Mia

GINGER AND I stand and watch for a moment as Laney and Betts pad up the pier. It strikes me that I feel comfortable in my nakedness despite the fact that I’m no taller and certainly no thinner than I’ve ever been. I’m cold as hell, but comfortable.

“You think either of them stands a chance no matter what I tell the press?” Ginger asks.

I look to the horizon, to the first edge of sun smearing an intense red across a friendly horizon of clouds, like lamplight between sill and shade. That this day has finally come seems no more real than the sunrise looks.

“An homage to your mom?” I ask. “The way your mom would have done it?”

Ginger looks at me then. She smiles ever so slightly, her wide lips pressed together with the barest upturn at the edges. She lifts her arm and touches the back of her neck. I wonder if she’s conscious of the gesture, if she is surprised her fair trade, eco-conscious, fruit of the gods hair clip isn’t there any more than her long hair is. I wonder where the child she gave her hair to is today. Or children, I suppose; all that taffy apple hair would have made wigs enough for a few children.

“I don’t suppose Mother ever told you she kept that African women article all these years, did she?” she says.

I shake my head. “I’d probably still be a lousy, unhappy, somewhat more well-to-do lawyer if not for your mom.”

“I should have told you,” she says.

As I’m considering this, imagining how much confidence it would have given me to know Faith framed that article, she asks, “Are you happy, Mi?”

I say, “Instead I’m a lousy, unhappy, penniless and unemployed journalist. Thanks, Faith!”

Ginger watches the sunrise for a moment. How long does it take to rise at this latitude, this time of the year, in this atmosphere?

“Seriously,” she says. “Being a journalist, I mean.”

I look out at the sea, thinking of the many places I’ve listened to water lap against shore, how different the backdrops to it are and yet there is some consistency to the water itself, something that doesn’t ever really change.

“I like to write,” I say. “I feel like I …”

Contribute, I guess is the word, but I don’t say it.

“Are you happy being a poet?” I ask.

“ ‘There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.’ ”

“Seriously,” I say.

Her hand again goes to the back of her neck, where her hair is plastered flat. “I’m … less sad when I write.” She pauses, considering what she has just said, perhaps recognizing only now that she is sad, that she has carried around a deep sadness for as long as I have known her.

“I figure I have to tell the whole truth,” she says.

She might be talking about the poetry she writes—telling all the truth, but telling it slant, like Dickinson suggests—but I don’t think she is.

“Everything?” I say.

“About me and Trey, too. But I have to explain it to Annie first.”

We both look to Laney and Betts making their way up the stone path toward the warmth inside the house.

“How do I explain it to Annie, Mi?” she says.

We stand watching as a boat heads out from Max’s pier, the ferry taking him across to collect the journalists again, as he’d promised; Max is a man of his word. I don’t have an answer for her. I don’t think she expects one.

“I’d like to stand beside you when you speak to the press, Ginge,” I say.

“I can do that part. No point in more than one of us exposing ourselves.” She smiles slightly, adjusting the hand that holds her towel. “No pun intended.”

“I’d like to,” I say. “I have my own penance to pay.” I wasn’t the blogger, but I may as well have been. “I thought I loved him. Doug Pemberley. I thought he loved me.” I reached out and lifted her wet hair from her neck. “I wasn’t the one who was raped, but somehow it’s always felt like I was violated back then, too.”

“We all were, weren’t we?” Ginger says. “Yes, we all were.”

She’s right, of course. We were all different people when we got back into Mrs. Z’s dented-bumper Ford at the yacht club than we had been when we’d arrived.

“I’d like to stand beside you, Ginge,” I repeat. “Everything is easier with a friend.”

Ginger doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t object again either. She says, “I warned you not to let Doug Pemberley sing to you, you know.” Then, “I’m thinking right here. What do you think?”

“On this pier?” I look down at the wood under my feet, at Laney and Betts now standing in the Chawterley doorway, looking back at us.

“Where it began,” Ginger says.

I want to object, to say the fact that we skinny-dipped with her brothers and Doug and Trey didn’t set the whole thing off, no matter what people might think when they hear the details. But I see in the way she studies the wood planks herself—not the water glittering with sunlight now, but the worn wood planks—that her beginning starts long before mine does.

“There will be TV, you know,” I say.

The corners of her wide mouth turn upward again, just barely. “I guess I hope so, right?”

She looks up the path at Laney and Betts and, beyond them, to Faith’s Library and its impenetrable glass.

“There’s got to be a book to write about this little adventure we’re having, don’t you think, Mi?” she says. “Wouldn’t you like to write a book someday? And there’s a very nice library here to write it in.”

“It would be a very nice library from which to write a book of poems, Ginge,” I say.

At the horizon, the full circle of the sun sits fat on the edge of the world now. It won’t be long before a boat shows up, before the press are upon us again and this all begins.

“I have other things to do,” Ginger says. “I have Mother’s affairs to sort out. I have to put her work in good hands.”

I say, “I’ve always liked your hands, Ginge.”

“I hate my hands,” she says.

“Good, strong hands,” I say. “So maybe this is the start of a new career for you?”

A little more upturn. “Maybe it is,” she says, and although I was joking, she repeats the words with a knot of surprise in her voice: “Maybe it is.”

The realization of what she’s saying hits her then. Can she fill her mother’s shoes? Could any of us?

“You need a partner?” I ask.

Her pale gray-blue eyes look almost as pleased as they do when she looks at her daughter. “I think I do, in fact,” she says. “Someone with press contacts would be ideal.”

“I don’t suppose I can lose ten pounds off my hips before this plays out,” I say. “I’m sorry to say that the camera really does add ten pounds.”

Ginger tips her head to the side a little and studies me. “You have beautiful hips, Mia,” she says finally.

“Well, we can hope for camera blur,” I say.

She laughs out loud, a wonderful sound that draws Laney and Betts back outside. She sounds like her mother in that moment. I half expect her to pull out a menthol cigarette and light it up and say, Humor is a much more effective way to get press coverage for something you care about than is rage.

“You guys coming?” Betts calls.

“I think we can hope for camera blur,” Ginger says as we head up the pier together. “In fact, I’d bet on that if I were you, if I were a betting kind of gal. But that’s not the kind of help I need today, Mi.”