Osprey Island

Ten

HOW THE OSPREY TENDS ITS NESTLINGS

From my canoe on the Connecticut River I have often watched the male enter the eyrie with his catch. After he eats the head, his mate takes the remainder from him and feeds the young the choice center part, bit by bit, saving the tail for herself. But in Florida, Fred Truslow, who photographed ospreys so beautifully for this article, saw a male depart from etiquette. “He brought back a pound-and-a-half weakfish and sat there nibbling,” Fred said. “When he ate beyond the head, the female clucked impatiently. When he reached the halfway mark on the body, she grew strident. And when he ate the tail section, she flew off with an angry scream. A few moments later she was back with a fish of her own. This she divided—center part for the youngsters, head and tail for herself.”

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

SUZY’S FIRST OFFICIAL ACT as head housekeeper was to clean the Squires’ cottage. Lance would be coming back from Merle’s, and word from Merle was he wanted his son with him, which worried everyone, since Lance had never particularly wanted Squee around when Lorna was alive. Still, they tried to understand. Squee was all Lance had left of his wife. It made sense he’d want to cling to him. Wouldn’t you? they murmured, pausing to chat in the aisles of the IGA, at the bar, as they shuffled out of the Episcopal Church.

Suzy gathered the housekeeping girls that morning. “Let’s just get in there and do it. A whole crew of us, it shouldn’t take that long.”

She was wrong. It took six of them all day. “Remember,” Suzy kept saying as they uncovered another den of mouse corpses—trapped on sticky-tape, bloody and desiccated—inside a kitchen drawer, “the rest of your work this summer is going to feel like a piece of cake after this.” By afternoon the girls were rolling their eyes, and Suzy shut up about it. When she and Brigid started going through the bedroom, collecting Lorna’s things, folding her clothes into discarded produce-packing boxes from the IGA, they were on their last legs.

“How well did you know her, then?” Brigid asked, standing at the closet door, surveying the contents, unsure where and how to delve in.

“In high school, I guess I knew her pretty well . . . better than I wound up knowing her, I guess.” Suzy sighed heavily. “It was hard, with Lance . . . she just kind of cut off other people.”

Brigid reached for an empty box. “He couldn’t be so altogether dreadful as everyone imagines, could he?” She sat down in the open mouth of the closet and dug in. They had designated a “Lance” mound on the bed, to be dealt with later, and Brigid began riffling through the closet, sorting “Lance” and “Lorna,” bed or box.

“Yeah, he probably is . . .” Suzy chuckled bitterly a moment, then sobered up. “No,” she revised herself, “he’s probably not . . .”

“Do you know him well, then?”

Suzy let out another spurt of hard laughter. She didn’t think very far ahead when she said, “Well, I knew him.”

Brigid turned around to see Suzy’s face, and grinned. “Oh, did you . . . ?”

“It’s a really small island,” Suzy said. “You grow up here and it can get a little incestuous.”

“So, you and Mr. Squire . . . you were a couple, then?”

“Me and Lance? Oh, god no.” Suzy tried to laugh, but her discomfort was growing.

Brigid stopped what she was doing. “But you . . . ?” she prompted.

Suzy shook her head regretfully, swallowing hard. She was an idiot to have said anything. “Unfortunately,” Suzy managed to get out, “very unfortunately, yes.”

Brigid let her jaw drop as she attempted to picture the scene of it. She wasn’t just going to let the subject go.

Suzy reached for the packing tape. “It was such a huge mess . . .” She had to dig herself back out of this somehow. “I mean, Lance and Lorna, they’d been together for a couple years at that point. And not that Lance didn’t fuck . . . Not that Lance didn’t mess around, back then at least . . .”

Brigid was about to speak, but then didn’t.

“Oh, it was such a big mess,” Suzy said. She wanted the conversation to be over. She wanted it never to have begun. “I was friends with Lorna. It never should have happened. And then my brother—my brother was like Lance’s best friend. He found out and got furious . . . And then he went off and died . . .” Suzy peered at a plastic bag she’d discovered under the bed; she held it up to the light to discern what might be inside.

“Your brother?” Brigid said.

