Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  Roddy’s face betrayed nothing. He spoke evenly. “Who’s Squee’s father?”

  “I don’t think Lorna even knew herself.”

  Roddy thought on that a minute. “But she was pregnant before, wasn’t she? Isn’t that . . . ? When they got married?”

  “Wasn’t his either,” Eden said. “And he knew it then too.” She stopped. She wasn’t giving away any more than he demanded.

  “But why do you know?” he said. “Why do you know all that? And why’s the sheriff know you know?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with the sheriff,” she lied. “Lorna and I, we were close for a time . . . When you were gone . . . When she was pregnant with Squee I helped her—staying healthy and not drinking and whatnot. She told me things, OK? She told me things. So would you go get down there and talk to Lance, please?”

  Roddy paused, confused and unsatisfied, then finally turned without a word and started up the hill toward his truck.

  It was nearly seven o’clock when Roddy showed up on the porch of the Squires’ cottage. Merle was watching the television, Lance seated in a chair near her, his eyes closed, head held back as if he were willing away a nosebleed. Roddy knocked and Merle waved him in.

  “Stay for Pat and Vanna . . .” Merle gestured toward an empty chair.

  Lance squinted open one eye and half raised a hand in greeting.

  Roddy hovered a few yards away from them, the way he hung on the periphery of his mother’s house, not wanting to get too close, become too involved. “I’m only going to stay a minute,” he said. “I just had something I wanted to talk to you all about.”

  Merle glanced to the TV.

  Lance opened his eyes and lifted his head from the back cushion of the chair. “You bring Squee?” he asked.

  Roddy stuck his hands deep into his pockets. “That’s what I wanted to come ask you about . . . is Squee. I’m . . . I know you’re ready to have him home with you here, which I respect, and understand. But he’s been having a hard time, like you might expect, and I’m worrying about bringing him back here so soon, what with the . . . the fire . . . the site still all . . . well, before we’ve been able to get everything cleared away, you know? I’m wondering if you think maybe he should stay back at my mom’s a little longer, till things get cleaned up here?”

  Lance swept a hand around the room. “Pretty fucking clean in here,” he said.

  Roddy nodded. “Suzy and the girls did a real nice job.”

  “You know,” Lance said, looking to his mother now, “Suzy, in high school . . . Roddy here was just about creaming in his pants about every five minutes for that girl.” He laughed, mocking.

  “Lance!” Merle shushed him playfully, disapproving the way a woman her age might flirt with her own husband: You filthy old goat, you!

  Roddy tried to ignore Lance. It was just like high school again, really. “Look,” he said, directing his plea to Merle now, “I wanted to know if it would be OK with you if we kept Squee at my mom’s place a couple more days, just until . . .”

  “My son belongs here,” Lance declared.

  Roddy looked at him a second, then turned back to Merle. “I’m not saying . . . just, maybe it’s too soon for him to be here at the Lodge . . .”

  Merle opened her mouth to speak, but Lance got there first. “He’ll have to get used to it at some point. Might as well be now.” Everything he said had the weight of a decree, as though with Lorna’s death he had ascended to royalty.

  “Look”—Roddy spun toward him—“could you please try to think about the boy for one damn second . . .”

  “Well, now you fucking sound like Lorna!” Lance jeered.

  “Dammit, Lance,” Roddy swore. “The kid won’t even stay at his own grandparents’ place.” He looked to Merle, remembering who she was. “He went out the window in the middle of the night and ran to my mom’s.”

  “Well, I don’t blame the kid,” Lance said smugly. “Who the fuck wants to stay with Art and Penny?” He warbled their names in singsong mockery. “I’d run too.”

  “Lance,” Merle cautioned.

  “Jesus Christ! It’s my fucking house, Ma!”

  Merle stood decisively. “I’ve had about all I can take of you, Lance Squire.” She looked to the television to once again register the contestants’ scores, then flicked off the set, grabbed her car keys from the table, and went toward the door. Passing, she clapped Roddy on the back. “Good luck with this one.” She jutted her chin at her son. “Lance, could you try not to be such a goddamn bastard for once, OK?” And with that Merle turned and went out of the cabin and down the steps.

  Lance had closed his eyes again and leaned his head back. He raised one hand and flipped the bird to his mother’s back as she walked away.

  “Look, Lance . . .” Roddy prepared to try again.

  “Look, Rodless,” Lance mimicked. Rodless was from junior high. Rodless, Dickless, stupid adolescent-boy humor. “I said no. Which part of that didn’t you understand?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Lance, would you look at—” Roddy’s anger was barely contained. “Could you just look at what you’re . . .”

  Lance was about to blow. “You know what I see when I look at myself, Rodless? You know what I fucking see? I see a man whose wife just died! A man whose wife just fucking died . . .” He started to break apart then, his voice cracking into words that came out with no sound. “She just fucking . . .” He dissolved.

  Roddy took his cap off his head, ran a hand through his hair. He gave a nod, one. “I’ll go get Squee.”

