Osprey Island

Five

HOW BLACK THE NIGHT THAT BLINDS OUR HUMAN HEARTS

Within the chalky prison-walls the infantile screams of the little hawks could be heard as they pounded feebly on the shell.

—WILLIAM I. FINLEY, “Photographing a Hawk’s Nest”

LORNA SAT ON THE CABIN PORCH, awkward and misplaced in the morning sun. She wished the light were like the stiffness of a new pair of shoes, and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine breaking it in. The sun eddied orange beneath her eyelids. If it were always sunny, maybe she could stay. If the darkness never set in to her again, holding her sure and tight, if she never turned away from the sun, just stayed outside with Squee forever and never went back inside, where blankets were hung over the windows to keep the light from bringing into relief all that was wrong with the way they lived. Squee belonged in the light, an angel child—that blond head of his, that devil’s grin on an angel’s face, her boy. But she could already see how worry wore him down, worry over his mama, shut tight in the dark like her life depended on it. To stay with Squee in the sun she’d have to vow never to take another drink. Never look at Lance again, because Lance was darkness, and Lorna’s dream of light ended right with him.

Lorna pushed inside through the screen door, let it close behind her, and then shut the wooden door as well. It was hard to see inside the cabin. Sunlight edged the window curtains like it might burst through, blow the drapery to smithereens the way hurricanes shattered windows from the outside or fires burst them open from within. It seemed wrong to Lorna that a day could be both dark and light. If it was dark and stormy you could stay inside with all the drapes drawn and lie in bed and drink and play cards and watch a movie with your kid curled up on your lap, and the world wouldn’t seem like it wanted something from you. It was so much easier to be a person when it rained.

Lance was on the couch, and he called to her, “Baby . . .” and she went to him, drawn back to the safest, warmest place there ever was. No fight, no struggle. Falling into Lance took no effort at all. It was like being conceived again, going back to the place before you were born, before there was work to bring you into the world. Sometimes Lorna wished she’d been allowed to stay in the first womb she’d known. No birth, no adoption, just a quiet death there in the darkness, before all the trouble of life had begun.

“C’mere,” Lance said, and held his glass to her lips, and held her head while she swallowed. The whiskey was warm and burned through her, so it wasn’t that she’d won the fight or lost the fight, there just was no more fight. And, yes, there were chores to be done, but what did it really matter if she did them or not? What did the world really matter? Squee was OK, off with Roddy, and what did anyone in the whole fucking world want, really, except to be left alone, and no one could accuse her of not leaving everyone the fuck alone. This. This was all she really wanted, just this.

She curled in Lance’s lap, and he pushed his hand down into her pants, warm into warm, like everything was meant to be, Lance warm in her, his fingers reaching all the way up inside to the darkest place they could find, because that’s all Lance wanted too: more darkness than he could get on the earth. He wanted to crawl inside her, as she crawled inside him. She opened around him and he pushed into her, like he could travel forever until he was gone. She felt herself contract around him, reached up with her arms to encircle him, realized her cheek was resting in his lap. Sometimes she wondered how he still got hard, because she’d heard that drinking made you lose that, but he’d never lost the ability to push himself inside her, everything concentrated deep in the pit of her pelvis. The darkness was immense, and she could swim in it, feel it open up inside of her and around her, and when she came it bloomed bigger and her consciousness fell away.

When she woke Lance was standing with one hand against the wall, the other probing painfully at his bare foot, which he was holding off the ground. There was a pilled yellow blanket nailed over the window beside him, and he yanked it down so he could see better, Lorna wincing as the blanket crumpled to the floor and sunshine poured in through the window. Dust glowed in the air like evidence of infection.

“Put it back,” Lorna pleaded, hand shielding her eyes.

“There’s a fucking piece of glass in my foot.” Lance tested his weight on the floor, grimacing.

Lorna levered herself up to sitting. Her head hurt, as though she’d missed her coffee. She leaned on the arm of the couch and tried to push herself up, but she didn’t have the strength, so she rolled onto her stomach and slid her knees to the floor, then climbed from a kneel to standing. She went to the window, bent slowly to pick up the blanket, and tried to jab it over the nails in the window frame, but it hurt her arms and she sank back to the floor and pulled the dusty blanket over her head. The light shone through—false, hopeful yellow—and she shut her eyes against it.

