The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The whole conversation was creeping me out, though it didn’t seem much to bother anyone else. Ginger was laughing with the fellas, and if Betts heard anything more than simple biology in Trey’s voice, she was masking it well enough. Maybe she was too focused on Beau to tend much to what Trey was saying; Mia clearly was. Beau was sitting by Mia’s feet, next to the wood-burning stove he’d settled her beside. So maybe I was the one whose mind was in the wrong place. Trey was a successful young partner in a conservative firm where every lawyer was an upstanding member of the community and no one was a creep. They were talking about something natural, something beautiful and loving if Trey was to be believed, and no one was disagreeing with him. They were laughing. They were having fun.

  “You’re leaving off the part about how crabbers take advantage of all this romance?” Doug said. “That’s so unlike you, Trey.”

  But it was almost dawn, and there were 136 steps to climb for the view of the sunrise we meant to have.

  Betts

  THE COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  THE SUN HAS long ago risen this time. But here we are back in the lighthouse. The Lightkeeper’s Cottage is gone just as Laney said. Ginger and I stare back through the tunnel-doorway to the blank space where it stood in 1982. Land now filled with tall grasses blending with the rest of the island. Filled-in emptiness.

  “We tried to talk Mother into tearing this lighthouse itself down when they bulldozed the cottage and the oil house,” Ginger says, “but she spent a small fortune restoring it instead.”

  The details fall into place then: The walls painted where they had been bare concrete. The sills of the windows along the winding stairs no longer flaking. The cracked panes replaced.

  “So when it was a useful lighthouse it was a dump,” I say. “And now that it’s useless it’s Architectural Digest material. Maybe that’s our future, too! When we’re useless we’ll have time to polish our nails.”

  Ginger examines her hands. “I have a photo shoot with Hand Digest this afternoon,” she says, her slight overbite disappearing into her grin.

  Our feet clank and our breaths deepen as we wind up the webbed-iron stairs to the watch room, where the lighthouse keepers once monitored the light. As we catch our breath, I try to remember whether the whole floor was just one open room like this. Did the windows go all the way around for this amazing view? What I remember was a filthy service room. Its beaded ceiling flaking strips of dirty white paint. The room itself full of rusty old tools. Wire. A single chair and table. And not much else. Not even the telescope that first night. It was still in Trey’s boat. If there was a view back then it was through windows that hadn’t been washed in years.

  But the walls and ceiling are now tongue and groove, painted a glossy white. The few tools left have been cleaned and polished as if for a museum. There isn’t a loose nail in sight.

  “Spira mirabilis,” Laney says. “Miraculous spiral.” She’s looking down steps as logarithmically perfect as the swirl of a nautilus shell.

  Several books sit on a polished table next to a plain wooden chair. The original chair and table where Trey Humphrey shot himself? Or was shot. Trey Humphrey who we all want to believe brought his gun up 136 steps to clean it. To this space that has nothing to do with guns.

  I pick the top book from the pile and open what looks to be a handwritten diary. “ ‘Arrived at Cook Island at 9:10,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘Commenced making inquiries for an additional man. Could not find anyone who is competent.’ ” I flip forward a few pages. “ ‘Snowed last night. Ice thick on the bay.’ ” And later: “ ‘Took inventory of all the groceries here belonging to keeper at invoice prices to be returned or sold to incoming keeper.’ ”

  I pick up the next book on the stack. Read silently for a moment. “Is this …?”

  Ginger stares at me. Or at the chair in which Trey died. Or both. She doesn’t seem to register that I’m talking. Her eyes have faded to the color of dirty bathwater.

  “Ginger?”

  “They’re the logbooks,” she says. “From when the lighthouse was manned.”

  “Did your mother …?”

  Ginger offers no answer to whatever question it is I can’t manage to put into words.

  We haven’t any of us asked the one question that needs to be asked. For thirty years. We’ve just pretended nothing to be questioned ever happened on this island. Someone must have talked, though. One of us must have talked.

