Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  Suzy took the plate of French toast and went out back toward Roddy’s cabin. It was a good fifty yards behind the house, tucked into some oaks perched just before the hill dipped down into a ravine. She passed the picnic table where she’d done shots of something awful on a night twenty years before, which she didn’t much like to think about. Three cement blocks served as a stoop to Roddy’s shack, and Suzy stood atop them, knocking tentatively, as though she might catch him at something she’d rather not see.

  He came to the door, opened it, and stood waiting for her to say something.

  She thrust the plate toward him. “Here,” she said, “your mom . . .”

  “Thanks.” He took the toast. “Do you want some coffee?” He gestured to the pot warming on a hot plate on an overturned crate beside the bed.

  “I think I want some whiskey,” she said.

  He reached for a bottle on the shelf above the hot plate.

  “No, no, no, I think I’m . . . shit, maybe I do.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Jesus.” She was standing in his one-room house, holding her hair back out of her eyes, slumped like she wanted to crumble to the floor.

  Roddy pointed to a chair beside the door. “Why don’t you sit down?” he said. “Why don’t you have some coffee?”

  She sat, as directed. She held her head in her hands, eyes closed tightly behind her palms.

  Roddy poured coffee from its tin kettle into a small blue plastic mug and held it out to Suzy, but her head was still down and she didn’t see. He stood there, arm outstretched, unnoticed.

  “I don’t have milk,” he apologized.

  “I couldn’t care less,” she said. She was about to cry for the first time since she’d been awakened by the hollering and commotion outside the laundry shack.

  “You should get some sleep,” Roddy said.

  Suzy laughed with resignation and resentment. “I feel insane,” she said. “I feel like I am losing my mind. I feel like I want to take Mia and walk down to the ferry and take the first one across and get on a bus and go home and pretend I was never here.”

  “Yeah,” Roddy said. “I know.”

  “I feel insane,” she repeated, as if maybe he hadn’t believed her the first time.

  “I know,” he said again. His desperation was quiet. He looked around the room, his eyes searching frantically, his body moving barely at all. “Do you want to lie down?” He made a gesture toward the camp cot. “Maybe you’d feel better . . .”

  “I don’t think I want to feel better,” she cut him off. “I think I want to feel worse, like I want to make it so bad that it breaks . . . that it breaks me or something and then I don’t have to be responsible for what I do or say or don’t. Or taking care of Mia or anyone else. Doc Zobeck could just shoot me full of something that’d make all the decisions for me. Jesus. I just want someone to knock me out.” Suzy stood suddenly. She looked as if she wanted to pace, but there was no room for it in the little cabin and her momentum stalled once she was upright. It seemed briefly that she might topple. She glanced around, looked to Roddy, flapped her arms awkwardly, then wrapped them around herself as if to contain something, to hold herself back from some downward tumble. Roddy watched her, afraid for what she might do. She hugged herself tightly, her tears finally breaking. “What are we supposed to do ?”

  It wasn’t a choice Roddy made then, not something he could say he decided to do and then did. He just moved. Here was Suzy, breaking, and there he was, feet away, moving to her. She held herself tight and small, and he enveloped her, the way his father used to envelop his mother, by his sheer size. He held her, his chin nearly level with the top of her head, and when she looked up at him he kissed her tears, and her eyes, and her cheeks, and everywhere the tears touched, because it was the only thing he could possibly do.

  Seven

  IN THE SHADOW OF THY WINGS WILL I MAKE MY REFUGE

  Lorna Marie Vaughn Squire died early Tuesday morning in a tragic fire at the Osprey Lodge laundry. She was thirty-six years old. The daughter of Arthur and Penelope Vaughn of Island Drive, Lorna was a 1970 graduate of Island High. She had been the head housekeeper at the Osprey Lodge since 1969 and was beloved by all. Lorna is survived by her husband, Lance Squire, 38, and a son, Lance Jr., 8. May she rest in peace.

