Osprey Island

Seventeen

AS THEY FLEE YOU’D THINK THEY FLOAT ON WINGS

He that had been present would have deemed

Their bodies to have hovered up with feathers. As they seemed,

So hovered they with wings indeed. Of whom the one away

To woodward flies, the other still about the house doth stay.

—ARTHUR GOLDING, trans., “Procne’s Revenge,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

SUZY WAS SITTING ON THE END of her bed when Mia returned from the beach early that evening. Their travel bags were out, unzipped and open-mouthed as though waiting to be fed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out, but were still full, and clothes from the closet sprawled across the bed as if they’d paused there to rest before their internment. Suzy sat immobilized, head in her hands, trying to see every potential decision through to its ultimate outcome. It was impossible; there were too many variables. But thinking kept her from moving, and not moving kept her from deciding. She’d been as she was for most of the afternoon: getting up to collect her soap and shampoo from the shower, then leaving them in the sink and returning to the bed, rising to sort Mia’s laundry but folding only one small T-shirt, which lay in the middle of the floor as if to mark the spot. The rest she left in a wrinkling lump. She felt so incapable of decision she found it hard to understand how she’d managed to leave Osprey Island in the first place. How had she ever just picked everything up and gotten on the ferry? She needed one more push from Mia, one more sob, one more plea. She needed Mia to come in the door and rush at her with relief to see the packing begun, thankful to be reaching the start of the end.

There was shuffling outside, a bump against the door as Mia shifted the contents of her hand to reach for the knob. Suzy felt such gratitude, anticipating the necessity that would emanate from Mia’s very body and provide Suzy a purpose and a direction. But as the door swung open and Mia pushed in from the hallway, the imperative she was to instigate first dwindled and then vanished altogether like the evaporation of a dream. Mia was barefoot, wearing an enormous Stanford T-shirt, the hem of which hit her about mid-calf, the collar slouched, coquettish, over one shoulder. Her arms were loaded down with a hodgepodge of sand-laden accoutrements that seemed to drop away from her as she moved, falling to the carpet like a flower girl’s petals. She was sunny across her cheeks and nose—sunnier than Suzy would have allowed—but she looked beautiful, freckled, as if she’d been dipped in sunset and rolled in stars. She drifted into the room, dropped the remainder of her burdens in a sandy heap at her mother’s feet, and flopped herself down onto the bed as though exhausted.

“Did you know that in Russia they killed the whole family of the czar, who’s like the king, except for his one daughter who had to lie under all her dead brothers and sisters until everybody was gone and she could get out and escape and nobody knew where she was because they never found her body because she escaped and then people, ladies, all came and said they were her so they could be the queen and they were all lying except the one who was really her but they didn’t have fingerprints back then so they had to tell by your ear who you were because every person has different ears than everybody else . . . And in the band the Beatles they got tired of being so famous and one of the men in the band wanted to take a vacation but he couldn’t so they had to pretend he was dead just so he could go on vacation and everybody thought he was really dead because if you listen to a song backwards it says I buried Paul, and in one album the car has the license plate number of the day that they said he died and also the cover of a different record was supposed to have all of them with aprons like a butcher and knives and meat like at the butcher shop and also broken up baby dolls but then they said they couldn’t have that but they had already made them and the people were lazy so they just put the new covers over the old ones instead of making them all new so if you have one that has the new cover over the old, if you put it in steam and take it off then it would be worth a lot a lot of money . . .”

Mia paused then, seemed to breathe in for the first time since she’d entered the room, and actually took notice of her mother, registered her as a separate being who might also, perhaps, have something on her mind. Suzy’s eyes on Mia were fixed and grave, and Mia’s face in sudden response went tight with concern. With a great emphatic gush she said, “Mommy?”

Suzy felt unable to speak. She just stared at her daughter, the words she’d been preparing, perhaps even unconsciously, all afternoon, were stuck in her throat: sweet coos of milky sympathy, whispered assurances of a future frothy with ease.

Mia was confused. She watched as Suzy stood up from the bed with awkward decisiveness and blurted: “OK, get packed. We’re leaving. Hup to.”

Mia lay there, unsure whether this was a joke. Her face tried to smile but couldn’t because her eyes were so tied up in trying to understand what was happening before her.

Suzy regarded her daughter. “I’m glad you had a good time at the beach, baby. But that doesn’t change anything. Not really.”

“But . . . but I don’t want to leave anymore . . . I changed my mind,” she cried, the tears of frustration on their way.

“Well,” Suzy said, “so have I. I’ve been thinking all afternoon, and I feel like it’s not safe to stay here, and I’m not letting you stay somewhere that isn’t safe.”

