GINGER

THE SEXTON VOLUME with the photo and the note were already in Nana’s Room when I climbed into my childhood bed; I had slipped away from dinner on the excuse of going to the bathroom and hidden them here. I want to open the note, and I don’t want to; I want to tear the photo into pieces, and I don’t want that either. I guess mostly I don’t want anyone else to connect this photo and this poem, although I can’t even say why. The Ms. Bradwells know I slept with Trey, and I can’t imagine Izzy or Annie would make anything of the photo wedged into these particular pages. Perhaps I’m mortified by the idea of the Ms. Bradwells knowing that Mother knew about Trey and me. It makes no sense: why should I care? But I could feel it in the way I slipped into the library to fetch the book on the pretext of finding Band-Aids for the heel blisters I hadn’t, quite frankly, even felt until Betts pointed them out.

I’m like a child waking from a nightmare, afraid to climb from the bed for fear that the monster will come out to get me. Holding the blanket to my chin and imagining if I lie still enough I won’t be seen. I want to climb from this bed and pull on my boots again, walk out into the dark by myself, damn the blisters. A possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night. I’m not brave, though. I dread what haunts the black air everywhere on this island.

All night I am laying / poems away in a long box. But my box is empty, it has none of Sexton’s “starving windows.” No skinless / trees … / in shapes of agony. No and what of the dead? They lie without shoes / in their stone boats.

My poems are no sadder than the years’ worth of words I wasted chasing partnership at Caruthers, though, Laney is right about that. Wanting to be a permanent female cog in a tired old male wheel that would never change anything except perhaps which few hands held a lot of dollars. How foolish was I, really, to think anything about that would bring me immortality? Mother had tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. All I could hear were the echoes of her anthem for my teenage years, her voice all those mornings shouting, “It’s nearly noon, Ginger! Get up and make something of yourself, for God’s sake.”

It’s nowhere near noon; it’s an hour or two before daybreak, but I heed Mother’s long-stale advice, and I get out of bed, thinking of the two books Mother left to Aunt Margaret, and the blisters on my heels, and the dreadful journal pages filled with my poems. I take the book I brought to read on the train from New York, John Felstiner’s Can Poetry Save the Earth?, to the chair by the fireplace, and I open it and read what he has to say about the biblical litany of Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come.” I consider skipping to the next chapter; I’m not much for God or the Bible. But since he calls the poem “as fine as it gets in our time” I read to see what he means:

I am weeping as I read the last line: for the loss of Mother, for all the things we never said to each other, everything we never shared. For the pain she must have felt at being unable to protect me. Could I have borne it if Annie did what I did and refused to listen to me? I weep for Laney, for everything she endured without my support. For what I went through myself without any idea how to make sense of it. For what Betts is going through now, and Laney, too, and even Mia, who must feel this is her fault. It’s all so awful, and yet it’s brought me to this place where Mother died; it has brought me here not alone, as I’ve dreaded coming, but in the company of my dearest friends. It’s brought us all together when we need each others’ comfort as much as we ever have.

RAINDROPS TICK AGAINST the windows as I slip into the Captain’s Office, with the book and the photo and the note. Before I can even whisper Laney’s name, a bedside light clicks on, and Mia says, “Ginger! God, you scared me to death.”

As I blink against the brightness, Laney, too, sits up in bed.

Mia reaches for her eyeglasses on the nightstand. “I thought you were … I don’t know. Hamlet’s ghost or something.”

My mother’s ghost. Faith Cook Conrad’s Ghost.

I’m wearing the underwear and blouse I wore to the Judiciary Committee hearing, the same thing I’ve slept in each night since we’ve been here.

“Ginge,” Mia says. “You okay?”

“I thought you were with Max,” I say, I don’t even know why. “I thought you were, you know, slipping out to screw him like you did with Beau.”

“Ginge,” Laney says, soothing and scolding all at once.

Some part of me knows I should take the words back. I hate myself for saying them. I don’t have any idea why I’m saying them. They aren’t even true. Max is sleeping in his own bed in his own house tonight, and even I haven’t imagined Mia would slip out of Chawterley and make her way through the unfamiliar darkness of Cook Island to Max’s house even if he’s left the light on like he did for Mother.

“What’s wrong, Ginger?” Mia says. “What’s wrong?”