Lance was gone when she woke again, later, to a couple of waiters shooting the shit on the staff barracks’ back stoop.

“You go to Morey’s last night?” one boy said.

“Dude, I didn’t get this hangover in my room.”

“Yeah, so who was out?”

“I don’t know—you know, everybody, the usual.”

“How ’bout that girl?”

“Which girl?”

“The Irish one—Brigid.”

“Yeah, that Irish girl, yeah, she was there. With Lance fucking pissing himself over her.”

“She was with Lance?”

“He wished!”

“He was hitting on her?”

“It was pretty sick.” The boy paused. “Pathetic, you know? I totally feel for his wife, you know? I mean, that’s fucked up.”

“She’s been here before?” asked the boy who’d stayed in.

“Who, Lorna?”

“No, no. Brigid.”

“Nah. Her sister was here last summer. Fiona.”

“She as hot as Brigid?”

“Nah. I mean, she was good-looking enough, but not the same way, you know?”

“Yeah . . .”

The boys were silent a moment, lost in their own private reveries on the hotness of Brigid.

“What do you think of her?” the new boy said finally.

“Who, Brigid?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, she’s hot.”

“Like I’m blind!”

“I don’t know. She’s totally hot. But kind of prickly too, you know? Like she’s super smart or something. Kind of sneaky, sort of.”

“Yeah,” said the new boy, “you get the feeling, kind of, when you talk to her, like she’s listening kind of too carefully or something. Like she’s memorizing things or something.”

The other boy let out a long negative sigh, shaking his head and considering his reply as it slowly escaped. “Naaah,” he said, “I don’t think she’s that smart . . .”

They were quiet.

“Dude, you got another smoke?”

“Upstairs.” A moment later the door slammed.

Lorna lay in her house under the old dirty yellow blanket. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know, really, and nothing she hadn’t heard before. Nothing worse than she’d done herself. And still, it hurt. Because there was nothing in the world—even joy—that didn’t hurt.

ON THE LODGE PORCH THAT NIGHT, Peg and Jeremy sat off to themselves, away from the rest of the staff on the edge of the deck, their feet dangling. Squee and Mia were playing Ping-Pong at the table underneath the deck, and their squawks and cries of victory and defeat rushed up through the planking. Gavin was playing Spit with a waiter named Joe who didn’t talk much and seemed even less happy with where he was than Gavin. Brigid sat around a table with three guy waiters who were playing I Never and seemed thrilled to have a girl, especially Brigid, join their ranks.

“I never had sex with someone I worked with,” said one of the waiters, who looked fifteen and had probably never had sex with anyone at all. The group paused, collectively considering their own checkered pasts. Brigid was the only one to drink. Never mind that she hadn’t actually shagged the boy, only messed about with him once at a party somewhere. But these boys didn’t need to know that. Brigid liked how impressed they looked, all agog at a girl who’d freely tell them whom she’d fucked and how. She liked that she could look down on them now: so immature to be impressed the way they were.

The next boy took his turn and upped the ante. “I never had sex with my boss.” He had on a pink Lacoste shirt and looked to be feeling mischievous.

Again, Brigid drank alone. The boy whom she hadn’t actually shagged hadn’t actually been the boss, only a coworker, but Brigid felt a sense of obligation to give these boys something to fuel their little dreams.

The third boy said, “I never watched someone else having sex.”

Brigid turned to him, coy. “Does that include the person you were having the sex with then? Like: I never kept my eyes open?”

The guy laughed. “I never watched two other people, who were not me, having sex,” he said.

“Live?” Brigid asked. “Or pornography as well?”

“Live,” said Lacoste boy.

No one drank.

“All right, then,” Brigid said, “so I’ve got to think up something I haven’t done, is that right?” She pretended to be racking her brain.

“Don’t tax yourself,” said the boy in the pink shirt.

“I’ve got it: I never rented pornography,” Brigid said. All the boys drank, and she laughed at them and they laughed back.

