Osprey Island

Twenty-two

NIGHT IS THE SUREST NURSE OF TROUBLED SOULS

Carl Jenkins, 67, of Strawberry Lane reported a speeding car on South Ferry Road. Police responded to the call and were unable to locate the alleged vehicle . . . Firefighters responded to an anonymous call reporting the smell of smoke in the vicinity of Wickham Beach; a homeowner was found burning leaves with a valid burn permit . . . Police jump-started a car on the Osprey Island Ferry line . . . A Scallopshell Beach resident reported a deer in the woods, but was uncertain as to whether the deer was sleeping or dead. Police were unable to locate the alleged animal.

—from the police blotter, Island Times, 1988

LANCE FELL OVER SQUEE on the truck seat; neither of them moved or made a sound. Yards off, Roddy gave up the struggle to stand and just lay there breathing at the sky. Peg peered out from behind the door of the house, which she had employed as a full-body shield. Beside Lance’s truck, Eden had gotten the shotgun turned back around so that it was once again aimed at Lance’s chest. She had no idea whether or not the gun was loaded—had always been somewhat afraid to check, envisioning the headline: “WIDOW DIES AT OWN HAND—LATE HUSBAND’S HUNTING RIFLE TO BLAME.” At the very least she could see herself in the Island Times weekly police blotter: “Eden Jacobs, 56, summoned police to her home on Island Drive after a shotgun accidentally misfired, causing damage to her living room wall and sofa. Mrs. Jacobs claimed to have been attempting to unload the gun, which belonged to her late husband, Roderick, when it went off.” She’d always made Roderick promise to keep them empty in the gun case, but she knew he lied to her and kept a few loaded for raccoons on the property, a deer down by the ravine, the occasional stray pheasant in the driveway. In either case, loaded or not, she felt safer standing there with the more dangerous part of the gun pointed away. She had no idea how hard she’d hit Lance in the forehead. As she waited those painfully long minutes for the sirens to come up the hill, she feared that she had killed him—envisioned a trickle of blood right now running out from his ear and onto his son beneath him. Such things happened. Agatha Christie killed people off with candlestick and statuette blows to the head all the time.

Eden realized then that she didn’t much care if Lance Squire was lying dead in the truck in front of her. Which is what she contemplated during those eternal minutes as she stood there and watched Lance breathe: If he were to stop, what would I feel then? She’d have rather seen Lance Squire die by his own hand, drive his old truck as fast as it would go and plunge it off the cliffs at the far end of Sand Beach Road. He’d been driving in circles so long that when finally the ground lapsed and the wheels hit air, you could only imagine he’d feel some gratification at the sheer difference of it. Time would stretch then too, and when the steel nose of that truck hit the water off of Sand Beach Cove like it was slamming a wall of solid stone, and then crumpled, sinking, time would stretch out so thin that it snapped— pop!—one last breath before the truck just disappeared, one sigh of relief for Lance Squire—maybe the first true breath of respite of his short, sad life before he exited the world. An exhalation that would free him, divest him, allow him one flash of unencumbered existence. One pure sigh with which to end his life as he slid beneath the surface of the water and was gone.

They cuffed him for the trip off-island to the hospital, though he didn’t come to until the ferry was halfway across the bay. The ambulances turned off their sirens for the ride; no sense polluting everyone’s ears when—at least for that stretch of the trip—they could go only as fast as they could go. The sirens resumed their blare at the Menhadenport shore: two ambulances crying for the hospital in Fishersburg. They’d put Roddy in with Lance; Squee rode in the other with Eden.

And back on Osprey, Peg was left to drive herself back to the Lodge in Jeremy’s car and spend the rest of the night—and the rest of the summer, and probably the rest of her dun-colored life—telling of what had happened up on that hill during her stay on Osprey Island.

WHEN THE MORNING SUN ROSE on Osprey Island it was almost as if nothing had happened there at all. The air was sea-cool and the island had that scrubbed-clean feel, as though everything had been washed in salt spray and scoured with sand. Stones and pebbles along the shoreline glimmered, drying in the early sun, the sand beneath them still cold from the night before. Scrolls of dark seaweed lay unraveled across the beach like tremendous clumps of ruined cassette tape scattered with shards of clamshell, some chalky and white as bone, some tide-polished and glistening like teeth. Smaller shells rested like eggs in seaweed nests, with tiny inhabitants curled and protected inside. On Sand Beach Road, an osprey patrolled the shore, riding the wind back and forth like a bored kid riding his bicycle up and down the street, just waiting for something to happen.