In the soft tone of her voice, I hear how perfectly ridiculous it is for me to hold Mia’s sleeping with my brother against her after all this time. Still, I don’t take the words back. I push my glasses into place and look to the rain outside.

The empty swivel chair at the Captain’s rolltop desk inexplicably moves, as if the Captain’s Ghost is pushing back from his after-death work. My heart is whacking against my fucking chest before I hear Betts’s voice from under the center drawer say, “Other than the fact that half the world thinks one of us shot Trey Humphrey?”

“Lordy, Betts! You scared me half to death!” Laney says as Betts emerges like some fantastic sea creature arising from the waves.

“I couldn’t sleep when we went to bed,” Betts explains, “so I opened the connecting door.” She shrugs her square diver’s shoulders. “I could hear Laney’s little snore, which is oddly comforting.”

“I don’t snore,” Laney protests.

Mia rolls her eyes.

“Well, glad I could help you sleep,” Laney says.

“Oh, you didn’t,” Betts says. “But I did feel less alone as I lay awake.”

They all turn to me standing there in just my underwear and blouse.

“Trey Humphrey’s Ghost,” Mia says. “I didn’t think you were Hamlet’s ghost, Ginge. I thought you were Trey Humphrey’s Ghost.”

Laney scoots over and thumps her hand on the bed. “It’s cold in here,” she says, an invitation to climb in next to her, under the covers of the twin that I still think of as Frankie’s bed although he and his succession of wives sleep in Emma’s Peek these days. Laney hands the extra pillow to me, and I snuggle under the covers next to her, feeling the weight of the Sexton volume pressing the soft cotton sheet against the skin of my bare thighs. The last time I climbed into bed with Laney was after finding Trey in the watch room, dead or almost dead.

Betts sits on the end of Mia’s bed, her legs falling as if by memory into that yoga pose she does with both soles facing upward, like she’s about to start chanting a mantra. She untucks the bedspread from around one of the end posts and pulls it up over her legs.

“That’s one of the books your mom didn’t leave you,” she says. The way she says it doesn’t make me feel bad, though. It leaves me thinking maybe Mrs. Z left her favorite zhaleika to a friend.

“The Sexton poems,” Laney says. “Like the poems you write.”

“I wish,” I say. I smooth my hand over the front cover of the book, as if smoothing the wrinkles from the sheet underneath. And then I’m spilling it all, about the photograph and the note for Aunt Margaret stuck into a poem about incest. “I don’t even know why I care that Mother knew about Trey and me,” I say. “But I hate the idea of her thinking of it. I hate the idea of her agonizing with Aunt Margaret about whether the press will get hold of the scandal of her promiscuous thirteen-year-old.”

“Ginge.” Betts runs a hand along the smooth wood of the bedpost, shaking her head as if she disapproves of me as much as Mother ever did.

“You should have been her daughter, Betts,” I say. “She would have liked that: perfect little virgin Betts who will go on to be appointed to the fucking Supreme Court.” I feel the tears begin to stream down my cheeks, but I will not acknowledge them.

“Ginge,” Laney says, and she puts her arm around my shoulders.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed / go black inside.

Mia gets up and looks for a tissue but can’t find one. Betts says she has some in her briefcase, which is just in the closet. She climbs under the desk on her hands and knees so that her skinny little yoga-toned butt sticks out under the drawer, then reemerges with her swanky black leather briefcase. She climbs back onto the bed and sits cross-legged again, zips open the briefcase, and looks inside.

What she pulls out is not a tissue but rather the strand of black pearls she wore at the hearing. Mother’s pearls. She sets them aside and pulls out a small plastic packet of tissues, which she tosses to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean any of that. I don’t know why I say things like that.”

I take a tissue from the package and blow my nose.

“So you’re absconding with my mother’s pearls?” I say, trying to sound lighter than I feel.

Betts holds them out across the gap between the beds. “Guess I won’t be needing them anymore.”

The gold clasp is cool against my palm, but it warms as I close my fingers over it, remembering the smell of Mother’s perfume on evenings when she and Daddy were going out, the luster of the blue/green/purple-gray pearls around the matte skin of her graceful neck. Remembering Daddy’s expression as he turned to see Mother descend the stairs, the tendons of his neck (as thick and ungraceful as mine) straining just before he stepped to the bottom of the stairs to take her in his arms. He always kissed her, then, and told her she looked stunning. Not just beautiful, but stunning. I never could understand why he loved her. They were so different, and I was like him.