“Yeah. Vietnam. That glorious war.” Suzy opened the bag, sniffed at it tentatively, and pitched it into the industrial garbage bag in the far corner. “It’s just one goddamned drama after another around here.”

“I’m sorry,” Brigid said softly.

They were quiet then, for a time, sorting clothes. Brigid thought about the ethics of going through someone’s closets—Lorna might have been dead, but Lance wasn’t, and the closets were half his. Did being married to a dead person suddenly mean that the whole world could go riffling through your underthings? Brigid thought in some ways that living on this island seemed to simply imply that the guy pumping your gas had probably changed your diaper, and the woman serving your burger was likely sleeping with your dad. Dirty laundry was public domain. Which was either a terribly healthy, out-in-the-open, no-secrets-here sort of a thing, or it wasn’t. And what seemed most likely was that no matter how soiled the laundry hanging out on the clothesline, you could be altogether sure there was something far dirtier balled up and festering in a plastic bag in a corner of the basement where even the snoopiest didn’t think, or dare, to go.

If Brigid had wanted to ask more of Suzy—about Lance, about Chas, about the island dramas Suzy had known—she either refrained or was too caught up thinking about how she might find her own way into Osprey lore: as the girl who took up with the fellow who almost came between Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane. So now Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane could go on and pump out their nineteen children who’d all grow up hearing the stories of how their ma had nearly gone off with a college boy from California, but didn’t, and, well, so now here they all were. Brigid was entirely pleased with the role she might play: the Irish chambermaid whom Gavin had taken up with, with whom he had a torrid and passionate affair, while Heather and Chandler got soft and fat and ever more local.

Brigid wasn’t stupid. She could see quite well—in herself, for fuck’s sake—why a place like Osprey Island could be addictive, why it might be dead hard to break away from it entirely. Your life mattered enough here that people would be talking about you long after you’d gone. And there was something lovely about that. Yes, all right, Brigid conceded, big fish, small pond and all. Yet she was altogether gratified to be making her way into island history as she was. You didn’t hear anyone on Osprey Island talking about her sister Fiona, now did you?

LANCE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, with Merle, in time for dinner that night, but he didn’t eat with the rest of the staff in the dining room or on the porch. Merle made up an invalid’s sick tray and brought it to him at the cabin. He sat in that newly sanitized home, barely noticing the work that had been done. It struck him as somehow logical, or at least right, that his world should be suddenly swept clean, all evidence of Lorna stacked along the wall in boxes marked CREAMED CORN and MALT-O-MEAL. The cottage looked as empty as Lance felt, yet just because everything had gotten picked up and wiped down and vacuumed away didn’t mean that nothing had ever been there. You could erase mess, but not history. Lance just sat in the armchair, poured himself a stiff glass of bourbon, and demanded his son. “Where is he?” Lance asked Merle. “Where’s my boy?”

“I’m sure they’ll bring him over in a bit,” Merle said, calming him. She’d never talked to Lance a whole lot, hadn’t known intimately what went on in his and Lorna’s life; nonetheless, she felt strangely hopeful. Maybe that was something you never lost as a parent: the hope that your kid might do something right someday. She’d certainly had more than enough discouragement on that front, but you wanted to believe that people always had the capacity to change. Especially your children.

“He wants Squee back at the Lodge tonight?” Eden’s incredulity was matched only by the ferocity of her anger at Lance’s sheer, arrogant, ignorant, selfish gall.

“That’s what I was told,” Roddy repeated. “Bring him back after dinner.”

“No!” Eden cried. She stamped her foot into the ground between garden rows. She held a bushel basket to her chest defensively. She’d been harvesting snap peas.

“Ma, you can’t keep the man’s son against his will. He’s got rights. A man wants his son with him, you can’t deny him that . . .”

“His son!”

“Look, he’s no model parent, I’ll give you that, but the man’s grieving, you know? He just wants what he’s got left of family . . .”

“Oh for the love of god!” Eden cried. “His family? He wants his son? Lance Squire’s been denying his paternity since the day Lorna told him she was pregnant! Goddamn it, Lorna!” Eden swore as though it was Lorna, not Roddy, standing in the garden beside her. “Goddamn it!”