  —Island Times

  ART VAUGHN WAS INCONSOLABLE. He’d been holding off mourning the loss of his daughter for more than twenty years, keeping alive the hope that she’d return to him someday. Now there was nothing more to put between himself and the pain, between the fact of the world with Lorna and the fact of the world without her. There were no maybes, no more possibilities, no more roads that led his daughter back to him. She was just gone, and Art Vaughn sat on his living room sofa and cried as he should have cried on Lorna’s wedding day.

  Art and Penny Vaughn had been unable to conceive. But they had adopted Lorna in infancy, and Osprey Island was the only home she ever knew. The Vaughns were cut and dried: they acted according to the dictates of the Church, ate ground beef, Kraft Singles, and Rice-a-Roni, and lived in an aluminum-sided ranch house, blue ducks and pink cows stenciled on the walls, wicker baskets of syrupy potpourri and stitched quilt samplers festooning every cranny. Lorna’s parents loved her as a streak down the center of their otherwise eventless lives. They distrusted Lance even before they knew him, had always looked down on Merle Squire and the disgraces that defined her. When Lorna met Lance she was not yet thirteen years old—a child!— and Lance’s mere existence seemed to grant Lorna all the permission she needed to break into the lawless limbo of adolescence.

  On an autumn evening in 1965, Lance had arrived at the Vaughns’ nest of faux-country charm to pick up Lorna for their first official date. It was his first and last encounter with Lorna’s father.

  Lance was formal and officious, standing militarily at ease beside a framed cross-stitch of the Lord’s Prayer and answering to the third degree that passed for small talk when it came to some chump from the high school wanting to get into the panties of Art Vaughn’s only daughter. Art knew you could never trust a boy. His only hope, as he saw it, was to instill enough fear in the young man’s heart so that even if Lorna was ready to put out (as he feared she would), the boy might develop a case of temporary impotence. Art didn’t know if he had that kind of power to frighten, but for the sake of his little girl’s virginity, he gave it all he had.

  “You’re Merle’s boy,” Art said. It was not a question.

  “Yes sir.” Lance nodded once.

  “Your mother’s doing well.” The pause that followed Art’s statements were his only indication of inquisition.

  “Hasn’t done herself in yet,” Lance said.

  “Say what?”

  Lance shook his head in self-effacement.

  “No word from your sister,” Art said. But if there’d been news from Kiki, everyone on Osprey would have heard it within hours. Art knew that. He’d heard talk about the Squires. Rumors about Merle finding the girl in Lance’s bed. Others said it was Lance in hers. And maybe all those were exaggerations. Maybe nothing like that had ever happened at all. But rumors started somewhere, suggested something of the truth that spawned them.

  “No one’s heard from Kiki since summer,” Lance said, his eyes narrow as paper cuts.

  Art lifted his wrist and looked at his watch as if it could tell him just how long she’d been gone and when she might be expected to turn up. “She’ll come ’round,” Art told Lance.

  “She might,” Lance said.

  “What kind of prayer is that, son?”

  “Not a prayer, Mr. Vaughn.” Lance paused. His tone shifted darkly. “And I’m nobody’s son except my mother’s, sir.”

  Art Vaughn blanched.

  “Unless,” Lance went on, his voice slow and controlled, “unless you are my father. Which would make you a real sonofabitch.”

  Art drew in his breath. “I beg your pardon,” he hissed.

  Lance laughed, low and mean. He still held his
hands behind his back. His feet were spread in a stance so vulnerable it was menacing, a stance that said, You threaten me so little I’d roll over on my back and bare my belly, you prick. “You don’t beg a thing from me, Mr. Vaughn. And I know you don’t give two shits for pardon, mine or anyone else’s.”

  Art sucked in his gut. He reached for the front doorknob. “You better pray you’ve got the Lord’s pardon, boy. For that you better pray.” He opened the door, and Lance never set foot in the Vaughns’ house again.

