Osprey Island

Twenty

GRIEF-SPURRED, SWIFT-SWOOPING

“Bird” in Greek and Latin also means “omen.”

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

BRIGID WOKE EARLY THAT MORNING on the Squire cottage sofa to the smell of frying bacon wafting up the hill from the Lodge kitchen. The doors to both Lance’s and Squee’s bedrooms were closed, and Brigid could remember drifting to sleep on the couch with Squee curled beside her. She remembered vaguely the television station signing off and Lance coming by to lift Squee from her arms and carry him to bed, and how she’d been touched, even through the wash of sleep, by a tenderness in Lance, and wished she could have invited them all in—Peg and Jeremy and the lot of them—to bear witness. Lance put Squee into bed, closed the boy’s door, and came back toward Brigid on the couch. She’d been quite awake by then. She felt a rush of fear and caught her breath, the act of which took that fear and transformed it, took her quickened heartbeat and moved the pulse of blood down between her legs in an arousal that in turn both scared and excited her. She lay on the couch beneath her own dorm blanket, eyes closed as if in sleep, and waited for what Lance would do. A waft of sweat and cigarettes traveled with him, emanating from his clothes when he got near, and he stopped by her head and bent down toward her, and then she could only smell the sweet yeast of beer clouding hot and dense out of his mouth as he put his lips, hot and cracked, to the bare skin of her forehead and said, “G’night, angel,” before he stood again, walked to the bathroom, and pissed for what seemed a very long time. And then he’d flushed the toilet, flipped off the light, gone into his own room, and shut the door. And the next thing Brigid knew it was morning and there was bacon on the griddle down at the Lodge.

She was hungry. Wrapped in the blanket, pillow in hand, Brigid hurried back to the staff building. She walked into the room without knocking—it was her room too, wasn’t it?—and found Peg and Jeremy asleep in Peg’s bed. Even in sleep, Jeremy seemed to be trying to envelop Peg’s body like a human cocoon. He stirred as Brigid entered and struggled to focus. He lifted his head, a nod of greeting or acknowledgment. Brigid flashed a split-second mockery of a smile and proceeded to change her clothes without giving a bloody fuck whether he watched or not. She found some flip-flops under her bed, took a sweatshirt from the hook on the back of the door.

In the dining room she sat alone at a table near the windows. The other girls weren’t yet up—which was fine with Brigid, as she’d decided that they were, to a one, boring and insipid—and she’d certainly no intention of sitting at the long east wall table with the lot of Neanderthal construction workers who looked about ready to whip out their waggling cocks whenever she passed by. Hello, she had a mind to tell them, did not mean oh please let me blow you. She thought she’d rather sit about with Jock, the cook, who liked to tell them all to suck his fat French dick but at the end of the day was really quite a sweet man, who’d been a young widower and raised, on his own, two teenage girls, whose photographs hung in plastic-wrapped frames by Jock’s workstation in the kitchen. Once Brigid had inquired about his “girlfriends up there,” and Jock had wiped his hands on his apron, motioned Brigid over, and told her all about Margeaux and Jeanine, both married now, one in Cleveland, the other in France, with a grandchild on the way. “The first,” he beamed, thumping his chest.

When she finished eating, Brigid picked a cheap paperback from a shelf of guests’ discards in the office and went out onto the deck to smoke. The novel turned out to be in Italian, so she just smoked and watched the birds instead. There looked to be ospreys in two of the nests she could see from the Lodge, busy with their breakfast as well, taking off from the nest and looping out over the water, just swooping and gliding, hardly any motion to their wings at all. Even after two cups of Jock’s industrial coffee, the broken night of sleep on the Squires’ couch caught up with her, and Brigid began to doze off in the deck chair, Italian novel open face-down on her lap, half-smoked cigarette falling limply from her fingers and onto the deck, where it went out, unnoticed and meaningless.

When she woke again, the girls were all inside, eating around a circular center table with the waiters. The construction workers had gone up the hill, and soon the boys went to join them, leaving the girls to clean up the mess of the meal while they waited for Suzy to come down and give them the day’s directions.

At eight-fifteen when Suzy still hadn’t shown, Peg was dispatched to go knock on her door upstairs, and returned reporting no answer. She sat back down, and someone dealt her in to a hand of rummy.