By the time the game broke up there were at least ten of them playing and Brigid was plastered—there were actually plenty of things she hadn’t done, involving all manner of relatives and root vegetables, that she was all too happy to admit to never having done. Jeremy and Peg, who were clearly about to become the new staff lovebirds, had gone for “a walk on the beach,” and there was much speculation among the rest of the group as to what that meant. Gavin had made his way over from the card game and sat in a chair just behind Brigid, close enough that she could feel him shift and sigh, not close enough that she was sure he’d done it deliberately. She liked the feel of him close to her. He was driving her a bit insane. She liked that some. Not too much. But some.

“YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW, LANCE? You make an ass of yourself— you think I sit here with no fucking clue?”

“You talked to my mother?”

“I never talked to your mother. I don’t talk to your damn mother.”

“So what the fuck are you talking about?”

“You come in blasted out of your fucking mind, three in the morning . . . You think Squee doesn’t hear? You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“What am I doing? You tell me what I’m doing. Waking up your goddamn baby? Oh! Oh!” Lance threw his hands in the air, his voice high and squeaky. “Oh, don’t hurt my baby!”

Lorna looked as if she might strike him, but then she sank down to the table and buried her head in her hands.

Lance’s body released. He went to kneel by her chair, pushed his face into her lap, his cheek against her leg. “Baby,” he said, “Lorna.”

She let one hand fall to his head, ran her fingers through his hair, soft, greasy at the scalp, but so soft for a man, softer than anyone would think. “Go,” Lorna said quietly, “just go. Fuck whoever you want. Just go.”

“I didn’t fuck anybody.”

“Sure you did,” she whispered to the table.

“No I didn’t.” He opened his mouth on her thigh below the seam of her shorts. “I didn’t.”

“Why?” Lorna was crying now. “Why not?”

“I love you, Lorna Vaughn.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Don’t talk stupid, Lorna.”

“What do I care anyway? Fuck them . . . all those girls . . .”

Lance lifted his head abruptly, his demeanor changed again, his face accusing and hurt, a shield of defense shot through beneath his skin. “Why?” he demanded. “You guilty about something, Lorna? Maybe it’s you we should be talking about now? Who’s the one who goes and fucks whoever she goddamn pleases? You tell me that, Lorna. Who’d you go and fuck this time? Find yourself a waiter? What were you doing last night? Want to tell me that?” He stood and backed away haltingly, as if suddenly repulsed.

Lorna didn’t move, didn’t lift her head. She just stayed there face-down at the kitchen table in their shack by the Osprey Lodge, her arm wet with tears, her nose dripping on her arm, her head stuffed so full she couldn’t breathe, just let the snot and tears run down her, too afraid to lift her eyes. It was dark outside, but the overhead light above the table was on, and she heard Lance turn from her in disgust, stride away, across the room toward the door. She wanted to call out, to ask him to please put out the light, but she couldn’t. She tried, her head down, eyes shielded—“Please . . .”—but the slam of the screen door cut her short, his feet heavy on the porch steps as if damning each one as he went. Then she was alone under the glare of the kitchen light. All she could think was that she would stay there with her head down until it burned out on its own.

JEREMY AND PEG HAD RETURNED from their walk on the beach and were wending their way slowly back toward the staff barracks. They climbed the stone steps on the path between the laundry shack and the Squires’ cabin and had stopped to kiss awhile on the cobbled path when, from inside the Squires’ cabin, they heard the shouting. Peg broke away first, startled. Jeremy turned his head toward the cabin and in the same motion pulled Peg to him—away from the noise of a husband and wife, a mother and a father, yelling fuck you for everyone to hear—as though spending the better part of the evening with their tongues in each other’s mouths had served to designate him as her protector. Peg strained against his grip and craned toward the cabin, then ducked back when, a minute later, the front door flew open and Lance charged out, swearing to himself. Peg hid there under Jeremy’s wing and stayed very quiet until Lance had passed, tearing off toward the Lodge. Peg and Jeremy stood, stunned. Then Peg looked up to Jeremy, his face a good foot above her own.

“Where was the boy?” she asked, breathless and rushed.

Jeremy seized the imperative. “Under the deck, playing Ping-Pong before . . .” And without another word the two took off toward the Lodge to find Squee, his self-appointed guardians, teenage social workers certain they had only the best intentions: to look after the child.

