Mia

WE’VE BEEN SITTING in the Captain’s Bedchamber for hours—all of us taking surreptitious peeks out the window while I’ve been taking surreptitious peeks inside myself—when Betts spots yet another boat headed for the Chawterley pier. “There aren’t enough journalists squashing the flowers already?” she asks. As Laney rises to have a look, too, I stuff down the urge to defend the press, to defend myself.

“Not many flowers on that side of the house,” I say.

“You think there aren’t reporters and photographers on every side of this house?” Ginger says. “But the flowers are all dying, anyway.” She, too, goes to the window, leaving me alone to wonder how many times Faith sat here by the fireplace, with no one to share the night.

“It’s Max!” Ginger says. “That’s Max’s boat. And, shit, that’s Annie helping him dock. Annie and Iz.”

I join them at the window just in time to see the horde of journalists swarm the pier as the boat approaches, already clicking photos and shouting questions. They have no idea who they’re photographing, but they don’t want to miss the shot, just in case. In this digital age, they waste nothing but the time it will take to delete what they don’t use.

Betts moves toward the door, but Ginger grabs her sleeve before she gets very far.

“Max will get Izzy in, Betts,” she says. “Believe me, Max will get Izzy and Annie both into the house unharmed. If we go out there, especially if you go out there, it’s just worse for them. Trust me this once: let Max get them in the house.”

“It’s locked,” Betts says. “All the doors are locked.”

“I’ll get the door,” I say, heading out into the hall before anyone can object.

“Max is such a nice guy,” I hear Laney say as I’m leaving. “Why do you suppose his wife left him?” Her words register in my pathetic little brain only as my feet hit the marble of the back foyer: Max and his wife have split? But there is no time for that now.

I peek through the backdoor sidelights, my hand on the doorknob as Max barrels through the press, one arm around each girl. Tiny Isabelle is practically buried in the crook of his arm, where the photographers can’t get much of a shot of her, but Annie, at six feet, is all there for everyone to see. I silently will her to reach up and release the clip holding her hair back, to let the veil of blond loose to cover her face. And I see in Annie how Ginger, too, must have been as a girl: taller by a margin than all the middle-school boys, gawky tall until she got used to her height, everyone-turning-to-look tall, and beanpole thin. It’s the last pin clicking into place, why Ginger never has seen herself as beautiful: she was a gawky virgin, and then Trey seduced her without falling in love with her, and she became a gawky slut. How many years does it take to get over the burden of the teenage girls we were?

I throw the lock and open the door. “You are not even thinking about using tape of a minor, or stepping on this porch,” I announce loudly to the cameras still pointed at the arriving threesome. “You’re all from reputable news sources, Fran,” I say, picking Fran off from the pack to personalize this. “You have standards of conduct.” Which maybe they would all remember without my help, but there is no percentage in testing that.

My words have the intended effect: everyone turns to me, their cameras rolling, their shutters snapping, but no one steps beyond the path as Max and the girls break free of them and hurry inside.

Annie has just had a birthday, I remember as I close the door and throw the lock again. She’s eighteen now, not a minor. An honest mistake on my part, though, and it will take them some time to figure it out.

Annie isn’t the story here, anyway, and now they have a clip of me.

I’m glad I put on makeup in the little moment before I headed to Max’s house this morning—a vain thought, I admit it, but my squishy fairness looks bad enough in photos with makeup.

I kiss first Annie, then Iz, telling them they look beautiful, which they do. Gawky, almost grown-up beautiful in Annie’s case, and dark hair and pale skin intelligent beautiful in Izzy’s. “Hollywood agents are going to be knocking on your doors based on just that little bit of film,” I say, trying to keep this light.

Max hikes up the sagging butt of his jeans, bracing himself for the plunge back outside. The thought of his boxers showing in the TV footage makes me oddly fonder of him. I tell the girls their moms are up in the Captain’s Bedchamber, and suggest Max come say hello. He demurs: he’s already intruded on us once today.

“You brought us the newspaper,” I say. “That isn’t intruding, that’s doing a favor. And now you’ve brought us the girls, which is exactly what we need. At least come upstairs and let everyone thank you for that.”

GINGER, AFTER HUGGING both the girls, asks Max how he knew to get them. I can’t decide if she’s oblivious to her daughter’s trauma at being run over by the press, or if she is handling it by letting her get over it quietly in a way her own mother never would have allowed her to do.

“I called him.” Annie takes in the empty ashtray, the pleading clip, the robe that perhaps Faith wore when she drank her morning coffee. “I used to call him a lot when Grammie was alive, just to make sure she was okay.”

I don’t know which surprises me more, hearing Faith called “Grammie” or the idea of a teenage girl who worries about her grandmother, who calls a neighbor to check up on her. Maybe Faith found the relationship she’d always wanted to have with her daughter in her granddaughter instead.

The girls are famished; they’ve been traveling without stopping to eat. I offer to fix something for dinner, and Max again starts making excuses to leave.

