Osprey Island

Twenty-one

THAT FLESH OF HIS OWN FLESH

As in the life experience of man, so in the life of birds, some of the many accidents which befall the birds may easily be averted by man, by means of a little forethought.

—B. S. BOWDISH, “Bird Tragedies: Even Birds’ Lives Are Not Exempt from the Tragic Element”

LANCE PARKED IN THE NORTH LOT, and he and Brigid walked together up the path, then parted between their respective residences. He waved, turning back to her as they separated, calling, “I’ll put these beers in the fridge—come by later if you get thirsty.”

Brigid went to the room in the barracks that she and Peg shared. The building was mercifully empty, the other girls not yet back from their day at the beach, the boys still down the hill working on the new laundry. Brigid dropped her bag, took a couple of towels from her hook behind the door, and went to the shower room, toward the water she could finally allow herself the desperation of wanting.

While Brigid was in the shower—sitting on the floor of the stall, just letting the water spray over her, hot as it could go, because it seemed right to feel the burn of her burned skin, as if she’d been pricked by a million needles and the water flowed not just over but into her, the scald of it turning her inside out with pain so insistent and encompassing she could lose herself in it—Peg and the girls returned.

Six housekeepers, plus Squee, had crammed into Jeremy’s car, which they’d borrowed for the trip to the beach. Peg—in what had to be the most undeniably unconscionable thing she’d ever done—drove. Even Jeremy, who was superhumanly tolerant of Peg’s monstrous sense of propriety, ribbed Peg, in his own inimitable fashion: “The day you get arrested on Osprey Island for driving without a valid international license is the day I’ll . . . I don’t even know what.” On the way back from the beach, it was Peg’s idea to drop Squee off at the Jacobses’ place, to keep him away from Lance as long as they could, and she’d been pretty sure she could find her way to Eden and Roddy’s, and back to the Lodge from there. She was good with directions, she told the others. She had an uncanny memory, an instinctual knack.

Brigid heard a few girls come in to use the toilets; she had the water so hot that when they flushed and all the cold disappeared for a minute there was barely a difference. She dried herself inside the stall behind the mildewed vinyl curtain and wrapped her hair in one towel, the other around her body, for the walk across the hall to their room, which she sincerely hoped was empty. There were few people she’d have liked to see less, just then, than Peg.

But, of course, there she was—seated at the desk, penning her eighty-seven thousandth Hi! How are you? I’m fine postcard of the summer. She turned at the sound of the door shuffling open like the lid of a cardboard box, saw Brigid enter, started in horror, looked again more closely, and let out a scream—short and sharp, worthy, perhaps, of an aging Agatha Christie heroine, but a bona fide scream all the same.

“Christ, it’s only me,” Brigid said. She shot Peg a look of deadly annoyance and turned toward her shelves for something to wear.

Peg was practically on top of her in seconds. “My god—oh, god, Brigid, what’s he done? Oh, Jesus god!”

“What is your problem?” Brigid shrilled. She shoved past Peg to the closet, where she didn’t need anything. The room was so tight there wasn’t anywhere to go, and Peg kept coming at her, her hands outstretched as if she were ready to grab Brigid by the throat and throttle her.

“Have you lost your mind?” Brigid screeched. “Stay the fuck away from me!”

Peg stopped, stood trembling, her voice a quiver; “My god, Brigid, your face . . .”

Brigid paused then, for the first time since she’d entered the room. She looked down at the thready fuchsia of her old bath towel, her too-pink legs sticking out from beneath—sunburned, and reddened too from the heat of the shower. There was no mirror in their shoe-box room. She tried to look at her shoulders. She’d been out in the sun a good long while and never had put on any of the sunblock she’d bought. It would be just like Peg to fly into fits over a sunburn. Brigid fixed her roommate with the most patronizing look she had and spoke in a voice so saccharine and mean she surprised even herself: “It’s called a sunburn.” Sunburn: as though it were a new vocabulary word on educational television. “It’s caused by the sun . . . ?” Sun. Is that a word you understand, you stupid, annoying little tool? Sun? Sunburn? “Most victims survive them.” And then she turned from Peg and opened the closet door.