  My answer to the senator’s question was too quick. My look too unfazed. Mia and I had never discussed how I should look when I answered. But that’s what I was going for. Unfazed. A mistake. I was too well prepared for a question I didn’t want to appear to expect.

  I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that.

  Ginger goes to the windows and stares out. She reaches up and touches the back of her hair. Like the day we met. Ginger standing in class insisting that her name wasn’t Cook. Insisting that identifying a woman by her marital status was demeaning. Ms. Decisis-Bradwell. Stand by that which is decided.

  I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that. It’s the kind of nonanswer Mia might arm me with if she had in mind that I might need a weapon. If she worried that I might not stand by what we’d decided without the right words. Why did I let her talk me into this? Why did she want to? Mia, the one who thought we should go to the police. Who never has given up thinking she was right.

  Except she didn’t talk me into anything. I’d already talked myself into it. She just fed me the words. Mia has always been good at words.

  Although not good enough to persuade Ginger and Laney to tell someone what had happened when it did. Mia and I were the only ones who thought we should say something. And it isn’t me talking now.

  “You don’t think Mia was the blogger, do you?” I say. The treachery coming out in a whisper. Is this why Ginger suggested Mia go with Max? Did she suggest it? Or was that Laney?

  I arm myself with arguments against the protest I expect from Laney: Mia was being vague in the blog so it would look like the information could have come from anywhere. She didn’t need to name me specifically to implicate me. She only needed to mention the Conrad summer home. Practically every article about my nomination mentioned how sad the timing was. How Faith Cook Conrad had been a mentor to me. How she’d died only weeks before the nomination was announced.

  Arguments I haven’t realized I’ve been having inside my own head until I blurt out the charge.

  Lordy, you’ve been blaming Mia since the first moment in the kitchen. That’s what Laney must be thinking. Or simply Lordy, how can you think Mia would do that to us, Betts? Laney is so naïve about what we Ms. Bradwells will do, even still.

  But Laney says nothing. Ginger says nothing. In the silence of the waves against the shore below, I wonder if this is what Ginger suspects after all or only what I suspect. Mia has just lost her job. And that’s what journalists do these days when they’re unemployed. They start a blog with a big splash so they can live on the ad revenues. They start with a messy, life-drenching post—like the one suggesting Trey Humphrey’s death may not have been an accident—even when they aren’t so jealous of what their best friend is accomplishing that they have to be begged to come help her celebrate.

  Madagascar. That’s off the coast of Africa. You know that, right?

  But would Mia really do that to me? How can I even think that? What does it say about how poor a friend I am that I can even imagine she might?

  Mia

  MAX’S HOUSE, COOK ISLAND

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

  THE HOUSE MAX pulls the skiff up to is the most gorgeous I’ve seen maybe ever. Until this moment, I would have told you I’m a traditionalist when it comes to architecture: Victorian or Craftsman or even Colonial or Tudor, anything but modern—not that I’ve ever owned a house. But this slender expanse of glass and wood is hardly noticeable even as I stand in fro
nt of it, which is part of what I love. It somehow smoothes the intersection of land and sea rather than interrupting the two, the house evoking trees, and the landscaping—not just plants but also streams hurrying down rocky paths and over baby waterfalls, pausing in shallow pools—evoking marsh grasses and seawater, as if a wave has washed up and will just as surely wash back to join the bay.

  “Wow,” I say.

  He smiles. Man, the guy does look goofy when he smiles.

  “How does it just … disappear? Blend? I don’t even know the word.”

  Max shrugs, as if it’s a small bit of luck, and perhaps it is. When I write, I’m not always quite sure a piece is going to work until it does. But it’s one thing to approach without certainty a two-thousand-word article that I’m spending four weeks on, another thing entirely to risk a year and a million dollars on something you’re not quite sure about. Like writing a book—risky business. What if, after all that time, it simply doesn’t work? Which is why, I suppose, I cling to journalism even though a part of me longs to immerse myself in something larger.

  It’s partly the line of the house, I think. Everything is soft. It has corners, but they don’t seem like corners because of the landscaping.

