The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  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.

  “MAX?” 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

  IF 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.

  Iz sits across from me, still in the oversized-man’s-shirt-and-boxer-shorts pajamas that no doubt have their origin in this divorced man I’m supposed to embrace. A man nearly as close in age to me as to her.

  “Does he want more children?” I ask. “He already has—”

  “We’ve barely been dating a month, Mom,” she protests.

  “But it’s one thing to love a man and another thing entirely to love a whole family, Iz. To be denied children of your own when—”

  “We’re not planning our futures together yet, Mom! So why don’t you just chill?”

  The closed-in Tea Parlor is beginning to feel claustrophobic. Amazing what an effect lack of sunshin
e will have on you.

  “Maybe I don’t want children,” Izzy says. “Aunt Mia doesn’t have children, and she’s the happiest one of you.”

  Mia’s startled brown eyes fix on this daughter of mine who adores her.

  Maybe Izzy doesn’t want children?

  “Oh good lord, Isabelle, you can’t want to be like Mia,” I say. “She can’t even hold a relationship together. She doesn’t know how to love!”

  The untruth of my words rushes over me as Mia picks up her fork and pushes the cold, gelatinous remains of a crêpe around.

  Annie rises to Mia’s defense, saying, “That never stopped anyone in my family.” Probably referring to her Uncle Frank, who is on his third wife, his third set of kids, and his third law firm. But her dagger hits Ginger’s heart. You can see it in the way her pale eyes and her wide mouth soften. Laney and Mia and I all suspect Ginger’s marriage isn’t as Midwestern-idyllic as Ginger likes to project. But this is the first crack in the façade any of us has actually seen.

  I need to say something funny here. Something that apologizes to Mia and lets Ginger know her daughter isn’t talking about her. But I don’t feel funny. I don’t feel apologetic or forgiving.

  I want Ginger to explain how she could possibly ever have thought it was okay to have sex with her cousin.

  I want Mia to stop forever thinking she knows better than everyone else. I want to throw Faith’s words in her face: It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. Get over it, Mia. Let go of it. Move on.

  Iz is the one who moves on, though. She excuses herself to shower and dress. I want to stop her, but there is no reasoning with Isabelle when she’s upset.

  Annie announces she needs to dress, too. She’s always been Izzy’s loyal puppy. She hurries across the hall after my daughter.

  Laney watches the empty hallway long after the girls disappear into the Ladies’ Salon and up the servants’ stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s her daughter Gem she’s thinking of rather than my Iz or Ginger’s Anne. Her brown slacks and turquoise three-quarter-sleeve blouse are fresh and pressed but her eyes are weary.

  “I didn’t kill Trey,” she whispers.

  Only then does she focus on the pink-walled room and the round table. The four of us sitting in the flowered chairs. She’s lain awake all night rethinking her decision to go public about her rape, thank God. It’s the way Laney has always been. Mia makes a decision and never looks back. Ginger is the same although perhaps she ought to rethink her decisions. I’m a worrier like Laney, but it rarely keeps me awake all night. Not since those early months after Zack died. Laney though? She goes over and over her choices even when there is no longer anything to do about them. Maybe she was like this before the rape. Or maybe she wasn’t. I don’t remember anymore.

  Have we seen her bright smile at all this weekend?

  “If I go public with … with what Trey did, the whole world will think I killed Trey and y’all helped me cover it up. I didn’t, but they’ll be mighty sure I did anyway. Who else would have done it?”

  “Any of us might have, Lane,” Mia insists.

  “But none of us did,” I whisper. We’re all whispering. We can’t get away from the fact of the reporters outside. Their attention was raised by my outburst about Mia. Cranky journalists who’ve had no decent sleep. Who need to justify their discomfort with news.

  “We were all together in that little bunkroom the night he died,” I say without conviction.

  In the long silence that follows I stare out through the archway, into the Ballroom Salon and the door to Faith’s Library beyond on the far wall. This is one of the questions I worried someone would ask me back then. It was one of the questions I held my breath for as the Judiciary Committee grilled me. The question I’ve never put to Mia because I haven’t wanted to know for sure. One of the uncertainties I hang my hat on when I’m assuring myself I don’t really know what happened to Trey Humphrey. That I have nothing to add to the public record.

  “I wasn’t, not all night,” Ginger says.

  I turn to her, confused. This is the confession I expected but not the source. Ginger was in the bunk with Laney. It was Mia who was out. Mia who tried to slip in without being seen.

  “I went out for a walk, just for a short walk,” Ginger says. “Trying to sort things out.”

  “I wasn’t either,” Mia says. “I was out for … for a while.”

  “But you weren’t alone, Mia,” I say. Launching into a choice selection of the little speech I’d prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee before Mia talked me into the single “nothing to add to the public record” line: Mia wasn’t alone.