At eight-thirty Reesa Delamico came in, and when someone asked if she knew where Suzy might be, she got a funny, mischievous look on her face and went into the office to make a phone call. She got Eden, who said that no, the driveway was empty and as far as she knew she was home alone. Reesa reentered the dining room, frowning, shaking her head with a shrug, saying, “I’m sure she’s on her way,” but she didn’t look sure at all as she left them to their vigil and went about her own business in the salon. Cybelle Schwartz and Janna Winger got to the Lodge a few minutes behind Reesa, but neither of them had any idea where Suzy Chizek might be. Peg—as she was wont—began to worry.

At eight-forty-five Bud Chizek came down the hill, through the back kitchen door, and into the dining room on his way to the salon to see if Reesa was in yet, when he came upon the table of card-playing Irish girls. He stopped in his tracks, as though he’d happened on some infestation of vermin he’d forgotten to exterminate. Bud stood there in the middle of the dining room, trying to say something, with a look on his face that was—a number of the girls would later note—just this side of sheer hatred. He stammered, then finally spat out: “Take the day off—all of you!” He scowled, as if his words alone should have succeeded in removing them from his sight instantaneously. “Just get out of here!” he cried, and then he stormed toward the salon, leaving the girls with a distinct sense that when he reemerged they’d better have been long gone.

They conferred quickly among themselves. A moment later Peg stepped from the group and came tentatively through a sliding door and onto the deck toward Brigid, who stared her down as she approached. Peg said, “You heard that, did you? Bud’s told us to knock off work for the day . . . We thought we’d go to a different beach, if you’d like to come . . . ?”

It was a peace offering in which Brigid had little interest. “No thanks,” she said coolly, and picked up the novel on her lap as though eager to get back to reading.

But Peg didn’t leave. She just kept standing there, with something else she wanted to say but didn’t know how. Brigid slapped the book back down: “What?”

Peg looked as if she were swallowing a lemon. “I suppose,” she began, “that I’m the last person you’d want to do a favor for . . .”

Brigid lifted the corners of her mouth into a mean smile that conceded the point.

“It’s not for me,” Peg qualified, then inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a slow wash as if to steady herself. “We’d like to bring Squee—have him come to the beach with us today—and if you might ask his father for us, ask if the boy might come along. It would seem . . .” Oh, she was trying so desperately not to spoil it! “We thought, as you’re . . . perhaps he’d be more inclined to agree if it was you who asked, don’t you think?”

If what Brigid really wanted to say was You pathetic whining coward, she managed to merely nod definitively in Peg’s direction and spit out a curt “Fine,” as she flipped the book back over and attempted to feign great absorption.

Peg still wouldn’t leave. “We’ll be ready to go just as soon as we’ve changed . . .”

“Bleedin’ Christ!” Brigid slapped the book down on the table beside her, got quickly to her feet, and stalked off. And Peg watched after her, unsure as to whether she’d succeeded in getting what she wanted or if she’d simply managed to drive Brigid away.

REESA, JANNA, AND CYBELLE were sitting around the salon drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups when Bud came up to the glass door that divided the dining room from the beauty parlor and stood outside, miming a knock. Reesa waved him in, but already she could see something was wrong. The pieces started to assemble in her mind: Suzy missing in action, Bud looking mad . . . She didn’t know what it added up to, but she couldn’t imagine any way that it might be good.

Bud pushed through the door. He was a man who dispensed with niceties like Good morning, as if it was generally acknowledged that it was his wife who took care of such civilities in their family. “Reesa, I need to talk to you alone” was all he said. He did not acknowledge Janna and Cybelle except to make clear his wish for their absence.

Reesa, equanimous to a fault, reached for her purse and pulled out a few dollars. “Why don’t you guys go pick up some doughnuts from the IGA. We’ve got plenty of work here today . . . we’ll need them.” She tossed Janna her keys. “North lot.”

Reesa stood. “What’s wrong?” she said, before the door had even finished closing.

Bud looked down at his shoes with mild surprise, as if he couldn’t remember how they’d gotten on his feet. “Well, Suzy’s run off again,” he began.

“She’s gone?” Reesa broke in. Then more softly she said, “She did it.”