“No!” cried Peg—and Brigid thought for a second that Peg was telling her, No, under penalty of death, please god I beg you don’t open that closet! “No . . . your neck . . . your throat . . .” and Peg dissolved again.

Brigid stood before the open closet door, wrapped in her sister’s hand-me-down beach towel, her back to her roommate and their tacky hole of a room, and it was, in that moment, as though she were naked, completely, in the open and exposed, a wash of shame like urine running down her legs in public, and there was nowhere to run. All she could do in the panic-rush of her brain was scream at the top of her voice, the pitch cracking and breaking as it rose: “Get out of here! Get away from me! Get out! Get out now!” The sound of Brigid’s voice was terrible, and Peg was terrified, and she ran.

Brigid thought of her own throat. It might have been someone else’s throat, for she could not feel its attachment to her body, could not even lift her hand to touch it, as if doing so would bring it to life on her body, the way everything turns to color as Dorothy cracks open the farmhouse door in Oz. She sank down, the towel slipping from her body as she bent into the closet, rummaging, riffling, tearing open the travel bags that lined the floor. There was a makeup case somewhere filled with stuff she hadn’t even thought to use since she’d arrived on the island; not even through the courting of Gavin had it seemed a place where one would brush on a little gloss. She felt the case there, under her hand, a nylon zippered sack crammed and stretched full of bottles and tubes the authorities had searched at customs not two weeks before, as if they might have been sticks of dynamite. She tore it open, dumped its contents on the unfinished wooden floor. There was a compact, square and brown, which she grabbed and flipped open. The towel was falling from her head, and she pulled it off, loose from her hair, and let it drop to the floor beside her. The compact’s mirror was dusted with powder, and she rubbed it clean with her thumb, held it up, tried to angle it right, to see her throat, pulled it away, rubbed the mirror with the towel that was pooled in her lap, then tried again. The mirror was so small it was hard to see much, but she could see enough to know.

She flicked her hair out of the way of her view, and it was the brush of her own fingers across the skin of her neck that did indeed bring the pain to life, animating it as if by a magic so strong and swift it choked her, as if his hand was there again, fingers curled around her neck, pressing purple welts into her throat like a handprint in ink against the white-pink of her flesh. She coughed and the pain spread inward, as if she’d been bruised from the inside as well—the raw, swollen pain of strep throat she’d had as a child, right there on her skin. Where had she been not to notice the pain now clamping down on her airway as if to gag her? She sat in the mouth of the closet, naked but for the towel now fallen to her hips and in her lap, choking as though her throat were swelling shut by the second.

Peg didn’t pause to think. She ran from their room in the staff’s barrack quarters and across the path toward the Squires’ cabin. She did not knock at the door or stop in the doorway but flew straight into the living room of Lance Squire’s home, where he sat drinking down the final can of that case of beer. Peg flew at him, then stopped, yards from Lance’s chair, shouting, hollering as loud as her voice would take her, “You bastard! You bastard! What did you do to her? You answer me! So help me . . . tell me what you did to her, you . . .” and it was only when Lance stood—stumbling backwards as he did so but then holding steady, standing tall. Only then did Peg seem to realize where she was and what she was doing: swearing in the booze-stinking face of a man she feared perhaps more than she’d ever feared a living, breathing person. Lance steadied himself and Peg backed away; for every step she took from him he took another toward her, sneering as though it were a game. The front screen door had closed itself, and now Lance backed Peg up to it. The smell of him nearly made her retch, that sick stink of alcohol blowing out of him in gusts. Peg had not in her life known this desire—a want that felt so much like need—to hurt someone the way she wanted to hurt this man, to beat him bloody with her fists and make him crawl away in shame. She suspected that to slink away was something Lance Squire would never do; he seemed, to Peg, incapable— inhuman, she realized, that’s what he was, and she cried it then: “You’re inhuman! You bastard! You inhuman bastard!”

Which is what she was screaming when Lance stepped back. He took one step away, as if he’d become aware of a terrible smell, something coming from her that made him instinctually retreat. He dropped his chin, narrowed his eyes to slits, glanced around the room as if to check that there was no one to see when he pounded her one. Then he fixed on her, this dishrag of a girl hollering at him as if that blue vein was going to pop right out of the middle of her forehead. Lance said, “Where’s my son?”

