We chat for another minute and we’re just saying goodbye when he asks, “Mia, is there anything to this?”
I hesitate, unsure how much if anything Laney has told him. In the silence, I hear music from his end of the line, something gospel-bluesy. “I don’t think Laney had anything to do with Trey Humphrey’s death,” I say finally, “but that doesn’t mean this isn’t going to be messy.” I almost blurt out what happened then, because I know William, I know he loves Laney and nothing will change that. But what if she hasn’t told him anything? The fact of Laney’s not allowing him to help her—not trusting him—might just break his heart, and it isn’t my place to break his heart like that.
“You know you’re the best thing that ever happened to Laney, don’t you?” I say.
“No, that would be you Ms. Bradwells,” he says. “You gave her a sense of belonging. I just reap the benefits of that.”
AFTER I HANG up, it occurs to me that Max must have Internet access. “You don’t have a computer in the study?” I ask, saying the words as I realize I didn’t see a computer there—or anywhere else.
“You want to take a look at that WOWD blog,” he says. “Thought you might but didn’t want to raise it if you didn’t. I’ll grab my laptop from the bedroom for you.”
“Wireless? I can use my BlackBerry.”
“The screen will be too small,” he says.
It wasn’t too small at Dulles Airport yesterday. But as I put my hand to my pocket, I realize my BlackBerry is back at Chawterley anyway.
While Max fetches his computer, I sit on one of the cozy white couches, imaging a crazy wife kept hidden in the bedroom on this remote island where she can’t hurt anyone, like Rochester’s mad Bertha from Jane Eyre. Never mind that in one of the photos I’d noticed—the whole family together at his son’s wedding last summer—Max’s wife didn’t look crazy at all. She looked like she could be a Ms. Bradwell. She looked like someone whose husband I ought not to flirt with, much less do anything more than flirt.
Max returns with his laptop, boots it up for me, and leaves me for a minute on the excuse of checking something in some other room. As the computer chimes to life, I remain facing the bronze sculpture that isn’t a Rodin and beyond it, through the empty space where the wall has been moved away, the Chesapeake. I listen to the lap of the waves, or the movement of water through the landscaping streams, or both, for a long time before typing into the browser a blog address I know all too well. The page loads then, WOWD appearing at the top of the page in a Tempus Sans font that is the exact blue of the sail on the Row v. Wade.
GINGER
THE WATCH ROOM, COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9
THE THING I’M most ashamed of as I stand in Mother’s remodeled lighthouse monument to Trey (with all its focus on this watch room: not a damned speck of dust, not a thing out of place) is that I didn’t believe Laney. When Betts and Mia and I found her curled up in the top bunk in the waitstaff’s bedroom, pretending sleep, what I remember feeling was relief that she wasn’t still with Trey. And then disbelief.
The eight of us had been playing Risk in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage. Beau was the first to be eliminated, followed shortly by Mia, and then Trey and Laney. They’d all gone off to look at the stars through the telescope while the rest of us finished the game. But when Mia and Beau came back without Trey and Laney, I’d imagined the two of them out in a skiff together, on Hunters’ Gut or Little Thoroughfare or Fog’s Ghost Cove.
I was the one who first said the word “rape,” so I must have known it was true. When she broke down and told us the awful details, though—the lighthouse and the telescope and Trey—I shut down as quickly as she had. I couldn’t believe it, so I simply chose not to. Chose instead to feel anger at Laney, fury at her for doing what I was afraid to do. I knew Trey. I knew he liked it rough sometimes, that he turned to the island girls when he wanted it rough.
I try to attend to what Betts is saying about Mia and the blogger, but the memory of Trey in this watch room is overwhelming. Trey, the first man I ever slept with, the only one I slept with for years. I had this idea that the fact of that meant we were supposed to be together, that if I was patient he would come around, too, and his doing so would prove I wasn’t a slut as surely as it would prove the island girls he slept with were. Prove to whom, I can’t say, because no one ever knew Trey and I slept together until I told the Ms. Bradwells. And the saddest thing about that confession is that I was offering it as proof that Trey couldn’t have raped Laney. “Trey and I are lovers. Trey loves me,” I’d insisted. “Why would he want Laney when he has me?”