Bud nodded suspiciously. “Last night, maybe this morning. Left a truck in Menhadenport. Room’s cleaned out.” He gestured to where the proof lay.

Reesa waited for more.

“Look,” Bud said, “here’s what I came down to ask: I need a head of housekeeping. I need someone who knows this place. Someone who can put all those girls to work . . . I don’t know what the hell’s going on with her, but you know Suzy . . .” His words were frothing with bitterness. “I got to assume she’s not coming back.”

Reesa sat there a moment, not realizing that Bud had already gotten out what he’d apparently come to say. Then she understood. “Are you asking me?”

“There’s you . . . There’s my wife,” he said, as though the absurdity of such a thought was patently indisputable. “I don’t know who the hell else knows this place well enough not to just make more trouble instead of cleaning it up . . .”

“Bud”—Reesa was trying to keep her voice calm—“I’ve got a business to run here.”

“Not if I don’t have a business to run, you don’t.”

Reesa breathed in sharply. “It’s not coming to that.”

“Well, it just might!”

“A hotel does not go under because it’s missing a head housekeeper!”

“Yeah?” Bud said. “Exactly what do you know about what keeps a hotel from going under? What exactly do you know about running a hotel?” He was getting angrier, and it was Reesa’s bad luck to be the one still left on the island to take it. “Why don’t you take over running the damn hotel then?” he spat. “You take the hotel, and I’ll be the goddamn chambermaid! Or we’ll just let the whole place fall to shit and you can cut hair in your goddamn kitchen all year round!” And with that he turned and stormed back out into the conspicuously empty dining room.

LANCE WAS ON THE PORCH SMOKING when Brigid came fuming up the hill. He started to smile, but his expression shifted as hers came into view. “Oh boy,” he said, “that’s one pissed-off girl coming up the way.” The words took on an inadvertent singsong. “That’s one pissed-off girl, I’d say . . . What’s pissing off the pissed-off girl?” He looked almost happy, prattling on. “Come tell me who went and pissed off the pissed-off girl . . .”

He’d actually almost managed to make Brigid crack a smile. “Well,” she said, “we’ve been given the day off for god knows what reason, and the girls”—she sneered—“are heading to the beach and they’d like to bring your son along, only they’ve commissioned me to ask your permission, as they’re rather afraid you’ll eat them if they get a bit too close.” She stood squarely on the ground before him and waited for a response.

“Eat their nasty shit?” Lance puckered up his face in distaste. “No fucking way I’d eat their nasty asses!” They both laughed. Then Lance said, “You going with the girlies, Pissed-Off Girl?”

“Are you joking? I’d rather be working.”

Lance smiled broadly. Then he got an idea. “You been over to Dredgers’ Cove yet?”

Brigid shook her head. She’d not even heard of it.

“Tell you what,” Lance said. “I say we give them the damn kid, and you and me take a cooler of beer and some fishing rods and we go over to the prettiest cove on this island and get the fuck out of this place for a little while. What d’you say, gorgeous?”

And if there was a part of Brigid that said, Don’t do it, there was a bigger part, a stronger part, a part that was more important to her that said, Don’t be like them, don’t be like Fiona, don’t be like the people you don’t want to be, and so whatever fear or dread or caution or suspicion she might have felt got covered in a sleepy, grateful, relief-filled smile as Brigid said, “Mr. Squire, that’d be lovely.”

Dredgers’ Cove was on the far eastern side of the island, an old clam-digging site that had been incorporated into the Manhanset Nature Preserve. It was accessible only via an abandoned logging road, which was now prohibited to cars by a heavy padlocked chain stretched between two thick oaks. Lance yanked up the emergency brake, hopped from the truck and strode ahead. At the tree he stopped, took a ring of keys from his belt, undid the lock, and loosened the chain. It clunked to the ground, and Lance stepped back to the truck, drove over the chain, and then went back to pull it taut again and resecure the lock.

“What do they do—just pass round keys to the lot of you who live here?”

Lance grinned. He hadn’t been so animated since the fire. “Nobody gives out anything around here, baby. You want something, you find a way to get it.”

“You’ve a lot of friends, then,” Brigid ventured.

Lance thought about that. “Nope. But I know lots of folks.”