Peg stopped yelling.

Lance said it again, every word a stress of its own. “Where. Is. My. Son.” He reclaimed the offense, gave her a fraction of a second to answer, and then laced in: “You’re the one who took him today, you little piece of shit. You tell me where my son is, and you tell me now!”

He was only a few paces back, but her movement was so unexpected he didn’t even have a chance to reach out and grab her before she was gone. She spun, somehow her hand already on the screen door handle, and was out and down the steps and running for the barracks before it slammed again behind her. She ran for her room, then realized Jeremy’s keys were still in the pocket of her shorts and switched course mid-sprint, veered down the hill toward the north parking lot, where she jumped into Jeremy’s boat of a car and drove out of the Lodge and up the hill toward Eden Jacobs’s house in a decidedly more reckless manner than she’d perhaps ever done anything in her eighteen precious, law-abiding years.

Lance saw her run for the parking lot. He heard a big old engine turn over and saw the car itself come over the rise on its way up Island Drive, and it didn’t take much—even for Lance, even after consuming the majority of a case of beer and whatever else he’d put away while no one was there to see—to figure out where she was going. His own car keys were still on his belt. He tore out the door not five minutes behind her.

Peg burst into Eden’s living room with all the gumption that a girl of her sort possessed, which is to say that she knocked hard and waited, her face contorted in anguish, for Eden to open the door. Eden and Squee appeared to be in the midst of a game of cards, which was spread out on the coffee table, and Eden had something cooking in the kitchen for dinner. Peg entered with urgency, urgency instantly drenched with pity: Why, she wanted to know, couldn’t this child just be left alone to eat his dinner and play a bloody hand of rummy? And now that she was there, she didn’t know what to say. Squee had to get out, they had to get him away, hide him, but she’d have to explain why, wouldn’t she? What was the answer to that question—why? Squee had to get away because Lance was coming for him. Lance was coming for him, and he was shit-faced drunk, and he’d probably just beat up or raped or done something horrible to a nineteen-year-old girl who was stubborn and stupid enough to stand there in broad daylight and sneer as if it was Peg who’d done something wrong.

Eden stood waiting for Peg to form words. “Would you like to come in? Sit down?” she said finally, and that managed to jump-start Peg.

“We’ve got to get the boy away from here!” she cried, and Squee looked up at her from the couch. He’d been trying to pretend that this wasn’t anything to do with him, this crazy girl bursting into Eden’s living room, that she had to do with something else entirely. Eden turned to make sure Squee was still where she’d left him, then spun back to Peg, who was spewing out the words now as fast as she could think them. “Something’s happened, and I don’t know what, but something’s happened to Brigid, my roommate, and now Lance wants Squee. He’s probably followed me here . . .” She looked over her shoulder and out the living room window as though she might see him coming up the drive behind her. And then she looked again to the window, and there was a truck coming up the drive toward the house. Peg gasped, and then she hung there, waiting for Eden to make the next move, ready, it seemed, to run.

The truck approached, Peg’s panic mounting, Squee’s heart beginning to beat faster, the voice in Eden’s head telling her to stay calm, watch, wait, see what unfolded. The truck came closer, low sun reflecting off its windows, blurring the color of its flanks. Eden had one foot in front of the other as though she was ready to pivot around, scoop Squee up from the couch, and run him out of there herself, out the back door and down to the ravine, where they’d hide him, swaddled among the rushes, while they went back to the house and waited for Lance, aiming shotguns out the windows like outlaw vigilantes defending their own.

The truck turned to park in the driveway and Eden sighed audibly, the breath rushing out of her lungs as if she’d been holding it longer than she’d realized. It was Roddy, home for the day. The five o’clock whistle had sounded some minutes before. It was only Roddy, and Eden let herself feel, for just a moment, the tremendous sense of relief: it was Roddy. She wasn’t alone. Roddy was back. There were things in the world for which she was thankful. Her son had come home.

He was worried already, just seeing the strange car there in the driveway, and he came straight up the front walk to the door. Knocking but not waiting for a response, Roddy entered the house and pulled his hat from his head penitently. He held it before him in his hands. “What’s going on?”

