Betts

IF THE IDYLLIC-weekend-with-Iz-and-Annie idea wasn’t shattered before we went to bed last night, it is by the time we finish Sunday brunch. There were no English muffins for eggs Benedict. The sad remains of Max’s cinnamon apple crêpes lie scattered before us. The chef himself declined to join us for breakfast on the excuse of not wanting to intrude on our time with the girls. But the truth is the bickering started before we sat down. Bickering and worse. Laney and Ginger are each acting like the other simply is not here.

Iz sits across from me, still in the oversized-man’s-shirt-and-boxer-shorts pajamas that no doubt have their origin in this divorced man I’m supposed to embrace. A man nearly as close in age to me as to her.

“Does he want more children?” I ask. “He already has—”

“We’ve barely been dating a month, Mom,” she protests.

“But it’s one thing to love a man and another thing entirely to love a whole family, Iz. To be denied children of your own when—”

“We’re not planning our futures together yet, Mom! So why don’t you just chill?”

The closed-in Tea Parlor is beginning to feel claustrophobic. Amazing what an effect lack of sunshine will have on you.

“Maybe I don’t want children,” Izzy says. “Aunt Mia doesn’t have children, and she’s the happiest one of you.”

Mia’s startled brown eyes fix on this daughter of mine who adores her.

Maybe Izzy doesn’t want children?

“Oh good lord, Isabelle, you can’t want to be like Mia,” I say. “She can’t even hold a relationship together. She doesn’t know how to love!”

The untruth of my words rushes over me as Mia picks up her fork and pushes the cold, gelatinous remains of a crêpe around.

Annie rises to Mia’s defense, saying, “That never stopped anyone in my family.” Probably referring to her Uncle Frank, who is on his third wife, his third set of kids, and his third law firm. But her dagger hits Ginger’s heart. You can see it in the way her pale eyes and her wide mouth soften. Laney and Mia and I all suspect Ginger’s marriage isn’t as Midwestern-idyllic as Ginger likes to project. But this is the first crack in the façade any of us has actually seen.

I need to say something funny here. Something that apologizes to Mia and lets Ginger know her daughter isn’t talking about her. But I don’t feel funny. I don’t feel apologetic or forgiving.

I want Ginger to explain how she could possibly ever have thought it was okay to have sex with her cousin.

I want Mia to stop forever thinking she knows better than everyone else. I want to throw Faith’s words in her face: It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. Get over it, Mia. Let go of it. Move on.

Iz is the one who moves on, though. She excuses herself to shower and dress. I want to stop her, but there is no reasoning with Isabelle when she’s upset.

Annie announces she needs to dress, too. She’s always been Izzy’s loyal puppy. She hurries across the hall after my daughter.

Laney watches the empty hallway long after the girls disappear into the Ladies’ Salon and up the servants’ stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s her daughter Gem she’s thinking of rather than my Iz or Ginger’s Anne. Her brown slacks and turquoise three-quarter-sleeve blouse are fresh and pressed but her eyes are weary.

“I didn’t kill Trey,” she whispers.

Only then does she focus on the pink-walled room and the round table. The four of us sitting in the flowered chairs. She’s lain awake all night rethinking her decision to go public about her rape, thank God. It’s the way Laney has always been. Mia makes a decision and never looks back. Ginger is the same although perhaps she ought to rethink her decisions. I’m a worrier like Laney, but it rarely keeps me awake all night. Not since those early months after Zack died. Laney though? She goes over and over her choices even when there is no longer anything to do about them. Maybe she was like this before the rape. Or maybe she wasn’t. I don’t remember anymore.

Have we seen her bright smile at all this weekend?

“If I go public with … with what Trey did, the whole world will think I killed Trey and y’all helped me cover it up. I didn’t, but they’ll be mighty sure I did anyway. Who else would have done it?”

“Any of us might have, Lane,” Mia insists.

“But none of us did,” I whisper. We’re all whispering. We can’t get away from the fact of the reporters outside. Their attention was raised by my outburst about Mia. Cranky journalists who’ve had no decent sleep. Who need to justify their discomfort with news.

“We were all together in that little bunkroom the night he died,” I say without conviction.

In the long silence that follows I stare out through the archway, into the Ballroom Salon and the door to Faith’s Library beyond on the far wall. This is one of the questions I worried someone would ask me back then. It was one of the questions I held my breath for as the Judiciary Committee grilled me. The question I’ve never put to Mia because I haven’t wanted to know for sure. One of the uncertainties I hang my hat on when I’m assuring myself I don’t really know what happened to Trey Humphrey. That I have nothing to add to the public record.

“I wasn’t, not all night,” Ginger says.

I turn to her, confused. This is the confession I expected but not the source. Ginger was in the bunk with Laney. It was Mia who was out. Mia who tried to slip in without being seen.

“I went out for a walk, just for a short walk,” Ginger says. “Trying to sort things out.”

“I wasn’t either,” Mia says. “I was out for … for a while.”

“But you weren’t alone, Mia,” I say. Launching into a choice selection of the little speech I’d prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee before Mia talked me into the single “nothing to add to the public record” line: Mia wasn’t alone.

Ginger’s hand goes to her lips. “You and Dougie?” she says. “I knew you were with him that week. You can’t say I didn’t warn you not to listen to him sing.”

Mia looks to the Music Room and the Painter’s Studio, the journalists on the pier outside. “With Beau,” she whispers, maybe because of the journalists or maybe because that’s all the air she can get behind the confession.

“No way.” Ginger looks for support. Finds none. “No way,” she repeats. She crosses her arms at her chest. Trying to communicate a conviction she doesn’t feel. “Shit, Mia,” she says. “You’re seducing my brother while you’re engaged to Andy?”

I’m pretty sure what Laney told me she saw in the Painter’s Studio was Beau seducing Mia. But I don’t say this. No one says this.

“You’re fucking fucking my brother while my cousin is drowning in his own blood?”

Mia doesn’t protest. As if this attack isn’t about her at all.

The anger in Ginger’s voice improbably bubbles over into something else. Sadness or fear or some other emotion that has her touching her hair for comfort that way she does. Trying so hard not to cry.

“He was dead when I got there,” she sobs. “Or maybe he was alive, a little alive, I don’t know.” She sinks back into her chair. Focuses on the emptiness in front of her as if the ghost of Trey Humphrey were floating in the stale-breakfast air under the chandelier. “But he’d already shot himself, the blood was all over the place.” She closes her eyes against the horror she’s buried under layers of pretend happiness for thirty years. “The blood was all over the place.”