Osprey Island

Fifteen

IF THE PRICE WERE TREACHERY

The osprey should, in all honesty, have been named in its genus, for King Nisus of Alcathous, whose daughter, Scylla, sacrifices him to his attacking enemy, Minos, whom Scylla loves. But Minos rebukes her, disgusted by her betrayal of her father, and he quits the land she offers him. Scylla, mad with despair, jumps into the ocean to follow Minos’ retreating ship, and is followed by her father—now turned into an osprey—who plucks her from the water as such a bird of prey is wont to do. Regard: Her father saw her as he hovered near (changed to an osprey now with tawny wings) And swooped to seize and tear her, as she clung, With his hooked beak.

—A.D. MELVILLE, trans., “Scylla and Minos,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Would that the early ornithologists had more closely read their Ovid.

—DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

SUZY WORKED THROUGH THE MORNING at the Lodge darning blankets and bed linens on a relic of a sewing machine she’d unearthed in the maid’s room and managed to render functional. When the Irish girls broke for lunch, Suzy went up the hill toward her parents’ place. The sun was high overhead, beating down on the Chizek house. Suzy could hear the air conditioner as she approached, a window unit installed at her mother’s demand. It blew exhaust against the scrappy rosebushes Nancy had planted there in an inadequate attempt at camouflage.

Nancy Chizek was a finicky woman, but not necessarily thorough. She liked the edges of her world tucked and trimmed, but was famous for cutting corners in ways that were at best unceremonious and at worst downright tacky. She had lobbied for the air conditioner with the insistence of, say, one in line for a heart transplant. Then, once the thing was in, the offense of its unsightliness became the bane of her existence—a topic she brought up not only to complain of her husband’s stinginess, but because she found such a topic interesting and worthy of lengthy discussion. Finally she’d bought a few twiggy, thorny starter rose bushes at Kmart, planted them herself, and then neglected their care entirely. The rose “bushes” were two feet tall, the air conditioner at least four feet off the ground. What could anyone possibly do in such an impossible situation, Nancy implied, but throw up one’s hands and wait for the bushes to grow?

Suzy didn’t knock. She could see her mother through the picture window, sitting at the kitchen table, telephone crooked to her ear as she flipped through a catalog of what looked like swimming pool supplies. Nancy looked up as Suzy entered, lifted a hand and wiggled a few fingers absently as she turned back to the catalog. Suzy poked her head into the stairwell. “Dad?” she called.

“Excuse me for a moment. I’m so sorry,” Nancy said into the phone. “Suzy, your father’s in the shower,” she called, though it seemed like the information was being relayed as much to whoever was on the other end of the phone line as to Suzy. “I’m sorry,” Nancy said, back to the phone again, her apology so vehement it was as if she’d just forced that person to overhear something of an intimate and mortifying nature.

Suzy sat down on a chair near the door to wait. She shuffled through a pile of junk mail on the hall table, leafed through a flier of the IGA’s price specials. In the mirror beside the door she caught a glimpse of herself, wearing an old gray T-shirt that had never been flattering, and her failure to recall which boyfriend it had once belonged to made her feel slutty and juvenile. Her hair, which she had only wet, not washed, in the shower that morning, had dried to reveal a lumpish wad of matted hair at the back of her head, a knot that had no doubt formed the previous evening, in bed with Roddy. From her parents’ coatrack on the other side of the door she grabbed a hat— one of the ugly lavender ones from the laundry equipment company, which wasn’t even ugly in a kitschy or cute way, it was just ugly—and put it on. She pulled her hair through the hole in back and tugged down the brim. God, to be incognito! To be someplace where nobody even knew her name! She looked like a suburban housewife ready to carpool the kids on over to goddamn Little League. She never felt so misplaced as when she was at home.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Her father descended the stairs two at a time, and she turned to see the panic crossing his face. She felt sorry for him for a moment, imagining how he must feel, the dread, all of the many things that could go so wrong when you ran a large operation with a big staff and more loose ends than seams. His face was rigid. His eyes said, Oh god, what now?

“Nothing,” Suzy said quickly. “Everything’s fine. I just wanted to talk to you.”

Bud released his breath, and as his chest sank his expression went from fear to annoyance: he was peeved that she’d caused him this moment’s anxiety, put out at the notion that she wanted something else from him now, as if he didn’t have enough to do and enough to worry about. “What is it?” he said, and though he did not look at his watch, he may as well have.

“I don’t mean to trouble you,” Suzy began obsequiously, for nothing rankled Bud more, and that’s what it was always about between the two of them: who could piss the other off most. On your marks, get set, go!

“I’ve got a busy afternoon,” Bud warned.