The road was pitted and bumpy, unmaintained and almost never used. Lance went along at a good clip for such conditions, and Brigid wished she hadn’t opened a beer from the case, since she’d have been far abler to enjoy the ride if not for trying to keep herself from getting drenched. She had a go at drinking off a good portion to get the liquid level down, but the truck hit a rut mid-gulp and sloshed half the can onto her face and neck. Lance glanced over and laughed largely. “Ha-ha!” he whooped. “Starting off the day right!” The truck rumbled along, pitching and bucking, Brigid wiping her face on the sleeve of her T-shirt, still attempting to hold the beer can steady. Finally Lance reached over, grabbed the can, and pitched it from the truck, and Brigid watched it arc through the air behind them, giving off a fountain spray of foam before it landed in the woods beside the road. They barreled on. “That’s why you get a case,” Lance declared. “That’s why you get a cheap-ass case! Afford to give one to the raccoons.”

They’d stopped for the beer at the IGA in town, had both gotten out of the truck and gone into the store, ordered sandwiches from the deli, pulled chips from the rack, and Brigid picked up a bottle of sun-tan lotion in the health and beauty aisle. Lance had grandly insisted on paying for it all himself. He was in full social mode, chatting up the cashier, who happened to be the mother of a school buddy of his. It was possible that he didn’t even notice how the people in the store looked at him and at each other as he passed. He was flying, and they were so far below him—specks, dots of fish in the ocean. The cashier looked at Brigid as though she’d have liked to take her into the back room and give her a good talking to, and Brigid felt almost surprised when Lance paid and picked up the beer and they left through a door that slid open and parted before them. The clerks looked on as though Brigid and Lance were shoplifters about to be stopped at the exit. But the door just slid magically open and they walked from the bleak fluorescence back into the bawdy sunshine, leaving nothing more than a wake of gossip.

They parked the truck in a pine clearing where the ground beneath them was rusty with fallen needles, the air infused with a rich, heady evergreen. When a breeze swept in from Dredgers’ Cove—the water was right there, just through the branches—the pine scent swirled with the briny smell of the sea. Lance carried the beer, Brigid the sack of food. Lance had forgotten the fishing poles. Brigid followed him down a narrow path toward the beach. It was strange, that line where the forest turned to seashore, as though someone had trucked a load of sand into the woods and thrown up a trompe l’oeil mural of the ocean horizon.

It was eleven or so, the sun high and hot. Brigid, at Lance’s suggestion, set the food down in the pine-shade.

“Should’ve bought ice . . .” Lance started to say, as he set the beer by the food, but they wouldn’t have had any use for ice, as he’d also neglected to bring a cooler.

Brigid walked toward the water. She took the towel from her beach bag and laid it out on the sand. Lance didn’t appear to have brought anything with him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, work boots, as though it had never dawned on him to wear something different to the beach. He hung back on the periphery of the woods, inspecting things, checking out the place, jumping onto a great chunk of driftwood, kicking a horseshoe crab over onto its back to expose the brown skeletal legs, its underbelly. Another swift soccer kick, a crunching crack, and the shell launched into the air. Lance lost interest then and wandered, picking up bits of sea glass, then tossing them back down, or skipping them out into the bay. He seemed agitated, or nervous, and it made Brigid feel the same. He didn’t even have a towel to sit on, and Brigid wondered how long he’d actually planned on staying. They had food to last them the afternoon, and beer for a lot longer than that, but Brigid feared that maybe she’d misunderstood his intentions for the day. Back at the Lodge, she was the sharp-talker, fearless and crude, the only one who could deal with Lance Squire. But out here she felt like Peg—tentative and vulnerable, and pathetic—and it made her loathe herself a bit. She got up and went for a beer.

She downed half the can as she returned to her towel, then nestled it into the sand where it wouldn’t spill. She lay back, face to the sun, to let on like she couldn’t have cared less what Lance was doing, because that’s what made her feel she had power: not caring. And not thirty seconds later, there he was beside her, plunking himself down, the heels of his boots digging into the sand, arms draped casually over his knees, as if he had all the time in the world to just stare out at that horizon.