Peg and Jeremy rushed out the sliding door and onto the porch, hand in hand, stopping just beyond the threshold, the sea breeze blowing in their faces as they scanned the crowd like young cops closing in on their man. Squee was scrunched into a wicker lounger with Mia, playing cat’s cradle with a piece of old string. Peg and Jeremy came at them. Jeremy stopped and suddenly checked his watch. It was just past ten.

“You two want to go into town and get some ice cream?” he said brightly, a camp counselor at heart.

The children struggled excitedly out of their chair.

“Go on and ask your mum,” Peg said to Mia, who dashed upstairs.

When she returned, nodding vehemently, she took Peg’s hand, and the group made their way down the steps to the parking lot and Jeremy’s car. The porch sitters heard the grumpy car engine turn over, die again, then turn over at last. When the car rolled around the bend in Sand Beach Road, conversation on the porch resumed as though nothing had happened. A few people made excuses and started up the hill toward the barracks. Brigid and Gavin sat and had another glass of whiskey. The last of the drinking boys headed off to bed. Brigid and Gavin smoked a cigarette. The night was warm, the air saturated with mist.

“What’s between our respective roommates, do you think?” Brigid asked.

Gavin gestured toward the stairs down which they’d disappeared with the kids. “What you see, I guess.” He shrugged and took a long, pensive drag on his cigarette, as if to imply that he had other things on his mind.

“You don’t get on, then?” Brigid asked.

Gavin shrugged again. “Don’t think we’ll be best friends.”

Brigid laughed, too eagerly.

“I think I’m going to head up.” He motioned to the hill. “You going to hang here?”

Brigid yawned conveniently. “Nah, I’m knackered.”

He gave a laugh, then pushed back his chair, gestured— after you.

She let herself lead.

They walked single file up the trail, not quickly, but with purpose. Brigid let her heart beat faster. The back door was propped open with a cinderblock, and Brigid pivoted on the stoop of the barrack so that she stood facing him in the threshold. The look on his face conveyed an acknowledgment of the inevitable. He took another step to her as if to plow her down in the doorway, but then he stopped abruptly. A breath escaped him, high and short, and he leaned in. His hands went to her shoulders, pushing her inside the building, against the dark wall of the downstairs hallway. He kissed hard, allowing her no opportunity to kiss back, only to take, as if this kiss was something he needed to give to her, like a present she might refuse if he equivocated in the slightest. She wanted to say, I wouldn’t turn you away, wanted to say it in her kiss, but couldn’t find the voice, the right intonation of movement, so she just let herself be kissed by Gavin and let herself think about how Peg and Jeremy were out with Squee and Mia, and how both their rooms were empty, and how, maybe, with this same kissing fervor, he might push her down onto that pathetic creaking cot bed and do whatever he wanted. She was quite sure she knew precisely what she wanted.

Gavin pulled away, took a step back in the hall as if to see what he was doing. “Good night, Brigid,” he said, and he turned and started up the stairs.

For a second Brigid thought he meant for her to follow, but then it seemed clear that wasn’t the case at all. She’d been kissed good night, nothing more. She leaned against the wall for a minute, her lips feeling large on her face. Then she collected herself and stepped back onto the stoop. Sleep seemed impossible now. She thought about going down to the pub; she wished everyone hadn’t already gone to bed. She even half wished she’d run into Peg and Jeremy, persuade them to come along. She could go alone. And maybe would, she thought.

She started back down the hill she’d just climbed and entered the Lodge through the back kitchen entrance, headed toward the dining room. She’d cross the porch, down the steps to the beach, which she’d follow to Morey’s, have a pint, sit on the back deck by herself if it came to that. She wanted that moment back, to do it again and prolong it, extend it, change it somehow so it would come out different. She felt cheated, and sore, as if she had reached for her wallet and realized it was missing, unsure whether she had lost it or someone had fleeced it from her. Just as she reached to slide open one of the glass dining room doors, her eye caught a tiny orange glow, which for a split second relieved her. There’s a bonfire down on the beach, she thought. Someplace to go! Then the image rearranged itself and she stopped and turned quickly. In the armchair in the dark back corner of the room, Lance was smoking a cigarette.

“Hey, gorgeous,” she heard him say. His tone was predatory but not menacing.

