Osprey Island

Seven

IN THE SHADOW OF THY WINGS WILL I MAKE MY REFUGE

Lorna Marie Vaughn Squire died early Tuesday morning in a tragic fire at the Osprey Lodge laundry. She was thirty-six years old. The daughter of Arthur and Penelope Vaughn of Island Drive, Lorna was a 1970 graduate of Island High. She had been the head housekeeper at the Osprey Lodge since 1969 and was beloved by all. Lorna is survived by her husband, Lance Squire, 38, and a son, Lance Jr., 8. May she rest in peace.

—Island Times

ART VAUGHN WAS INCONSOLABLE. He’d been holding off mourning the loss of his daughter for more than twenty years, keeping alive the hope that she’d return to him someday. Now there was nothing more to put between himself and the pain, between the fact of the world with Lorna and the fact of the world without her. There were no maybes, no more possibilities, no more roads that led his daughter back to him. She was just gone, and Art Vaughn sat on his living room sofa and cried as he should have cried on Lorna’s wedding day.

Art and Penny Vaughn had been unable to conceive. But they had adopted Lorna in infancy, and Osprey Island was the only home she ever knew. The Vaughns were cut and dried: they acted according to the dictates of the Church, ate ground beef, Kraft Singles, and Rice-a-Roni, and lived in an aluminum-sided ranch house, blue ducks and pink cows stenciled on the walls, wicker baskets of syrupy potpourri and stitched quilt samplers festooning every cranny. Lorna’s parents loved her as a streak down the center of their otherwise eventless lives. They distrusted Lance even before they knew him, had always looked down on Merle Squire and the disgraces that defined her. When Lorna met Lance she was not yet thirteen years old—a child!— and Lance’s mere existence seemed to grant Lorna all the permission she needed to break into the lawless limbo of adolescence.

On an autumn evening in 1965, Lance had arrived at the Vaughns’ nest of faux-country charm to pick up Lorna for their first official date. It was his first and last encounter with Lorna’s father.

Lance was formal and officious, standing militarily at ease beside a framed cross-stitch of the Lord’s Prayer and answering to the third degree that passed for small talk when it came to some chump from the high school wanting to get into the panties of Art Vaughn’s only daughter. Art knew you could never trust a boy. His only hope, as he saw it, was to instill enough fear in the young man’s heart so that even if Lorna was ready to put out (as he feared she would), the boy might develop a case of temporary impotence. Art didn’t know if he had that kind of power to frighten, but for the sake of his little girl’s virginity, he gave it all he had.

“You’re Merle’s boy,” Art said. It was not a question.

“Yes sir.” Lance nodded once.

“Your mother’s doing well.” The pause that followed Art’s statements were his only indication of inquisition.

“Hasn’t done herself in yet,” Lance said.

“Say what?”

Lance shook his head in self-effacement.

“No word from your sister,” Art said. But if there’d been news from Kiki, everyone on Osprey would have heard it within hours. Art knew that. He’d heard talk about the Squires. Rumors about Merle finding the girl in Lance’s bed. Others said it was Lance in hers. And maybe all those were exaggerations. Maybe nothing like that had ever happened at all. But rumors started somewhere, suggested something of the truth that spawned them.

“No one’s heard from Kiki since summer,” Lance said, his eyes narrow as paper cuts.

Art lifted his wrist and looked at his watch as if it could tell him just how long she’d been gone and when she might be expected to turn up. “She’ll come ’round,” Art told Lance.

“She might,” Lance said.

“What kind of prayer is that, son?”

“Not a prayer, Mr. Vaughn.” Lance paused. His tone shifted darkly. “And I’m nobody’s son except my mother’s, sir.”

Art Vaughn blanched.

“Unless,” Lance went on, his voice slow and controlled, “unless you are my father. Which would make you a real sonofabitch.”

Art drew in his breath. “I beg your pardon,” he hissed.

Lance laughed, low and mean. He still held his hands behind his back. His feet were spread in a stance so vulnerable it was menacing, a stance that said, You threaten me so little I’d roll over on my back and bare my belly, you prick. “You don’t beg a thing from me, Mr. Vaughn. And I know you don’t give two shits for pardon, mine or anyone else’s.”

Art sucked in his gut. He reached for the front doorknob. “You better pray you’ve got the Lord’s pardon, boy. For that you better pray.” He opened the door, and Lance never set foot in the Vaughns’ house again.