Have you listened for the things I have left out?
I thought I was so grown up because a grown-up loved me; I thought having sex was the same thing as love, or would be. Trey, who was admitted to Harvard at sixteen, who was editor in chief of the Law Review at twenty-one. The one Mother set up as the example for us all, and Daddy loved him, too. Trey, who was the best shot on the island, the only one of the boys who could knock down a bird with more certainty than I could. Whose final view as he bled to death was these windows and the sea and the syzygy.
Syzygy. In poetry, two metrical feet combined into a single unit. I thought that’s what Trey and I were.
“Statutory rape,” Mia had said the night I told them about Trey and me, but I was so sure Trey hadn’t raped anyone, not Laney and certainly not me. It wasn’t until I was a mother myself—until Annie was thirteen or nearly so and I saw how very young a thirteen-year-old girl is—that I understood that a twenty-year-old man had no business seducing his thirteen-year-old cousin. What voyage this, little girl? Trey’s attention had made me feel special. I thought that Laney was jealous of that, I thought she’d been jealous since the moment Trey stepped into the Captain’s Library. I thought if she’d had sex with him (which maybe she had but I thought it just as likely that she was making it all up), she had wanted him.
Laney, who was the closest friend I ever had or ever will. It’s a sign of how close we all were that she even told us; most rape victims never tell a soul, even today.
That following night when I’d curled up in bed next to her, Mia and Betts thought I was comforting Laney, and I let them think that. I let everyone think I was a good friend when I was no friend at all, when I was scared shitless and seeking comfort from Laney, not giving her anything.
I have always been such an ignorant fool when it comes to men. First Trey, and then L. Gordon Hayes, who I fell for in my junior year at Virginia. He was like Trey, but younger and better looking, and he pursued me until, finally, I slept with him after the Kappa formal. He took my roommate out the next night and slept with her, which would have been humiliating enough if he weren’t a fraternity brother of Beau’s, and Beau in D.C., too far away to reach L. Gordon Hayes’s handsome but imminently breakable jaw. I escaped with my humiliation to New York, where I met Scratch, and I got drunk with him, and woke the next morning in his bed, suddenly counting three lovers where just days before there had been only Trey. When Scratch headed to South Africa for a playwriting fellowship in Cape Town the next week, I went with him. And when that ended badly, I came home and finished at Georgetown, graduated early, went off to law school bound and determined to make an even bigger fool of myself. I thought I’d be like Trey and Frankie, taking lovers and casting them off at my own whim. But it didn’t make me feel quite the way I’d thought it would.
The truth is I wasn’t even that wild about my husband, Ted, at first. I worked with him, and I’d determined not to sleep with anyone at work that summer, not meaning to blow my chance for an offer at Caruthers by tumbling into bed with the wrong guy. But we’d drunk too much together on a summer clerk sailing outing, one of the ones Betts worked through, already gunning for the Supreme Court when even the firm wanted her to be having fun. And somehow Ted and I ended up necking in a dark corner of a dark club afterward. He suggested screwing right there, but I was not so drunk as to have se
x within a few (albeit dark) paces of our fellow office mates. Not smart enough to say no later that night, though; I let him come up for a drink after he walked me home. I’d slept with so many guys by then, anyway.
But Ted married me. He’s stayed with me all these years. Maybe he’s taken other lovers along the way and maybe he hasn’t, I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to. I haven’t, that’s the thing. I still want men to want me even when I don’t want them. Even Max. But in all the years I’ve been married, I’ve never slept with anyone else. And the truth? It’s a relief.