Peg looked to Eden, as though she, as the elder, were more qualified to address such a question. Eden said, “I can’t say I’m sure, but”— she, in turn, looked to Peg for confirmation—“I think maybe you and Squee need to go out and get some dinner someplace . . . ?”

Peg nodded fervently. Squee was looking around at all of them, trying to keep up with a game whose rules he didn’t quite understand. Roddy froze briefly, taking stock of the situation around him and formulating a plan. A second later he was moving toward Squee. He reached out his hand to help the kid up off the couch, then realized he had a hat in it. He gave the hat a shake, then, inspired, flapped it onto Squee’s head. “Shakes or Morey’s, Squee-man?”

Squee peered out from beneath the lavender brim of the hat. “Shakes!” Eden mouthed the same word—Shakes—at Roddy. She was nodding. Lot less of a chance of running into Lance at the ice cream parlor/snack shop than at the joint where the man’s mother tended bar.

Squee hopped up from the couch with surprising energy. He glanced toward the kitchen, briefly wondering what would become of Eden’s dinner (which surely involved some weird constellation of lentils and broccoli) from which he was pleased to escape. He stood before Roddy, who lifted the cap off Squee’s head, adjusted the band as tight as it would go, and replaced it on the boy.

“Let’s do it,” said Roddy, and he scuttled the kid ahead of him and out the door. He turned back to Eden. “I’ll call?” he said. “See when it looks OK to come back?”

Eden nodded. She waved him away, and then she and Peg watched from the living room window as Roddy and Squee climbed into the truck and began to back down the driveway. They were still watching seconds later when another truck came over the rise and sped up the driveway straight at Roddy and Squee.

Peg drew in a sharp breath, anticipating the impact—a sudden smash of glass and metal. Eden simply held hers. Roddy saw the other truck. He braked, then put his own truck in forward drive, ready to go over the lawn, around the side of Lance’s truck, and down the hill. In her mind, Eden saw Roddy hesitating over whether it would be wrong to run tire tracks through his mother’s lawn, and it wasn’t until Peg looked at her that she realized it was her own voice saying, “Go! Just go!”

Roddy pulled out forward, steering his truck to the right, onto the far side of the lawn. Lance—coming up from behind him, his vehicle bucking as he took the ruts too quickly—saw Roddy turn off the driveway and onto the lawn, and he swerved his own truck right as well, as though his plan—if Lance was capable of having a plan—was to block Roddy’s exit. Lance didn’t know who was in that truck, besides Roddy. He couldn’t see Squee in the passenger seat from that distance, four feet tall and hidden beneath the lavender hat.

Then came the crash that Peg had braced for, Roddy’s brakes squealing as he slammed them, Lance’s truck coming straight for Roddy’s passenger side as though he’d never thought to brake at all. The trucks seemed to hit in the flash of an instant, just a slam: the front of Lance’s truck into the side of Roddy’s. And then everything went slow: the protracted skid of the trucks across the lawn, joined in a lopsided T, Lance’s pushing Roddy’s as if to nudge it along, impeded by the surface of the grass, which tore beneath them and slowed them down as though the ground itself was offering what help it could by way of traction.

When the trucks stopped altogether, Eden and Peg were running from the house and across the lawn. There was a moment of nothing, no movement from the vehicles whatsoever, just the two women running, their steps nearly silent, across the grass toward the collision. Then, first, the door of Lance’s truck flew open and Lance stepped out, tall, and seemed to hover on his feet for a moment, his face wrenched with fury, before he pitched and stumbled sideways, his expression shifting from anger to confusion as his feet slipped from under him and he buckled to the ground.