  Lorna, as a matter of course, was forbidden to see Lance Squire under penalty of every penalty that her parents (who were not creative people) could dream up. Perhaps equally predictable was how little these threats affected Lorna. She disobeyed every order laid upon her, and in the end it was more than clear who held the trump card in that family. What Lorna had on her parents was that they loved her a lot more—or at least in a qualitatively different way—than she loved them, and they forgave her every time, pulled her back into the fold, because they wanted her with them more than they wanted her justly punished. Lorna learned this lesson early: the less you cared, the more power you possessed. And it was maybe just that which kept her with Lance for so long. For everything you could say about Lance and Lorna—and there was certainly plenty to say—one true thing was that their love existed in a balance few people ever know. For everything they did wrong—and that was almost everything—there was something fundamentally right about the fact of them together.

  In 1968 most of Lance’s high school buddies were breathlessly awaiting their eighteenth birthdays and the chance to go fight in Vietnam, but Lance, who’d had a childhood bout of measles that stole a good fraction of his hearing, didn’t go anywhere after graduation. He kept his job at Lovetsky’s car shop, rotating tires and patching flats, and Lorna stayed in school. She was no honors student, but she stuck it out, even after she got pregnant in the spring of her junior year and married that June in a big Island to-do held at the Lodge. The party was an uncharacteristically generous wedding present from Bud Chizek, although anyone would tell you he’d been acting strange—if understandably so—ever since Chas (his only son) had gotten killed in Vietnam six months before. But Bud didn’t only host Lance and Lorna’s wedding celebration—he invited the newlyweds to come live at the Lodge as heads of maintenance and housekeeping. Lance didn’t know why the tragedy of Chas’s death would prompt Bud to do such a thing, but he didn’t question a gift horse, at least not until he’d accepted the gift.

  Art and Penny Vaughn were invited to the wedding out of cordiality, but they stayed home. That Lorna was pregnant surprised no one, least of all the Vaughns, who could have predicted it, despite higher hopes. And when Lorna lost the baby later that summer, it was no longer necessary that such a pretty seventeen-year-old girl be married to the island ne’er-do-well, but it was too late to take it all back. It was 1969, and Lance and Lorna were already well along on the path they’d follow to the end.

  In the immediate aftermath of their daughter’s death, Penny was coping far better than her husband. She was eerily composed and ministering to Art when Eden knocked on their door that morning.

  “Eden. Come in.” Penny stepped aside to let her pass.

  “Oh, Penny,” Eden sighed, her tone meant to impart a world of sympathy. “Oh dear, no. I won’t bother you now. I only came to see if there’s anything you needed, anything I can do . . . Have you eaten? Can I bring you something? Something for Art?”

  “Eden, you’re a dear. So thoughtful. I think we’re OK. Trying to stay busy, you know. Making up the guest room for Squee . . . Lord knows Lance can’t be caring for the boy now on his own.”

  Eden nodded. “I have him at the house—Squee. He’s asleep—they were up all night. I guess we all were . . .”

  Penny absently lifted her hand to her ear in the gesture of a telephone. “You just give a call when he wakes up and I’ll swing by for him . . .”

  “Oh, I’ll run him down to you,” Eden cut in. She waved off toward her car. “Goodness, of course I’ll bring him down to you.” For the degree of emotion in their exchange, Penny and Eden might have been discussing carpooling to Wednesday-night bingo at the VFW. This was hardly unusual for Eden, well known for her disturbingly placid reactions to events that sent others careening. Penny Vaughn, on the other hand, was a woman who regularly wept during her weekday television “stories” and was known to carry a purse-pack of Kleenex for when she teared up during a particularly moving Sunday service. But there she was, at the dawn of the most dreaded tragedy of her life, puttering about like a chickadee. Penny Vaughn was perched at a very precarious place; whenever she finally fell, it seemed clear she would fall hard.

  “You sure there’s nothing I can do . . . get . . . for you?” Eden asked again.