I lean back against the headboard. “What kind of mother lets her thirteen-year-old-daughter sleep with her twenty-year-old cousin?” I pull another tissue from the pack. “What kind of mother doesn’t at least try to put a stop to that?”

“She couldn’t have known, Ginge,” Laney says quietly.

“She left our photo in a … in a fucking poem about incest.”

What voyage this, little girl?

Betts worries her bare big toe, sliding her fingers over a callus. “She didn’t know before I told her,” she says quietly, “and then Trey was dead.”

A rush of wind crushes tiny raindrops against the windows in a gust, the panes rattling with the force of nothing more than condensed mist.

“I told her the day after Laney … I couldn’t believe we should just do nothing about it all, you know?” Betts explains.

“You told Mother about Laney?”

“The day of your father’s birthday party, while you were out hunting. I went to her office and I told her.” “About Laney,” I whisper.

She pulls her top leg more tightly toward her hip, reminding me of Justice Bradwell, the contortionist gargoyle in the Law Quad, where we used to meet. “About everything,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t have, it wasn’t my place to do it, but I thought she would help, I thought she would know what to do.” She looks up at me. “And then she didn’t. She just told me not to say anything to anyone. Even to you.”

“You told my mother,” I repeat, trying to absorb this. “She didn’t know, and you told her?”

The morning of the day Trey shot himself.

“I … I just assumed she knew,” Betts stutters. “But she didn’t. I’m sorry, Ginge.”

“She didn’t know,” I repeat dumbly, trying to make sense of it, thinking Mother didn’t know then, Mother didn’t allow it to go on. Maybe she should have known but she didn’t, she just didn’t know.

And then she did?

“Her reaction …” Betts looks from my face to the pearls, the book, the letter. “It was more than just … you know. Concern that I knew. She didn’t know.”

“Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus,” Laney says.

Betts stands and moves to Laney’s bed, then, sits next to me and picks up the book. She sets aside the photograph and examines the sealed note: For Margaret, should the time come.

“She wouldn’t have let it go on if she’d known,” she says. She turns the envelope over to the sealed triangle, Mother’s signature sprawling across the joined edges. “Your mother? She wouldn’t have let it go on, Ginge. You must see that.”

I wipe my eyes with the tissue again, and I say I do see, even though I don’t see, I don’t understand anything except that I need to stop Betts from saying anything more until I’ve sorted this out. “I do see,” I say again, to prevent a silence she might need to fill, trying to imagine Betts telling Mother, and Mother hearing. How do you tell a mother she’s failed to protect her daughter for years? How can a mother bear to hear that?

I climb from Laney’s bed, trying to imagine Mother telling Daddy. Would she have? Or even telling Margaret. There is the sealed envelope and there is the photo and there is the poem “Briar Rose.” But that can’t be Mother speaking from the grave, to tell Margaret about a relationship her daughter had thirty years ago. That doesn’t make sense either.

I walk to the window, look out into the rain. The drapes are open; Mia or Laney must have opened them this afternoon. To hell with the press if they come back.

When I turn back to the room, Betts is still studying me, watching my hands, which, I come to realize, are worrying the pearls Mother gave me, that we all have worn. She stands and comes to me, rests her hands on my shoulders, her face close to mine, her hair gray where it was such a pretty red, her face lined and marked but still freckled, her eyes through the bifocals still the same intelligent blue gold green.

“Your mother loved you, Ginge,” she says. “Surely you must know that by now.”

I look down at the manicured nails of hands that look more and more like my father’s, fingering these pearls that have been mine for nearly as long as I can remember. Mother’s favorite pearls, which she gave to me years ago, when she still wore them. Betts is trying to tell me something without saying it. I don’t know if I am trying to hear her or trying not to, but all I can think of is the way Mother and Daddy came in from a walk around the island the night Mother gave me the pearls. She came in to the Sun Room to find Frankie and Beau and me all huddled around the Risk board. Trey was there, too, I remember, because I was sitting on the couch and he was sitting next to me but not touching me, and I wanted him to touch me like he sometimes touched the island girls when we were all hanging out together, and since he wouldn’t I was being merciless, about to wipe him out. I was acting all gleeful about it, but I wasn’t feeling gleeful. And then Mother and Daddy came in, laughing. I remember thinking they were laughing at me, although I couldn’t say why. Maybe because I felt Trey laughing at me, and my brothers, too. And then Mother was standing behind me, setting her pearls around my neck, lifting my hair to fix the clasp and then gently turning the necklace so that the clasp would sit at the base of my throat, like it did on her. She didn’t even say anything. She just latched them there and kissed the top of my head and said good night, and when I turned to see her, she and Daddy were headed up the stairs, holding hands.

