Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  The hiss came again, this time decidedly human. Brigid wasn’t a scared sort of a girl, and it was her romantic imagination that kicked in first: the sultry-eyed waiter was calling from the shadows! She peered off in the direction of the noise, smelled cigarette, and watched as a tiny dot of orange glowed bright for a moment, then subsided. As her eyes began to distinguish shapes, she could make out the old grand piano in the corner and the figure seated nearby in a low-slung armchair. There was something eerily exciting about it. Brigid wanted that—some strange and overwhelming indiscretion in this new place. “In the habit of hissing at girls across dark rooms, are you?” she said coyly.

  From the corner came a snort, a hack thick with phlegm. “Only the ones with tits like yours,” he said.

  Brigid thought at first that she must have misunderstood, but her eyes were adjusting to the dark and the man’s features began to come together and coalesce. She turned without another word and walked away, leaving Lance to finish out his cigarette alone in the empty Lodge lobby. And as she passed through the kitchen exit, Brigid thought for the first time that perhaps she wasn’t quite as ready as she’d thought. Or maybe she was ready, but for something a bit less strange and overwhelming than she’d previously considered. A brooding waiter was one thing; the crude, married, alcoholic handyman another entirely. He was rather attractive, she thought—quite attractive, really, in a sad, brutish sort of a way. But no. No, she told herself firmly. It was an altogether stupid idea to fuck the father of anyone at all.

  Four

  TO WHAT DIRECTION WILL YOUR CHICKS TAKE WING?

  Ah! mother bird, you’ll have weary days.

  —MARGARET E. SANGSTER, “The Building of the Nest”

  IN THE BACK OF THE nonfunctional minifridge in the laundry shack Lorna kept a bottle of vodka (Lance would likely have killed her if he knew) and a purple spiral notebook she’d bought at the drugstore when she was pregnant with Squee and Eden Jacobs had told her to write down her thoughts and feelings. Lorna and Eden had gone for walks together in the mornings back then, Eden pointing out every downy woodpecker and Carolina wren, pushing her binoculars at Lorna, telling her, Look. Eden tried to get Lorna involved in the henhouse too, but that wasn’t really Lorna’s thing, raising chickens and worrying who was eating whose eggs and who was sitting on whose nest and picking whose feathers. It was enough building the osprey platforms. It was actually enough just taking care of herself, let alone every winged thing that managed to land itself on Osprey.

  Lorna knew she’d let Eden down in ways that had nothing to do with birds. It was hard for Lorna to see Eden now, the disappointment on her face. On her own mother’s, Lorna had gotten used to that pinched look of dread and hopefulness. But from Eden, who’d had so much faith in Lorna . . . from Eden it was pure judgment. Eden called her on it, plain and simple. You’re drunk, Lorna. Don’t you think of Lance Jr., Lorna? How can you do that to yourself and think of him at the same time?

  Sometimes Lorna really did want to live a different life. The thing was, she knew better. Unfortunately, knowing better didn’t in any way mean she was going to do better, just that she knew more clearly how wrong she was. Lorna had, she knew, done a lot of bad things. For her, the choice to do good or bad was the same sort of dilemma as when there was a platter of finger foods out in front of you and you knew you should eat the carrot stick but you also knew that it was the sausage roll that was going to hop right into your mouth. Soothe the biggest greasy hankering and leave you feeling nasty the rest of the night. When a choice like that presented itself to Lorna, she’d start to deliberate: Which path should I follow? And then it was like her body would just lurch forward. Lorna and Lance had laughed when they’d heard about a guy—a fisherman who lived just across the bay—who had a disease that made him all of a sudden, all the time, unexpectedly and uncontrollably yell things out. And though they’d laughed, Lorna couldn’t help but wonder what her own life would be like if all the terrible thoughts inside her rose to the surface like dead bodies and made themselves known. Lorna thought that if all people like that fisherman did was yell out “cunt” in the supermarket or “motherfucker” from the church pew, then those people weren’t even the tiniest bit as bad a person as she was.