“Mr. Squire?” Brigid said to the dark corner.

Lance laughed, his head thrown back for a second in exaggeration. “Mr. Squire,” he repeated, mocking.

“Sorry,” Brigid said.

Lance shook his head. He waved her toward him, but she stood where she was. “No, no, honey,” he said. “That’s all right.” And they both stayed there, not saying anything for a minute.

“I was just on my way . . .” Brigid began.

“Rough night?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah, me too, baby,” he said.

“I’m about gumming for another drink . . .” she said, her voice drifting as she spoke.

“Go-min?” he mocked.

“Oh bleedin’ ”—she took on a dreadful American accent—“I want a drink,” she drawled.

“Yeah?” he said. “Yeah, I almost think I could use a drink myself,” he said softly, so sadly she almost felt sorry for him.

“I’ve some whiskey,” she offered.

“Oh . . .” he said, as though relishing the thought, knowing its power, knowing he shouldn’t, feeling how much he wanted it. “Oh . . .” he said again.

“Come, have a whiskey with me on the porch, won’t you?” she said.

“Oh, honey,” he said. “Could I do that?” His voice was different, the harsh tones gone, sadness overtaking.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll fetch it. Find us some jars—glasses— find us some glasses, why don’t you? And meet me on the porch.” She felt compelled to give him some direction, as if he were sitting there asking her, Please, tell me what to do.

He seemed grateful, and he struggled to his feet to make his way toward the bar at the far end of the dining room. “A hot redheaded angel,” he said, more to himself than to her. “A hot little angel.” Brigid went to the office, to Gavin’s staff cubby, where they’d stashed the whiskey.

On the deck, Lance took over Gavin’s chair from earlier that evening; Brigid reclaimed her own. She tipped whiskey into their glasses. He lifted his gingerly. “Cheers,” she suggested. “To better evenings.”

“Shit,” he said, and clinked her glass. He was a practiced drinker— downed his shot and lifted the bottle, his eyes on her: OK if I take another? She gestured: Be my guest. He poured and drank again.

“I thought you didn’t drink,” she said.

“Fuck you.” His tone mocked hers. Then he said, “It’s been a bad night.”

“Cheers,” she agreed.

“So what fucked you up tonight, pretty girl?” he asked.

“Whiskey,” she said, “and men.” She drank.

The night was quiet. Across the sound, pier lights from the mainland wharves and docks reflected on the water. A radio tower blinked. In the water, red and white lighted buoys bounced as the tide lapped and strummed against Sand Beach. A seagull flew in, landed on the porch railing nearby, and pecked at a fallen corn chip.

“And what’s it been that fucked with you this evening, Mr. Squire?” Brigid said.

Lance laughed again. “Mrs. Squire.” He took another long drink.

“I expect that’s as it’s meant to be,” Brigid said.

“Hmm.” Lance snorted. “Yeah, guess so.”

The seagull knocked the chip to the porch, hopped down behind it. Peck peck peck.

“Ever been married, beautiful?” he asked suddenly.

She laughed at that. “I’m just nineteen.”

Unfazed, he said, “So was I.”

“Nineteen? When you were married?”

He nodded. “Lorna was seventeen . . . prettiest girl you ever saw.”

“Is she still, then?” Brigid asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Lorna,” he said, as if introducing them.

“I haven’t had the pleasure,” she told him.

He wrinkled his brow. “You’re kind of a bitchy little thing, aren’t you?”

“What?” she said. “Why? What’ve I done?”

“What, me? Who, me?”

“And I’d begun to think you weren’t such a bollix as they’ve made you out to be.”

“What the fuck’s that?”

“Bollix? An arsehole,” she said.

“Well, you’d be wrong about that,” he told her.

“I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?” She drank the rest of her whiskey down and reached for the bottle.

“Should I fuck him up a little for you? Your college boy? He’s the one you’re pissed at? Should I fuck him around some for you?” Lance offered.

“No,” she said. “Grand of you to offer, all the same.”

“No problem.” There was another pause. “You like it when they treat you wrong?” he asked.

Brigid let out a soft snort. “I bloody must, mustn’t I?”

Some quiet, sipping.

“What’s happened between you and your wife?” she asked.

“Oh, married woes,” he said, as though she wouldn’t understand.

