Mia

THE FISHY STINK of the Chesapeake is as overwhelming now as it was the first time Ginger and Laney and Betts and I made the trip to Cook Island, spring break of our third year in law school. Ginger had wanted us to go to Mexico, but a week in Cancún wouldn’t explain all that well to the financial aid office for Betts and me. Ginger’s father’s sixtieth birthday was that week, anyway, and Ginger’s mom—“Faith,” she’d asked us to call her—thought it would be “just grand” if Ginger brought us all along. So with “Sub Judice Bradwell at 4:05” as the plan, we’d muddled through Friday classes imagining the warm waters of the Caribbean—never mind Ginger’s insistence that the bay wasn’t exactly balmy in August, much less in the spring. After Ginger’s Corporate Tax class, with the trees the dead gray of late winter and clouds spitting something between mist and rain on the windshield of Mrs. Z’s rusty Ford, we’d set off at the mandated gas-saving fifty-five miles per hour (more or less) to conquer the five hundred miles from the Law Quad to this same yacht club.

A boat to take us across to Cook Island waited for us then just as one does now. I hope Ginger is right that my fellow members of the press will have a harder time following us to Cook Island than they would to New York. She’s a poet; she has no idea how resourceful we journalists are.

Betts has been on her cellphone nonstop since we closed the car door on the thrust microphones and rolling cameras, as if to make up for having spoken so little in the Hart Building lobby. Her restraint there showed how good her prep was; Betts is not one to stand down when there are things to be said. Now she’s assuring one White House aide after another that the death the senator was questioning was indeed ruled an accident. I pretend not to be listening, but of course I am.

“A blog?” she says.

Laney is intent on the road ahead and the press vans behind as Ginger directs her into the yacht club parking lot. “Max says to pull right up to the entrance,” Ginger says. “He’s got someone to take care of the car, and the press won’t be allowed in the door.” She and Laney either haven’t heard Betts or it doesn’t surprise them that this mess has broken in a blog.

Betts is being so Betts here. Calm and even. I hear the edge of alarm in her voice only because I’ve heard it before, that fall of our third year when she realized she’d forgotten to turn in a take-home midterm. Just forgotten, which was so unlike her. She was so unlike herself that whole term that I’d begun to imagine she was in trouble, unwed girl trouble. But she’d handled that midterm like she’s handling this: she’d simply taken it to the professor and explained what happened, direct and honest and sure of herself. And he’d accepted it and given her an A.

“I can’t imagine what the senator is thinking,” she is saying over the phone now. And then, “Yes. Yes, of course I’ll hold.”

A few frantic minutes after we pull up to the door of the yacht club, we slip out the back of the building to a waiting boat, an elegantly simple one with a clean white deck and a hull some color between royal and navy, its masts bare, the boom wrapped in canvas the blue of the hull. It’s the boat’s name, though, written in the same blue on the white stern, that announces in no small way that this was Faith Cook Conrad’s boat: the Row v. Wade.

As we board—Laney and Betts teetering in their pumps, leaving me glad of my practical flats—a faint whiff of Faith’s menthol cigarettes mingles with the salt air. I remember the waxy up-close scent of Faith’s “trademark red lipstick”—really more of a dark pumpkin, but some detail-challenged journalist called her lips red in the days of black and white newspaper photos, and his “trademark red” stuck. I imagine Faith still with us, in the cabin maybe, improbably hunched over a legal brief in a pleading clip, with pages rolled back over the top and the graphite of a chewed pencil spilled all over the page. Faith talking easily to the press we’re running from, her wide smile so like Ginger’s, or Ginger’s so like hers. I can almost hear her voice, gravelly and certain, Faith advising us … but what would she advise us to do now, stuck as we are between the truth and our own unwillingness to accept it all those years ago?

And Faith has been dead for months now. The only person with us is Ginger’s friend Max.

“All right. Thank you, Mr. President. Yes, I will. Thank you.” Betts closes her cellphone and looks up, surprised to find herself already on the boat.

“Mr. President,” Ginger repeats. “As in, of the United States?”

In Betts’s perky, small-mouthed smile, I find the girl she was when I first met her, all that irreverent humor and kindness and drive. “He said if anyone catches us skinny-dipping this weekend, I should deny, deny, deny.”

“Lordy! Betts is joking with the president of the United States!” Laney says.

I’m thinking it’s us Betts is joking with. I didn’t hear the term “skinny-dipping” cross her lips.

“I promised him we’d all do our best not to get photographed in the buff,” Betts says.

I say, “Ginge, the press will have a boat in thirty seconds,” trying to hurry her.

“Won’t, actually,” her friend Max says. “The club members are more loyal than the press is persistent, and there’s no other boat for miles. Nor another way to get to Cook Island except by boat.”

Ginger pushes the bracelet sleeves of her jacket up over her elbows and takes one of the two steering wheels at the back of the boat. Why two steering wheels? I remember my Holga and pull the camera out, framing Ginger’s broad hand on the white wheel as the engine hums to life, low and easy in the reddening afternoon light. And we are out on the Chesapeake again, with only the briny stretch of water and the inadequate stretch of years between us and Chawterley and the lighthouse, and everything that happened that spring break of our third year at Michigan Law.