Mia wailed: “But it is safe! It is!” She was panicking now, that profound desperation of being misunderstood.

“Mia,” Suzy said in a studied and patronizing calm to which Mia was entirely unaccustomed. “There are some times when you’re a parent when you have to make a decision that a kid maybe doesn’t understand. But it’s my job to take care of you, and there are going to be times when I have to do what I think is right, and now is one of those times, and you can hate me if you want to, but I’m not doing this to make you mad. I’m doing this because I feel like it’s the best option we have right now.” She was softened somewhat by her own speech, and she broke in the end and became, for a moment, the mother Mia thought she knew. “You’ve got to trust me, babe, OK? I’m sorry, but you’ve got to trust me.”

Mia stood up from the bed, her body and her expression rigid with indignation. She was livid, and incredulous too, unable to believe this was really happening. She faced her mother down with as much rage as Suzy had ever seen in the child, and said with a vehemence she could only have inherited from the woman she was saying it to: “I don’t care. I’m staying here.”

“No, actually,” Suzy countered, “actually, you’re not.”

“I am. You can go. I’m staying.”

“No, Mia, you’re coming with me.”

And they went at it like that for some time, until Mia locked herself in the bathroom, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” at the top of her lungs, and Suzy stormed from the room.

She went downstairs, found a housekeeper to post outside the room upstairs to watch Mia, and then went straight for the office and grabbed the keys to a Lodge truck. In the parking lot she tried the keys in three vehicles before she found the right one, cursing herself, the trucks, her father, her daughter, Osprey Island, and everything that had ever conspired to get her born there in the first place. When the engine of the old tan Ford finally turned over, Suzy sank down in the seat, put her head back, and squeezed her eyes shut.

She swung out of the parking lot onto Sand Beach Road and sped up the hill. It felt good to drive, to move that fast, the whipping of wind, the adrenaline of speed. She wanted to stay with that speed, just to drive away, far. And what struck her was the dreadful familiarity of that sensation. It was high school. It was dying for flight, anything just to drive and keep driving. The preposterous, insidious envy she felt for people who lived in open spaces, who could put their car on I-80 in Pennsylvania or Illinois and keep driving until they hit the Pacific. God! The freedom in that! You dreamed of flight on Osprey Island. You dreamed of getting in your father’s Chrysler and gunning for the docks. Dreamed of how it would feel when the wheels lifted off the cobbled planks and took air.

It explained everything. The high school kids who just drove and drove around and around and around that little island, so fast they squealed the curves, grazing the guardrails. They’d swipe the fence on Sand Beach Road and leave their mark in the whitewash, streaking Daddy’s fender. It made the blaming easy. Citizens in their homes heard the skid: tires screaming on asphalt. They called the police, called the sheriff at home in his bed, said Sheriff, it’s the kids again out joyriding . . . and Davey Mitchell and Sheriff Harty roused themselves from sleep to get out and hunt the hooligans down and haul them in, maybe even keep them overnight in the island jail, which was fine; it was better, really, because for those kids anything was better than sitting still. Anything was better than driving your car up onto that ferry and knowing Chip or Matty or whoever was on duty that night would have a call in to your folks, who’d be down there hauling your ass back to bed before you could even smoke a godforsaken cigarette in peace. It wasn’t worth pulling your car onto the damn ferry, since you knew they were going to make you back it right off again.

Suzy pealed off the asphalt and onto the dirt road that bordered the old golf course. The truck slid in the sand, kicking up a spray of pebbles in its wake. She steered into the skid and barreled on up the hill. Rounding the rise, she could see both Roddy’s truck and Eden’s car in the driveway, and Suzy parked beside them, jumped out, and went down the ravine toward Roddy’s shack. She knocked, poked her head in, then turned, let the door fall shut, and went back up toward Eden’s. Halfway up the path, near the chicken coop, she saw the back door open onto Eden’s porch, and Roddy stepped outside. He raised a hand in tired greeting. Such a sweet man, Suzy thought, and the sight of him there in all his exhaustion was such a comfort. She couldn’t think of the last time a man had inspired comfort in her; she wasn’t sure it was something she’d ever felt. The thought made her desperately sad. If she could have done anything in the world right then— the kind of thing Mia asked constantly: If you could be anybody in the world who would it be? If you could have any candy in the whole world, which kind would you get?—if she could do anything right then, she thought, she’d have loaded herself and Roddy and Mia and Squee into Roddy’s truck, all their bags piled under tarps in back and held down with bailer’s twine. They’d drive to New York, enroll Squee at Mia’s school, find Roddy work easily doing construction, contracting . . . Families had been built on a hell of a lot less than that.