Lorna, as a matter of course, was forbidden to see Lance Squire under penalty of every penalty that her parents (who were not creative people) could dream up. Perhaps equally predictable was how little these threats affected Lorna. She disobeyed every order laid upon her, and in the end it was more than clear who held the trump card in that family. What Lorna had on her parents was that they loved her a lot more—or at least in a qualitatively different way—than she loved them, and they forgave her every time, pulled her back into the fold, because they wanted her with them more than they wanted her justly punished. Lorna learned this lesson early: the less you cared, the more power you possessed. And it was maybe just that which kept her with Lance for so long. For everything you could say about Lance and Lorna—and there was certainly plenty to say—one true thing was that their love existed in a balance few people ever know. For everything they did wrong—and that was almost everything—there was something fundamentally right about the fact of them together.

In 1968 most of Lance’s high school buddies were breathlessly awaiting their eighteenth birthdays and the chance to go fight in Vietnam, but Lance, who’d had a childhood bout of measles that stole a good fraction of his hearing, didn’t go anywhere after graduation. He kept his job at Lovetsky’s car shop, rotating tires and patching flats, and Lorna stayed in school. She was no honors student, but she stuck it out, even after she got pregnant in the spring of her junior year and married that June in a big Island to-do held at the Lodge. The party was an uncharacteristically generous wedding present from Bud Chizek, although anyone would tell you he’d been acting strange—if understandably so—ever since Chas (his only son) had gotten killed in Vietnam six months before. But Bud didn’t only host Lance and Lorna’s wedding celebration—he invited the newlyweds to come live at the Lodge as heads of maintenance and housekeeping. Lance didn’t know why the tragedy of Chas’s death would prompt Bud to do such a thing, but he didn’t question a gift horse, at least not until he’d accepted the gift.

Art and Penny Vaughn were invited to the wedding out of cordiality, but they stayed home. That Lorna was pregnant surprised no one, least of all the Vaughns, who could have predicted it, despite higher hopes. And when Lorna lost the baby later that summer, it was no longer necessary that such a pretty seventeen-year-old girl be married to the island ne’er-do-well, but it was too late to take it all back. It was 1969, and Lance and Lorna were already well along on the path they’d follow to the end.

In the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, Penny was coping far better than her husband. She was eerily composed and ministering to Art when Eden knocked on their door that morning.

“Eden. Come in.” Penny stepped aside to let her pass.

“Oh, Penny,” Eden sighed, her tone meant to impart a world of sympathy. “Oh dear, no. I won’t bother you now. I only came to see if there’s anything you needed, anything I can do . . . Have you eaten? Can I bring you something? Something for Art?”

“Eden, you’re a dear. So thoughtful. I think we’re OK. Trying to stay busy, you know. Making up the guest room for Squee . . . Lord knows Lance can’t be caring for the boy now on his own.”

Eden nodded. “I have him at the house—Squee. He’s asleep—they were up all night. I guess we all were . . .”

Penny absently lifted her hand to her ear in the gesture of a telephone. “You just give a call when he wakes up and I’ll swing by for him . . .”

“Oh, I’ll run him down to you,” Eden cut in. She waved off toward her car. “Goodness, of course I’ll bring him down to you.” For the degree of emotion in their exchange, Penny and Eden might have been discussing carpooling to Wednesday-night bingo at the VFW. This was hardly unusual for Eden, well known for her disturbingly placid reactions to events that sent others careening. Penny Vaughn, on the other hand, was a woman who regularly wept during her weekday television “stories” and was known to carry a purse-pack of Kleenex for when she teared up during a particularly moving Sunday service. But there she was, at the dawn of the most dreaded tragedy of her life, puttering about like a chickadee. Penny Vaughn was perched at a very precarious place; whenever she finally fell, it seemed clear she would fall hard.

“You sure there’s nothing I can do . . . get . . . for you?” Eden asked again.

Penny shook her head primly. “Just my sweet grandson,” she clucked. This was odder still, in that Art and Penny had never spent much time with Squee at all, had never been particularly interested in Lance Squire’s progeny. Lorna and Lance had certainly spoken poorly enough of Lorna’s folks to color Squee’s opinion of his grandparents. Some Sundays Art and Penny asked to bring Squee with them to church, to which the Squires occasionally conceded, reluctantly. Art and Penny seemed less concerned for the actual person who was Squee than for the soul they believed to be housed therein, which they felt obliged to look out for. If they could have taken that to church with them and left the ragamuffin back at the Lodge, playing in the dirt outside his parents’ ill-kept home, they would quite surely have packed the Squee-specter into Penny’s pocketbook alongside the tissues and smuggled it into the service for some necessary deep-cleansing.

