The Four Ms. Bradwells

by Meg Waite Clayton

  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

  IT’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.

  “I think Mother wanted to make sure Margaret could show she didn’t know what was in the note until after Mother died,” Ginger quietly agrees with Mia. “To protect her friend.”

  I nod. They probably can’t see me nodding. “That makes sense,” I say.

  Laney floats on her back in the water. Her face and her breasts break the surface. But the rest of her is submerged. Mia paddles over to the wooden post anchoring the pier. She puts a hand up on the wood slats above her so she no longer has to tread water. The skin of her arm is pale in the moonlight just breaking through the clouds now. Pale as it was thirty years ago when we went skinny-dipping with the guys.

  How stupid I’d been back then. I hadn’t given a thought to how bad it would look for Laney and me should Trey or Frank mention our skinny-dipping to anyone at Tyler & McCoy. The firm she was going to work for and the firm I meant to join after my clerkship. I’d been all tied up in my jealousy of Mia. Trying to find a way to turn Beau’s attention from her to me.

  “If Margaret didn’t know what was in the envelope,” I say, thinking it through, “then how would she know when ‘the time’ had come? We’re saying Faith left the note to … to protect anyone else who might be accused of”—I hesitate, but then I say—“of killing Trey, right? But how does Margaret know that’s what it’s for?”

  If Ginger is half as cold as I am she doesn’t show it as she dips back in the water to clear her hair from her face. It doesn’t float out across the water like fine seaweed as it did when we were young. I was so surprised the first time I’d seen her after she cut it. She’s pretty by any measure. But it was all that hair that turned men’s heads. She’d only shrugged, though, and said she’d needed a change. It was Laney who told me, and years later, too, that Ginger had donated it to make a wig for a child who was as bald as Zack had been when he died. It’s the side of herself I think Ginger least understands. The place her poetry comes from. It’s what keeps us loving her. Will always keep us loving her despite the total pain in the ass she sometimes is.

  “Margaret knows the same way we would know,” Ginger says. “Because she was Mother’s best friend. It isn’t exactly that she knows at the time so much as that, when she receives the envelope, she realizes what maybe she’s always known about her friend but hasn’t been quite able to piece together.”

  �
�Or maybe hasn’t wanted to,” Mia says.

  “But Aunt Margaret is dead now, too,” Ginger says. “If she was an accessory after the fact, it’s too late to hang her for that now. So I can just burn it?”

  I imagine the headline: ADVOCATE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS INVOLVED IN BIZARRE SEX-RELATED MURDER. I think of the irony of this. After years of resisting Faith, Ginger now wants to protect her mother’s reputation. But it’s not that simple. In protecting her mother’s reputation she protects her own.

  “If the note says anything about this, Ginge,” Mia says, “it could save Betts’s chance of the Court.”

  “If the note says anything that will destroy Faith’s reputation,” I say, “it will cast a pall on so much of the work she’s done. Not that it should. Not that this has anything to do with that. But it will.”

  “She’ll be tried in the press,” Laney says, “and everything she did’ll be dragged out and reconsidered, found flawed.”

  “It will set us back,” I say.

  “By ‘us’ you mean women in general?” Mia says. “Not us in particular? But you in particular, Betts, Laney in particular—that’s progress, too.”

  “Progress that maybe happens if the explanation for Trey’s death doesn’t involve you loading up a rifle with bullets, Betts,” Laney says. “Mia is right. We need to clear your name.”

  “Loading a shotgun with bullets,” Mia says. “A twelve-gauge. The kind Hemingway used to kill himself.”

  “Shells,” Ginger says. “You don’t load a shotgun with bullets. You load it with shells.”

  “It doesn’t save my appointment,” I say. “An explanation that involves me knowing facts I withheld?”

  “Suspicions,” Laney insists.

  “The fact that Faith might have had a motive for killing Trey,” I say.

  “A motive for the accidental death of Trey Humphrey?” Ginger says. “No one thought it was anything but an accident.”

  “No one but me,” I say.

  “Shit, I’m freezing,” Laney says.

  “Laney said ‘shit’?” Ginger says.

  “Laney said ‘shit,’ ” Mia confirms.

  “Shit, it must be time to get out, then,” Ginger says.

  We climb from the water. Wrap ourselves in the towels. Stand there for a moment trying to get warm.

  “Are you really that smart, Betts?” Mia asks. Her face in the moonlight looks almost young.

  I look up to see the moon through a thin gauze of cloud now. Its light sifting through.

  “Did you really sort this all out so quickly back then?” Mia insists. “Trey shows up dead and you deduce in the space of the few chaotic hours we had between when he was found and when we left that it wasn’t an accident? That a woman you’d spent the last three years aspiring to be like did something you could never in a million years have imagined her doing?”

  The question stops me. I want to say that of course I knew. But did I? How could I have put that all together so quickly when I still couldn’t believe that Trey raped Laney. When I was still thinking Ginger’s story about Trey and her might just be Ginger trying to hold everyone’s attention, not wanting to share even such an awful spotlight?

