The Four Ms. Bradwells (42 page)

Betts frowns. “Then why didn’t he name me?”

I focus on the rain on the window, the tree branches and stone steps and pier distorted through the wet glass. “Because he doesn’t really believe you’re involved?” I suggest. “But he isn’t sure? He’s not sure enough about anything to name names, but he’s been carrying the guilt of Trey’s suicide his whole life, and he wants to set it down.”

I recognize the truth of this as I say it. Doug just meant to set his own hurt down, finally. If he’d meant to hurt me, he would have welcomed tossing my name toward scandal in pursuit of the truth. He would have justified naming me on the excuse of my knowing something I haven’t admitted, to give the questioners a place to start. But the only name he gave them was Trey’s name and the mention of the Conrad summer home. A home more than a few friends from Washington had visited over the years. Faith Cook Conrad’s house. Faith, whose protégée, Elsbieta Zhukovski, was now the nominee for the Supreme Court—people would know that because Faith introduced us Ms. Bradwells to everyone she could. Connections and timing, that’s what she thought it took for women to succeed, and she shared every connection she could with us.

Elsbieta Zhukovski, who’d been a law school friend of Faith’s wild daughter, someone would have remembered—after which any of the party guests might recall that the daughter had had her law school roommates with her that weekend, hadn’t she? Half the guests and probably a few people who hadn’t even attended would have remembered meeting Betts at Mr. Conrad’s birthday party then, because who doesn’t want to have known a Supreme Court justice since she was a girl? And any single one of them wondering aloud whether Betts had known the dead nephew would have fired up the rumor mill. The public loves a scandal. We always have.

“Doug doesn’t
know
anything,” I insist. “All he knows is that I had doubts about Trey’s death.”

“But how can you be sure?” Betts asks quietly.

“I just said I—”

The thought registers then: we aren’t the only ones who knew what happened. Trey knew what happened, too. Trey knew what he had done for a whole day before he blew his guts out. Or before someone else did
it for him. All this time we’ve been thinking we could control this, but who knows what Trey himself might have told someone? Not rape, probably. But he might have talked about Laney without calling it rape.

“That’s why you made me rehearse that line over and over,” Betts says. “You
knew
this was going to surface—”

“I didn’t, Betts. I swear I didn’t have any idea. I was as shocked by the WOWD blog as you were. When I saw it in the airport—”

“You saw it in the
airport
?
Before
the hearing?”

“You were already at the microphone, Betts. By the time I got off the plane, the afternoon session had already begun.”

“And you had no idea it was coming? You just happened to check one single blog at the airport and it happened to be this one?”

“It wasn’t like that, Betts. I swear it wasn’t like that. I’ve been reading his blog for weeks. I … He’s a nice guy, Betts, and he just wanted to have dinner while I was in town, he was just trying to understand what he did wrong and he didn’t do anything wrong,
I
was a schmuck, I just—How could I—”

Laney won’t even look at me now. She stares at the gray-black television screen over the fireplace.

“There just was no way to make that relationship work,” I say.

“You made me practice that line a million times, Mi,” Betts insists. “ ‘I have nothing to add to the public record on that.’ Like you knew it was coming.”

“But Mia has always been like that, Betts,” Ginger says. She sets the book in her lap and settles her manicured hands over the title,
Transformations
. “She always knows without knowing she knows. Mia, the Savant.”

“Mia, the
asked
,” I say. “You asked me, Betts. That first phone call, when I was in Madagascar, you asked me. ‘What do I say if someone asks about Cook Island?’ I thought maybe
you
knew it was coming. I thought maybe you somehow knew something none of the rest of us did.”

Betts

FAITH’S LIBRARY, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

“I
THINK WE
should go for a walk,” Laney says. Just like that. As if I’m not about to bludgeon Mia. As if we’re only discussing whether the storm has passed enough to go outside.

“It would be a nice thing to do with the girls,” she says.

Ginger looks as astonished as I feel. But she sets the book with the photo and envelope beside the miniature peacock book. She says Annie would like that. In her response I see what she sees: Laney has hit a wall. She can’t talk about this anymore. She can’t listen anymore.

Ginger prods Mia to call the girls. They’ll come for her, she says. “They all think you hung the fucking moon.”

A minute later, the girls tumble down the center stairs like three-year-olds just offered a ride on a merry-go-round.

“Umbrellas in the mudroom,” Ginger says.

But she hesitates when we get to the mudroom. Her bare feet sit wide and long across a join of tile. “You guys go,” she says. “I think I’ll stay here and start going through Mother’s things.”

Annie bends her long, thin neck to study the mudroom floor. Ginger must see how much her daughter wants her to come. Still, she doesn’t move to put on shoes.

“Do you still keep those boot things you wear duck hunting, Ginge?” I ask. “Seems like a perfect day for them.”

Ginger stares at me the way she did the night in the hot tub when she claimed to hate waking up next to a guy she doesn’t know. I hold her gaze as steadily as I did then. This time it’s for her rather than for me.
It’s okay
, I try to say with my eyes.
I’ve been sleeping in Zack’s old shirts for almost
thirty years now, and I couldn’t wear my mother’s shoes either
. I want to tell her that she has no idea how very much her mother loved her. That Faith loved her as much as she herself loves Annie. I want to tell her that Annie needs her just as much as she needed her own mother. That all this indifference is just an act, a way of defending herself from the fear of being rejected by rejecting her mother first.

