GINGER

WHAT VOYAGE THIS, little girl? The damned “Briar Rose” line echoes through my mind as my old hunting boots (which have always been as comfortable as a second skin) rub at my bare heels. We’re walking along the bay, my own little girl forgoing Mia’s proffered umbrella to share mine. It’s hard to say why this makes me want to cry, but it does, as surely as seeing that photo of Trey and me stuck in the pages of that damned poem has.

I look younger in that photo than Annie does now. Still with braces on my teeth. Trey and I standing together after a morning of duck hunting, me wearing these very same boots. Had we fucked in the Triangle Blind the morning it was taken? Fucked. It’s such a brutal word, and yet there it is. I thought what Trey and I did back then was making love, those quick takings in a skiff late at night, or in the Triangle Blind while everyone else was focused on shooting the damned ducks, or up in the fucking lighthouse that sits abandoned ahead of us, its darkness inviting ships to crash onto Misty Vista Rock.

We haven’t intentionally headed toward the island’s end, but we seem irresistibly drawn toward the lighthouse. There is no direction I can go on this island without facing something, though. The other direction leads to the Triangle Blind.

Trey liked the Triangle Blind best, the nearness of my father and my brothers. Quick, frantic sex that he came to already hard. Sometimes I could see his anticipation even as he was putting on his boots in the mudroom, as he was first loading his gun. How very long I hung on to the idea that that first time at Fog’s Ghost Cove was the beginning of love.

Mother must have known all along. Why else would she leave our photo stuck into “Briar Rose,” a poem about incest, as if she might actually have approved? Her thirteen-year-old daughter and the golden boy. Golden man.

I take Annie’s arm, handing her the umbrella, ceding that little bit of control to her. If any man had so much as touched her when she was thirteen, I’d have had him in jail for eternity.

She’s eighteen now. No longer a minor. No more actionable than I was when I took off with Scratch. If she decided to run off to South Africa with a sleazy playwright, what could I do? Seethe, like Betts is doing now over Izzy and her divorced business school professor, to be sure. But is that it?

Izzy is walking with Mia, ignoring her mother, leaving Betts to share an umbrella with Laney, with no idea that the two of them have convinced themselves that their futures are behind them, that there will be no Drug-Lord Bradwell Supreme Court justice, no Cicero-Bradwell state senator to represent the Georgia Forty-second or anyplace else. Which is the problem I should be solving, but it’s impossible to focus on any problem other than my daughter’s with her walking beside me. Sweet eighteen and never been kissed, which I would choose for her over what I chose for myself. I would choose it for myself if I could choose again, over not-so-sweet thirteen and already fucked. Still, I worry that Annie is lonely. Still I think the solution to loneliness is a boy.

I was lonely when I first met the Ms. Bradwells, despite all the boys, or maybe because of them. Laney was lonely, and Mia and Betts, too, I think. We all had friends, family, relationships, but we none of us ever quite fit in anywhere until we met each other. Sometimes I think I want that kind of friendship for Annie even more than I want her to find romance: a friend who will stand by her the way we stood by Laney. The way, I see now, Mia and Laney and Betts all stood by me. It isn’t that our friendship has saved me from loneliness or anything else, really. But our friendship makes it all easier to bear. Our friendship leaves us with someone to call when we need to. Friends we know love us even when it seems no one else does. Friends who are sometimes lonely, too.

It must be menopause, all this wanting to cry I’ve got going on here. Bring the bloody bloodless change on and be done with it.

What voyage this, little girl?

Mother must have known, that must be what she is telling me, leaving a photo of Trey and me wedged into “Briar Rose” with a note for Margaret. For Margaret, should the time come. Whatever the hell that means. Should Mother be the first of them to die, I guess. But Aunt Margaret is dead, too. The time has come and gone.

It’s impossible that Mother would have approved of me having sex with Trey when I was thirteen, though. Even with the golden boy. Which means what? That she knew and disapproved, but did nothing to stop me? Could she not get past the idea of the publicity it would stir if the word got out that the thirteen-year-old daughter of a prominent feminist lawyer was promiscuous, and with an older cousin, no less? Mother loved publicity when it promoted one of her causes, and hated it when it intruded into her personal life. I remember the calls from Beau when I was living in South Africa with Scratch: “Mother would haul you back here by your long hair if she could. But you’re not a minor anymore so there’s nothing she can do, and it would only fuel the press.”

Fuel the press. Those words had stung so, although I’d pretended they didn’t. I’d pretended I was too busy living the life of the darling muse of the soon-to-be-famous playwright to care what Mother thought. Pattie Boyd to Scratch’s Eric Clapton, a relationship that ended badly, too.

Shit, I would shoot Annie if she ran off with someone like Scratch. I would get on a plane and fly to South Africa and shoot them both.

Annie adjusts the angle of the umbrella as the rain blows sideways, soaking us despite her efforts. Iz turns to Annie and sings the first few silly doo-doo-doo-doo notes of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

“Don’t you dare,” Mia warns Izzy good-humoredly. “If you’re gonna dance here, you just leave the umbrella with me.”

She and Laney and Betts are already laughing as Izzy grins just the way Betts used to do in law school, and sometimes still does. I wonder if humor is hereditary or learned. Betts, the Funny One; me, the Rebel; Laney, the Good Girl; and Mia, the Savant. That’s what I’m thinking as Izzy pirouettes away from Mia, taking the umbrella with her, swirling it around her as if she’s Gene Kelly, the start of a routine our three girls have done in pairs or all together so many times over the years, and yet still I never tire of it.

And then the rain is pouring down on me, and Annie is spinning away into the unlit grayness with her umbrella lowered, too. Our umbrella lowered. Our umbrella that is doing me not one bit of good. Only my bare feet in the heavy boots are dry.

Mia and I scurry to join Laney and Betts, our faces leaning close as we try to squeeze in under the single umbrella. All four of our asses hang out in the rain, getting soaked. We watch the two girls dancing and singing, stomping in puddles and kicking up muddy water, intentionally splashing us.

We breathed in rain, I think. A line I would like to have written.

I guess Laney is right about how I hide my feelings away in other people’s poems. I’m afraid to put them in my own poems, for fear they might be seen.

“They need a lamppost,” Betts says. “What kind of establishment do you run here, Ginger, that you don’t even provide a lamppost?”

The girls have closed the umbrellas now and are strumming them like guitars. They open them again, and flip them; and I remember the first time they actually caught the umbrellas, so surprised to succeed that they’d dissolved into laughter and never finished the routine. Now, they move right into what Betts calls the big-swirling-with-umbrellas part, and then the part where Gene Kelly goes up and down on the curb. There’s no curb here, but the granite rocks that edge the path serve well enough.

“Do you think they even imagine harm can ever come to them?” Laney asks.

Mia crosses her arms like the cop who comes in at the end of the scene in the movie, a role the girls persuaded her to play years ago.

“Do we want them to?” she asks.

“Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo,” Laney begins singing, the wind-down. I join her, “Doo doo doo doo.” Fortunately for all of us, Betts doesn’t sing.