  Max starts talking about the technical attributes of the house as if anyone looking at its beauty might be interested in its guts, but I listen because I know how this is, to be proud of something and yet reluctant to admit to the pride. I nod and look as he points and explains: the autoclaved aerated concrete, the rainwater recapture.

  “Solar panels?” I say.

  “Hidden behind the top edge of roof.”

  “But the glass goes up to the roof.”

  Again, he shrugs. “Solar panels are pretty thin.”

  He puts a hand on my back to urge me up the path and into the house. The shock of his touch shoots through me, like the first time Ginger’s brother Beau touched me, when we were gut-running all those years ago. Ginger had warned us against Doug’s voice, but it was nothing compared to Beau’s touch. I’d been engaged to Andy already, which I see in retrospect was part of it: I was engaged, so any other man was forbidden fruit, and although the Midwestern girl in me—the side of me that is my father’s daughter—didn’t want anything to do with forbidden fruit, some other piece of me wanted a big, juicy bite.

  Forbidden fruit never fails to stain everything, though. And Max, as a married man, is the worst kind of forbidden fruit, the kind that would leave me feeling as awful as I did that spring break when I was engaged to Andy and slept with Beau. How do you tell the truth about something like that? At the time, I’d decided you didn’t. I didn’t tell Andy about Beau until Andy left me for Michael, and when I did tell him, finally, it was under the guise of a kindness to him, to let him off the hook for leaving me. Although Laney insists that wasn’t really why I told Andy; she says I told him because I wanted to have rejected him before he rejected me. She thinks I’ve never been any better at losing than Ginger is, that I’m only better at convincing everyone I haven’t really lost.

  Max’s house, inside, is all smooth, curved walls, one room leading to another without barrier. The outside walls are made of large expanses of glass so that the outside is brought in, and yet the house feels private. That’s the landscaping obscuring the inside without, somehow, disturbing the view.

  “No doors? Or are they hidden somewhere, like the solar panels?”

  Max raises his eyebrows in a way that makes me want to laugh, which I do. If we weren’t here in a house he shares with his wife, I would think he was flirting. I wonder where the wife is. I half expect her to emerge and introduce herself.

  The lack of doors leaves me wondering how quiet he and his wife must be when they make love, unless they don’t care if their children hear them. But the photos of his children scattered about remind me that they’re older, away in college—which they have been since before he built this house.

  His wife is not in the living room, a room with cozy white couches and bamboo floors, with a bronze sculpture that could be a Rodin but isn’t, and a small print he confirms is a Miró although he’s quick to point to the seam in the middle, to say it’s unsigned and not particularly valuable.

  He pushes a button and a long wall of glass slides away, leaving no barrier at all between this room and the bay.

  “The sunset from here must be delicious,” I say.

  “The sunrise,” he says. “You’re looking east. Only Chawterley is far enough up island to see both ways. Chawterley and the lighthouse.”

  “So you’re a sunrise kind of guy?” Flirting even though I shouldn’t.

  “I like the freshness of early morning,” he says, which maybe means he likes to have sex in the morning, but probably doesn’t, probably that’s just my attraction to him.

  “How ’bout you?” he asks.

  I raise both my eyebrows in the same way he did, wanting to make him laugh, which he does.

  “I like both,” I say, which sounds better than the truth, which is that I rarely see either sunset or sunrise with anyone, that I meet fellow journalists in bars—usually well after sunset—and I’m careful to go to their places rather than to mine so I can slip out before dawn, alone.

  He shows me the kitchen, clearly a cook’s kitchen: the eight-burner stove is the giveaway. When I ask who the chef is, he admits to learning to fend for himself when he went vegetarian. I’m about to go for the opening, to ask, “Your wife isn’t vegetarian?” But I pause, wondering what the hell I’m doing here, why I’m so damned curious about his damned wife.

  I think of Dad still cooking for Mom although she long ago ceased to recognize “that nice man who takes care of me” as her husband of sixty years.

