Osprey Island

Twelve

ON THE INTERACTION OF SPECIES

[A]t present the place is a grubby fishing port of dirt lanes strewn with sun-baked fish heads, eatery floors tramped with mud and blood and salt. A moss bunker refinery destroys the western shoreline—great smelting kettles and massive iron drums, the smell that emanates therefrom is enough to raise the dead. But where others less visionary will come away with only a visceral memory of the unrelenting stink, I see here a great hotel, stately, luxurious suites overlooking the majestic sunset shore. There will be tennis courts, a bathing pavilion, a restaurant and theater, and on a Sunday afternoon the ladies from Fishersburg and Menhadenport will stroll the whitewashed docks, parasols cocked overhead as they watch the schooners set sail into the bay.

—SYLVESTER DANIEL, investor, from an 1869 letter to his wife, Amelia

DEMOLITION FIRST. Then, construction. Bud, needing all the manpower he had, even cycled his waiters into the crew. Besides, it was pretty much free labor: the arrangement for June had always been beachfront lodging and meals in exchange for help in readying the Lodge for the season. And fine, true, that “readying” usually involved work of a highly undemanding, nontaxing variety. That it had turned into full-time hard manual labor was not something to which Bud was planning to draw anyone’s attention.

The police lines were down, and some progress had been made in the demolition. Off-island boys had worked the day of the funeral, guys who knew Lorna only as the someone who’d died in the fire. The grunt-work guys were there early, drinking coffee from Thermoses or Styrofoam cups, getting ready for another day. Roddy and the unlucky waiters joined the crew, pulled on heavy work gloves, and got down to it. A matter of throwing shit into the dumpster. Why they weren’t doing it with a bulldozer, no one had stopped to inquire. Probably because it was cheaper to pay a bunch of stupid thugs than it would have been to rent the necessary machinery. And Bud Chizek was nothing if not thrifty.

They’d busted down the remaining walls and posts with sledgehammers—the fun work, no doubt, for a few guys with more muscle and spare energy than they had any constructive use for—so there was wet, charred timber splintered over everything. They started gathering and tossing, collecting and discarding. It was rhythmic, methodical, awful work. Roddy hefted awkward shovelfuls of soaked and blackened linens into a wheelbarrow, and a guy with the remains of a black eye and tattoo lines snaking out from the sleeves of his T-shirt wheeled the loads away, got help from another guy—who’d already removed his shirt in preparation for the morning emergence of the Irish girls from their dorm—in hefting the load to the dumpster’s mouth. How Bud planned to lift the monolithic old sheet presses was anyone’s guess. The sun shone down with macabre earnestness. A lone yellow butterfly flirted at the periphery of the wreckage, as though it knew not to come any closer.

Suzy brought Mia over to Eden’s for the day to keep Squee company there, away from the Lodge. Then she got half the Irish girls out inspecting rooms—noting anything torn, broken, grotesquely or obscenely stained—and took the others with her to the maid’s room. Upon entrance, they looked crestfallen.

“Look . . .” Suzy was already defensive. Did they think she wanted to be there any more than they did? They’d all signed on for this godforsaken summer job! Did they think this was the way Suzy had planned to spend her vacation? “I know it’s bad,” she conceded, “but the rest of the summer’ll be a fuck of a lot easier if we can turn this place into an organized base of operations.” The girls’ expressions seemed to lighten at the utterance of “fuck.” Suzy made a mental note: swear. Often. She took a box of Hefty bags off a shelf and began dispensing them, one per girl, like uniforms. “Let’s take advantage of the dumpster out there.” She flicked the garbage bag in her hand in the direction of the old laundry. “The more of this shit we can get rid of”—she swept the bag around the room—“the happier I’ll be. And right now, I’m not very fucking happy.” The girls cracked smiles. It was like teaching, Suzy thought. You just had to get down there in the dirt with them and hash through it.