  Ginger’s hand goes to her lips. “You and Dougie?” she says. “I knew you were with him that week. You can’t say I didn’t warn you not to listen to him sing.”

  Mia looks to the Music Room and the Painter’s Studio, the journalists on the pier outside. “With Beau,” she whispers, maybe because of the journalists or maybe because that’s all the air she can get behind the confession.

  “No way.” Ginger looks for support. Finds none. “No way,” she repeats. She crosses her arms at her chest. Trying to communicate a conviction she doesn’t feel. “Shit, Mia,” she says. “You’re seducing my brother while you’re engaged to Andy?”

  I’m pretty sure what Laney told me she saw in the Painter’s Studio was Beau seducing Mia. But I don’t say this. No one says this.

  “You’re fucking fucking my brother while my cousin is drowning in his own blood?”

  Mia doesn’t protest. As if this attack isn’t about her at all.

  The anger in Ginger’s voice improbably bubbles over into something else. Sadness or fear or some other emotion that has her touching her hair for comfort that way she does. Trying so hard not to cry.

  “He was dead when I got there,” she sobs. “Or maybe he was alive, a little alive, I don’t know.” She sinks back into her chair. Focuses on the emptiness in front of her as if the ghost of Trey Humphrey were floating in the stale-breakfast air under the chandelier. “But he’d already shot himself, the blood was all over the place.” She closes her eyes against the horror she’s buried under layers of pretend happiness for thirty years. “The blood was all over the place.”

  Mia

  THE TEA PARLOR, CHAWTERLEY HOUSE

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10

  TREY WAS DEAD when Ginger got there? As we sit in stunned silence, the journalists outside laugh, just another day at work. It seems so bizarre that it stops me. How many times have I been laughing just outside, passing the time waiting for news to drop into my lap?

  Laney is the first of us to recover. She moves to the chair beside Ginger and takes her hand, saying, “Hey, Ginge,” comforting Ginger the same way we’ve so often seen Ginger comfort Laney. “Hey,” she says again. “Hey.” I half expect her to offer up a line of Latin in apology for the blast she gave Ginger last night. If Ginger tucks her emotions into lines of other people’s poetry to cast them off, Laney tucks hers into Latin words no one can understand.

  Max emerges from the Ladies’ Salon and crosses the hall. Before I can figure out how to turn him back, he blunders into the Tea Parlor, saying, “Rain’s going to start within the hour.” He stops when he sees Ginger, who is working hard to recover her composure. He shoots me a look, as if I might have some clue how to help him out here. He’s interrupted something, he sees that. But he’s in it now.

  “I’m making a run across for groceries,” he says as nonchalantly as he can muster. “Any special requests?”

  “Across?” Ginger’s voice so artificially light it sounds ridiculous. “To the mainland?”

  Max runs a hand over his thinning hair. “Don’t worry, Ginge,” he says, grinning in a way that is almost convincing. “I’ve been practicing my ‘No comment’ all morning. I think I’ve got it down.” And he’s in the hallway and headed out the back door before we can put in the special requests we haven’t thought of yet.

  Ginger bolts from the windowless
Tea Parlor through the Ballroom Salon and into Faith’s Library, Betts and Laney following her. I bring up the rear, thinking Ginger really is smarter than I am; I’d have gone straight for the closer Music Room windows, where we would more likely be seen peering out.

  We peek through the tinted glass of the low-e windows, through the tree branches beyond the glass. Outside, Max faces a large bouquet of microphones offered by the swarm of reporters. If we’d planned this, we could easily be slipping out of Chawterley while they’re distracted, but Iz and Annie are upstairs showering, and where would we go, anyway?

  Ginger cracks open a window just in time to hear Max say, “The only comment I have for you folks is that the sky up there looks mighty ugly.” They all look up, and he pushes through them and throws the lines, hops onto his boat. Not the skiff, but the larger boat he brought the girls over in. A minute later, he’s headed out.

  “He’s not going to the mainland,” Ginger says as we watch the boat grow smaller. “He’s headed to town. That makes more sense.”

  The loud motor of a boat approaching not much later makes me glad of the fact we’ll have food. With a quick peer through the drapes, though, we see that the boat is not Max’s but rather the ugly wreck that takes the day’s catch across to the mainland, a.k.a. “the ferry.”

  “What the hell is Arthur doing here?” Ginger asks.

  It’s started spitting; the microphones thrust toward the poor guy trying to secure the boat are held by slightly damp journalists. With the press distracted, Ginger again opens a window slightly so we can hear what’s going on.

  The guy looks at the journalists like they are poisonous.

  Max emerges from the ferry cabin, hiking up his baggy jeans. The press turn as one, offering him their bouquet as he hops to the pier. His expression is almost smug.