Eden took a detour by the Lodge on her way back home to stop in at the Squires’ cabin and pick up some things for Squee. She parked as close as she could get to the cottage and walked past the firemen and police still on the scene, past the charred remains of what had been the laundry shack.

“Hey, Eden,” the sheriff called out as she passed. As if it were any ordinary day.

She waved. “Just picking up some clothes for the boy,” she said. The sheriff waved her along.

Inside, in the room that had to be Squee’s, there was a chest of drawers, but everything seemed to have exploded out of it onto the floor. Eden would have collected some clothes in a pillowcase, but there didn’t even appear to be a pillow. The bed was covered in a stained mattress pad but nothing else. A Star Wars sleeping bag lay in a slump on the floor. She found a trash bag in the kitchen and threw in an assortment of T-shirts, shorts, underwear, and socks, all of which she’d have to wash when she got home.

On her way back up the hill, Eden passed Roddy in his truck. They paused, idling in the road, leaning out their windows to talk.

“I’m going to see what I can do down there,” Roddy said. “Find Bud . . . see . . .”

Eden nodded. “You’re a good boy, Roddy.”

Roddy closed his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, Ma,” he said, as though it pained him. “Oh, Ma.”

Back at Eden’s, Suzy and the children were half awake on the living room couch, blindly watching a television screen they could hardly see in the glaring midday sun. Mia was now wearing a T-shirt of Roddy’s that came down past her knees. Eden loaded Squee’s clothing into the washer, then busied herself baking a lentil loaf and an apple brown Betty for Penny and Art. She prepared peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and got Squee to eat a few bites, though he did so mechanically and seemingly without hunger. Squee was operating robotically, but his lack of animation almost seemed a blessing. He seemed dampened, his reactions to the world dulled. Against everything Eden believed, she allowed the kids to sit dumbly in front of the television all afternoon. Even Eden understood the necessity of mindlessness on some occasions.

When Suzy began to ready herself and Mia to return to the Lodge that evening, Squee wanted to go back with them. “Is Roddy there?” he asked. “I need to go help Roddy.” It was more vitality than he’d exhibited all day.

Suzy knelt down beside him. “Squee, babe,” she said, “you’re going to keep helping Roddy just like you have been, but what’ll help him the most right now is if you go and stay for a little bit with your Grandpa Art and Grandma Penny. They’ve got a room all ready for you, and they’re really going to need you with them now.” Suzy’s voice was teacherly and terrible.

Squee’s face was, for the first time that Suzy had seen, set in a child’s angry stubbornness. “I have to go to Grandma and Grandpa Vaughn’s?” he whined.

“Yeah, babe, for a little bit, you do . . .”

Squee looked weary and drained. He said, “Grandma and Grandpa Vaughn suck.”

It was all Suzy could do to keep from bursting into laughter. Her struggle seemed to please Squee, who brightened some. Suzy said, “That’s exactly what I used to say when I had to go visit my Grandma Dolly.”

Squee didn’t speak, just looked to Suzy as if he wanted more.

“It’s just for a little bit, Squee. Just until your dad’s back from Grandma Merle’s . . .” she trailed off. It was a prospect that didn’t make anyone feel any better at all.

THE LODGE WAS OVERLY QUIET. You might have suspected hubbub, but there was none. It was quiet as a funeral, small groups of people huddled in corners, processing the events. Everyone had a version to tell: how they’d heard, where they’d been, what they’d thought at first, how that had changed. Sheriff Harty and Deputy Davey Mitchell spoke to the employees a few at a time. As some of the last people to hear, if not see, Lorna Squire alive the previous night, Peg and Jeremy were questioned together, their responses taken and recorded with great enthusiasm on the part of the deputy who didn’t often get to do much but look stern and holler at kids he caught climbing the yacht club fence for late-night swims.

No foul play was suspected—what was foul about it? A very sad, very, very drunk woman who’s just had a fight with her husband passes out on the couch, a lit cigarette in her fingers . . . What more was there to say? She left no note. No intimation of suicide. But whose mind didn’t it cross? It wasn’t hard at all for anyone to picture Lorna Squire doing herself in. They’d watched her take her own life, day by day, for years. They wondered what would happen to Squee, what would happen to Lance, but people had wondered all of those things when Lorna was alive. She’d always been dying; now she was dead. In the wake of the fire Gavin found himself overcome by a sense of protectiveness that made him envy his roommate, Jeremy. He wanted someone in his arms the way gawky, pimpled Jeremy cradled Peg in his, and though Brigid wasn’t exactly what he wanted, she was also clearly not unwilling to have him nearby.

