Laney

THE DOOR FROM the lantern room scrapes open behind me, and the sound of Ginger’s rushed breath mixes with the lap of the bay below and the smell of wet cement, the awful aftertaste of remembering Trey.

“He called me a slut,” I say, wanting suddenly to hand it all over to her, to have her lift it from me. But I don’t turn to her, I can’t face her.

She doesn’t move on the lantern deck behind me. She just stands dumbly, not even approaching the rail. She didn’t believe me then and she doesn’t believe me now. She’ll never alter her notion of what happened that night. How could she if she’d been sleeping with Trey for years by then? It’s why I’ve never told the awful details even to her, my closest friend. Because she can’t bear to hear them. She can’t bear to face what it means about who she is, what she thinks it means about who she is.

What kind of woman loves a man who rapes?

I keep staring out at the bay that had been dark that night, until the door from the lantern room opens again, Betts joining us.

“A nigger slut, that’s what he called me,” I say, throwing the bitter words at Ginger. A whole new bunch of lady crabs present their backsides to him, little nigger sluts like you wanting to skip the kissing and romance and go straight to the fuck.

Betts and Ginger close ranks, one on either side of me, and I want Ginger to just go away, and I don’t. The three of us stare out at the sea, at the faraway spit of mainland and the little dot on the water at the horizon. Betts’s hand covers mine.

When Ginger gently fingers my hair, I’m back in the bunkroom, with Ginger climbing into bed with me that next night, wrapping herself around me, protecting me. Would things have been different if I’d told them this then?

I expect there was only so much I could say, though, not just because Ginger didn’t want to hear it, but because I couldn’t bear to believe it myself.

“I didn’t worry about getting pregnant,” I say. “It wasn’t that way.”

Betts’s hand tightens over mine, and Ginger leans her head on my shoulder. They don’t look at me. I expect they know this is hard to admit even without having to face them, without them being able to see the shame in my eyes.

Why does it shame me, this thing I had no control over? But there it is, even after all these years. Maybe I ought to be thankful that he took me in a way that wouldn’t leave me pregnant, but it only makes the shame worse, even with the Ms. Bradwells, even now that I’m trying to get past it, now that I’m running for office and thinking I’ve decided my past be damned, it wasn’t my fault.

I don’t know if I would ever have told even William if it wasn’t for a midnight call from Mia a few months ago, not very long after Faith passed. My telephone ringing off the hook in the middle of the night, an East Coast number I’m sure it was because I thought it was Faith’s number, I had that moment of thinking Faith? I hope she’s okay as I picked up the receiver, before remembering Faith wasn’t okay at all, Faith was dead. It was Mia saying she was thinking of getting married again, ringing me in the middle of the night like she needed my approval or my permission or maybe just my advice before she could accept a fella’s ring.

“Well, do you love him, Mi?” I asked. Not terribly original, but I wasn’t half awake.

“He sings beautifully, Lane,” she answered.

The sun could have risen and set again in the time I tried to make sense of that one, before I decided she must mean it as a euphemism. For as much sex as Mia has, her reluctance to talk about it is a thing to behold.

“Mi,” I said. “A good voice is certainly an important thing to look for in a husband. A good voice does go a long way.”

She said, “Remember Doug Pemberley from Cook Island?”

Just a name, not even Trey’s name, but I sat in my bed in the darkness, William asleep beside me, the shame catching me by surprise.

I think I stammered something like, “Well, I do suppose if he sings that well …”

She seemed as at loss for words as I was, which is very un-Mia.

“The ring is gorgeous,” she said finally, in a way that made me wonder if this ring was such an ugly thing that it made her doubt her choice of this fella, whoever he was. Made me think this was more difficult somehow than I imagined it was for her. Made me set aside my own feelings and try to attend to hers.

“But do you love him, Mi?” I insisted.

Her answer to that question was even odder than the thing about the singing: “I want to, Lane. Maybe I even do. Maybe I do love him. But I don’t think I should. I don’t think any of us would be happy, do you?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Any of us? And when I didn’t say anything she thanked me for always being there to listen and she told me she loved me and said goodbye and hung up before I could say another thing. I rang her right back on the number she’d called from, but there was no answer, just an endless ringing at the end of the line. And when I rang her cell, I got the message on the first ring, her phone turned off. William was awake by then, asking who it was, if the children were all right, and so I let go of thinking about Mia to assure my husband our children were fine.

I couldn’t reach Mia that next morning, but that never did worry me much; so often she’s in remote places where cellphones simply don’t work. I did call Betts, though. I told her about the call, and she said maybe Mia was seeing someone new, but then when wasn’t she? And when I finally heard from Mia again she clearly wasn’t meaning to marry anybody anytime soon. She’s not wearing a ring now, anyway, and when I mentioned that I guessed she’d decided not to marry the fella with the ugly ring, she looked confused for a moment, and then said she’d decided I was right, that she didn’t love him. Which I hadn’t said at all. But if Mia wants to lay the responsibility of her remaining single on my shoulders, it’s all right by me. Lord knows she’s done enough kindnesses for me over the years that I’m glad of the chance to pay a small kindness back.