“I was just wondering . . .” She spoke so smoothly as to nauseate herself. “I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help in the search for someone to replace Lorna as head housekeeper. I know you’re probably doing everything you can, but if there’s anything I could do to help I’d be more than happy . . .”

“Is it so hard,” Bud spat, “to put a little bit of work into your family’s business?” His voice was raised. “Is it so much to ask . . . ?” His daughter’s audacity rendered him speechless. Her selfishness never ceased to amaze him. Unbelievable! She was lazy and opportunistic, and she could be downright nasty when she didn’t get her way. If he steered clear of his daughter as a rule, it was because his anger toward her was of a variety he recognized to be violent. Too often, he felt himself just one step shy of slapping her insolent face, or shaking that haughty defiance right out of her. Bud held his hands at his sides with a force of will as he managed to reroute his violence to his mouth instead of his fists. “Are you not able,” he bellowed, “to do a single goddamn day’s work without your griping and bitching that everything’s so goddamn unfair?! A woman is dead here . . .”

Nancy, from the kitchen, in a voice that almost topped Bud’s in pitch and command, said dramatically into the telephone (but so loudly that it was impossible to think of the phone as anything but a stage prop), “Look, I’m just going to have to call you back later!” Whereupon she slammed down the receiver, stalked past Bud and Suzy, and climbed the stairs to her bedroom, one hand firmly gripping the banister, the other held across her eyes as though the migraine brewing therein might just kill her this time, as if that’s what her family had been after all along.

They waited for her door to close before they resumed. Then they turned back on each other like cats in a tangle.

“Do you think”—Suzy’s fury was slow and leveled—“do you think I don’t work?” His oblivion was unfathomable to her. He imagined teaching to be a cushy sort of a pastime—like taking tickets at the movie theater, or babysitting a few afternoons a week—something that spoiled, lazy, loudmouthed girls like his daughter did so they didn’t have to work real jobs. Like what? Like running a hotel that was only open two months a year? By the time Suzy spoke again, she was shrieking. “I work twelve-hour days, five days a week. On the weekends I grade papers, I plan lessons, I advise three different extracurricular activities, I sell Oreos at intermission of the goddamn school play! Teachers get three months in the summer because we work so fucking hard the other nine months of the year, and I didn’t come here during my vacation to scrub toilets for six bucks an hour!” Suzy’s face was boiling red, and she was gesticulating wildly with her arms. “Did you ever have any intention of looking for someone to replace Lorna, or did you just figure it’d be easier if I did it this season and you’d deal with it in the fall when you had some more time on your hands?”

They stood, faced off, as she waited for an answer and he waited for the wrath to continue as it always did. He’d learned that sometimes the only way was to ride it through, let her tire herself out, the way you’d contend with a child’s tantrum.

They stood, glaring at each other, Suzy’s breath heaving now, the only other sound the chink and buzz of the window-unit air conditioner. It whirred and clicked and spun, and then it double-clicked, spat a hiss, and wound itself down for a brief thermostatic hiatus. In the silence that followed, Bud finally said, “Are you finished?”

Suzy said nothing. There was nothing to say. She spun around, threw open the front door, and walked out.

RODDY HAD STOPPED AT the Squires’ cottage around eight-thirty that morning, but there were no signs of waking life inside. At ten he knocked again. No answer. He tried the outer door, which was unlocked, but the screen was latched from the inside. Roddy could see in, through to Lance’s bedroom, where Lance lay sprawled across the bed, fully clothed, dead asleep. Further inside, the door to Squee’s room was also open, the boy a lump under a sheet, a blond mop of hair poking out at the top. Roddy stood for a moment, frozen, to make sure he could see Squee’s body rising and falling with his breath.

When Roddy came by again at noon, Lance was standing at the kitchen sink, ashing his cigarette into the drain. Squee was at the table, a bowl of cereal before him, though he was clearly not eating. He held the spoon in the milk as if he were about to eat but couldn’t remember the next step. His eyes were blank. He looked small, and anemic, and gray, and it made Roddy very afraid. But before he could say anything or even make a move toward the boy, Lance was laying into Roddy as if it were high school all over again.

“Ro-od-LESS!” Lance cheered. When they were kids, if Roddy so much as spoke to a girl, the ribbing from Lance and Chas and Jimmy Waters and all of them was relentless. It had been enough back then to pretty much keep Roddy from attempting to even make eye contact with anyone of the opposite sex. Lance stood beside the kitchen sink, cigarette in one hand, and lifted his arms and swiveled his hips in a burlesque move that was as embarrassing as it was awkward. “Woo-woo!” Lance hooted. “It’s Roddy the Rodless Wonder Boy!”