  Back at Eden’s, Squee was also watching Wheel of Fortune on a TV that hadn’t been tuned to anything but PBS since Roderick Senior had died. Roddy rapped on the back door and summoned Eden to the porch. She came out of the kitchen drying her hands on a dish towel, passed Squee on the couch, and glared at the TV. “Do you know how much television that child is accustomed to watching?” Eden said to her son.

  “No, I don’t. Look, Ma . . . I tried. I don’t what else there is to do . . . Lance is losing it.”

  “All the more reason that child should be nowhere near him,” Eden hissed.

  “Fine, but what am I supposed to say? My mother says he’s not your kid anyway and you know it, so go shove it, Lance? What exactly—”

  “I’m calling him,” Eden declared.

  “Oh, Ma, come on.” But Eden had already turned away, into the house. She went to her bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  It had been long enough since she’d called the Squires that she didn’t even remember the number. She looked it up, dialed, readied herself for Lance, and then let the phone ring and ring and ring. She hung up and tried again. This time he answered.

  “What?” he said. “What now?”

  “Lance, this is Eden Jacobs calling . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, Eden. Sorry, thought you were my mom.”

  Eden was nothing if not straightforward. “Firstly, Lance,” she said, “I’d like to express my greatest condolences to you. Lorna meant a great deal to me, and though we weren’t on much of terms these last years, I think of her daily and will continue to do so. She’s always in my prayers, along with you and Squee.”

  “Oh,” Lance said. “That’s nice. Thanks.”

  “Which brings me to the other reason for my call, which is to talk with you about Squee. I understand from what Roddy’s told me that you’re looking forward to having him home with you at the Lodge.”

  “Yes, I am,” Lance said decisively.

  Eden plowed on. “And while I understand your wishes at this time,” she said, “I can’t help but feel that you’d think differently about bringing him home if you were to really only think about him for just a moment, about his well-being . . .”

  “Look, Eden,” Lance said, more forcefully now, “Roddy already tried, and the answer’s still no. I want my son home—what’s the big fucking deal? I come home, he comes home too. Done, OK?”

  “No,” Eden said, “no, it’s not OK! Suddenly yo
u decide he’s your son . . .”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “I am terribly sorry that Lorna is dead, mister. Maybe mostly because of what is going to happen to that little boy”—Eden remembered Squee again, out in her living room, and she lowered her voice— “without her around to be some sort of a parent to him . . .”

  Lance spoke loudly, and bitterly slow. He said, “I am coming to get my son now.” And he hung up the phone.

  Eden sped by Squee on the couch and went out the back door. Roddy was sitting at the picnic table, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. “I made it worse,” Eden said, coming down the stairs.

  “Shit.” Roddy sighed. He closed up the knife. “What happened?”

  Eden shook her head. “He’s coming over to get Squee himself.”

  “Aw, Christ.” Roddy stood, then sat back down, then stood again. “Christ!”

  Eden had her hand on her hip and was nodding, as though running a conversation through her head. Then she straightened pointedly, her jaw set in fury, and made a noise like a growl of frustration through her teeth. She went up the steps. “Squee!” she called out as she went through the screen door. Her voice was changed entirely. “Hey, Squee, time to get packed up, mister. Dad’s on his way over to get you, bring you home.” She was trying to sound cheerful, and the effect was almost ghoulish.

  Five minutes later Lance pulled into Eden’s driveway, left his truck running, and climbed the front steps. He rapped good and hard on the door, then opened it without waiting for anyone to answer. He looked around.

  Squee came out of the guest room. He looked at his dad, looming large in the doorway of Eden’s little home. It was the first they’d seen each other since the fire.

  “Hurry up,” Lance said, and Squee went back into the room to finish gathering his things into Eden’s old suitcase. From the kitchen doorway Eden stood and watched Lance without a word.

  Squee came out of the bedroom a minute later, suitcase in hand. He didn’t speak either, not to his father, not to Eden. Didn’t even run out back to say good-bye to Roddy before he got into Lance’s truck and was driven away.

  THEY PUT THE MATTRESS ON THE FLOOR. That worked better. Or used the chair; the chair worked too. It was a good, sturdy chair. But honestly, it didn’t much matter what they did it on, just so long as they did it. Because that’s what it was like: urgent and necessary and inappropriate and clandestine. They couldn’t get past it, neither of them, couldn’t get past just how incredibly good it felt. Jesus, it just felt so incredibly good: the kind of sex that took over everything, so that whatever else you were doing, you were never really doing that thing, you were just not having sex. It divided the world for them: there was the sex, and there was everything else. And everything else felt—oh, well, who the hell even knew what everything else felt like? They knew what the sex felt like, and beyond that, well, there was death and drinking and runaway children and fires and washing machines and rooms to be cleaned and parents to be placated and hotels to be run and what-the-fuck-ever else, because how could you possibly care about anything else when there was sex that felt like that sex felt?

  The thing was, they did care. And it wasn’t that sex didn’t feel good, but about three seconds after it stopped feeling like the most amazing thing you ever felt in your life, about three seconds later they did care about the children and the laundry and the dead people and the live people and everything-the-fuck-else there was to worry about. So they got up. They went back to the world. And then they scrambled back to Roddy’s shack as soon as they possibly could, because that was the only way they were getting through any of it.