Brigid was probably no older than the other girls, but she comported herself with an air of some disdain, as though they were younger siblings she’d been forced to babysit. She gravitated toward Suzy, who seemed more of an equal. The other girls needed direction— Here: you take this closet, and why don’t you check the vacuum cleaners, see what works, what doesn’t, what just needs a new bag . . . Brigid had initiative, which was a relief to Suzy. She was able to assess a situation, see what needed doing, and get on it. She took over an old housekeeping cart that probably hadn’t been used as anything but a junk repository in more than a decade, checked the cleaning products to see if anything was still usable, chucked the rest, and pretty soon had flipped the cart over, found a screwdriver and some WD-40 in a toolbox, and was working on the wheels. She looked confident enough in what she was doing that Suzy went to work clearing another similar cart of debris so Brigid might have a go at its wheels as well.

“So,” Suzy began, with an animation so contrived that she didn’t even want to finish the sentence, but there was nothing any better, nothing particularly less ironic to say. “So how are things going for you here at the Osprey Lodge?”

Brigid snorted. “I’d rather be scrubbing shitters for the IRA at this juncture, I’d say.” She bugged her eyes, her mouth pursed in a psychotic grin.

“Oh, that sounds fabulous,” Suzy cried. “You think they’d take on an American? Really, I could be packed, ready to go, in”—she looked at her watch—“five minutes.”

They laughed halfheartedly.

Awhile later Suzy said, “I feel really awful for all of you guys, coming all this way . . . it’s usually a little better around here than this.”

“My sister was here a year ago.”

“That’s right,” Suzy said. “I forgot. So you know . . .”

“To be honest with you,” Brigid said, “I’m rather sure I’d still be something of a miserable article if Mrs. Squire . . . if there’d been no fire at all. I’d’ve managed to get myself messed with quite regardless, I expect.”

Suzy looked at her in confusion.

“Oh, it’s a damn boy,” Brigid said.

Suzy winced in empathy. “Someone back home?”

“Oh, no luck of the sort, no. Right here.” Brigid nodded resentfully.

“On-island?” Suzy was surprised.

“Oh, right here at the Lodge, if you’d believe.”

“A waiter?” Suzy’s face was still pinched, as if expecting a blow.

Brigid brightened then. “You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?” Her eyes were expectant. “Gavin? He’s from California?”

“Yeah,” Suzy said. “No, I mean, I know who he is, but . . . the one who came from Stanford, with Heather Beekin, right?”

“Is that her name?” Brigid hardly concealed her disdain.

“Did you meet her?” Suzy was confused again.

“No, not me. Not exactly . . .” Brigid paused, as though figuring out how to explain. “After the funeral yesterday, a gang of us went for a bite at the Luncheonette.”

“Heather went out to lunch with you?” Suzy was more confused than before.

Brigid slowed, explaining as though Suzy were not very bright. “There were quite a lot of them I hadn’t met. From the town. Introductions weren’t properly made, you know. Then, last night, quite late—Gavin—he was out here on the deck with her, he was. Not that I know him well, you know,” she confessed. “I’d only just met him, but he’s acted . . . oh, bloody, I don’t know—”

Suzy cut in. “I’d have a hard time . . . What’d she look like? The girl?”

Brigid made a face to imply she wasn’t much to look at. “A bit tall,” she said, “fair skin, dark hair, a bit heavy in the hip . . .”

Suzy was shaking her head.

“Rather a gothic look . . .”

“Janna,” Suzy said. “That’s not Heather Beekin. That’s Janna Winger.”

Brigid’s face went blank. The name meant nothing to her.

“Janna works for Reesa? At the salon?”

Brigid was shaking her head. “I’d entirely assumed it was the girlfriend, the . . . Heather.”

“Janna,” Suzy said again. “They were talking at the Vaughns’ yesterday, actually . . .” She caught herself. “The Vau . . . Lorna’s parents, they had a little gathering after the funeral at their—”

“And Gavin was there, you say?”

“Actually, we passed him on the way there—he walked over the hill.” Suzy was nodding.

“He did head for a walk . . .”

“No,” Suzy said, “no, but, he knew where he was heading. We stopped. We offered him a ride. That’s where he was going.”

“What a shit.” Brigid’s tone was bitter; she cared a good deal more than she wanted to reveal.

“I’m so sorry.”

Brigid slammed down her screwdriver. “The fucker,” she said.

“Were you . . . ?” Suzy tried.

“Oh, I don’t even know. We’d had a . . . We’d just begun to . . . Oh, bloody—how bloody stupid.”