“You’ll be hounded by the press, Maxie,” Ginger says. “You’re bound to say something stupid. Just about anyone with a microphone thrust in his face manages to sound stupid. Besides, Mia can’t cook worth shit.”

“I can cook,” I say, but Laney and Betts agree: I can’t cook worth shit.

Max says he’ll stay if I’ll sous-chef for him and, honestly, I’m happy for the excuse to get away from the other Ms. Bradwells. I’m still stinging from Ginger’s words, even if I do deserve them: So that leaves either you or me, Mia. Me and my ‘sordid sexual history,’ right? I’m going to be publicizing that, for sure. I can’t imagine how Max isn’t stinging from the charge that he’ll be stupid in front of a microphone—which I say once we’re settled in the kitchen.

“Ginger never will get past thinking of me as an island boy,” he says. “You end up with a warped perspective when a place like Chawterley is your summerhouse. But she has such a big heart, even if she isn’t always quite as socially graceful as she might be. She’s like her mother that way. It’s easy to forgive them both, because they have so much bigger hearts than they recognize.”

Ginger startles us by appearing at the bottom of the servants’ stairs. If she’s heard us, she pretends not to have. “We’ve decided to dine in the Tea Parlor,” she says, and she heads across the kitchen and out through the Ladies’ Salon. The others follow her into one of the few rooms downstairs that has no window to the outside.

“Set a place for Faith’s Ghost,” Betts whispers as she brings up the rear.

Max puts me to dicing onions, then takes the knife back. “Maybe you can just be the soundtrack to my cooking?” he suggests.

“I can sing better than Betts, but that isn’t saying much.”

“Better than you dice?” He grins his nerdy-glasses grin. “Think talk radio.”

And then we’re talking easily, like we’ve known each other forever. At some point in the conversation, I remember my Holga, and I frame him in the viewfinder. He has a whole mess of things cooking together in the pan, and he’s boiled a pot of pasta he’s now dumping into a colander. I click the shutter, catching the steam and the falling pasta and Max’s age-stained hands, remembering for some reason the rearview mirror of my mother’s car. Am I looking backward still, or am I looking ahead?

He dumps the drained pasta into the pan of things he’s been cooking, then cracks a few eggs in and stirs it all around. I want to tell him that I wasn’t the blogger but that it was my fault, that I told someone I wasn’t so sure that Trey shot himself. It would compound my sin to tell Max this, though, sharing my doubts with yet another non–Ms. Bradwell. So I lower the camera and hold the wide, flat serving bowl while he dumps the pasta mixture in.

“Ginger tells me …,” I start, and I almost say “that your wife left you.” But I remember how I reclaimed my name, quit my job, left San Francisco, and headed as far away from Andy as I could get, far away from everyone who might see how I’d failed him. “… that you’re divorced,” I say. “That must have been hard, with kids and all.”

He looks at me like he has no clue where this is going, and I sure don’t either, but I kiss him anyway. Not a long kiss, just a tentative one. He tastes like the pasta smells, all olive-oil buttery and herby.

He looks at me through his goofy glasses, and he says, “Pasta’s getting cold.”

I nod, thinking, Well, it serves you right, blowing off what any idiot ought to have seen were his advances.

“They think I’m the blogger,” I say.

“Who does?”

“Ginger.”

It feels like she has been beating me up over whether I’m the anonymous blogger for about a hundred years now. It was just a suspicion when she first suggested it … this morning? yesterday? She said it with a rise in her voice at the end, the only way you can ever tell when Ginger doubts herself, because Lord knows she never admits to doubting anything. But she’s convinced herself she’s right now, that this is my fault. And of course it is my fault.

“Ah, Ginger,” Max says. “Ginger is wrong about so many people. Always has been, even when she was a kid. It’s her Achilles’ heel.”

“I thought it was only men she was always wrong about,” I say.

He shoots me what Betts would call a raised-brows-behind-the-lenses-surely-you-can’t-be-serious look before taking the pasta bowl in one hand and a stack of smaller bowls, napkins, and forks in the other. He nods toward the jelly glasses and wine bottle on the counter. I pick them up and follow him through the Ladies’ Salon.

The reporters outside have settled in to keeping a looser kind of vigil. They might see us hurrying across the hall and into the Tea Parlor, or they might be too busy sharing shots from flasks like the ones we drank from that night we went gut-running. They’re huddling closer together against the wind that rattles the windowpanes, that any minute now will hoot down the chimney in the Captain’s Library, sending the low moan of the Captain’s Ghost through the house.

I hope they have no blankets or flashlights or food. It’s a long walk to town from here, and I didn’t see them unloading a car or even a bicycle from those boats they came over on, boats which are long gone. I hope the Pointway Inn is already full, although of course it won’t be in October. Still, I can hope. I can hope they have no choice but to sleep uneasily on the pier, in danger of rolling into the bay and joining Beau’s lost sleeping bag. I can hope the wind whips Fran Halpern’s perfect coif into a rat’s nest that even her wonderful hair and makeup crew can’t tame. I can hope the skies will open up and a downpour will wash their damned cameras into the Chesapeake, that the sunrise will find them floating like crab-pot markers strung across the bay: MSNBC, FOX, CBS, APTN.