Roddy pulled off his hat, ran a hand over his head, back and forth, rubbing the hair one way and the other so it stuck up like he’d slept on it wrong. She climbed the porch steps and he began to speak, updating her on the latest developments as though he were the one with something to tell. “We’ve got one of your housekeeping girls inside.” He flicked his head toward the door, replaced his hat and secured it down as if preparing to go out into a storm. “Peg?” he said. “Peg, right?” He rolled his eyes slightly. “She’s worried . . .” He said it half-mockingly, then seemed to retract the judgment as it came out of his mouth and just shook his head, saying, “Worried about Squee. About what Lance might do to him.”

It was all the validation and prompting Suzy needed. “He’s dangerous,” she said. “Mia’s been hysterical all day—he is dangerous.” She felt the power in that reiteration; it became truer each time she said it. She felt a blooming sense of freedom, the freedom to say anything, because she was out of there! She was already gone, she was on that ferry, and nothing mattered anymore. She wasn’t going to get up tomorrow and do her father’s bidding another day. She wasn’t going to put her kid through this any longer, no matter how that kid felt about it after a day at the beach and three scoops of pistachio ice cream.

“Lance is dangerous,” she said again. She fought the urge just to keep saying it, over and over and over again. “Of all people, I should know how dangerous Lance Squire really is.”

“What?” Roddy was confused. “What do you . . . ?” And then he commanded himself to stop—all thought, all action, everything— until he understood what she was saying. She could see him shutting down, the way you’d close the doors and batten down the windows in the threat of an oncoming twister. Only it ceased to look like steeliness. It was a slackening, if anything—like the way Squee looked when Lance came at him.

Suzy choked. Then she began suddenly, almost violently, to cry. She sucked in breath and held her hair in her hand, the arm blocking half her face to cover at least a fraction of her shame. Her words came in sputters. “You can ask your mother,” she choked out. “She knows it all.” And then she didn’t know how to go on, for she was saying something she had never said in her life, and though it had always been true, she had never felt its truth the way she felt it right then. “I lost my virginity down in that ravine”—she threw a hand out behind her—“when I was sixteen years old.”

“To Lance?” Roddy said. “I knew you . . . I didn’t know it was—”

“Everybody and their fucking grandmother knew I slept with him. He basically raped me—Lance, there, in that ravine—when I was sixteen years old. Ask your mother,” she sobbed, “just ask your mother. She probably remembers more than I do. Ask Eden . . . That’s how I know. That’s how I know what Lance is capable of.” She paused then, drew in her breath, and looked up at Roddy for the first time since she’d begun. “I have to leave,” she said. “I feel like I’m losing my mind. I can’t stay here. I can’t. I have to leave.”

She started to say “Come with me” but he stopped her.

“I can’t . . . ,” he said.

“You could . . . ,” she said. She didn’t know if it was true, or if she wanted it, but she said it anyway.

He said, “My mother . . . Squee . . .”

And she just sobbed harder until finally he had to take her in his arms. It was easier to hold her and feel her sadness than it was to stand by and feel his own. So he held on to her, relieved that he had something to hold on to, at the same time realizing that the real relief would be in letting her go.

BRIGID WAS IN THE ROOM when Peg returned from Eden’s. She was lying on her bed, on her back, in gym shorts and a skimpy tank. It was hard for Peg to know what to say to her. It was hard for Brigid to know what to say to Peg. Peg was well enough aware that Brigid hadn’t come back to work with the rest of the girls after lunch; she’d run off after Lance Squire and never returned to her duties. The way Peg thought of it, she didn’t see Brigid as having run after Squee— didn’t even consider that Brigid might be concerned about the boy at all.

Brigid, for her part, had still been sitting on the Squires’ porch with Lance when the other girls had gotten off work, and had seen Peg climb into a car and get whisked away down Sand Beach Road. She hadn’t come to dinner. No one knew where she’d gone, not even Jeremy, who’d passed the meal in a state of demonstrable concern.

“Where’ve you been at?” Brigid said, looking off toward the window as if she was merely asking out of politeness and couldn’t have cared less where Peg had spent the last few hours.

“Pardon?” Peg said.

Brigid turned back into the room. “People wondered where you’d gone,” she said.

Peg paused. “The girls were likewise wondering where you’d knocked off to this afternoon.”

Brigid’s face went deadpan with annoyance as she tried to stop her eyes from rolling. “I was in plain sight of the lot of you on the Squires’ porch all afternoon. You couldn’t’ve wondered all that much, now could you?”