Roddy stood by, helpless.

“Let me tell you something, son,” Eden said, and her voice was low, as if she was afraid that Squee might hear them from the house, over the babble of the television. “Let me tell you that that man would have no claims on that child if Lorna’d done what she ought to have done and put Father Unknown on Squee’s birth certificate and made a goddamn will and put someone else as legal guardian in case something ever happened to her—Art and Penny, me, Reesa Delamico and Abel, anyone, anyone’d have done it. But no, that was too much for Lorna to manage. She didn’t want to hurt Lance. Swore up and down it was Lance’s baby—” Eden paused, her face twisted with emotion. “Do you see how hard it was to be any part of that girl’s life? Can you see what it was like to sit by and watch her ruin every chance she ever got to right herself? She was a smart girl—I don’t even know if you know how smart of a girl she was. But so stupid ! So goddamn stupid about things. Goddamn it, Lorna!” she swore again, gripping her green pea basket to her body as if it were the child she’d protect at any cost.

Roddy’s own anger at that point was growing less focused on Lance and more on Eden. “You planning on telling me what in hell you’re talking about?”

Eden ignored the question. “Go talk to him, Roddy. Go over there and talk to Lance—maybe he’ll listen to you . . .”

“Not if I don’t know why I’m talking to him or what I’m talking about! No.”

“Roddy,” she begged. “I tell you: it’s too complicated to open up that sack of worms without letting out every other question that comes along with it. Too many things you don’t need—and you don’t want to know. Could you trust your mother, please? Just take my word and talk to Lance . . . ?”

Roddy stood his ground.

“For Squee’s sake, Roddy,” she pleaded. “Please, for the sake of that child . . .”

“How about for the sake of that child you tell me what the hell is going on.”

Eden saw her defeat, her mind already calculating how much he’d need to know. She would reveal the bare minimum of what there was. “You,” she accused her son, “have turned out to be a very stubborn and unforgiving man, Roddy Jacobs.”

Roddy almost smiled. “Just like you raised me to be.”

Eden narrowed her eyes. She spoke quickly, as though she’d agreed to say it once and only once, and he could catch what he caught and forever after hold his peace.

“I’m no doctor,” Eden said, her voice so low it was nearly lost. “And I’ve surely never examined the man, but as far as I can tell you, I’m pretty damn sure that it’s a medical impossibility for Lance Squire to have children. I’m pretty sure he’s infertile, or some such, and never has been anything but. He’s well aware of that fact. And whatever Lorna said, I know Lance doesn’t believe for a second that any part of him went into making Squee. He’s certainly held that over her head in every way he could. So now he’s gung ho about being the boy’s father all of a sudden. But I know what that man’s capable of. He’s been rough with Lorna and he’s been rough with others. Lorna and I broke not too long after Squee was born, you know, so I don’t know if Lance ever lays his fist into that boy, but I don’t want to find out now. Please go talk to him, Roddy, and stop wasting time asking me questions, please . . .” She waited, breathing hard.

Roddy’s face betrayed nothing. He spoke evenly. “Who’s Squee’s father?”

“I don’t think Lorna even knew herself.”

Roddy thought on that a minute. “But she was pregnant before, wasn’t she? Isn’t that . . . ? When they got married?”

“Wasn’t his either,” Eden said. “And he knew it then too.” She stopped. She wasn’t giving away any more than he demanded.

“But why do you know?” he said. “Why do you know all that? And why’s the sheriff know you know?”

“It’s got nothing to do with the sheriff,” she lied. “Lorna and I, we were close for a time . . . When you were gone . . . When she was pregnant with Squee I helped her—staying healthy and not drinking and whatnot. She told me things, OK? She told me things. So would you go get down there and talk to Lance, please?”

Roddy paused, confused and unsatisfied, then finally turned without a word and started up the hill toward his truck.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Roddy showed up on the porch of the Squires’ cottage. Merle was watching the television, Lance seated in a chair near her, his eyes closed, head held back as if he were willing away a nosebleed. Roddy knocked and Merle waved him in.

“Stay for Pat and Vanna . . .” Merle gestured toward an empty chair.