None of this was what Gavin had expected. He’d been prepared for a summer of long walks with Heather, his Stanford girlfriend, on the beaches of her childhood, which she’d so languorously described to Gavin as they lay pinned to each other in his dorm bed back at school. It was meant to be a dream summer. She’d told him about the hotel, straight out of Dirty Dancing, she’d said. And he’d pictured the two of them, like Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, only reversed, kind of, since he was the one from the upper-middle-class family in LA, she the island girl he loved. Gavin liked that about himself, that of all people to fall in love with, he’d tumbled not for a Palo Alto sorority girl or a politician’s daughter from D.C., but for a girl from the other side of the proverbial tracks. His parents had liked Heather, thought her, as he had, smart and sensible, someone who valued a good education but also held onto dreams of a family and a quiet life, dreams Gavin had felt himself latch on to, perhaps for lack of real, tangible dreams of his own. But his parents had certainly not understood their son’s desire to go off and serve prime rib dinners to the East Coast vacation set rather than lead wilderness trips in the Sierras or scramble for some prestigious summer internship in San Francisco. Gavin had been proud of his decision. Also, he liked the notion of following a woman, not a career, liked thinking of himself not as a doer but as a lover.

When Heather had announced her intention to return home to Osprey Island for the summer, Gavin had felt gallant in offering to accompany her. She’d protested, albeit meekly, saying no, that was crazy, what was he going to do, wait tables at the Lodge? For real? And he liked the picture he’d painted himself into: he was the boy who loved her and wanted to get to know her family. There was even a part of him that wanted to fall in love with that island, to step off the clanking old ferry Heather’d described and into a place that would feel more like home than home had ever felt. Heather was to be his entrance into another world. They’d finish their degrees and move back to Osprey, have an island wedding at the old golf house on the hill. Maybe secretly Heather’d already be pregnant, and they’d move into an A-frame overlooking the sound and start their own family. They’d make their living restoring old houses and selling them to wealthy New Yorkers looking for vacation homes. Or they’d open a restaurant, work like hell from Memorial Day to Labor Day and have the rest of the year to themselves. Gavin had allowed himself these dreams.

He felt now—given the circumstances which had arisen since his arrival—that Heather hadn’t protested his coming to Osprey quite as much as she should have. It was possible, he conceded, that she had protested vehemently and he’d merely taken it as her thoughtfulness for his other prospects, his welfare. Now all that thrummed through his mind were imagined conversations he invented between Heather and her high school boyfriend, Chandler—late-night phone calls in April and May between Heather’s dorm room and Chandler’s parents’ home on Osprey. Heather complaining about the boy from LA who wouldn’t take no for an answer, Chandler saying, You got to tell him no. And Heather whining, I tried. And Chandler saying, Not hard enough.

From the Lodge deck Gavin could see a redhead sitting down on the beach. Beyond her, just offshore, the seagulls swooped and rose from the water like lazy yo-yos. To the right was Morey’s Dinghy, tucked where the sandy beach gave way to reedy swamp. To the left Sand Beach Road extended a good mile along the shore. Gavin crossed and made his way along the narrow, splintering boardwalk that ran between the asphalt and the sand. The whitewashed railing left a chalky residue on his hand, and he wiped it on his jeans as he tromped over the sand toward Brigid. She had on gym shorts and a striped bikini top. She was reading a fashion magazine.

“Looking to catch a little skin cancer?” he called, approaching.

She turned, shielded her eyes from the sun, and leveled her gaze at him soberly. “I think they’ve determined it’s not contagious.”

He hovered. “Still, you’re pretty pale to be lounging out, aren’t you?”

“Ah!” She clasped her hands at her heart. “Look at him! He cares!”

Gavin sat down in the sand beside her towel, legs bent out in front of him, hands on his knees. He looked over the bay. “How you doing?”

“Such attention! Hardly know what to do with myself.”

“You want me to go?” Gavin offered.

Brigid fixed him in her stare. “Now, what do you think?”

Gavin gave her a conciliatory smile but said nothing. They looked out at the water. After a minute Brigid said, “Not so bad, considering.” Then she said, “How are you, then?”