Give her a few years and she’ll come back to you
, I want to say. But I can’t say it. I can’t say any of it. Not with our daughters here and probably not even if they weren’t. So I just keep meeting her gaze.

She opens a closet door and pulls out a pair of waders. “Anyone who wants them is welcome to them,” she says.

We all decline.

“I’m sure I couldn’t walk any distance in boots like that,” Mia says with a note of challenge shaded in her plain brown eyes:
Go ahead, Ginge. Show everyone you can outdo me
.

Maybe Ginger sees Mia is trying to play her or maybe she doesn’t. Probably she doesn’t, because she pulls the heavy boots on and leads the way out the door.

GINGER

COOK ISLAND
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

W
HAT VOYAGE THIS
, little girl?
The damned “Briar Rose” line echoes through my mind as my old hunting boots (which have always been as comfortable as a second skin) rub at my bare heels. We’re walking along the bay, my own little girl forgoing Mia’s proffered umbrella to share mine. It’s hard to say why this makes me want to cry, but it does, as surely as seeing that photo of Trey and me stuck in the pages of that damned poem has.

I look younger in that photo than Annie does now. Still with braces on my teeth. Trey and I standing together after a morning of duck hunting, me wearing these very same boots. Had we fucked in the Triangle Blind the morning it was taken?
Fucked
. It’s such a brutal word, and yet there it is. I thought what Trey and I did back then was making love, those quick takings in a skiff late at night, or in the Triangle Blind while everyone else was focused on shooting the damned ducks, or up in the fucking lighthouse that sits abandoned ahead of us, its darkness inviting ships to crash onto Misty Vista Rock.

We haven’t intentionally headed toward the island’s end, but we seem irresistibly drawn toward the lighthouse. There is no direction I can go on this island without facing something, though. The other direction leads to the Triangle Blind.

Trey liked the Triangle Blind best, the nearness of my father and my brothers. Quick, frantic sex that he came to already hard. Sometimes I could see his anticipation even as he was putting on his boots in the mudroom, as he was first loading his gun. How very long I hung on to the idea that that first time at Fog’s Ghost Cove was the beginning of love.

Mother must have known all along. Why else would she leave our photo stuck into “Briar Rose,” a poem about incest, as if she might actually have approved? Her thirteen-year-old daughter and the golden boy. Golden man.

I take Annie’s arm, handing her the umbrella, ceding that little bit of control to her. If any man had so much as touched her when she was thirteen, I’d have had him in jail for eternity.

She’s eighteen now. No longer a minor. No more actionable than I was when I took off with Scratch. If she decided to run off to South Africa with a sleazy playwright, what could I do? Seethe, like Betts is doing now over Izzy and her divorced business school professor, to be sure. But is that it?

Izzy is walking with Mia, ignoring her mother, leaving Betts to share an umbrella with Laney, with no idea that the two of them have convinced themselves that their futures are behind them, that there will be no Drug-Lord Bradwell Supreme Court justice, no Cicero-Bradwell state senator to represent the Georgia Forty-second or anyplace else. Which is the problem I should be solving, but it’s impossible to focus on any problem other than my daughter’s with her walking beside me. Sweet eighteen and never been kissed, which I would choose for her over what I chose for myself. I would choose it for myself if I could choose again, over not-so-sweet thirteen and already fucked. Still, I worry that Annie is lonely. Still I think the solution to loneliness is a boy.

I was lonely when I first met the Ms. Bradwells, despite all the boys, or maybe because of them. Laney was lonely, and Mia and Betts, too, I think. We all had friends, family, relationships, but we none of us ever quite fit in anywhere until we met each other. Sometimes I think I want that kind of friendship for Annie even more than I want her to find romance: a friend who will stand by her the way we stood by Laney. The way, I see now, Mia and Laney and Betts all stood by me. It isn’t that our friendship has saved me from loneliness or anything else, really. But our friendship makes it all easier to bear. Our friendship leaves us with someone to call when we need to. Friends we know love us even when it seems no one else does. Friends who are sometimes lonely, too.

It must be menopause, all this wanting to cry I’ve got going on here. Bring the bloody bloodless change on and be done with it.

What voyage this, little girl?

Mother must have known, that must be what she is telling me, leaving
a photo of Trey and me wedged into “Briar Rose” with a note for Margaret.
For Margaret, should the time come
. Whatever the hell that means. Should Mother be the first of them to die, I guess. But Aunt Margaret is dead, too. The time has come and gone.

It’s impossible that Mother would have approved of me having sex with Trey when I was thirteen, though. Even with the golden boy. Which means what? That she knew and disapproved, but did nothing to stop me? Could she not get past the idea of the publicity it would stir if the word got out that the thirteen-year-old daughter of a prominent feminist lawyer was promiscuous, and with an older cousin, no less? Mother loved publicity when it promoted one of her causes, and hated it when it intruded into her personal life. I remember the calls from Beau when I was living in South Africa with Scratch: “Mother would haul you back here by your long hair if she could. But you’re not a minor anymore so there’s nothing she can do, and it would only fuel the press.”