  It was past twelve that night when Suzy left Roddy and drove back to the Lodge, not much more than a five-minute drive on the dirt road that cut between the back of the hill into which the Jacobses’ place was wedged and the beach below. The night was warm, the air alive with crickets and fireflies. You felt it outside of you, inside of you, everywhere, that kind of summer night.

  Suzy took the Lodge truck down that rutted, pitted road, bouncing in the seat, stressed about getting back to Mia, about having to get up at the crack of dawn when Mia inevitably got up, stressed about whatever else she might have done wrong, since that’s what being on Osprey made her feel: as if she had done something wrong but didn’t know what it was yet. Whether or not her father and mother were actually watching her, her father and mother were always watching her, and she had always done something wrong.

  To the right of the road were woods—if you bushwhacked through you’d hit the ravine down beyond Eden’s place. On Suzy’s left, the old golf course stretched out, overgrown, unused, except as a sledding hill in the winter. They’d built a new eighteen-hole course out by Wickham Beach, let this one go to seed. The dirt road had begun its life as a golf cart path, then became trafficked by locals when they realized what a shortcut it was. It pounded the shit out of the underside of a car, but the locals drove trucks mostly, and it kept the summerers in their Saabs out of the way and on the pavement, since they didn’t know how to drive dirt anyway and were more nuisance than the raccoons who got plowed down nightly as they went scampering across from the golf course to the woods. Bam. There were always a few good raccoon carcasses sprawled across the dirt road, their insides baking into the sand.

  Coming over the first rise and around the sharp bend by what was once the seventh hole, Suzy spotted in the headlights, on the side of the road, what looked to be a raccoon. She slowed. They always waited, then dashed out in front of your car at the last second, like the kamikaze squirrels in autumn who got drunk on fallen fermented fruit from crab apple trees and started racing zigzags across Route 11. Suzy peered out, straining to see farther than her headlights’ range. She prepared to brake, anticipating the raccoon’s mad dash. And then as she got closer, she realized it wasn’t a raccoon. And as she got closer still, she realized it was Squee.

  She swerved to a stop, yanked the emergency brake, leaving the engine running, and jumped down from the truck. Squee stood, frozen, off to the side of the headlights’ beam as though he couldn’t decide whether to run toward Suzy or away from her. Suzy managed to quell her alarm and slowed as she approached him.

  “Just out for a stroll?” she said, her voice modulated.

  Squee didn’t say anything.

  “You . . . um . . . need a ride or something?” she asked nonchalantly.

  Squee shrugged, suspicious.

  She got close and squatted down to his level. “Pretty late to be out alone, huh?”

  Squee shrugged again, but there was concession to it. He knew she was right.

  “You going anywhere in particular, or just walking?”

  In the half-lit, overgrown field, Squee scratched at his shin. His fingers came away touched with blood, a mosquito-bite scab. He wiped them on his T-shirt.

  “Come on,” Suzy said, beginning to stand again, “let me give you a ride. I’d hate to leave you walking up that hill in the dark. Come on. Hop in. Where to?” She started toward the truck, as if to assume he’d follow. He did.

  “Seat belt, please,” she instructed. Squee complied. “So, where can I drop you off?”

  Squee gestured with one limp hand up the hill, reluctantly, as though he hadn’t had a destination in mind, but since Suzy was asking, well, he guessed he might as well go to Roddy’s. She pulled a U-turn on the old golf course and drove back the way she’d come.

  Pulling into Eden’s driveway, Suzy shut the truck’s lights. “You wait here a sec?” she asked Squee. “I’ll see who’s up?”

  Roddy was already at the door when she got there. He looked puzzled.

  “I’ve got Squee in the truck . . .” She lifted her chin toward the driveway.

  Roddy interrupted, stepped out onto the stoop, as if he didn’t believe her. “What?” It was too far for him to see.

  “He was coming up the golf course road.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “This is clearly where he was hea
ded.”

  “Good thing he didn’t make it about half an hour earlier!”

  Suzy laughed helplessly, a picture in each of their minds of whatever position they’d been in a half hour before. Roddy stepped back inside and started to pull on a pair of pants.

  “What do you . . . ?” Suzy started.

  “He slept on the floor here last night,” Roddy said. “He can do it again. I didn’t know he was there till morning then, I don’t have to know now. Lance can fucking deal with it, then. The kid doesn’t want to be there.” Roddy shoved his bare feet into his work boots and sat down to lace them enough so he could walk.

  “You want him down here?” Suzy looked around, checking the shack for evidence of herself. “Or up at Eden’s?”

  Roddy did the same once-over of the room. “I think he’ll probably want to be . . .”

  And then they were interrupted by the lights and the sound of another vehicle pulling into Eden Jacobs’s driveway.

  “Fucking shit.” Roddy bolted up. In seconds they were both out the door and running up the hill.

  Lance had gotten out of his truck and was walking quickly and angrily toward Suzy’s.

  “Lance,” Roddy called as they approached, the name curt and damming, warning Lance away from whatever he was going toward.