The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton Page A

here with Doug Pemberley, why I ever thought I could marry him, why I still need the lifetime guarantee I know doesn’t exist.
    Ginger turns the wheel a degree or two, setting our final course, headed directly toward the pier taking shape now: a long stretch of wood reaching out into the bay, with what looks to be a great blue heron perched on one round wooden post. The little boat tied up there, or one like it, was the way we got to town that spring break, up through thewinding marsh streams that riddled the island—“guts,” Ginger called them, or “channels,” or “cricks.” The mail is brought here by boat from the mainland, and the garbage truck is a trash boat, the school bus also a boat. It’s the way you arrive and the way you leave, the way even Trey Humphrey left. The way Faith, too, must have left, her body taken to the mainland to be cremated. It doesn’t make sense to bury anyone on Cook Island; the rising ocean levels caused by global warming are slowly absorbing it into the Chesapeake.
    A second little boat is upside down on the shore—which is disconcerting, finding something unexpected already. Why two skiffs? As if ready for the eight of us again to race through the marsh channels, shouting and laughing into the darkness. I remember the longing I felt as we first arrived at Cook Island, impatient for the end of law school and the beginning of whatever life would have in store for me: marriage and jobs, apartments and houses and children. I remember imagining owning a summer home like Chawterley with Andy, something grander than his parents’ cabin, somewhere more exotic than a small Midwestern lake. I remember wondering if Mom would have wandered so—frighteningly? Is that what she was, frightened?—all those summers if she and Dad had had a place like this to get away to, if she’d had a family and a future she was willing to embrace.
    The details of that first night on Cook Island flood me, then: the bright stars and the splintered roughness of the pier, the drip of bay water down my back after that initial cold plunge, the wet tug of my swimsuit as I’d pulled it from my unlined body, leaving me wearing only the small diamond engagement ring on my left hand, my promise to Andy and his to me. I remember the slick push of the cold, dark water as I dove back in again, the startling shock of something wrapping itself around me, refusing to let me go. I was twenty-four and unmarried, undivorced, unaged—and as quick to laugh as Ginger and Laney and Betts were when the water daemon I screamed in terror of turned out, in the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, to be only a tangle of seaweed and marsh grasses clinging to my skin.
    As I settle in to the reality of the second skiff now—Max’s, of course; he would have run from the village down to the Chawterley pier to bring over the Row v. Wade —it occurs to me that it was Max’s boat we stole that night we went gut-running with Frank and Beau and Trey and Doug. “Borrowed,” Ginger and Trey had insisted. Does Max know wetook his boat? Would he want to know? Would he even care? I think of the things I know that I never wanted to, and I imagine how I might start to tell the Ms. Bradwells what I’ve done, knowing I should.
    It’s Ginger’s voice, though, that breaks the silence as we approach the pier. “Anne Sexton. My mother would be Anne Sexton,” she says softly, uncertainly. “ ‘I’m no more a woman / than Christ was a man.’ Except Mother would never have killed herself.”
    She begins issuing directions before any of us can respond. She puts me at the helm again—just for a second, she says, just hold it straight—and she lowers the sail, then directs Laney and Betts to take their heels off and hurries them to the front of the boat. She sticks a coiled length of rope in Betts’s hands, then turns to Laney and says, “When we’re close enough, you’re going to jump across to the pier.” Then to Betts, “You just toss her