  On that late June Sunday, while the rest of the staff got to work readying the Lodge for the season, Lorna hid in the laundry shack. A few minutes after the blare of the five o’clock whistle at the ferry dock, she heard a truck pull up outside. She stood from the couch and stowed her notebook and vodka bottle in the minifridge. Lance never came into the laundry shack—literally gagged at the smell of the place—so her secrets were relatively safe inside. Lorna pushed bravely out into the sunshine, her hand shielding her eyes from the light. She didn’t see Roddy, but Squee sat in the passenger seat of the truck, patiently running a Matchbox car along the dashboard.

  Lorna hung her hands on the open truck window and leaned there the way she once had in the window of Lance’s car, when he’d stop in the high school parking lot to talk to her. “Hey, sweet son,” she said.

  Squee’s smile opened slowly and fully. “Mom!”

  Lorna held on to the window of the truck. Sometimes, with her son, love felt to Lorna like barbecue coals with too much lighter fluid and the flick of a match: love for Squee knocked her like a flare of heat so powerful she had to wait for the blow to pass before she was good for anything again.

  From around the back of the staff barracks, Roddy appeared, toting a few long pieces of lumber. He slid them into the bed of the pickup. Lorna lifted a hand in greeting, and Roddy nodded, but his brow was furrowed. He went to the driver’s side and fumbled behind the seat.

  “You getting hungry?” Lorna asked Squee. Her voice was tired.

  Squee was nodding as Roddy reemerged with some orange plastic ribbon, which he tied to the boards that stuck off the end of the truck bed.

  Lorna sighed. “Guess I better think about some dinner for you then, huh?”

  Roddy looked up at her again, the way she was leaning on the truck. Her skin looked too pale, and the hollows of her face too dark. “I’m heading to Morey’s,” he told Lorna, though he’d had no such plans until that moment.

  Lorna looked relieved. “You want to go with Roddy?”

  Squee shrugged his acquiescence.

  “You come too, Lorna,” Roddy suggested.

  “Oh, I’ve got work left . . .” she lied, gesturing vaguely toward the laundry shack. “You men go. Let me give you some money, Roddy.” She began to reach into her jeans pocket but Roddy held up a hand to stop her. “I got him,” he said. Lorna paused. She let her hands drop back to her sides. “Thank you.” She nudged Squee: “Thank you, Roddy.”

  “Thank you, Roddy,” Squee repeated.

  “Welcome.” And when he’d secured the lumber in the truck with some twine and a bungee cord, Roddy climbed in beside Squee, who blew his mother a last kiss.

  Morey’s Dinghy was an old fisherman’s shanty fifty yards up the beach from the Lodge and across a small footbridge. It perched on a curved lip of land where the beach cut back on one side into a swampy inlet of reeds where lurking heron were often spotted in the twilight hours. Old fishing nets threaded with colored Christmas lights and cast-off buoys hung from the rafters. The kitchen consisted of a freezer and a deep fryer; Morey served only food that cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Everything came on a grease-soaked slip of wax paper nestled at the bottom of a red plastic basket, all without so much as a sheaf of iceberg lettuce to soften the blow.

  Morey presided over the bar daily from noon, when he opened, until about seven, when Merle Squire, Lance’s mother, showed up for her shift. The Lodge staff were traditionally renowned for copious drinking, often starting out the night at Morey’s, then returning to the porch of the Lodge when the bar closed, by legal decree, at one a.m. The bar had four taps—Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite—but when the Irish girls arrived in June Morey switched one tap over to Guinness. His local crowd was stea
dy and loyal, more family than clientele, since his was one of only three island bars, not including restaurants that served bottled beer and wine, and his was the only one that stayed open through the off-season, which was everything but the summer. For three months a year, renters from New York City and its moneyed environs invaded Osprey with their private-schooled children and their au pairs and their Volvo wagons, and pumped enough cash into the island economy to keep it nominally running for the nine intervening months until they came crashing back for another season.