All across the beach, mixed among the shells and pebbles and seaweed, there were spent shotgun shells—red or green, big as a man’s thumb, with rusted metal rims—and Lance plucked one up, shook the sand from inside, and then put it to his lips like a reed. “You can whistle ’em,” he said, “like a bottle,” and he blew into it: a hollow, deep, mournful call, like the island ferry’s.

She sat up, reached over, and took the cap from his hand. It was all about proprietorship, she reminded herself. About deciding what was yours and claiming it for yourself. She blew into the gun cap; it left a salty taste on her lips, and she reached for her drink. Such a gorgeous day, she was off from work, there was more than enough beer, and they could stay as long as she liked. And if she decided she wanted to return to the Lodge, then they’d return. It was precisely why the rest of them were such namby-pambies. They didn’t know what they wanted—and if they did, then they’d have to scour up the courage to ask for it. It helped Brigid a good deal in times of stress to isolate the exact ways in which she was far more capable a human being than most. Certainly poor Lance was about as far down the ladder as people came in terms of having control over their lives. Which was probably why he liked spending time with her: she offered him a glimpse of what it was to take charge. It was probably, Brigid thought, why he’d got on with Suzy back when they were young; Brigid definitely saw Suzy as sort of a kindred spirit. She and Suzy were both—in Brigid’s mind—soaring examples of strong, independent women who didn’t stand for the crap that men dished out. Some people might have even agreed with her—no sir, those ladies don’t stand for one ounce of bullshit—but there were other folks who’d say that Brigid and Suzy were girls who wouldn’t know from bullshit if you stuck their pretty noses in it. And still others might contend that some people’s lives were so steeped in bullshit they didn’t even know it stank.

Lance stood. “You want another?”

Brigid shook her can. “Yessir,” she said, and drank the last gulp down.

She watched him walking back with two new cans, and then he stopped ten feet away and lobbed one at her. It sailed past—actually, she pulled her hands away instinctually, as she always did in games in which one was meant to catch things—and skidded into the sand.

“Oopsie,” Lance said. “Oopsie daisy . . .”

Brigid cocked her head. “Bastard.”

He held his own beer to his heart, drooped his eyes and mouth in puppy-dog innocence. “Me?”

Brigid rolled her eyes. This was how she liked things. With him fetching, eager to please. And herself: sarcastic, mocking, entirely in control. She flipped over and stretched to retrieve the wayward beer without having to stand. It was a sexy maneuver for a girl in short shorts, and she was well aware of it. She reached the beer with her fingertips, managed to roll it toward her and grab hold. Then she sat up and began turning to Lance, who’d sat himself down beside her again. She had one hand around the beer and one on the flip top, and when she cracked it she caught Lance dead on in the spray. He jerked back, sloshing some of his own beer onto himself as well. “Whoaho!” he cried, his shirt and face splattered, wet with dots of foam. “So she’s playing dirty now, is she?” he jeered, half mocking, half sinister. He lifted his chin toward her: “Got yourself there too, darlin’.”

Brigid set her beer in the sand. “But I,” she began, “have dressed for our outing appropriately,” and she pulled off her beer-splotched T-shirt, then wriggled out of her shorts. She stood, reclaimed her beer can, spun on her heel in the sand, and stalked down the shore and into the surf wearing a striped bikini, about which even Lance was sharp enough to call after her: “There’s nothing in the world appropriate about what you got on, angel.” She laughed without looking at him, and raised her can in the air to toast her agreement, calling “Cheers!”

Brigid kicked around the shallows for a time, can raised above her head as she improvised a one-handed backstroke. On shore, Lance polished off his own beer and fetched another from the pine-tree stash. When Brigid came dripping back up the beach toward her towel, he was sitting on it, eating generic-brand sour cream and onion chips. He offered her the bag. Shaking a spray from her hair, she declined, indicating her desire, rather, for the towel, and when he understood what it was she wanted he clambered to his feet—no easy task with both hands full, and on a surface of sand—and then he set down his burdens and tried to pick up the towel for her. He seemed to want to wrap her in it, the way a parent might greet a child emerging from a bath, but the towel was covered in sand, and as he raised it a breeze caught and lifted it like a sail, whipping Brigid with a small sandstorm. She looked down at herself, dredged like a cutlet ready for frying, and let out a burst of laughter. “Thank you very much,” she said, snatched the towel, and left him chuckling as she went back down to the water to rinse off.