DINNER IS SURPRISINGLY relaxing. We linger in the skirted chairs circling the round wooden tea table, forgetting about the cameras outside, or at least pretending to. One of the delights of having Baby Bradwells around is that the focus turns inevitably to them. They’re walking, talking yellow-triangle caution signs: yield to the concerns of this young person; it will do you a world of good.

Annie is planning to study archaeology at Princeton, and the girls on her hall seem nice. Her classes aren’t too tough and everyone brings their laptops to class, not just her. “It’s like I’m just regular,” she says. “Normal.” It makes my heart break for all those years she was the little girl weighed down with a backpack containing a computer nearly as heavy as she was, before students brought laptops to college classes, much less to the fourth grade. It makes me wonder about Ginger, too: how much did her schooling suffer because her handwriting was so difficult to read? Would she have made law review if she’d grown up in a world where everyone learned to keyboard, or even just without a feminist mother who forbade her learning to type?

Isabelle tells us she’s interviewing for jobs for after she graduates. The high-paying law firms all want her, but the low-paying public interest jobs she wants are ironically harder to come by. She does have a paid position at a legal clinic in New Haven for the school year, which helps cover her expenses. And she’s seeing a guy.

“You are?” Betts’s gaze behind her lenses is both hopeful and apprehensive.

Izzy’s dark eyes—her father’s eyes in her mother’s freckled face—don’t blink. “He’s from Tennessee originally,” she says. “He’s a business school guy.”

Betts crosses her yoga-toned arms. “The business school,” she repeats, and although she tries to hide it, you can hear the vision of rich, Southern, country-club bigot she is imaging in the words.

“He’s specializes in micro-investment. He’s putting together a program in Appalachia, like people have been doing in Africa with some success. That’s where he’s from, originally, a little town in Appalachia.”

Betts uncrosses her arms, lifts her fork, and twirls a length of pasta and julienned vegetables, then sets it back down.

“He sounds wonderful, Iz,” I say. “What’s his name?”

Is it possible she’s just gotten even smaller? I wish I could withdraw the question. It’s just a name, and she doesn’t have to take it on herself. It’s too much to risk, anyway, giving up your name.

“His name is Zack,” she says. “Zack Bloom.”

Betts’s breath deepens as if she’s entering a meditative state. To her credit, she doesn’t flinch at the fact that her daughter is dating a man who shares the name of the father she never knew.

“He’s a student?” she asks, and in the question I see that she’s right: he isn’t.

Izzy folds her hands together as if meaning to say grace. “A professor, Mom. He’s thirty-nine. Divorced. Two kids, a twelve-year-old son named Pete and a ten-year-old daughter, Rebecca.” Laying all the unacceptable cards out on the polished and polite tea-table top in a way I doubt any of us Ms. Bradwells ever could have done. Is this a generational thing?

Betts nods, knowing she needs to respond but unwilling to approve. Maybe she’s thinking of her married man from that summer at Caruthers. Maybe she’s hoping, like I am, that this romance started only after this Professor Zack split with Mrs. Bloom, so Izzy will never have to fault herself the way I did when Doug left Sharon. Or maybe Betts is thinking about Izzy’s father, maybe she’s awash in a moment of missing him. Maybe what I take for disapproval is only Betts’s unwillingness to let her daughter see her pain.

“Rebecca. That’s a great name,” Max says, as if that has anything to do with anything.

Betts wraps a hand around her jelly glass of chardonnay. At least Max didn’t say Zack was a great name, too.

Izzy gets up from the tea table and slips away, into the Music Room. She doesn’t turn on the lights there, and the drapes are drawn. A minute later, over the soft tinkle of piano keys, Izzy begins to sing.

She sings beautifully. It’s one of the miracles of mixing genes that Betts and Zack, neither of whom could carry a tune, produced a child with such a lovely voice. The tune is familiar, yet not, and the words are foreign, guttural. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a song Betts used to play on her zhaleika, a Polish folk song.

“You taught her this one,” I say to Betts. The only Polish she ever learned was the words of songs.

Betts is listening to her daughter play. Maybe she’s heard me, or maybe she hasn’t. She takes a sip of her wine. She hasn’t eaten a bite of her dinner. She hasn’t had a single dessert this weekend despite my resolve back in the Hart Building hearing room. Her eyes are moist.

“Betts?” I say into the silence after the song ends.

“Matka taught it to her just before she died,” Betts says. “They did it as a surprise for me. To make me happy.”

“It’s beautiful,” Laney says softly. “Happy beautiful, not sad.”

In the Music Room, Izzy starts playing another piece.

Betts pushes her still-full plate away, sits back in her flowered chair, stares up at the four-candle chandelier. “Matka taught it to Izzy,” she says, “so I would have someone to play music with after she was gone.”