“OK,” he said. A pause. “You going out tonight?”

Brigid shrugged noncommittally: Make me an offer.

“You think it’s wrong to go out?” Gavin asked.

“Fuck if I know.”

“Yeah . . .”

“I never so much as laid eyes on the woman,” Brigid said.

“Yeah,” Gavin said, “but everyone who’s from here knew her.” He thought for a moment. “I wonder if they’ll even open the bar. I mean, it’s a pretty damn small town.”

“Pub or not,” Brigid said, “I’ll be fucking gumming for a pint by evening.”

“That worry you ever?” Gavin said, half-teasing. “That nationalistic need for beer?”

“About as much as your nationalistic need for cheeseburgers worries you, I’d say.”

“Touché.” Gavin smiled.

Brigid faced him then and nodded once. She was taking note of his challenge, registering it; he’d set out the ante and she’d met it. She didn’t raise him. She was waiting. Exercising some caution, for once.

“How are we on whiskey?” he asked.

She looked startled for a moment. “Out entirely,” she said, regaining composure. “Polished it off last night, Mr. Squire and myself, in fact.”

“Oh?” he said. “Oh, really?”

“He’s not such a bleedin’ maggot as everyone thinks . . .”

Gavin looked surprised. And skeptical.

“I mean, he’s desperate sad . . .”

“And losing your wife doesn’t make that any easier.” Gavin shook his head, as if he had a clue what Lance was going through.

“He’s just full of wind and—”

“Maybe . . .”

“I just think he’s maybe not so up entirely brutal as all that.” It was hard to condemn a thirty-eight-year-old widower, especially one who, it seemed, had garnered nothing but condemnation for much of his life. It was even harder when considering Squee, because you wanted to think that somehow Lance might be able to be a good father to the kid. You wanted to hope, however far-fetched that hope might be.

“Getting sweet on old Lance, now?” Gavin teased.

“Course I am,” Brigid growled. “I just love a man in mourning.”

“Jesus!” he said.

Brigid sighed. “I’ve not rapid endeared myself to you now, have I?”

Gavin laughed a little. “You’re not exactly delicate,” he allowed. “I think you take some getting used to.” He thought for a second. “You’re not so easy to figure out.”

“I’m not bloody easy!” she balked. “It’s not been me shoving people up against the wall and kissing them and then tearing off like a bleedin’—”

“I’m sorry ...”

“Oh, you are, are you? Sorry for kissing me, or sorry for tearing off—”

“Wait a second,” he said, his voice silencing hers. “Wait. Look: I’m sorry. I just . . . Look, I’m just really confused these days. I’m not really sure what I want, OK? I’m just—”

Brigid cut him off defiantly. “Well, put some manners on yourself then, but don’t be—”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Shut your gob with ‘sorry’ already!”

“Jesus—why are you so antagonistic with me? What did I ever do to you?”

“You haven’t done a thing, aside from shoving your tongue down my throat, which I quite enjoyed, so I won’t go on about it . . . Only you’ve pissed me off—”

“Look,” he interrupted her. “Look, can we just start over? Please? OK? Can we just start over from the beginning? Wipe the slate clean? Try this again?” His eyes entreated her; his hands were open in offering.

She let out a breath, an ironic laugh. She shook her head and, rolling her eyes, brushed the sand from her hand and held it out to him. “Brigid,” she said.

“Hi, Brigid, I’m Gavin,” he said, shaking her hand. “Really nice to meet you . . . So where’re you from, Brigid?”

“Bloody Americans.” Brigid snorted. “So bleedin’ friendly, the lot of you!”

WHEN IT WAS TIME to leave for Penny and Art’s, Squee ran and hid down in the ravine behind Eden’s house. Eden hollered his name into the twilight for half an hour, pleading, cajoling, begging, before she threatened to go get Roddy, who she was sure would be none too pleased with Squee for acting so irresponsibly at a time like this. Squee emerged, somber and reluctant, from the woods. “Don’t tell Roddy, OK?” he asked, and that was the last thing he said as Eden handed him a small old suitcase of Roderick’s packed with his washed and neatly folded clothes, and they drove down the hill to his grandparents’ house. Art had already gone to bed, but Penny greeted them at the door with a grandmotherly flourish and welcomed Squee inside like some sort of delicious prey. Eden stroked the boy’s hair as he stood beside her and paused a moment, her hand upon his head as though she were saying a prayer, before she bade them good night and made her way back to the car alone.