think it’s time for a swim,” Ginger says again.

Laney’s bony, spotted hands stroke the edge of the sheet. “We don’t have swimsuits.”

The sad blinking of Mia’s plain brown eyes suggests she’s working her way toward the same conclusion I did years ago. That it’s impossible. And that it’s probably true.

It has always seemed such a coincidence that Trey turned up dead that morning. I think Mia has always sensed that. Mia, the Savant. But her choice before tonight has always been to think it was one of us who killed him. And how could she believe it was one of us?

I was the only one who knew that Faith knew about the rape. Who knew that Faith had just learned about Trey’s seducing Ginger when she was a girl. I was the only one with facts that might have led the way to whatever the truth was about what happened all those years ago, when justice might have been served.

I’ve thought about it so many times since. I’ve thought that I should say something. But to whom? And what? I didn’t know anything at all, really. I had only fantastical suspicions that flew in the face of all the evidence doctors and policemen assured me was something else. And what kind of justice would it have been to punish a mother for protecting a child against the failures of a legal system anyway? Against the failures of a whole society.

“When have we ever swum in suits?” Ginger says. “Not even at that first hot tub party did we keep our suits on.”

It isn’t true. Or that isn’t my memory anyway. I kept my suit on at that hot tub party and so did Mia. The first time we all bared ourselves in so many ways was here on Cook Island. But I don’t say that. I don’t do anything but remember how close we’d been that first night, swimming together in the star-thick night.

We’ve seen one another regularly over the years since then. Vacations. Reunions. Weekends. But we’ve never again shed our clothes together. We let Trey Humphrey steal that reckless abandon from our friendship. That complete trust in each other that we were just gaining. That trust that is so impossible to find in friends, but there it was in our grasp. We’ve all of us let what one man did make us ashamed of who we are. Because he hurt one of us. Because none of us stopped it. We hadn’t recognized what was happening. We hadn’t known anything needed to be stopped until it was too late. But that hasn’t saved us from feeling that failure. From feeling our friendship wasn’t enough.

Ginger stands and takes Laney’s hand. “Come on, Lane,” she says. “The water is good and cold out there. Let’s swim.”

PART III

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

The world would split open.

—from “Käthe Kollwitz,” by Muriel Rukeyser

Betts

THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

I
T’S CHILLY AS
we stand on the pier. The sky is still dark and cloudy. The water black and hard, unyielding. There is a hint of light at the horizon. Or maybe there isn’t. Maybe that’s just me hoping there is.

“The girls will be horrified if they see us skinny-dipping,” I say.

“It might be good for them to be horrified by something their mothers do,” Mia says.

I bristle. Why does Mia need to contradict me? Even on something she knows nothing about: motherhood.

She says, “I think maybe it allows you a little freedom yourself, if you can get over the shock.” Speaking not as a mother but as a daughter. It’s not a way I see myself anymore. But maybe I should. Maybe I’d be a better mother if I did.

“Annie and Iz are students,” Ginger says. “Virtual teenagers. And it isn’t even dawn. There is not a chance in the world they’ll wake up and see us.”

She dumps the towels she’s had the good sense to grab onto the raw wood of the pier.

“ ‘I fold my towel with what grace I can / Not young and not renewable, but …’
woman
?”

She pulls off her blouse and stands in her underwear. Probably her own that she wore to the hearing Friday. If Faith’s shoes and pajamas are too intimate to wear surely her underwear is.

“What do I do about the note to Aunt Margaret?” she asks. Speaking, I guess, of being horrified by the things one’s mother has done.

“She died just before Mother did,” she says.

The rest of us begin shedding our pajamas as Ginger drops her underwear and dives off the dock. She disappears into the darkness. Emerges with a quiet splash. “Shit, it’s cold!”

“What do you think the note says, Ginge?” I ask.

Her voice floats up from the dark water below us. “I don’t know. My first thought was that she wanted Margaret to know about … about Trey and me, I guess. But if she didn’t tell her before, why now? It’s just that the note was there, with the picture and the poem. But maybe that’s random.”

And maybe Trey really did just happen to shoot himself the night we all wanted him dead.

Ginger splashes water toward us. Cold drops sting the tops of my feet.

“I’m thinking I should open it,” she says.

I consider this for a long moment. Then jump in after her. Come up sputtering. “ ‘Supreme Court Nominee Body Found Frozen and Naked in Waters Off Cook Island,’ ” I say. Not, suddenly, giving a damn about the press. I imagine it might even be funny if a crowd of reporters showed up in a boat just now. I imagine that instead of climbing from the water and rushing into the house the way we did when Trey and the guy gang arrived that spring break, we might wave and say hello. Finish our swim and our conversation. I imagine for a moment that our bodies are just our bodies. The caretakers for our brains.

Someone plunges into the water to the right. A shadow head emerges in the darkness between Ginger and me.

“You can’t open the letter, Ginge,” Mia says.

Laney jumps in feet first. Close enough that I wonder if she’s trying to sink me. I can see the whites of her eyes, maybe because mine have adjusted to the darkness. Or maybe because it’s a little lighter. The sun isn’t coming up quite yet. But there is a grayness in the sky where the moon is trying to break through.

“Ginger can do anything she wants with the note,” I say to Mia. “The woman it’s addressed to is dead. The note is technically in Faith’s estate. And you’re the residual heir, right Ginge?” Ginger inherits everything not specifically given to anyone else in her mother’s will. “The two books were left to Margaret. If she had survived Faith then her heirs would be entitled to the books. Maybe there would be a case that they’re entitled to what’s inside the books, too. But likely not. Anyway, she didn’t survive
Faith. So the books stay in the estate and go to Ginger as the residual heir.”

The water laps in my direction as Mia says, “Ginger isn’t asking for a legal opinion, Professor Drug-Lord-Bradwell. Faith signed her name across a sealed envelope, Faith who was a lawyer and a damned good one, for God’s sake. Why would she have done that on a note to a friend?”

“You two don’t need to one-up each other anymore,” Laney says quietly. “You don’t need to be smarter than each other. You’re already smarter than everyone else.”

My face warms at the charge even in the cold water. I want to protest. But the thought that comes to me in my defense has nothing to do with smartness.
I’m not the one who slept with Beau when I was engaged to Andy
. It’s even more mortifying than still needing to be smarter after all these years: still needing to be more attractive.

I remember Mia’s face that night in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage when she and Beau threw the Risk game to Ginger so they could be alone. I’ve been imagining Mia as the least scarred by all this. She wasn’t the one who was raped. She wasn’t the one who was seduced when she was a girl. She isn’t even the one whose life dream is now at risk. But she’s the one whose budding love was polluted by everything that happened. I see that now. And in seeing it I can’t imagine how I failed to see it before. Mia and Beau might have ridden off into the nerdy-smart sunset together. Mia’s life could have been a different thing, too, if not for Trey.