Lance squinted open one eye and half raised a hand in greeting.

Roddy hovered a few yards away from them, the way he hung on the periphery of his mother’s house, not wanting to get too close, become too involved. “I’m only going to stay a minute,” he said. “I just had something I wanted to talk to you all about.”

Merle glanced to the TV.

Lance opened his eyes and lifted his head from the back cushion of the chair. “You bring Squee?” he asked.

Roddy stuck his hands deep into his pockets. “That’s what I wanted to come ask you about . . . is Squee. I’m . . . I know you’re ready to have him home with you here, which I respect, and understand. But he’s been having a hard time, like you might expect, and I’m worrying about bringing him back here so soon, what with the . . . the fire . . . the site still all . . . well, before we’ve been able to get everything cleared away, you know? I’m wondering if you think maybe he should stay back at my mom’s a little longer, till things get cleaned up here?”

Lance swept a hand around the room. “Pretty fucking clean in here,” he said.

Roddy nodded. “Suzy and the girls did a real nice job.”

“You know,” Lance said, looking to his mother now, “Suzy, in high school . . . Roddy here was just about creaming in his pants about every five minutes for that girl.” He laughed, mocking.

“Lance!” Merle shushed him playfully, disapproving the way a woman her age might flirt with her own husband: You filthy old goat, you!

Roddy tried to ignore Lance. It was just like high school again, really. “Look,” he said, directing his plea to Merle now, “I wanted to know if it would be OK with you if we kept Squee at my mom’s place a couple more days, just until . . .”

“My son belongs here,” Lance declared.

Roddy looked at him a second, then turned back to Merle. “I’m not saying . . . just, maybe it’s too soon for him to be here at the Lodge . . .”

Merle opened her mouth to speak, but Lance got there first. “He’ll have to get used to it at some point. Might as well be now.” Everything he said had the weight of a decree, as though with Lorna’s death he had ascended to royalty.

“Look”—Roddy spun toward him—“could you please try to think about the boy for one damn second . . .”

“Well, now you fucking sound like Lorna!” Lance jeered.

“Dammit, Lance,” Roddy swore. “The kid won’t even stay at his own grandparents’ place.” He looked to Merle, remembering who she was. “He went out the window in the middle of the night and ran to my mom’s.”

“Well, I don’t blame the kid,” Lance said smugly. “Who the fuck wants to stay with Art and Penny?” He warbled their names in singsong mockery. “I’d run too.”

“Lance,” Merle cautioned.

“Jesus Christ! It’s my fucking house, Ma!”

Merle stood decisively. “I’ve had about all I can take of you, Lance Squire.” She looked to the television to once again register the contestants’ scores, then flicked off the set, grabbed her car keys from the table, and went toward the door. Passing, she clapped Roddy on the back. “Good luck with this one.” She jutted her chin at her son. “Lance, could you try not to be such a goddamn bastard for once, OK?” And with that Merle turned and went out of the cabin and down the steps.

Lance had closed his eyes again and leaned his head back. He raised one hand and flipped the bird to his mother’s back as she walked away.

“Look, Lance . . .” Roddy prepared to try again.

“Look, Rodless,” Lance mimicked. Rodless was from junior high. Rodless, Dickless, stupid adolescent-boy humor. “I said no. Which part of that didn’t you understand?”

“Oh, Jesus, Lance, would you look at—” Roddy’s anger was barely contained. “Could you just look at what you’re . . .”

Lance was about to blow. “You know what I see when I look at myself, Rodless? You know what I fucking see? I see a man whose wife just died! A man whose wife just fucking died . . .” He started to break apart then, his voice cracking into words that came out with no sound. “She just fucking . . .” He dissolved.

Roddy took his cap off his head, ran a hand through his hair. He gave a nod, one. “I’ll go get Squee.”

Back at Eden’s, Squee was also watching Wheel of Fortune on a TV that hadn’t been tuned to anything but PBS since Roderick Senior had died. Roddy rapped on the back door and summoned Eden to the porch. She came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a dish towel, passed Squee on the couch, and glared at the TV. “Do you know how much television that child is accustomed to watching?” Eden said to her son.