“Ginger?” Betts is saying, calling me back to the refinished table and chair, the clean windows, the bay. I try to think what she wants of me, but I can’t shake the memory of Trey with his guts blown out. His eyes closed, but behind the lids the unblinking stare I’d gotten when I’d asked him in the Triangle Blind that morning if he’d fucked Laney.
“Did you fuck Laney in the lighthouse last night?” I’d demanded, feeling even more humiliated than I had sitting in that theater in South Africa, wanting him to deny it even if he had.
For years, I used to wake from the nightmare memory of Trey’s blood pooled on the floor here. Blood blooms, spreads / its wide foliage in my chest. All that blood meant he’d died slowly, that the shot hadn’t killed him immediately; he’d bled to death, and the dead don’t bleed. I know it should bother me that Trey died slowly. The way it used to bother me when I had to break the neck of a bird I’d shot to put it out of its misery. But even after all these years, it doesn’t. If there’s a hell, I’ll probably burn in it for the satisfaction I’ve taken from believing Trey knew he was dying before he was dead.
Laney
THE LANTERN DECK, COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9
AND HERE I am, out on the lantern deck, not touching the railing, I can’t tolerate that, but with my back again to the lantern room and the bay stretching away in every direction, like Noah looking out at the flood. It’s the last place I’d have said I would come, yet when Ginger said I’d be wanting the key, I saw this was the graveyard I needed to visit. I expect what she says is true: she does know me better than I know my own self.
The light is well past dawn this time. We’ve missed the awakening that was such a beautiful thing that morning after we went gut-running, when we were exhausted and wet from boating all night, and not much drier for the time we spent warming in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage. I’m comforted by the murmur of Betts’s voice from below me, and then Ginger’s. My friends, with me without being all over me, as I remember Mia (that coward) standing just here where I’m standing: a younger, thinner Mia leaning out over the rusted railing in a way that would panic me now, after twenty years of trying to keep my children from talking to strangers, and riding with friends who’ve been drinking, and leaning against high railings that just might not hold.
It’s daylight and I can see so many things I couldn’t see back then.
It was still dark when we circled the heavy black teardrop of counterweight again and again, heading up to the watch room on legs less weary than mine are now despite the scotch we were drinking even as we climbed. We were trying to hold on to the boat-racing buzz we’d already lost, I expect.
“Let me get the beacon,” Trey said at the top of the stairs. “I’m not taking responsibility for you girls going blind.”
We paused on the final steps while Trey disappeared into the lantern room, the bright light flashing onto the stairway giving way to a darkness that left me dizzy, imagining my skull crashed onto the ornate inlaid marble of the counterweight well 136 steps below. It seemed forever before I could begin to make out the dark form of Ginger on the stair above me, before we continued on past the glass darkness of the lantern and out to this higher view of the night.
The air was cold and damp, the taste of salt mingling with the aftertaste of scotch. An almost-full moon was setting to the west. Mia, though, went to the rail facing the eastern horizon, the lightening sky.
“Look, the sea is violet,” she said in a hushed tone, as if she’d just seen Jesus rise.
Purple water? But she was right: a hint of violet shone from the black water.
I took a sip of scotch and held the sharpness on my tongue, thinking I was the painter, I was the one who was supposed to be noticing color. Mia the Savant and Betts the Funny One, even Ginger the strong-willed Rebel. But I was just the Good Girl, the one without courage even to break a rule.
“Sunlight scatters differently at sunrise and sunset because it comes at a tangent to the earth, through a bigger slug of atmosphere,” Trey told Mia. “More of the shorter blue and green light waves are knocked off before they get to us, so more of what we see—what our brains perceive—is the longer-wave-length red.”
In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.
“Hence the red sky,” he said. “And as any kid who ever dyed an Easter egg can tell you, when you mix red and blue—”
“But why isn’t the ocean red then, like the sky?” Mia asked. “Isn’t its color just reflected light?”