“Maybe they’re not . . . ?” Suzy began again.

“Right.” Brigid snorted. She’d passed the fucker in the hall of the barracks that morning, and again at breakfast in the dining room, and he’d given her an absurd, sheepish, apologetic, nodding hello, then tucked his head down and barreled off as if he had savagely important business ahead. Brigid was so blindsided that she had yet to so much as acknowledge his greetings. She thought she might soon be able to muster a response of acutely conveyed distaste: nose wrinkled and lip curled as though repulsed by a horrid smell, hand slightly open, a breathy snort to say, What the fuck? It seemed as if it might be the only look she had left. As they worked in the maid’s room that afternoon, Brigid developed a private theory to explain Gavin. She told Suzy about how he sounded when he’d spoken a bit about Heather, and about his fantasies about moving to the island and living happily ever after. Brigid’s theory was that he had it in his head to take up with another island girl—it was the only way to make Heather adequately jealous, to make it really sting.

When Brigid left the lodge that afternoon, her skin felt itchy and raw from the cleaning chemicals. She was walking up the hill, desperate for a shower, when she saw Gavin come out the north door of the barracks, freshly showered himself, and start down the path.

“Hey, pretty girl . . .”

But it wasn’t Gavin calling. The Squires’ cottage sat just south of the staff building, and from where she stood Brigid could see Lance sitting on his porch, beer in hand, waving her over. To her left, she shot Gavin her well-rehearsed What the fuck? look, though he was probably too far off—or too clueless—to appreciate it, and she veered right, to Lance Squire.

“Hey-ay,” Lance called as she approached.

“Hi.” Brigid felt awkward, unsure of what to say to this man. She knew what was only appropriate: “I’m so dreadfully sorry—”

He cut her off. “You know,” he said, “that’s all I heard today from anyone. Can’t take much more sorry.”

“I’m sor—” she began, then dropped it with an involuntary laugh.

“That’s what I need,” Lance said. “I need to see a pretty girl smile.”

Brigid obliged.

“Would you like a beer?” Lance asked. “We can shoot the shit here, just talk, just talk, not talk about sorry, about how sorry we all are, just not talking about anything, just shoot the shit . . . Would you do that, gorgeous? Can I get you a beer? Please? Sit and have one beer with an old man?”

Brigid took the bait. She swiveled her head from side to side. “What old man’s that? Where?”

Lance veritably leapt from his chair, pulling it back and offering it to her. “You sit. Sit. I’ll get you a beer.”

Brigid did as she was told.

When the door slammed again, Lance was placing an icy can of Schlitz in her hand and plunking down a chair for himself beside her. The beer felt exactly like what she wanted. She cracked it open, took a long sip, then rolled the can along her stinging forearms.

“It’s that cleanser stuff,” Lance said. “Right? It itches?” His eyes were already welling with tears. “Lorna’d rub ice on it.” He flicked at his eyes with the back of his hand, then fumbled to light a cigarette. “God, I’m a fucking mess.” He got the smoke lighted and inhaled deeply.

“Could I bum one?” Brigid asked.

“My pleasure, baby.” He handed her the pack and the lighter. As she extracted one and got it lit he was saying, “Tell me something— anything. Tell me some dumb normal thing. Like you’d of told me last week. Some stupid thing about noth—hey,” he remembered, “how’s that boy? That college boy—how’s things with the fucking college boy?” He was extraordinarily pleased with himself for the retention of that small memory outside his own circumstance and pounced on it. “How the fuck goes it with the college boy?” He smiled so wide, it was ghoulish.

“To tell you the truth,” Brigid said on an exhale of smoke, “he’s a shitty bastard and I should have known it from the outset.”

“Oh, no,” Lance cooed, enjoying himself now. “What’d he do to hurt you, baby?”

Brigid brushed hair from her face with calculated nonchalance. “Just found himself another girl to take up with entirely.”

Lance let his mouth drop open. Then his face contorted in disbelief. “Who?” he said, so vehemently it sounded like a dare: You just try and name someone hotter than you on this island.

“The one from the beauty salon . . . ?”

Lance nearly tipped over in his chair. His eyes bulged with laughter. “Reesa?!” he cried incredulously.