“No, I don’t. Look, Ma . . . I tried. I don’t what else there is to do . . . Lance is losing it.”

“All the more reason that child should be nowhere near him,” Eden hissed.

“Fine, but what am I supposed to say? My mother says he’s not your kid anyway and you know it, so go shove it, Lance? What exactly—”

“I’m calling him,” Eden declared.

“Oh, Ma, come on.” But Eden had already turned away, into the house. She went to her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

It had been long enough since she’d called the Squires that she didn’t even remember the number. She looked it up, dialed, readied herself for Lance, and then let the phone ring and ring and ring. She hung up and tried again. This time he answered.

“What?” he said. “What now?”

“Lance, this is Eden Jacobs calling . . .”

“Oh, yeah, Eden. Sorry, thought you were my mom.”

Eden was nothing if not straightforward. “Firstly, Lance,” she said, “I’d like to express my greatest condolences to you. Lorna meant a great deal to me, and though we weren’t on much of terms these last years, I think of her daily and will continue to do so. She’s always in my prayers, along with you and Squee.”

“Oh,” Lance said. “That’s nice. Thanks.”

“Which brings me to the other reason for my call, which is to talk with you about Squee. I understand from what Roddy’s told me that you’re looking forward to having him home with you at the Lodge.”

“Yes, I am,” Lance said decisively.

Eden plowed on. “And while I understand your wishes at this time,” she said, “I can’t help but feel that you’d think differently about bringing him home if you were to really only think about him for just a moment, about his well-being . . .”

“Look, Eden,” Lance said, more forcefully now, “Roddy already tried, and the answer’s still no. I want my son home—what’s the big fucking deal? I come home, he comes home too. Done, OK?”

“No,” Eden said, “no, it’s not OK! Suddenly you decide he’s your son . . .”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I am terribly sorry that Lorna is dead, mister. Maybe mostly because of what is going to happen to that little boy”—Eden remembered Squee again, out in her living room, and she lowered her voice— “without her around to be some sort of a parent to him . . .”

Lance spoke loudly, and bitterly slow. He said, “I am coming to get my son now.” And he hung up the phone.

Eden sped by Squee on the couch and went out the back door. Roddy was sitting at the picnic table, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. “I made it worse,” Eden said, coming down the stairs.

“Shit.” Roddy sighed. He closed up the knife. “What happened?”

Eden shook her head. “He’s coming over to get Squee himself.”

“Aw, Christ.” Roddy stood, then sat back down, then stood again. “Christ!”

Eden had her hand on her hip and was nodding, as though running a conversation through her head. Then she straightened pointedly, her jaw set in fury, and made a noise like a growl of frustration through her teeth. She went up the steps. “Squee!” she called out as she went through the screen door. Her voice was changed entirely. “Hey, Squee, time to get packed up, mister. Dad’s on his way over to get you, bring you home.” She was trying to sound cheerful, and the effect was almost ghoulish.

Five minutes later Lance pulled into Eden’s driveway, left his truck running, and climbed the front steps. He rapped good and hard on the door, then opened it without waiting for anyone to answer. He looked around.

Squee came out of the guest room. He looked at his dad, looming large in the doorway of Eden’s little home. It was the first they’d seen each other since the fire.

“Hurry up,” Lance said, and Squee went back into the room to finish gathering his things into Eden’s old suitcase. From the kitchen doorway Eden stood and watched Lance without a word.

Squee came out of the bedroom a minute later, suitcase in hand. He didn’t speak either, not to his father, not to Eden. Didn’t even run out back to say good-bye to Roddy before he got into Lance’s truck and was driven away.

THEY PUT THE MATTRESS ON THE FLOOR. That worked better. Or used the chair; the chair worked too. It was a good, sturdy chair. But honestly, it didn’t much matter what they did it on, just so long as they did it. Because that’s what it was like: urgent and necessary and inappropriate and clandestine. They couldn’t get past it, neither of them, couldn’t get past just how incredibly good it felt. Jesus, it just felt so incredibly good: the kind of sex that took over everything, so that whatever else you were doing, you were never really doing that thing, you were just not having sex. It divided the world for them: there was the sex, and there was everything else. And everything else felt—oh, well, who the hell even knew what everything else felt like? They knew what the sex felt like, and beyond that, well, there was death and drinking and runaway children and fires and washing machines and rooms to be cleaned and parents to be placated and hotels to be run and what-the-fuck-ever else, because how could you possibly care about anything else when there was sex that felt like that sex felt?

