The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton

insisted that if our mothers were the ones forcing women members on a club that didn’t want them, we’d be the ten-year-olds alone on our towels at the pool, the debutantes no one asked to dance. If we got pregnant, maybe the guys would marry us or maybe we’d get abortions or give up our babies, but no one would read about it in the Times .
    I raise the camera, framing the circle of the wheel, the straight line of the horizon, the textured triangles of her jacket and the triangular bow of the boat. In her admission—that even though the house and all its contents have been left to her, Ginger has not, in the months since her mom died, returned to Cook Island to sort through her things—I feel the ebbing away of a small anger I’ve been nursing since Faith died. Faith was important to the rest of us, too, but maybe Ginger’s refusal to have us at her mom’s funeral wasn’t the same kind of selfish thing Ginger has always done, the way she tries to hoard everyone close to her lest they abandon her for someone else.
    “You have clothes on the island, Ginge?” I ask. Betts’s suitcase was in Laney’s trunk—they’d all had breakfast together—and Laney and Ginger took mine when they ran for the car. But Ginger took the Acela Express from New York this morning, meaning to train back with us in tow tonight.
    “Not so much as a swimsuit,” she says, her gaze fixed on the uncluttered horizon.
    “None of us brought swimsuits this time,” Laney says gently, and although it’s obvious why—we brought clothes to wear to the theater, heels, the light evening jackets in which Laney and Betts and I now huddle, little protection against the wind of the bay and the speed of the boat—still, it seems a bad omen, as does the silence that settles over us.
    I squint against the coloring sunlight, wondering if the shadow darkness I think I see at the horizon now is anything at all, torn betweenwanting this journey to end and not wanting to arrive at Cook Island again.
    Cook Island. I remember Ginger telling us that even though it looks like two islands, the two ends are attached by a strip of earth barely wider than the one-lane no-name road that crosses it, connecting her family’s half of the island to the public end: the little white village with Haddy’s Market and Brophy’s Bar; the fishing docks; the Pointway Inn where the four of us had dinner with Ginger’s brothers and Trey Humphrey and Doug Pemberley before we went stargazing all those years ago, where Doug and I stayed the week he asked me to marry him.
    We all watch silently as the horizon shadow grows closer, taking shape, but just barely, a raggedy outline that is the tops of the trees—hackberries that Ginger once told us “drop shit everywhere but are the only tall things that grow in this salt pit, unless you count my brothers and me.” The high slate roof of Chawterley asserts itself as a flatness in the treetops then, and because I see the roof now, the house, too, emerges: three stories of green shingle bleeding into trees that are not the new-leaf-spattered tangle of limbs they were that spring break but rather a tired camouflage tinged with yellow and dying brown. I can make out the white trim of all those windows now, the stone chimneys rising over the blue-green of the roof, the pale foundation stones washing into the sand or the fall-dying marsh grasses—what does front Chawterley?
    I finger the electric tape holding the back of my Holga in place, resisting the urge to turn the lens on Ginger or Laney or Betts, to look without being seen. The words are on the tip of my tongue: I came here once without you guys, with Doug Pemberley, remember him? I don’t know why I never told you . But I would have to shout the words to be heard over the wind, and I can’t imagine shouting them. Because Ginger’s friend Max is on the boat? Because it feels a bit like a betrayal, not to have told them? Because even now I don’t understand why I returned