As Trey explained that clean water absorbs red light—that’s why water usually looks blue, but in coastal zones with high concentrations of matter like this it’s more complicated—I considered this side of Trey: a man who cared about the different ways the sun’s rays appear at dawn and noon and four, who imagined children dyeing eggs the colors of the changing sky. It was a side of him I’d never seen at Tyler & McCoy.
Mia nodded eagerly as Trey spoke, having no worldly idea that thirty years later she would write a six-page piece for the Sunday magazine about how satellite images of ocean color indicate increasing levels of pollution at our shores.
“Think about it,” Trey had said. “If it weren’t for Rayleigh scattering—light’s interaction with air molecules—when we looked up at the sky we’d see the black of space.” Then he started on about the optical illusion that made the moon appear big as all outdoors at the horizon, talking about upside-down Ponzo illusions and our brains seeing the sky as a flattened dome. I braced myself for another Trey Humphrey monologue. But he grew silent, then, watching with the rest of us as the moon sank into the earth.
It was the end of a long and wonderful night running through the island streams under a vast, dark sky. The beginning of a third day of a whole week enjoying life with my best friends before we set off our separate ways. It was going to be the first in a string of long and wonderful nights with Ginger’s brothers and friends, smart fellas who could teach me something about the sun and the moon and the sea, the creatures on the island, the stir of life I hadn’t much noticed in law school, or perhaps ever. How often in my whole life had I just relaxed and enjoyed a moment without any thought to how it would appear on a résumé that would get me … what? Someplace my parents had always expected me to wind up, even if it would surprise the rest of the world to bump into a black girl there.
If Trey had been a bit off-kilter in that conversation in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage about the crabs, it was beginning to seem just another piece of something innocent and unthreatening, a fella who tried to understand his world. If I was finding something sinister in that, surely I should be looking inside myself.
After the last sliver of moon disappeared, we turned back to the east, our arms touching as we joked about how sturdy the lighthouse might be and whether it could take all this weight on one side—at the top, no less. The horizon continued to brighten with our laughter, and the sky reddened, and the water purpled until the first lovely smack of sunlight shocked our eyes.
Doug sang out then, “Morning has broken,” his voice joining the lap of the bay and the fading crickets, the rising clamor of morning birds. Beau’s voice joined Doug’s after a moment, followed by Frank’s and Trey’s. And then we joined in, too, even Betts moving her lips to the words. It’s hard to describe how lovely it was. I’d forgotten that: how really lovely it was.
We went back to Chawterley and fixed breakfast, all eight of us crammed
into the kitchen, as on top of each other as we’d been in the skiffs. We made griddle cakes and sausage we ate in the Sun Room, and after breakfast I found a sketch pad and charcoal pencil in the Painter’s Studio. I took them back into the Sun Room and sketched with Ginger observing over my shoulder. I remember the sensual odor of salt air and sausage and scotch clinging to her long hair, which was loose for once, not confined in a barrette but hanging long and untamed all the way to her fanny.
“I wish I had all your long, long hair, Ginge,” I said.
She reached down and fingered the edge of my sketch pad. “I wish I could draw, but Beau took all the artist genes.”
Beau, stretched out on the floor, raised his head to protest, but it was true: Ginger’s drawing would never be any better than my hopes for fanny-brushing hair.
Mia came and sat next to me on the couch, admiring my sketch with Ginger: the pier, the twin boats, the bay, and the endless horizon.
“I wish we could stay like this forever,” she said.
We all looked at her for a fond moment before Betts said, “ ‘I wish that I had duck feet. And I can tell you why …’ ”
We laughed, looking down at our feet as Betts hopped up and duck-walked around, and Frank obliged her with a comic quack. We were at that point you get to when you’ve been up all night, when you aren’t exactly drunk anymore but you aren’t exactly sober, when life seems full of endless hope. Betts kept duck-walking, tapping on heads now, saying, “Duck. Duck. Duck.” But Mia was the one who shouted, “Goose!” She leaned over and tapped Beau’s head and then hopped up and sprinted out the back door and down the stone path, Beau a puppy dog at her heels.