“I see: you’ll ask the questions, but you won’t stoop to answer them then, will you?”

Lance was flustered, suddenly afraid she might get up and leave. “No no no no no,” he said. “No, you got me wrong.”

“Oh I do, do I?”

“What do you want to know? I’ll tell you. You tell me what you want to know.” He waited. “Come on, you ask me. Anything you want to know.”

Brigid considered. “Do you cheat on your wife, Mr. Squire?”

Lance paused before answering. “I do not,” he told her.

“Hmm,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“That’s the truth, is it?”

“Do I look like I’m lying?”

She fixed her stare on him. “You always rather look as though you’re lying.”

“Nothing new,” he said, dejected. “You’re nothing new, sweetheart. That’s nothing, nothing, nothing new to me in the world.”

“Hmm,” Brigid said again. “Why’s that?”

“Why’s what?”

“Why’s it you always look as though you’re lying?”

“Couldn’t tell you.” He pouted out his lower lip and shook his head slowly.

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?” she asked, but all he did was laugh.

“You wouldn’t believe I was telling the truth anyway, would you?”

Now she laughed. “You claim you’ll not cheat on your wife,” she repeated, a detective taking inventory of the facts. “Yet you look on me as though you surely would . . .” It was not something she’d have said sober, and she knew it. Her ego was talking, nursing bruises.

Lance laughed uncomfortably. “Just wishing . . .”

“Wishing, are you?”

“Wishing,” he said, “wishing things were different . . . that everything was different . . .” he trailed off, then snapped back to attention. “You’re a nice girl,” he told her. “You’re a real nice girl.”

“I’m not all that nice of a girl,” she corrected him.

“Oh, you’re a nice girl . . . You don’t even know how nice of a girl you are.”

“If you’d be so kind as to tell that to the fucking college boy . . .”

He raised his glass. “To the fucking college boy.”

“To fucking the college boy, cheers,” she said, and he laughed, and they clinked and drank.

A car came up the beach road, its headlights cutting the night between water and Lodge. It slowed and turned into the Lodge’s driveway. Headlights disappeared, doors slammed. Brigid and Lance looked to the stairs. Peg was herding the kids, who stumbled before her as if they’d been awoken from sleep. When Peg looked up and saw Brigid, she started. Then her gaze fell to Lance and she froze, disapproval washing across her face. “Hel—hello.”

Lance’s eyes went to Squee, nearly asleep on his feet, and everything about Lance changed. The fuddled man drinking with Brigid on the porch receded, his confusion replaced by anger. He addressed his son. “Where the hell do you think you’ve been?”

Peg’s jaw set firmly. “We’ve taken the children for an ice cream,” she said, a thousand curses held under her tongue, which she’d never speak aloud. Even to Lance Squire.

“Your mother’s probably worried sick,” Lance accused Squee. He didn’t so much as acknowledge Peg’s presence. Jeremy stood by ineffectually. Lance said to Squee: “You didn’t even think about telling your mother where you were at, now, did you?”

“My mom said it was OK,” said Mia, who was standing beside Squee looking spooked, as if she’d had a bad dream and couldn’t shake the fear.

Lance fixed his stare on the little girl. “Did I ask what your mother said?”

No tears came to Mia’s eyes just then, though they were surely only delayed by shock.

“You get home,” Lance told Squee. “Now.”

No one moved. Then Peg spoke, finding her voice before the rest of them. It seemed likely that Jeremy might never speak again. Peg looked to her dumbstruck beau, her tone leveled by fury. “Take Mia to her mother, won’t you?” she said. “I’ll walk Squee up the hill.” And she turned without waiting for Jeremy’s response, touched Mia’s shoulder by way of good night, pivoted Squee around with her other hand, and led him away from the porch without another word.

There was no one in the cabin when Squee got there. He looked out the window and watched Peg walk away toward the staff house. Then he went to his room, prying off his sneakers and stepping out of them as he walked. They made a little trail to his bedroom door, which he closed firmly and locked. In his clothes, which were dirty and sweaty from a day of work outside, his hands and chin sticky with Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Squee climbed into his unmade bed, pulled the covers over him, and shut his eyes so hard against tears that he succeeded in stopping them from coming at all.