Free The Four Ms. Bradwells by Meg Waite Clayton

before Mother sold the house; back to Ann Arbor; back to New York.
    Max says, “I’m glad you’re here, even if just for the weekend, Ginge. It’s been bleak, looking out every night to see Chawterley gone dark.”
    Gone dark. It’s an expression I’ve heard so often from Cook Islanders, but never about our house. We were always summer people until Mother moved here. Chawterley was always dark all winter. That never bothered islanders the way a house in town sitting vacant did. No one could see its lights anyway. We shared this end of the island with no one.
    Now Max has a house here, too, on a one-acre lot Mother sold him not far from the no-name road. Mother never would have sold to anyone else; she didn’t sell for the money. My brother Beau approached Max, then suggested the idea to Mother, who’d been fond of Max even when he was just one of the many island kids we ran around with. It made Beau nervous to have Mother out here alone.
    “Mother goes to all this trouble to make sure Max builds a house that she won’t even have to admit is there,” I tell Laney and Mia and Betts, “then asks him to leave a light on at night.”
    “Just an eight-watt LED,” he says. “It’s not like she was asking me to drill in the Arctic Refuge to keep it lit.”
    “What about the lighthouse?” Laney asks quietly, addressing Max as if she can bear to talk to him about this even if she can’t talk to us. “The lighthouse puts out a lot of light.”
    “Built a new one down to town, where the ferry stops in,” Max says, the funny preposition choices identifying him as an island boy despite the many years he spent in New York. He alone looks north, to where the old lighthouse sits as silent and empty as Chawterley, its white shingle tower rising up to the red of the lantern deck and cupola, the lightless beacon. “The darkness out here’d make anybody lonely,” he says.
    I turn my back to the lighthouse, looking down the marshy shoreline to Max’s house. I’ve never imagined Mother lonely out here. It’s hard to imagine Chawterley without a dozen Cooks and Conrads and Humphreys setting off to hunt in Goose Marsh or sail to Lightning Knot or stir up whatever trouble we could find in town. And Mother wasn’t a woman to be lonely. She didn’t indulge much in emotions that couldn’t be channeled into bettering the world.
    Mia follows up on Max’s LED comment, the two of them launchinginto an enthusiastic discussion splattered with terms like “autoclaved aerated concrete,” Kirei Wheatboard, “passive solar gain.” Who knew postindustrial denim batt insulation (recycled blue jeans in the ceilings and walls) could be as sexy as unrecycled blue jeans falling away from bare hips? That’s where they’ll slip out of their blue jeans together, I think: at Max’s house, with the low-e glass sliders wide open to the water. Maybe on the sustainable bamboo floor. What would it be like to have sex on a bamboo floor? Or perhaps in the spa, in the glow of the LED landscape lighting, although fucking in water (even solar-heated water) isn’t as great as it sounds. So maybe on the spa’s wide stone edge, with their feet in the water to help keep them solar-heated, too.
    I try to imagine Ted and me slipping out of our blue jeans on the stone coping of Max’s spa, with the waterfall splashing away from us, pouring toward the bay. Ted used to love to slip my blue jeans down my hips anywhere outdoors. Or slide his hands up under my skirt to find I wasn’t wearing underwear. He liked public places, with the risk of being caught, and so did I: the woods in Central Park in broad daylight; a conference table at the office late at night; a little alleyway in the East Village where, to be honest, a couple seen in the act probably wouldn’t have fazed anyone.
    We have a spa in the backyard in Cleveland. No waterfall, but it is solar-heated, with a gas heater, too, because you can’t get to a hundred degrees on solar alone. We