  When Roddy and Squee walked in that evening, Suzy and Mia were seated at the bar. Squee swung himself up beside Mia, who was rationing sips of a tall Shirley Temple, climbing up onto her knees to drink from the straw and then ducking down to check the level of pink in the glass. Roddy hovered awkwardly, then finally took the stool next to Suzy.

  “What do you want?” Roddy called to Squee. Morey stood behind the bar twitching his mustache.

  “Chicken fingers.” Squee didn’t take his eyes from Mia and her glass. “And a Coke.”

  Suzy looked to Squee. “How ’bout Seven-Up?”

  Squee shrugged, nodded disinterestedly. Suzy nodded to Morey. Roddy looked confused.

  “You don’t want that kid hopped up on caffeine all night,” she said. “Trust me.”

  Roddy conceded. “You have those clam strips?” Morey nodded. “And a Bud.” Roddy glanced to Suzy, gestured vaguely toward her drink.

  “Sure,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “Maker’s and soda.” She drained her glass and set it solidly on the bar.

  Roddy and Morey met each other’s eyes, impressed.

  Though the sun was still shining outside and wouldn’t set for another few hours, Morey’s was dark and cavernous, the Christmas lights twinkling in a sort of sordid merriment. Squee and Mia twittered together, and Roddy tapped his foot on the bar rail, feigning interest in the muted news on a TV mounted high in a corner.

  Morey set drinks in front of them, and Suzy began to lift hers in a toast, then thought better and paused, the glass half raised before her. “Ever considered matricide?” She looked at him. “Murdering your mom?”

  Roddy shook his head. “My dad.” He nodded now. “Yeah. Never my mom.”

  “I should take out both of mine, maybe—two birds, one stone . . . God, why do I do this to myself?” Suzy whined.

  “Do what?”

  “Come here.” She drank. “Agree to live with their bullshit. I don’t know what possesses me to think it’s going to be OK. It’s never OK. I never should have let them know I’d had a kid in the first place. I was gone; I was free. We were on perfectly lovely nonspeaking terms . . . and then I had to go and ruin it all!”

  “Hmm,” Roddy said.

  “You’re not much of a talker, huh?”

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “Sometimes you are, or sometimes you aren’t?”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Suzy laughed. “Are you always this difficult?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “So I shouldn’t take it personally?” Her eyes were still laughing, though her face had stopped.

  “No,” he said. “I mean, yes, you should take it personally.” He looked at his beer. Down the bar, the kids were in their own world.

  “I should?”

  Roddy smiled now, took a sip of his beer, watching it steadily, as if it might morph into something else if he lifted his eyes. “It’s personal.”

  “It’s personal?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and smiled a little. “It’s very personal.” He looked right at her.

  “You,” she said, and she drank again. “You’re going to have to forgive me for saying so again, but you are a very difficult man to have a conversation with.” She smiled this time, peering up at him from her glass, suddenly shy to face him straight on.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You know? So you’re trying to be difficult?”

  “No,” he tried to explain: “I mean, do you try to make me nervous?”

  “What? You? No. Why would I do that?”

  “That’s my point,” Roddy said. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you try and make me nervous, but you do anyway—”

  She cut him off: “Why do I make you nervous? What do I do that makes you nervous?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not such a bad nervous. It’s an OK nervous.” He paused. “It’s a nervous I’m willing to live with.”

  He took a deep breath, let it go, and then changed his mind about what to say just as the words were coming: “You . . . would you like another drink?”

  She lost her composure, lapsed into nervous laughter. “You just did it again. That’s not normal conversational practice.”

  There was too long a pause. Then he said, “What exactly do you want from me?”

  “Nothing.” She was surprised. “I’m sorry, I don’t want anything from you. I didn’t . . .”

  “That’s the thing,” he said.

  She waited, but he offered nothing more. “What’s the thing ? I don’t understand anything you say!”

  “Yes, you do. Of course you do.” He paused, drank, stared straight ahead, and lowered his voice. “I wish you’d stop making fun of me.”

  She put her hand out across the bar toward him—didn’t touch him, but made the gesture, the movement toward the touch. “I am not making fun of you.”