Roddy shot him a look: Not in front of Squee, at least not in front of Squee. At the same moment he caught sight of one of the Irish girls coming out of the staff quarters. Without pausing to second-guess, he pushed back open the door through which he’d just entered and called out to her across the path. It was Peg, whom he recognized, though he didn’t know her name. “Good morning!” he called. She looked up, then away, and continued toward the Lodge. “Miss!” Roddy shouted. “Um . . . Miss? Hello?” Peg stopped, looked around to locate the person being addressed, saw no one, then looked to the Squires’ porch and saw Roddy. She lifted two fingers to her breastbone—Me?—and then looked around again, making sure she hadn’t missed anyone lurking in the trees.

“Hi!” Roddy called again. “Hey, you’re one of the housekeeping girls, right? Hey, could you . . . Suzy wanted Squee here to help with something down in the Lodge—you think you could bring him down there with you, make sure he finds Suzy? That’d be great . . .”

“Of course,” Peg said, her brow knitted as though this new task might require a great intensity of focus. She waited, on edge, as if for the starter’s gun.

“Squee,” Roddy called gruffly. He didn’t look at the boy, just flicked his head. “Get down there, help Suzy,” he ordered, in a voice more Lance’s than his own. With one hand he held the screen door open. Roddy didn’t look at Lance, lest Lance take the opportunity to object. Instead, he squinted into the distance as though trying to make out something he couldn’t quite see.

Squee let his spoon fall into his cereal bowl and, also without looking at his father, walked stiffly across the room, past Roddy and outside. On the path, Peg clapped her hands to her thighs as if calling a puppy to come. The boy held the banister as he descended the porch steps, and there was something wrong about his carriage: he was off-center, or lopsided, as if favoring one side of his body but not sure which. When he’d made it to Peg—who put her arm around his shoulder and walked beside him down toward the Lodge—Roddy let the screen door close. Slowly he turned to face Lance, who was nodding his head with a patronizing swagger. “You got talking to do, Rodless. How’d you get in with that, old boy? Who’d ever think you’d grow up such a big stud? Such a fucking ladies’ man . . . RodLESS!” he cheered again.

Roddy took a big breath. “How’s things going, Lance?”

Lance looked around himself as if to assess his own situation right then and there. He looked down at yesterday’s clothes, unclean when he’d put them on. “Life’s a fucking piece of shit,” he said brightly, his smile pinched with sarcasm. “But who the hell cares about me? Who cares about me when our own little Rodless Dickless Rod is fucking the boss’s daughter? She good, Dickless? You know, I know how good she is, Rodless. You know, I fucked little Miss Chizek back then, when all you could do was cream your bed over her at night. Remember how it was back then, Rodless? Remember how much you wanted that fucking . . . that . . . You know, I’d’ve given her to you, buddy, back then, you know?” Here Lance’s eyes started to well with tears, and he lifted his cigarette to his lips and drew in long and hard. “I didn’t need . . .” He choked, coughed, took another long drag. When he spoke again his voice was wet and ragged. “I didn’t need that. I had Lorna. What’d I need with fucking Suzy Chizek? Suzy-fucking-Bud’s-daughter Chizek. I didn’t fucking need that shit.” Lance ground his cigarette out into the stained porcelain sink. “Get the fuck out of here,” Lance said, and turned on his heel, slamming the bathroom door behind him.

Roddy went to his truck, turned over the rumbling engine, and started out toward Sand Beach Road. Stalking across the north parking lot was a girl in a baseball cap and shorts, and it wasn’t until he got a lot closer that he realized it was Suzy and pulled the truck up alongside her. She jumped as though she hadn’t heard him approaching, then saw who it was and put her hand on the door to climb in. There was a moment, then, as they looked at each other and went from seeing nothing but the roiling inside themselves to catching on and realizing that something was not right with the other. A different sort of concern crossed each of their faces. Quickly, and at once, they said, “What’s the matter?” then both laughed for a pained half second, which was all they had in them.

“Get in,” Roddy said.

Suzy inhaled deeply. “I have to . . .”

“Just get in. You have lunch?”

She shook her head no. She got in.

“Mia’s with the girls?”

She nodded.

“Squee too.” Roddy pulled the truck out onto Sand Beach Road and headed north. They rode without speaking, each sorting their own thoughts all the way to the Luncheonette on Old Post Office Road. Suzy leaned to check her face in the rearview mirror but bumped the bill of her baseball cap on the way. She tore off the hat as if she’d just discovered the ugly thing to be the root of all that was wrong, and she shoved it behind the seat of the truck.