She dropped the towel near the shore, walked out waist deep, held her nose, and dunked under, arching her neck as she rose so the hair slicked back over her head. When she reclaimed the towel from its slump on the beach, she lifted it exaggeratedly in a display for Lance: Correct beach-towel procedure, sir, please watch as I demonstrate. She shook the sand away from her body, then wrapped herself dramatically, a game show hostess modeling the prize mink. Lance just stood there watching her from a distance, laughing, and it felt grand—it was grand, Brigid told herself—to bring laughter to a man who’d been through so much. He truly seemed to be enjoying himself. Whether Brigid was enjoying herself was another matter entirely, which—some people might have been inclined to point out—was something you’d expect might concern a strong, independent woman like Brigid, a woman who didn’t stand for any bullshit. A claim—the same folks might say—which was in itself a crock of bullshit big enough to sink an island.

The beers were growing warmer by the can, but they’d drunk enough that they didn’t much care. It was cheap, shitty beer—piss-water, Brigid teased, saying her friends in Dublin would be horrified—and it went down just like water, pretty much. They ate their sandwiches, and Brigid went in the water again, not because she felt like a swim but because she had to pee. Lance had already gotten up a few times to piss in the woods, and it seemed that every time he got up he sought out a closer tree, so the last time Brigid could literally hear his urine streaming and hitting the ground. She paddled a bit, floated around while she emptied her bladder, then splashed about to dispel the impression that she might’ve only gone in the water to pee. The bay felt grand anyway, refreshing, though it made her feel drunker than she’d thought she was, the way you might stand up from your table in a bar not feeling scuttered at all, but when you go to use the toilet, the bathroom starts to spin. When Brigid came out of the bay—water sweeping off her body, evaporating almost instantly under the intensity of the early-afternoon sun—she was overcome with tiredness: the night before, and the beers, and the heat all catching up with her at once in that kind of postlunch, postexercise exhaustion that might have felt rather glorious if she hadn’t been drunk, except she was.

Lance was squinting, laughing at her as she came up the beach, and as she flopped down onto her towel—facedown, her limbs sprawling out from her, useless as jellyfish—he said, “Siesta time, señorita?” all the while chuckling, mocking her for such alcohol intolerance. All Brigid could get out in response, her mouth already mashed sideways into the ground, was a muffed “Mmmmnn.” She would be asleep in seconds, one side of her face dangerously exposed to the sun, the other cheek growing warm with drool bleeding slowly from her open mouth as she slept.

The sun crept across the sky toward the west, and by early mid-afternoon shade had begun to overtake Dredgers’ Cove, spreading from the tree line out as the sun moved behind the pine woods. Brigid was still asleep as their spot on the beach lost its sun, first dappled by the leaves, then shaded altogether, and in her sleep she was growing chilly. The first thing she would remember feeling—remember being conscious of at all—was warmth, and she was grateful for it, as though someone had noticed her there, shivering in that tiny striped bikini, and thought to drape something over her—a jacket, or some clothes that were lying about. But there was weight to the covering, a warm, heavy pressing-in that came up beside her, curling around, cupping, and she curled into it, letting the warmth come over her like a dream, a good dream, an erotic dream where everything is warm and wet, everything coming together as though under warm bath water. But then, wrongly, the weight was on her, not around her, heavy on top of her, and it was too heavy, like a carpet unrolled over her back flattening her into the sand with not enough room for her lungs to inflate inside.

And then she was awake, and he was moving on top of her and though she felt cold, her sunburned skin was noticeably warm under his hand, which was cool as it came under the fabric at the bottom of her suit, tracing the crack of her ass down like he was going to push his cool hand in and warm it up inside of her. She knew what was happening; her head was still swirly from beer and sun, but she knew what was happening, had enough sense about her to think it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever done, and Brigid wasn’t averse, necessarily, to doing things that were a bit bad. No one was cheating on anyone, and his wife had died, and didn’t people seek human contact in times of grief to try to get through their pain and claim a life for themselves in the face of death? Isn’t that what people did?