Peg couldn’t help herself. “How’s the boy?” she said, her tone a mixture of accusation and longing.

“Squee? He’s just fine,” Brigid said quickly. “They took him to the beach, with Mia.”

“Who took him to the beach?”

Brigid paused, waiting for the acid to drain back from her lips before she spoke. She forced a terrible smile: “Gavin and his new little hoor.”

“Well, if you’re getting off with Lance Squire, what precisely did you expect?”

Brigid sat up. “You’ve bloody got to be kidding.”

“What?”

“You think I’ve passed over Gavin in favor of Lance Squire?” Brigid took it for granted that no one in her right mind would ever pass over Gavin.

“So you haven’t, then?” Peg said casually.

Brigid flopped back down onto the bed and turned to the window.

“Oh, I see, now,” Peg said snidely.

Brigid lay fuming in her bed by the window, words flashing through her brain, retorts and explanations so loud in her skull it seemed Peg should have been able to hear them. She tried to speak, but whatever came to her tongue felt inadequate, and she swallowed a number of beginnings before she managed to sit up and say: “The man’s wife has just passed on. Am I the only one around in this bloody place who thinks he deserves a bit of sympathy? You lot treat him as though he’d killed her himself!”

That struck Peg unexpectedly, for it was true: that was precisely the way she thought of him. “Oh, don’t be thick,” she snapped. “I’ve simply a bit more concern for the welfare of the child who’s been left in his care and’ll likely be scarred for life, or worse, if no one steps in and does a bloody thing about it—”

“Jesus Christ!” Brigid cried. “Who do think you are, then?” She was stammering for the next line when Peg cut her off.

“I’m someone who bloody cares what’ll happen to that child!”

Brigid’s astonishment stopped her from replying. She just sat there blinking at this girl who was her roommate. “My god,” was all she could manage. “Oh my fucking god.”

Peg was riled, every ill feeling she’d ever entertained toward Brigid rising to the surface. “You pass your time licking up to this man and that without opening your eyes and seeing what’s in front of your bloody face! I don’t see how you can so much as sit and talk with the man when you’ve seen the way he treats his son—the way he treats bloody everyone!—acting as though it’s altogether just grand!”

Brigid shook her head back and forth, slowly, in utter disbelief. “Heaven forbid,” she said, “that a man who’s just lost his wife doesn’t act like a bloody saint every fucking minute of the day! God forbid you cut the man just the tiniest bit of slack when he’s been through the worst thing you’ll ever imagine!” She stood up, the words jamming in her throat. She held up her hands: there was nothing more she could even think to say to someone so ignorant.

“You must be blind!” Peg hissed, but Brigid waved her hands by her ears to say she’d hear no more.

“You’re bleedin’ unbelievable,” Brigid finally managed to say. She stared at Peg another moment as she tried to figure out what she might do with herself at that point. Then, suddenly, she snatched the covers from her bed and grabbed up her pillow with the other hand. “Absolutely unbelievable!” And she slammed out of the room.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Peg cried. And then she heard the outside door slam at the end of the hall, and she was quiet, listening. All she could hear were the crickets.

Brigid hadn’t a clue where she was going except that she was going away from that self-righteous, arrogant, preachy little priss she’d been unlucky enough to get lodged with. It was dark out, and the first thing Brigid saw were the lights of the Squire cottage across the way. People were still out on the porch of the Lodge, but Brigid didn’t want to see any of them. She walked across the path and up the steps. Through the window she could see Lance sitting in his easy chair, a beer in hand. Squee was on the couch, his legs crossed under him, playing with an action figure of some sort. They were watching TV. Like any normal, regular, American family, Brigid thought—even a normal, regular American family who’ve recently lost one of their own!— peacefully watching the television in their own bloody living room! She hated Peg with all the ire in her. She knocked on the door, heard Lance call, “C’min,” and opened the door.

“Hi,” said Squee, looking up briefly from his play.

“Hey there,” Lance said, waving her inside.

“Could I knock about with you lot a bit this evening?” Brigid said bitterly. “My roommate’s a bloody mulchie wanker!”

Lance’s face broke into a wide, winning grin. “I don’t know what the fuck that means, but our casa is your casa.” With his old magnanimous flair Lance swept an arm broadly across the room. “Beer’s in the fridge.”

She got herself a can, and as she shuffled toward the couch to curl up beside Squee with her blanket and pillow, Brigid could honestly say that she felt welcome and grateful and at home for the first time since she’d arrived on Osprey Island. And as they watched mindless American blather, Brigid settled into an oblivion of comfort for which she was enormously thankful.