GINGER WIPES HER eyes, I can feel her hand moving to her face on my shoulder, but I just keep staring out at the not-endless sea, at the sunlight sharp in my eyes.

“I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” she says.

An anger I thought I let go of that night talking to William rises up in me, the long familiar tightening in my throat and my spine and my fists. What kind of fool is she, thinking she can just apologize thirty years after the fact and have everything be fine? She was the only person in this whole world I could have talked to, and she pushed me away without even trying to hide her disgust.

When we parted after graduation, I walked away from that friendship just as surely as I walked away from everything else. I called Maynard and told him I’d like to work in the mayor’s office after all. I called Tyler & McCoy and told them I’d been offered a political appointment, and they deferred me for a year, and the year came and went and I stayed in Atlanta. I chose an apartment that was more expensive than I could afford but had a security desk and cameras monitoring all the public spaces. I didn’t realize until I moved in that what I’d like about the security desk was that the security guard who’d been there when I signed the lease was a confident, heavyset older woman named Mildred, who would have been no defense against anyone with a weapon but who seemed likely to interrogate any fella coming in with me so aggressively that he wouldn’t stay. She wasn’t there when I moved in; her role that morning was played by a younger fella I never did find comforting. But Mildred turned out to be the evening shift, and was for a long time the closest thing I had to an Atlanta friend.

I didn’t date that first year. I didn’t go out at night. I didn’t even want a roommate. Roommates were only good for betraying you when you most needed them. I bought a used exercise bicycle, and I came home at night and locked myself in my secure apartment, and I bicycled off to nowhere, and watched television and read and slept not all that well. I was depressed, I see that now, but maybe only because I know the statistics: rape victims suffer from depression ten times more often than others do. I was depressed but I had this notion that I was just fine, that I was moving on with my life.

So many times, I thought about telling Mama. I would start conversations in my mind: Mama, can I tell you about something that happened to me? But telling my parents only would have caused them pain; they’d have felt they should have protected me even though no one could have protected me. That’s what I told myself. I started conversations with Faith, too. I thought I might tell Faith. But she, as much as my parents, would have taken the guilt on herself: it was her home, her nephew.

And there was the shame of it, too. I see that now. The shame that if I was raped it was my fault. The shame simply of being able to be taken, of not being strong enough or in control enough, or pure enough. Cogi qui potest nescit mori. She who can be forced does not know how to die.

I never told my parents that I slept with Carl either, or anything else I did sexually when I was young. All of it would have made them think less of me, I was so sure of that. It never occurred to me that they ever might have felt the same things. What is it about parents that makes you think they never do live life?

Years later, when I first met William, I didn’t want what had happened to be part of the way he thought of me, I just wanted to leave it behind. I knew what happened wasn’t my fault. I knew that. But knowing a thing is not the same as believing it. And maybe I didn’t even want to believe it.

My silence left me lonely, and angry at Ginger but also, in the little eddies where the anger ebbed, understanding better why Ginger was so messed up when it came to men. How do you get over being seduced when you’re just a child? When you think what is happening is love and then, when you begin to realize at some level, probably not even consciously, that it isn’t love, you try so hard to make it become love? And how can you possibly make love out of something that is at best a young man’s sickness? Poor Ginge.

You feel at fault. You know you were meaning for this man to like you. You know the way you’ve always gotten men to like you is by being attractive to them. That’s what men like: pretty gals who flirt with them. And I was flirting with Trey that night. I was. There it is. Maybe I was flirting with him that day at the firm, before he kissed me in the elevator. Maybe I don’t know how to talk to a man and not flirt a little bit. It’s not even sexual, exactly. It’s more that Southern hostess thing, the compulsion to make sure everyone is having a good time. Mama always flirted with Daddy’s friends, and Daddy with Mama’s, and I don’t imagine either of them ever went home with anyone else.

You feel at fault because in retrospect everything you did looks like something different than just trying to be a nice girl. It looks like the opposite of trying to be a nice girl.

Or maybe it isn’t that at all. Maybe you want it to be your fault. The thing about it being your fault is that it means you have some control over it, that you have some ability to keep it from happening again. Maybe you’d rather be a slut who can control your world than a victim who can’t.

Ginger called me a few days after I moved to Atlanta, just after I’d started my bar review course. “Hey, I was just calling to see how you’re settling in,” she said. “Is your apartment nice? Have you met anyone yet?” And then, without giving me a chance to answer, she said, “I miss you, Lane. I wish we’d all gone to the same city. I miss everyone, but especially you.”

And I remembered then the feel of her arms wrapped around me in bed the night Trey Humphrey died, her quiet weeping, and I saw that I’d forgiven her already. I saw that she was sorry even if she’d never said the words, that she’d seen the truth that night on Cook Island but just couldn’t admit it, even to herself. That she probably never would.