“No, not her,” Brigid said, “the younger one . . . Janna, is it?” Brigid now knew precisely what her name was, but the fact that she gave a fuck was no one’s business but her own.

Lance’s disbelief abated only slightly. “That fuckhead’s going to take Janna Winger over you? He’s out of his fucking mind, baby! Baby, anyone who’s going slumming with Janna Winger instead of the hottest little girl to hit this shithole in a hell of a time—he’s not in his right mind, baby. That boy’s fucking nuts!”

Brigid drank her beer eagerly. She didn’t know what to say.

Lance drank too, marveling at the insanity of the world. “Fucking nutcase. What a dumb stupid fuck.”

When Brigid had finished her beer, she set it down on the railing and stood to go. “I’ve got to have a shower . . . these chemicals . . .”

Lance’s eyes lit up. “Oooohhh-ooh! Can I come?”

And if the look she wanted to give him was the look she’d practiced for Gavin—the What the fuck is your problem, asshole? look—she managed somehow not to. Somehow she managed just to laugh—a hearty, heady, Ha ha ha ha, we’re all so bloody funny, aren’t we? laugh that at least got her down the porch steps and headed toward home.

SUZY STOPPED INTO the beauty salon when she’d finished in the maid’s room for the day. Reesa, too, was about to close up and head home, and Suzy helped her and Janna tidy the place a bit as they chatted. Reesa had trained a few of the local girls herself—Janna, and Cybelle Schwartz too. They were just past eighteen, and Reesa had invested a great deal of time and energy in trying to persuade both of them to get off Osprey Island and go live in the world before they wound up married or pregnant.

When she was younger, everyone thought Reesa would be the kid discovered by some movie director spending a weekend on Osprey, plucked out and whisked away to turn her all-American good looks into someone’s pretty penny. No one thought she’d be on Osprey past her sixteenth birthday. But sixteen, eighteen, twenty, all came and went, and there was Reesa, lovely as ever, waiting tables at the Island Grill or Tubby’s Fishhouse. She’d gone with Abel Delamico since before anyone could remember, and they’d married just after high school. Abel’s fishing business did well, and they had a nice house out near the point at Scallopshell Cove. Four beautiful kids. There was nothing in Reesa Delamico’s life to indicate that she was anything but content. She was the pride of Osprey: she could’ve flown away at any time, but never had.

Instead, she made sure that others took the sort of opportunities she hadn’t. Jasper, Reesa’s oldest, was eighteen and gone already, off to college a year early. She missed the hell out of him, and that was exactly the way she wanted it. Reesa wanted Jasper to have choices. She wanted him to do whatever he did because he’d chosen it, not because he’d never known enough to see a choice. If, after college, Jasper chose to come back home to Osprey, it’d be because Osprey was where he wanted to be, not because he didn’t know how to get to anywhere else.

It was just past five o’clock when Gavin appeared outside the salon’s glass door. Janna took off her smock, checked her face in the styling station mirror, checked it again in the next styling station mirror, said “ ’Bye,” and dashed out to meet him. They paused self-consciously on the deck to kiss, and Reesa and Suzy just watched, too interested to feign otherwise. If you’d looked in through the glass door at those two old friends inside the beauty shop, you’d have thought they were watching two entirely different scenes. Reesa beamed with pride— pride mixed with nostalgia. Janna was something of a second daughter to her, and she feared the girl might never muster the incentive to leave Osprey. But now—a boy from California! Even if it didn’t work out in the long run, he might at least induce Janna to see something of the world.

Suzy, on the other hand, might as well have been watching some graphic nature documentary, staring in horror as though a cannibalistic mating ritual were being enacted on the deck of the Osprey Lodge.

And then, in a flurry of twenty-four-hour-old love, Gavin and Janna were down the stairs and disappearing up the beach. It was Reesa who spoke first, wagging her head in marvel. “How about that?” she said. “I introduced them at Art and Penny’s yesterday . . . who’d’ve thought? I’ve never seen her like this—she’s usually harder, you know? Harder to crack. What?” Reesa noticed the look on Suzy’s face. “What? Suze? What’s the . . . ?”

Suzy shuddered off the feeling that had overcome her. “I just . . . I was just hearing . . . I mean, do you know him?”

“He’s the one . . . Gavin, the Stanford one . . . Heather’s . . .”