Lance was struggling to stand when Roddy’s door eased open. Roddy stepped out, then leaned back in to pull Squee across the seat toward him. Getting a purchase, he gingerly lifted the boy from the driver’s side of the truck. Squee was balled up into himself, his right arm under his left like a broken wing he was protecting from the wind. Roddy held the boy to him and started toward Eden. He said nothing, just moved, because moving the boy to safety seemed the only imperative. Eden went toward them, but Peg was rooted where she stood. Roddy and Eden came at each other, their focus direct and intent and singular, as if Roddy were going to hand Squee off to her, the next sprinter in this terrible relay. But then Peg screamed and Roddy and Eden broke the lock of their eyes and looked up. From a few feet away Lance was lunging at them. He looked unsteady, drunk and furious, yet he flew toward them with as single a purpose as Eden and Roddy had in rushing to each other. Lance yelled, spitting as he growled, “Stay the fuck away from my son!” and he grabbed for Squee as though a boy were something you could steal like the ball in a game of Keep Away. Roddy was just lifting Squee away from his own body, preparing to pass him off to Eden, when Lance dove and caught them all just off-balance enough that when Lance grabbed he managed to catch what was closest to him: Squee’s upper right arm. As Lance grabbed, Roddy lost his grip and his balance at the same time and went stumbling backwards as Squee was wrenched away.

Squee screamed. Lance had grabbed his arm, wrenched it hard without any purchase or balance of his own, so in snatching Squee he sent them both down, Lance with a look of surprise turning to annoyance at what he saw as a great injustice keeping him from remaining upright as he tried to go about the business he’d come for. Squee fell between Lance and Roddy with a cry of awful pain, and on the ground he curled tighter into a ball, holding his right arm desperately to him, rocking and crying into the grass.

Lance and Roddy both struggled to their feet and lunged for the boy. Roddy tried to throw his own body over Squee’s to protect him; Lance went at his son with arms outstretched, ready for a tug-of-war. Lance reached the boy first, grabbed hold of the collar of Squee’s T-shirt, and pulled. The boy screamed. Lance grabbed again, this time with both hands, trying to take Squee by the shoulders and stand him up. He was pulling at him, hollering inches from Squee’s head, “Get up! Get up and get in the truck! Get the fuck up!” and Squee wailed, just trying to curl in and protect the arm that his father kept ripping away from him, and he wailed louder as if trying to out-scream the pain.

Roddy, unable to throw himself on top of Squee without hurting him even more, instead came around and tried to tackle Lance from behind, tried to pin Lance’s arms behind him and stop him from reaching for Squee. But as Roddy pounced, Lance flung him off and sent Roddy sprawling and stumbling backwards, his legs buckling under him as he landed, ten feet back from where Lance and Squee struggled in the grass of his mother’s lawn.

Eden, in the midst of it, watched in terror for a moment, then turned and ran for the house, grabbing Peg from where she stood and pulling her as she ran. She pushed the girl up the steps and into the house, then shoved her toward the kitchen door, pointed at the telephone on the wall: “Call the police!” she shouted. Peg looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. Eden’s voice was cold and hard. “Call nine-one-one,” she said. “Call the police.” Then it clicked and Peg understood. She reached for the phone.

Eden dashed for the living room. She rummaged frantically in the organ bench through old musical scores and polishing rags, came up with a key and set across the room. Her late husband’s gun case stood by the entrance to the hall, virtually untouched since his death that spring. She fumbled with the key in its cheap tin lock, flimsy as the clasp on a child’s diary. Her hands slipped and the key fell to the carpet. She bent to find it in the shag, then stopped and spun around, her eyes on a bookend, a marble pedestal topped with one bronzed baby shoe. Roddy’s. She picked it up and hurled it through the glass door of the gun case, drawing her hands back over her face as it struck. Then she peeked out, saw the bookend on the ground, the shattered glass, more glass still falling around it, and she stuck her hand out, grabbed the barrel of a shotgun and yanked it out. It was heavier than she’d expected, and she faltered under its weight. Her arm slipped, slicing into broken glass, but she hardly noticed, just reestablished her grip farther down the long shaft and hefted it to her chest. She was running back out the door then, both hands on the gun, lifting to aim it as she ran.

Outside, Lance had left Squee writhing in the grass while he went after Roddy, who’d come at him again from behind. Lance threw him off, then staggered to where Roddy’d fallen and kicked him, hard, in the stomach and the ribs. Roddy curled into himself, fetal, like Squee across the yard. He tried to catch Lance’s leg, but Lance kept kicking, sent a hard-toed boot flying into Roddy’s back someplace that shot a blinding pain through him, and his back spasmed, and then he blacked out.