  As Max leads me around another curve to his study—where there is a welcome relief of untidily stacked magazines—I’m wondering if my mom can be blamed for the way she was on those summer adventures any more than she can be blamed for who she is now. Would I have done things differently if I were her, in those days when women had so few options to begin with?

  “My dad always wanted a study,” I say.

  “How much of our lives do you s’pose we live trying to reach our parents’ dreams?” he says. “My dad was a waterman. Spent far too many cold nights on a boat on the bay. His dream was for me to go out with him, but he died out on the water before I was old enough, and my mom’s dream became for me to be anything but a waterman.”

  “I think my mom’s dream was to have some time to spend with her lovers without my dad finding out,” I say, inexplicably spilling my guts to this near-stranger, wondering if Mom didn’t anticipate that someday she’d need Dad to take care of her the way he does now. “Not that I even know that about my mom. She’s never hinted that the friends we visited on our summer jaunts were her lovers, and maybe they weren’t, probably they weren’t, probably they were just the best of friends, like Betts and Ginger and Laney and me.” No men in my friend list, I realize too late, but maybe he won’t notice. I didn’t, or didn’t think I did. The idea that those friends might have been my mother’s lovers never occurred to me until Andy moved in with Michael. I never worked up the nerve to ask her about it, either, and the Mom who’s left to ask now doesn’t have any idea she ever set off each June for a three-month adventure with anyone.

  “My father liked the whole island to know of his conquests,” Max says. “Ma looked the other way, because what choice did she have?” In his voice is a certainty that he will never be like his father in anything he does. Whatever I’m seeing as flirtatiousness is something else. “I don’t s’pose I can really blame him for everything bad in life, but my sister, Tessie, she’s made a mess of her life, forever going out with the wrong kind of man. She has no idea what a decent man is.”

  “Tessie,” I exhale, not meaning to say it aloud but remembering all that talk about the “slutty island girl,” Tessie McKee. “Beau’s particular favorite,” someone had called her, but Beau had told me that night on the boat that h
e’d never slept with Tessie.

  “I guess my mom did love my dad in her own way,” I say, thinking I do know Andy loved me, that he still loves me in his own way. The two things don’t always line up, though: love and need.

  From Max’s study, we wander down a hallway to the children’s bedrooms.

  “Bathroom doors?” I ask, and he does the raising eyebrows thing again.

  “No bathroom doors,” I say. I peek around a bend to find a doorless bathroom next to a closet that also has no door.

  Max lifts a little metal tab in the archway between the bedroom’s bamboo floor and the bathroom’s stone, and pulls out a pocket door. “My daughter threatened never to visit if I didn’t have bathroom doors,” he says. “The things we do for our kids.”

  He asks if I have children.

  “Calling the kids! That’s what I’m supposed to be doing here!” I say, although the only kids I have belong to Laney and Ginger and Betts.

  He shows me to a phone and I call, but I get no answer from either Annie or Iz. No answer at Ted and Ginger’s; it’s Saturday, so Ted is likely playing golf and I don’t have a cellphone number for him. I finally reach Annie’s brother, B.J.—Beauregard James, after Ginger’s brother and Ted’s father—who is pretty sure Annie was going to spend the weekend with us.

  I call William, to let him know about the phone situation and tell him everyone is fine. He asks me to tell Laney to call her campaign manager, that the guy is about to bust a gut over the press coverage this morning. His voice is light, but that’s the way William handles things: he keeps the problems low-key and hopes they go away—which, surprisingly, they usually do. He doesn’t even ask why Laney isn’t calling herself, or what she’s doing. He only asks if she’s okay, and when I say I think so, he says, “I’m glad she’s there with y’all for this. You take care of her, Mia. And tell her I love her. Tell her I haven’t heard a word from Willie J or Manny or Gemmy, so presumably they haven’t flunked out of school yet. And Joey is fine: his debate team placed third and he’s spending the weekend on an English project with that cute little Emily he’s sweet on, so he barely realizes Laney is gone.”