The thing was, they did care. And it wasn’t that sex didn’t feel good, but about three seconds after it stopped feeling like the most amazing thing you ever felt in your life, about three seconds later they did care about the children and the laundry and the dead people and the live people and everything-the-fuck-else there was to worry about. So they got up. They went back to the world. And then they scrambled back to Roddy’s shack as soon as they possibly could, because that was the only way they were getting through any of it.

It was past twelve that night when Suzy left Roddy and drove back to the Lodge, not much more than a five-minute drive on the dirt road that cut between the back of the hill into which the Jacobses’ place was wedged and the beach below. The night was warm, the air alive with crickets and fireflies. You felt it outside of you, inside of you, everywhere, that kind of summer night.

Suzy took the Lodge truck down that rutted, pitted road, bouncing in the seat, stressed about getting back to Mia, about having to get up at the crack of dawn when Mia inevitably got up, stressed about whatever else she might have done wrong, since that’s what being on Osprey made her feel: as if she had done something wrong but didn’t know what it was yet. Whether or not her father and mother were actually watching her, her father and mother were always watching her, and she had always done something wrong.

To the right of the road were woods—if you bushwhacked through you’d hit the ravine down beyond Eden’s place. On Suzy’s left, the old golf course stretched out, overgrown, unused, except as a sledding hill in the winter. They’d built a new eighteen-hole course out by Wickham Beach, let this one go to seed. The dirt road had begun its life as a golf cart path, then became trafficked by locals when they realized what a shortcut it was. It pounded the shit out of the underside of a car, but the locals drove trucks mostly, and it kept the summerers in their Saabs out of the way and on the pavement, since they didn’t know how to drive dirt anyway and were more nuisance than the raccoons who got plowed down nightly as they went scampering across from the golf course to the woods. Bam. There were always a few good raccoon carcasses sprawled across the dirt road, their insides baking into the sand.

Coming over the first rise and around the sharp bend by what was once the seventh hole, Suzy spotted in the headlights, on the side of the road, what looked to be a raccoon. She slowed. They always waited, then dashed out in front of your car at the last second, like the kamikaze squirrels in autumn who got drunk on fallen fermented fruit from crab apple trees and started racing zigzags across Route 11. Suzy peered out, straining to see farther than her headlights’ range. She prepared to brake, anticipating the raccoon’s mad dash. And then as she got closer, she realized it wasn’t a raccoon. And as she got closer still, she realized it was Squee.

She swerved to a stop, yanked the emergency brake, leaving the engine running, and jumped down from the truck. Squee stood, frozen, off to the side of the headlights’ beam as though he couldn’t decide whether to run toward Suzy or away from her. Suzy managed to quell her alarm and slowed as she approached him.

“Just out for a stroll?” she said, her voice modulated.

Squee didn’t say anything.

“You . . . um . . . need a ride or something?” she asked nonchalantly.

Squee shrugged, suspicious.

She got close and squatted down to his level. “Pretty late to be out alone, huh?”

Squee shrugged again, but there was concession to it. He knew she was right.

“You going anywhere in particular, or just walking?”

In the half-lit, overgrown field, Squee scratched at his shin. His fingers came away touched with blood, a mosquito-bite scab. He wiped them on his T-shirt.

“Come on,” Suzy said, beginning to stand again, “let me give you a ride. I’d hate to leave you walking up that hill in the dark. Come on. Hop in. Where to?” She started toward the truck, as if to assume he’d follow. He did.

“Seat belt, please,” she instructed. Squee complied. “So, where can I drop you off?”

Squee gestured with one limp hand up the hill, reluctantly, as though he hadn’t had a destination in mind, but since Suzy was asking, well, he guessed he might as well go to Roddy’s. She pulled a U-turn on the old golf course and drove back the way she’d come.