“No, I know that,” Suzy said. “I was just hearing about him, from Brigid.”

Reesa shook her head; the name meant nothing to her.

Suzy’s dislike of this Gavin kid surged. “The girl after Heather and before Miss Janna. Brigid. She’s one of the Irish.”

Reesa’s face registered amusement and confusion. “There was a girl between Heather and Janna? For how long—three days?”

“Not even, I don’t think,” Suzy said.

Reesa’s good humor soured. Her hands went to her hips and her smile puckered in. She was awfully protective of Janna. “So, he’s a player.”

Suzy nodded ruefully. “Apparently he just disappeared on Brigid yesterday . . . One night he’s inviting her to sleep with him on the beach—” Both women shook their heads, rolled their eyes. People came from off-island and thought it romantic to camp on the beach, while Islanders knew far too well that it was neither romantic nor comfortable, and between the sand crabs and the mosquitoes it ranked up there as one of the more regrettable experiences to be had on Osprey. “—And the next night he’s nowhere to be found. Not a word of anything, Brigid says—no explanation, no apology, nothing . . . She’s sort of crushed,” Suzy said. “I feel for her.”

Reesa frowned. “And here I was getting all psyched for Janna. I’m plotting the wedding, packing her up, shipping her off to California.” She’d spent the day envisioning it all: the dress (strapless, with a full skirt, in something darker, not white, something to set off Janna’s paleness—maybe red, deep red), the reception (here, at the Lodge, in fall, when the summer folk were gone, as the leaves began to change— maybe the dress would be a burnt orange, or an autumn red, like Japanese maple), the sweet farewells, the infrequent visits home, just for the weekend, a baby or two in tow . . .

Suzy said, “I don’t think he’s looking to take someone away with him.”

Reesa didn’t get it.

“I think he’s looking for a way onto Osprey.”

“What is he, insane?” Now Reesa was worried. Understanding lit her face. “He’s just looking for a way back to Heather! I’m such an idiot!” She smacked her own forehead in emphasis. “Here I am, just thinking, La la la, a love story for Janna . . . He’s just trying to stay close to Heather! Oh Jesus . . . poor Janna! What a little shit.”

Suzy, coming quickly to regret the leaps of logic being made from her nuggets of gossip, began to hedge. “I don’t know, Reese. For all we know it could all be in earnest. They’re kids. He’s probably not scheming to—”

“Scheming or not,” Reesa said, firm conviction in her voice, “I don’t need some stupid college boy messing with Janna. That’d be just enough to scare her off the outside world. And I wonder why will no one leave this place?”

Suzy softened. “They leave,” she said quietly. “Some do, some leave . . .”

But Suzy was really talking about herself, and now Reesa was thinking of Jasper. Suzy had made it off, but so many of them— always the ones who were dying to get off—they’d last six months, maybe a year, and then they were back. Most of them. Suzy joked that it was like prison: you spent too long in that once you got out you were so scared you started making trouble just to land yourself back. But that was Suzy. Most people, if you asked them seriously, would say that if you grew up on Osprey you had ideas about how it would be to live out in the world across the bay. Osprey was your childhood; it was your troubled teen years. It was what you knew to want to escape. Then you got out and saw how things were out there, and then you understood how good you had it on that idyllic little island, where people knew who you were and what you came from, where it was safe to walk at night, where people took care. On Osprey you had credit at every store in town, and someone would always find you a job in construction, or helping out at the church, the school, the dump. You didn’t spend so much time deciding things on Osprey Island: You wanted coffee, you went to the Luncheonette. Prescriptions were filled at Bayshore Drug. You needed cigarettes, you stopped at Lovetsky’s. A haircut, Reesa’s. Life on Osprey was easier. Sure, there were things you missed out on, but if you’d grown up on Osprey you’d never had them, so you couldn’t really miss them much. And all those things out there in the world didn’t help if what you really missed was home.

Reesa folded a smock under her arm. “Thank fucking god Jasper didn’t have a girl here!” she said.

Suzy let out a laugh and held up both her hands, fingers crossed. “He’s going to make it, Reese. He’ll make it.”

Reesa closed her eyes, shook her head, and held up her hands in a short prayer for her son.