How odd I’d felt with those pearls around my neck. Confused. Like I was playing dress up. Like Mother was dressing me up, making me her. The weight of the dark pearls where I rarely wore more than a thin silver chain. Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress / bids me wear them, warm them. But they came to my skin already warm.

None of the boys said anything, but they ganged up on me then; I’d been about to wipe Trey off the board before Mother and Daddy came in, and Frankie and Beau were all for it, and then they weren’t and I lost, and the funny thing was I didn’t really care.

After they wiped me out, Trey said he didn’t want to play anymore, he thought we should all go gut-running, Frankie and Beau against him and me. I remember not wanting to go out in the skiff with Trey, and going anyway. I must have been fourteen, because I’d already been out to Fog’s Ghost Cove with him, and not just that summer. I remember thinking I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, and not knowing how to say no, and going with him even though I didn’t want to, knowing that we would lose Frankie and Beau somewhere in the darkness of Tizzie’s Ditch or Rock Creek or Midden Gut. And then we would have sex out in the skiff, quick sex on the little wooden centerboard, or more often with me lying down on the smelly hull and Trey over me. But maybe that memory isn’t even real. Maybe I didn’t hesitate that night any more than I had any other night. Maybe that’s just gauze I’ve overlaid in the intervening years, wanting to be someone other than the girl I was.

I don’t know how long I waited for Mother to ask for the pearls back, dreaded her asking for them back and dreaded her not doing so. That whole summer, I think. And it was only after I came downstairs in a new dress I’d picked out especially for our annual end-of-summer party that she mentioned them again. I was at the top of the front stairs and she was greeting someone at the door. Daddy’s partner, Mr. Johns, I remember, because he whistled up at me like he thought I looked hot, then looked as surprised as I felt. I’d giggled, and he’d laughed, and Mother had said, “Why don’t you wear your black pearls tonight, sweetheart? They’ll look beautiful with that dress.” And I did wear them, and I suppose they did look beautiful, but I never could get used to wearing them, I never could come to think of them as anything other than Mother’s pearls.

Mother, whom Betts had told. Who’d learned about Trey and me the day before I watched Trey bleed to death.

I reach up and hold the pearls at Betts’s throat. I don’t even know why. These pearls I so love to loan, but never wear. They seem to belong on Betts as surely as they ever belonged on Mother, even though Betts looks nothing like Mother, even though the pearls are a different thing against her skin than they are in my memory of my mom.

“They’ve never looked better than they did around your neck in the hearing,” I say.

“They bring out the gray-blue of your eyes,” Mother had said when I’d reappeared at that end-of-the-summer party. No, what she’d said was, “They pick up the gray-blue of your eyes.” Not them bestowing beauty on me but me bringing my beauty to them.

I loop the pearls around Betts’s too thin neck, under the edge of her driftwood hair. I fasten the clasp at her throat just as Mother did when she gave them to me, except that I am facing Betts, she can see my face.

“They’ll look stunning with your black robes,” I say.

Betts smiles wryly. “My orange prison garb, you mean.”

I touch the clasp that nestles into the dip between her collar bones, the pearls on either side. “Mother would be so pleased to know her pearls adorn the neck of a Supreme Court justice,” I say. “I want her to have that.”

Betts, fingering the pearls herself now, starts to protest.

“I want her to have that,” I repeat, “and you want her to have it, too.”

“I can’t accept your mother’s pearls,” Betts says.

A circle of unmatched black pearls, each one bringing something different to the connected whole.

“You’ll no doubt feel them spontaneously strangling you if you even think about overturning Roe v. Wade,” I say.

“I can’t accept your mother’s pearls, Ginge,” Betts insists.

“They’re not Mother’s pearls,” I say. “They’re my pearls, that Mother gave me. And now I’m giving them to you.”