  Penny shook her head primly. “Just my sweet grandson,” she clucked. This was odder still, in that Art and Penny had never spent much time with Squee at all, had never been particularly interested in Lance Squire’s progeny. Lorna and Lance had certainly spoken poorly enough of Lorna’s folks to color Squee’s opinion of his grandparents. Some Sundays Art and Penny asked to bring Squee with them to church, to which the Squires occasionally conceded, reluctantly. Art and Penny seemed less concerned for the actual person who was Squee than for the soul they believed to be housed therein, which they felt obliged to look out for. If they could have taken that to church with them and left the ragamuffin back at the Lodge, playing in the dirt outside his parents’ ill-kept home, they would quite surely have packed the Squee-specter into Penny’s pocketbook alongside the tissues and smuggled it into the service for some necessary deep-cleansing.

  Eden took a detour by the Lodge on her way back home to stop in at the Squires’ cabin and pick up some things for Squee. She parked as close as she could get to the cottage and walked past the firemen and police still on the scene, past the charred remains of what had been the laundry shack.

  “Hey, Eden,” the sheriff called out as she passed. As if it were any ordinary day.

  She waved. “Just picking up some clothes for the boy,” she said. The sheriff waved her along.

  Inside, in the room that had to be Squee’s, there was a chest of drawers, but everything seemed to have exploded out of it onto the floor. Eden would have collected some clothes in a pillowcase, but there didn’t even appear to be a pillow. The bed was covered in a stained mattress pad but nothing else. A Star Wars sleeping bag lay in a slump on the floor. She found a trash bag in the kitchen and threw in an assortment of T-shirts, shorts, underwear, and socks, all of which she’d have to wash when she got home.

  On her way back up the hill, Eden passed Roddy in his truck. They paused, idling in the road, leaning out their windows to talk.

  “I’m going to see what I can do down there,” Roddy said. “Find Bud . . . see . . .”

  Eden nodded. “You’re a good boy, Roddy.”

  Roddy closed his eyes and shook his head. “Oh, Ma,” he said, as though it pained him. “Oh, Ma.”

  Back at Eden’s, Suzy and the children were half awake on the living room couch, blindly watching a television screen they could hardly see in the glaring midday sun. Mia was now wearing a T-shirt of Roddy’s that came down past her knees. Eden loaded Squee’s clothing into the washer, then busied herself baking a lentil loaf and an apple brown Betty for Penny and Art. She prepared peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and got Squee to eat a few bites, though he did so mechanically and seemingly without hunger. Squee was operating robotically, but his lack of animation almost seemed a blessing. He seemed dampened, his reactions to the world dulled. Against everything Eden believed, she allowed the kids to sit dumbly in front of the television all afternoon. Even Eden understood the necessity of mindlessness on some occasions.

  When Suzy began to ready herself and Mia to return to the Lodge that evening, Squee wanted to go back with them. “Is Roddy there?” he asked. “I need to go help Roddy.” It was more vitality than he’d exhibited all d
ay.

  Suzy knelt down beside him. “Squee, babe,” she said, “you’re going to keep helping Roddy just like you have been, but what’ll help him the most right now is if you go and stay for a little bit with your Grandpa Art and Grandma Penny. They’ve got a room all ready for you, and they’re really going to need you with them now.” Suzy’s voice was teacherly and terrible.

  Squee’s face was, for the first time that Suzy had seen, set in a child’s angry stubbornness. “I have to go to Grandma and Grandpa Vaughn’s?” he whined.

  “Yeah, babe, for a little bit, you do . . .”

  Squee looked weary and drained. He said, “Grandma and Grandpa Vaughn suck.”

  It was all Suzy could do to keep from bursting into laughter. Her struggle seemed to please Squee, who brightened some. Suzy said, “That’s exactly what I used to say when I had to go visit my Grandma Dolly.”

  Squee didn’t speak, just looked to Suzy as if he wanted more.

  “It’s just for a little bit, Squee. Just until your dad’s back from Grandma Merle’s . . .” she trailed off. It was a prospect that didn’t make anyone feel any better at all.