She could have paused things, she thought, maybe just for that moment, to focus and get her bearings, but she was groggy, and it felt so nice, anticipating the coolness of his finger sliding its way up inside of her, pushing up and making her aware of herself inside, the way you could only be aware of inside when something came from outside and touched the inside and made you realize what was there and how empty it had been, how much you wanted something there, pushing through, feeling out the dimensions and making a space from a void, creating the space as it was entered, as though the walls appeared only as he made them with his touch. She breathed in, ready to feel the coolness of his hand, her inside warmth taking it over and transforming it, making it warm within her. He shifted awkwardly, and fell more on top of her, a greater crush of weight that pushed the breath back out of her and jerked her one notch further into wakefulness, aware suddenly of the sand pasted with spit to the side of her cheek, and the angle of one arm pinned underneath her, asleep, stiff, and painfully inert beneath her body. And as she became aware of these discomforts, on top of her back he shifted heavily again, one hand pressed into the sand beside her as though he might do a push up from where he was propped. But then, at once, the full weight of his body seemed to come crushing down on her from behind, and in the same motion he caught her from below and with one thrust had shoved the whole of himself, erect, inside her.

The shock she felt first was the shock of what was not happening— the shock that what was inside her was not the slim pencil-cool of his finger, as though that was something she’d been anticipating for hours or days, and not just seconds, fragments of seconds. It hit her like disappointment first—the largeness, the hotness of it—and then she felt the dig of the zipper on his jeans into her ass, and the sand from his jeans grinding into her skin. She tried to say something but couldn’t, like in a dream when you scream and nothing comes from your mouth, the horror of that, her mouth crammed down into the sandy towel, lips scraping grit as she tried to move but couldn’t shape a word with all the weight from above. And though she could breathe, somehow, through her nose, she panicked, her body seizing up in terror like one drowning, and she thrashed, trying to lift her head and open her mouth to the air.

He should have rolled off her then. He should have rolled off when she jerked like that, realized from that spasm that something was wrong—she couldn’t breathe!—rolled off her and checked to make sure she was OK: Honey, what’s the matter, oh, jeez, sorry, was I crushing you there? In fact, if she’d heard his voice, alone, with no accompanying movement, she’d have actually thought he meant to soothe her, because that’s what it sounded like when he whispered, “Shhhh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” blowing those shushes into her ear like reassurance. But as he shushed, his breath hot, she felt his hand clamp down on the back of her neck, hard, like he meant to hold her there, his fingers around the side of her neck pressing in too deeply. It panicked her further, the desperation of being unable to breathe, her face pushed into a towel, her throat constricted under the pressure of his grip, and she thrashed harder, and he held her harder, his grip tightening as he braced himself, kicking a foot deeper into the sand for purchase, all the while cooing “Shhh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” in her ear, the sound changing into something lordly and dominant, a farmer trying to calm a struggling chicken as he holds its neck steady against the chopping block.

Brigid squirmed under the weight of his body, tried to wrench her head around with such force—such impeded force—that she bit down fiercely on her own tongue and that absolute, terrible, thudding pierce of pain replaced everything else the way a scream shuts down a roomful of conversation, the pain in her mouth filling with hot blood, stopping everything else in her body. When she stopped kicking he let up the pressure on her neck, and she found she could turn her head into a pocket of air, and the pocket of air calmed her enough that she could breathe and feel the blood drain from her mouth, hot into the sand under her face. The blood-pulse in her tongue seemed to match the one inside her, hot throbbing mixed with gritting sand, sand in her mouth, sand inside, rubbing as he thrust, grating against her, and it seemed that she just lived inside that pain, the rhythm and tear of it, until somewhere something changed and he arched his back up as he came, and then fell again into her, gratefully this time. He lifted his hand from her neck and moved it through her hair, combing and rubbing and kissing the side of her face and her neck as he rubbed, still kissing, nuzzling, cooing, “Angel, angel, angel,” as he pulled himself out of her and rolled away, onto his back, breathing hard. She lay on her stomach, almost as she’d fallen asleep, almost nothing changed— just the towel wrenched away, one arm dead beneath her, her tongue swelling in her mouth, her crotch grated raw, and her bathing suit bottom hitched to one side and wedged up in the crack of her ass. She couldn’t move her arm to pull it down. She couldn’t move at all. She lay there, and she breathed.