He came to seconds later on the ground, and lifted his head to see Lance dragging Squee by the arm across the lawn toward his truck. Squee was limp, blacked out too, just a body being dragged across the ground. Roddy struggled to stand. Lance fell against the truck, lost his grip on Squee, then got himself turned around and pulled the dead weight of the boy up against him and flung him into the cab. He pushed Squee’s legs inside, then wedged himself into the driver’s seat, pausing to look for his keys. He found them right there in the ignition, and fumbled to start the engine. The truck had stalled where it hit Roddy’s so the key was still in the on position and wouldn’t turn. Lance was confused, tried again, then wrested the key out of the ignition and started from scratch.

When the front door of Eden’s house shut behind her she was already halfway across the lawn, coming at Lance with the shotgun raised to fire. Lance was so absorbed in trying to get the keys into the starter and turn over the engine that he didn’t even see her coming, hadn’t remembered Eden at all until the shotgun butted through the open truck window and into his shoulder. He lifted his head from the ignition, shoving the gun aside as he rose. Eden tightened her grip on the stock, her finger ready on the trigger, and replaced the gun at Lance’s chest. He was surprised, almost tickled, to see her there—Eden Jacobs, the lady who’d fed him cheese and crackers after school—with a shotgun aimed at his breastbone.

Eden saw Squee slumped beside his father and nearly dropped the gun. She didn’t want Lance—she wanted the child. She wanted the child out of the way of harm. Now that she had Lance stopped against the nose of her dead husband’s shotgun, she wasn’t sure she knew what to do. Should she say something? Threaten him? Or just stand there with her finger on the trigger and wait for the mercy of sirens to round the crest of Island Drive? She moved her eyes from Lance to Squee inside the truck, his arm twisted, she now saw, at an angle that made Eden cry out. And as she did, Lance started to speak, and she turned back to him and saw his dirty, drunken, stinking face curl into a smile, his watery eyes lit with what Eden could only think to call merriment. He laughed then, a choke of a laugh, false and patronizing. He laughed and said, “Why don’t you shoot me, Eden? Why don’t you just kill me?” The stale beer stench of him was enough to make Eden draw her face away instinctually, and Lance laughed at that too, made as if he was going to inhale and blow a whole gust of his foul breath right at her, but then he faked, reached up, brushed aside her gun, and leaned back down to resume his fumbling with the keys in the ignition.

Eden stood there, her shotgun now pointed into the seat-back cushion. She had a shotgun in her hands and felt more impotent than she’d ever felt in her life. She had no words to use. She stood dumbly as Lance fiddled under the dashboard, his total concentration on the gadgetry. He was so blind drunk he couldn’t even line up the key in its slot, but he fought on stubbornly, a child trying to force the round peg into the square hole. And then it worked: as if by accident the key slipped into the ignition. Lance sat up, gratified. He grinned at Eden. And as he turned the key he laughed and said, “You think I don’t want you to shoot me?” His words were slurred. He said, “What the fuck do I care?” and then the engine turned over and Lance’s sick smile broadened, and Eden thought of this piss-drunk bastard driving that boy down the hill on a goddamn dirt road, and she could already see the truck, its front end bashed in, flipped and smoking on the burnt-out turf of the abandoned golf course, Squee’s body thrown limp against the ceiling, and that was all it took for Eden to lift the gun again and jab it at the side of Lance’s smiling face.

The truck stalled. Lance doubled over onto Squee, his hand flying up to his face to cup it where the gun had slashed. When he rose again, the shock on his face was mixed with pride, as though he were somehow responsible for the nerve of this old lady. The angle had been awkward, the swipe relatively ineffective, like a pool shot slipped at the last second, the cue just glancing the ball and nudging it aside. Lance lifted his head as if to congratulate Eden on a brave try there, only to find that in the seconds he’d been down she’d managed to turn the gun around. She had one hand on the barrel, the other on the stock, and as Lance opened his mouth to speak, she steadied herself, and with the kind of force she’d only ever used to bring an ax down across the neck of a chicken, Eden Jacobs slammed the butt of that shotgun into Lance Squire’s forehead.