  Morey appeared then with food, and Suzy drew back her hand as though she’d been caught at something illicit. Morey deposited Squee’s dinner before him, then passed the other basket to Roddy. He reached under the counter, withdrew a handful of plastic packets, and slid them across the bar: tartar sauce and lemon juice.

  Suzy looked down toward Mia, who still had an inch of grenadine fizz in the bottom of her glass.

  “You know?” Roddy said, his composure returned, a clam strip dangling between his thumb and forefinger, “I had a crush on you in high school.”

  “You did?”

  “Big one.” He nodded at his clams.

  Suzy sat there, dumb.

  “Yup,” Roddy said, still nodding.

  “I have to say,” Suzy managed finally, “that was sort of a surprise there . . .”

  “Yeah?” Roddy stuck a clam in his mouth and chewed.

  “Yeah.” She laughed.

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s OK.” She laughed again, nervous. “Well, you have definitely succeeded in making me feel very uncomfortable now, so maybe, while we’re even, I’ll just take my leave.” She drained the last of her Maker’s, called to Mia—“Hey, kid, let’s hit the road”—slapped a few dollars on the bar for Morey, and stood to go. Mia slid reluctantly from her stool.

  Roddy chewed his lip, then said, “It wouldn’t be too hard to have a big crush on you now.”

  She stared at him for a second, as long as it took him to blanch and turn back to his food. Then she let out another laugh—a laugh of bafflement—and clapped a hand on Roddy’s back like a football buddy or a frat brother. “We’ll be seeing you, Roddy,” she said. “See you, Squee. Morey. Let’s beat it, kid.” And Suzy opened the door and followed Mia out into the disconcerting sunshine.

  The kids arrived early that night, so it was Morey who got them started on their drinks and made quarter change for the pool table. By the time Merle Squire showed up for her shift the air was thick with smoke and the din was as dense. Merle wasn’t particularly in the mood for summer to begin. Summer folk didn’t tip worth shit, and though some customers were better than none, she wasn’t sure she even cared. She didn’t mind tending bar when it was just George Quincy ordering his same old Jack and Coke for hours every night before he stumbled back up the hill, or the girls from the IGA who came in after work. But the summer folk set her on edge. They didn’t even try to fit in. The summer folk treated the year-rounders like mosquitoes: summer pests, inevitable but tolerable if you slathered on enough repellent and didn’t wander out of you
r screened-in gazebo. One summer Merle had gotten to talking with a chatty and particularly stupid housekeeper—and in Merle’s opinion those Irish girls were as bad as the New York lawyers and their skinny wives. The girl had asked where Merle lived.

  “Here,” Merle told her.

  “No, but during the year,” said the girl.

  “Here,” Merle said again, her patience rapidly waning.

  “People live here?” The girl seemed genuinely surprised.

  “What do you think?” Merle asked. “You think it’s like Disney World? You think we shut down after Labor Day, pull the docks in out of the water, put a big tarp over everything and pack up and go home?” The girl listened, drunk and bleary-eyed. “Like this is some summer camp for assholes? And what am I? An actress? They pay me to dress like a waitress and pour beer!” Merle laughed loudly, and clearly to herself.

  The first person Merle spotted when she arrived at Morey’s that night was her own son, sitting by the bar, drinking a Coca-Cola as though no one knew why he carried his drink with him out to his truck or what he added to it there.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  “Lance.” Merle nodded. She poured herself a shot of tequila, drank it down, and chewed a lime. Lance glared disapprovingly. “Save it,” Merle told him. He turned back to the Irish girls who swirled around the pool table, carrying their cues like scepters. Merle didn’t know the redhead approaching the bar, but Lance practically jumped out of his skin offering drinks, offering anything. Brigid accepted a beer— Guinness, two of them, actually, both of which Lance paid for— thanked him, and then stepped away.

  “You can’t let them know,” Merle told her son.

  “Huh?”

  “They don’t want to know—ones like that—how bad you want them.”

  “Shut up,” Lance said. He was watching Brigid, who handed one of the beers to a college boy skulking in the corner.