After a time Lance sat up. He tucked himself in and closed his pants, and then he leaned over to her, and pressed his face into the flesh of her exposed buttocks and breathed in deep before he tucked a finger inside the elastic and pulled it out for her, settling it around the curve of the cheek as though with that act, that gesture, he could make it fine. Snapping the elastic back into place, he pushed himself to his feet. She could hear him walking back toward the trees, then the sound of a flip top cracking. She could hear him return, flop down into the sand again beside her, and then she felt him place a beer, the can warm, on her back, try to balance it there on her as if he was playing a game. When he took his hand away the beer stayed upright for a second as she breathed, then toppled and fell, rolled off into the sand.

There was still sun on the water, and Lance unlaced his boots, strode down to the shore, pulled his shirt over his head, slipped off his jeans, and went naked into the salty sea at Dredgers’ Cove.

Brigid heard the splash and summoned the strength she had to pull on her shorts and shirt, slip into her beach shoes, and gather her things. She would have been thankful to dive into that water. It would have made the ride back easier somehow if they’d both been clean. But to follow him, naked, into the water was not an option, so neither was cleaning herself. She stood and walked into the woods, past the food and the beer to the truck, and she climbed in the passenger side and slammed the door and waited.

Lance dove shallowly, then twisted around under water and came back to where he’d begun. With both hands he rubbed his face with water and then stood and marched back onto the beach. He shook himself off like a dog, paused to judge the results, then shook again before shimmying back into his clothes.

And then he was there, opening the driver’s side door, pushing in the rest of the beer and the bag of food and climbing in behind them. Brigid was grateful for those packages on the seat between them; they were something in the way—not much, but something. He hoisted his hips up from the seat to reach in his pocket for the keys while Brigid watched him, aware of every move he made as though she had to keep track of it all from now on. She watched him as if it was the only thing that mattered: to account for every single thing Lance Squire did from the moment he got into the truck. This focused her second to second, gave her a purpose then, second to second to second. It took a great deal of focus, this accounting, to notice every detail, every twitch and glance, and Brigid was able to lose her sense of herself. In her awareness of him she was able to forget a bit of who she was, what she might look like, how she was sitting, what sort of expression she wore. As she watched, she lost her self. She made herself invisible; she watched him like prey.

He put the keys in the ignition, turned the engine over, put the truck in reverse, and began a five-point turn to get them headed back in the other direction down the logging road. A few minutes along, when he’d gotten the feel of the ruts and bumps again, he looked to her, then back at the road, and said, “You pissed at me now, Pissed-Off Girl?”

Brigid said nothing. She watched. She did not know how he might read her expression. She did not know what her expression was.

“Hey,” he said, like a plea for clemency, “you don’t have to worry: nobody ever gets pregnant off me.” He laughed a little, smiled over at her winningly.

Brigid turned away, realized she was mashed up against the passenger door, putting as much space between herself and Lance as the truck allowed. She leaned her head out the window and let the wind rush by, blowing back her hair, the air heavier with pine the deeper inland they traveled. She would go back and take a shower—a very hot shower—and she’d sober up, and sleep. She concentrated on the shower without imagining it too fully, because imagining the water scalding on her body made her want it so badly she thought she might cry out.

When Lance stopped for cigarettes at the gas station and paused outside the truck to lean back in the window and smile at her and ask, offhandedly, “You need anything, darlin’?” and she shook her head no and watched him turn and enter the store, heard the ding-ding of the door, saw it fan slowly closed behind him, she was cognizant enough to marvel at the macabre absurdity of the moment. She thought: I’ve lost my mind. She thought about simply saying to him, when he got back to the truck and offered her a smoke, which she might accept— she thought she might let him light it for her, inhale, then simply say: Is it my imagination, or did you just hold me by the neck and fuck me? But when he did get back with his pack of Merits and offer one to her, leaning across the packages on the seat to light it, she said nothing. If someone asked, later, she’d have said she was in shock. For it was shocking, she’d explain, to understand—to truly understand for the first time in your life—that what has happened to you is really only what you think has happened. There was a truth: she and Lance Squire had had sex on the beach at Dredgers’ Cove. Beyond that, how was she supposed to account for anything? If two people looked at each other, who was to say which one was the watcher?