Pulling into Eden’s driveway, Suzy shut the truck’s lights. “You wait here a sec?” she asked Squee. “I’ll see who’s up?”

Roddy was already at the door when she got there. He looked puzzled.

“I’ve got Squee in the truck . . .” She lifted her chin toward the driveway.

Roddy interrupted, stepped out onto the stoop, as if he didn’t believe her. “What?” It was too far for him to see.

“He was coming up the golf course road.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“This is clearly where he was headed.”

“Good thing he didn’t make it about half an hour earlier!”

Suzy laughed helplessly, a picture in each of their minds of whatever position they’d been in a half hour before. Roddy stepped back inside and started to pull on a pair of pants.

“What do you . . . ?” Suzy started.

“He slept on the floor here last night,” Roddy said. “He can do it again. I didn’t know he was there till morning then, I don’t have to know now. Lance can fucking deal with it, then. The kid doesn’t want to be there.” Roddy shoved his bare feet into his work boots and sat down to lace them enough so he could walk.

“You want him down here?” Suzy looked around, checking the shack for evidence of herself. “Or up at Eden’s?”

Roddy did the same once-over of the room. “I think he’ll probably want to be . . .”

And then they were interrupted by the lights and the sound of another vehicle pulling into Eden Jacobs’s driveway.

“Fucking shit.” Roddy bolted up. In seconds they were both out the door and running up the hill.

Lance had gotten out of his truck and was walking quickly and angrily toward Suzy’s.

“Lance,” Roddy called as they approached, the name curt and damming, warning Lance away from whatever he was going toward.

Lance had just reached to open the passenger door of Suzy’s truck, and he stopped to peer out into the darkness for Roddy. He stood, poised there, while Squee scrunched down in the seat, curled into himself, silent.

As the scene became clear to Lance, his expression shifted. He made out Roddy coming up the hill, and then Suzy behind him. He seemed to forget entirely about Squee in the truck and let go of the handle, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Well.” He started again: “Well, what do we have here, now?”

Neither Suzy nor Roddy said anything. They kept moving toward Squee.

“Well, after all these years! Did Rodless finally get what he wanted? After all those years . . . Hey, Suze, isn’t that just about the place where you and . . . You reliving old times with Rodless, here? You give him the mercy fuck he always wanted from you, Suzy?”

“Shut your mouth, Lance! Just shut . . .” Suzy flung her hand toward Squee, hunched there in the seat, which only served to remind Lance of the mission he was actually on. He turned again to the boy in the truck, confused for a second, and looked back to Suzy running at him with Roddy beside her. “What the fuck’s he doing in your . . . ?” He flung open the door. “What are you doing in there?” he demanded of Squee. “You kidnapping my son, Suzy? You fucking bitch, are you kidnapping my son from me?”

Suzy and Roddy reached the truck and hovered there on the driver’s side. “He was on the golf course road, Lance,” Suzy said calmly. “He was out on the road in the middle of the night. I picked him up.”

This news only refueled Lance’s anger at Squee. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” Lance slammed his fist down on the hood, and Roddy lunged at the sudden movement, the desire to protect Squee overtaking all else.

“Oh, what? Rodless gonna fight me? You’re gonna fight me, you dickless motherfucker?”

Roddy fell back immediately, hands raised in surrender. “I don’t want to fight you, Lance. The only thing I want is for Squee to get a good night’s sleep. That’s all, Lance. I just want your son to get some rest.”

“Oh, now you’re a fucking saint, you dickless piece of . . .”

“Lance!” Suzy screamed, just as a light in Eden’s bedroom came on. Suzy lowered her pitch. “His mother is . . . He wants to stay here. What is the problem with that?” Suzy’s voice was a low wail, one step from tears.

“Because I said he’s coming home with me!” Lance bellowed. And then he reached into Suzy’s truck, grabbed Squee around the waist, and hoisted him out of the seat.

Squee let out one cry of fear, that first, irrepressible wail of panic. It was obvious that he was crying from the way he held his hands over his eyes, but otherwise he let his body go slack, and Lance held him at his side with one arm, like a bag of topsoil. Lance opened the driver’s side door and shrugged Squee inside, then pushed in behind him, slammed the door, and backed down the driveway.