Betts

“I DON’T BELIEVE I have anything to add to the public record on that,” I say, thinking, You just close the damned door and walk on as if you haven’t left anything behind. Faith’s advice had nothing to do with dead bodies floating to the surface of Senate hearings. Still it comes to me as I lean toward the microphone and spit out the answer Mia and I rehearsed. Always from private lines in private rooms. Always with an irrational our-phones-might-be-tapped unease.

The senators all stare back at me. Thin layers of I’m-in-control-here cover each what-the-hell? expression. The question is a dreadful one on which to end this. But the chairman announced it as the final one. And it’ll be worse if I let this drag out. So I walk on. I launch into my prepared closing remarks without waiting for an invitation. I allow no possibility there might be anything more to ask or say. No doubt I’m violating every Senate protocol by wrapping things up here without being invited to first. One of the few benefits of being a woman: men are reluctant to call out your transgressions to your face.

I hope to hell the Ms. Bradwells have a plan to get us out of here without the press.

I slash whole paragraphs from my closing remarks as I say them. I need to stand and leave before a single senator interrupts. The chairman, a big supporter of my nomination, adjourns the hearing almost before I finish thanking him.

I stand and walk out. Jonathan follows. If every camera in the room has every moment of my leaving on film, well, then they have it on film.

I can’t run, obviously. And the press can. Jonathan and I are not out the door before I’m eating microphones. “Maryland” and “death” bounce around me like echoes in a deep pit.

“Frankly, we’re appalled at the senator’s willingness to muckrake when there is no dirt whatsoever here,” Jonathan answers. Pretty bold of him. He wouldn’t have been ten years old when Faith hosted that party at Chawterley. 1982. He wouldn’t have been watching the news even if this particular death had been news. Which it wasn’t. Maybe an obituary ran in The Washington Post or maybe it didn’t. I don’t even know. It wasn’t the unexplained death the senator is suggesting it was. The police didn’t interview a single party guest about it. They talked to Doug because Doug found him. They talked to Faith and Mr. Conrad because they owned Chawterley. I don’t think they even talked to Ginger. If anyone thought it was anything other than an accident, they thought suicide. “More often than you think, it’s suicide rather than accident,” I overheard one officer say as we were loading our suitcases the next morning. “But that only makes the family blame themselves, and Faith Cook has always been an awful nice lady, she and her sister Grace both.” So the police just added our names to the hundred other names. They filed their accidental death report. They sent us on our way.

Mia’s arm links in mine as we near the outside door. She whispers that Laney and Ginger ran for the car before the gavel banged.

A tap at my other elbow. Jonathan. It’s my turn to speak.

“The only death I can imagine the senator might be referring to was ruled an accident,” I say. Words I might have said to the Judiciary Committee if I hadn’t just blurted out the line Mia and I had rehearsed. But without that response at the ready who knows what I might have said?

“As I told the senators,” I say now, “I don’t have anything to add.”

Mia squeezes my arm again. The nondescript silver rental car Laney took me to breakfast in this morning pulls into the drive. Ginger holds a cellphone to her ear in the passenger seat.

Mia’s hand at the small of my back pushes me forward. Ginger is opening the rear car door. The microphones chase us. Mia pushes me into the backseat. Climbs in beside me.

“Like the cliché of every criminal and his lawyer fleeing the courthouse press,” Mia mutters under her breath.

Isabelle is occupied taking a midterm this afternoon. At least there’s that. And Matka is gone.

I hope the president isn’t watching this. I don’t know why it matters but it does.

“Good lord, you guys need to get a life,” Mia calls out as she slams the door on the press. Laney is already driving off.

We burst into laughter. As if this is some law school prank.

“Get a life? Tell me I didn’t really just say that.” Mia’s wry smile so familiar that for a moment we’re Izzy’s age again. Or even younger than my daughter. Mia and me sitting on our beds in our tiny room in N Section discussing the latest dirtbag of a guy Ginger had chosen to date.

“That’s my life they’re living!” she adds. “They need to get a life?!”

We laugh and laugh. It isn’t even funny, but what else are we going to do? Gallows humor. The way we always survived finals weeks. Laney is laughing so hard it’s a miracle she can still drive.

She hurries through a yellow light, the locks clicking down as we reach some critical momentum.

Mia wipes away laughter-tears.

“I’m guessing you need to turn your cellphone back on, Betts,” she says. “I’m guessing you should call whoever you need to call before they call you.”

Ginger says into her phone, “Max, I’m hoping the fact I have to leave a message means you’re already on your way.”

In the rearview mirror, I watch a press van pull into the Hart Building drive. Another follows just behind it. A third opts for the curb at the street. The reporters and cameramen load in no more efficiently than Mia and I did, despite being unhampered by microphones thrust in their faces.

I strap on my seat belt. “I guess the great break-the-bank orchestra seats for Les Miz are off the table,” I say. “So where the hell do we go?”