  “The thing is, y’all, we just need to tell whatever truth we know now,” Laney says. She speaks so softly that we all step toward her. Our heads bend together like football players waiting for the quarterback to call the play. “I need to do that,” she says. “I need to say ‘This is what happened to me.’ I need it for myself and I need it for Gemmy. I need to reclaim my … my certainty about who I am.” She pulls her towel more tightly. “If it costs me the election, then it costs me the election. I don’t want to feel shamed anymore.”

  I look to the horizon. Definitely lightening now. I think of Matka. Wonder how it would feel not to be ashamed anymore.

  “I don’t think the question is what we say about Faith or even about Trey,” Laney says. “I think the question is what we say about our own selves.”

  Again I think of my mom. It’s the way she lived her life. She went from being a doctor in her country to cleaning toilets to put me through school. Living in that crappy little apartment. But she never doubted her choices. She is the kind of woman I should aspire to be. She even more than Faith. All that stuff I was saying to the Judiciary Committee about how great Matka was. The Widow Zhukovski stories Mia urged me to tell. I thought I was just saying all that because it sounded good. But it turns out to be true.

  “The only thing is, I don’t want to be the one to have to say it,” Laney says. “I just want to have it be done. It’s not even that I’m a coward, although I expect I am. It’s just that I’m afraid I’ll do it poorly. It’s important that it be said well, and I don’t know that I can.”

  I shiver in the cold silence. We all do.

  “I can do it, Lane,” Ginger whispers. “I’d like to do it.”

  Let me do this for you, this one small thing.

  “Call it an homage to my mother,” she says.

  Laney balks. She didn’t mean to foist this off on anyone else. She was just talking about how she feels.

  “It will keep you and Betts out of the limelight,” Ginger says, “and it doesn’t really matter to my life. I’m not anyone.”

  I want to object. But the objection that comes to mind is that she is the daughter of Faith Cook Conrad. Which would only make her feel worse. She is the daughter of Faith Cook Conrad with no accomplishment to claim as her own.

  “The weird thing is that if Mother had been raped, she would have endured all the humiliation in the world to change things,” Ginger says, “but she wouldn’t put us through shit.”

  She’s more surprised than any of us at the truth of this.

  “We wouldn’t put Izzy or Annie or Gem through anything either,” I say.

  “Which is why we have to speak up now,” Ginger says. “If change is needed and it doesn’t start with us, then where the hell does it start?”

  “If it doesn’t continue with us,” I say.

  “If it doesn’t continue with us,” Ginger agrees.

  A shock of sunlight bruises the horizon then, leaking mauve through the thinning clouds.

  “Carpe diem,” I say. “Seize the day.”

  “Hey, I’m Ms. Cicero-Bradwell,” Laney says with a raised finger cross to me. She smiles in a way that (I know when I see it) I haven’t seen since we left the Hart Building. “And pluck the day is the more precise translation, actually.”

  Mia

  THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

  GINGER AND I stand and watch for a moment as Laney and Betts pad up the pier. It strikes me that I feel comfortable in my nakedness despite the fact that I’m no taller and certainly no thinner than I’ve ever been. I’m cold as hell, but comfortable.

  “You think either of them stands a chance no matter what I tell the press?” Ginger asks.

  I look to the horizon, to the first edge of sun smearing an intense red across a friendly horizon of clouds, like lamplight between sill and shade. That this day has finally come seems no more real than the sunrise looks.

  “An homage to your mom?” I ask. “The way your mom would have done it?”

  Ginger looks at me then. She smiles ever so slightly, her wide lips pressed together with the barest upturn at the edges. She lifts her arm and touches the back of her neck. I wonder if she’s conscious of the gesture, if she is surprised her fair trade, eco-conscious, fruit of the gods hair clip isn’t there any more than her long hair is. I wonder where the child she gave her hair to is today. Or children, I suppose; all that taffy apple hair would have made wigs enough for a few children.

  “I don’t suppose Mother ever told you she kept that African women article all these years, did she?” she says.

  I shake my head. “I’d probably still be a lousy, unhappy, somewhat more well-to-do lawyer if not for your mom.”

  “I should have told you,” she says.

  As I
’m considering this, imagining how much confidence it would have given me to know Faith framed that article, she asks, “Are you happy, Mi?”

  I say, “Instead I’m a lousy, unhappy, penniless and unemployed journalist. Thanks, Faith!”

  Ginger watches the sunrise for a moment. How long does it take to rise at this latitude, this time of the year, in this atmosphere?

  “Seriously,” she says. “Being a journalist, I mean.”

  I look out at the sea, thinking of the many places I’ve listened to water lap against shore, how different the backdrops to it are and yet there is some consistency to the water itself, something that doesn’t ever really change.

  “I like to write,” I say. “I feel like I …”

  Contribute, I guess is the word, but I don’t say it.

  “Are you happy being a poet?” I ask.

  “ ‘There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.’ ”

  “Seriously,” I say.

  Her hand again goes to the back of her neck, where her hair is plastered flat. “I’m … less sad when I write.” She pauses, considering what she has just said, perhaps recognizing only now that she is sad, that she has carried around a deep sadness for as long as I have known her.

  “I figure I have to tell the whole truth,” she says.

  She might be talking about the poetry she writes—telling all the truth, but telling it slant, like Dickinson suggests—but I don’t think she is.

  “Everything?” I say.