Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  Lance had just reached to open the passenger door of Suzy’s truck, and he stopped to peer out into the darkness for Roddy. He stood, poised there, while Squee scrunched down in the seat, curled into himself, silent.

  As the scene became clear to Lance, his expression shifted. He made out Roddy coming up the hill, and then Suzy behind him. He seemed to forget entirely about Squee in the truck and let go of the handle, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Well.” He started again: “Well, what do we have here, now?”

  Neither Suzy nor Roddy said anything. They kept moving toward Squee.

  “Well, after all these years! Did Rodless finally get what he wanted? After all those years . . . Hey, Suze, isn’t that just about the place where you and . . . You reliving old times with Rodless, here? You give him the mercy fuck he always wanted from you, Suzy?”

  “Shut your mouth, Lance! Just shut . . .” Suzy flung her hand toward Squee, hunched there in the seat, which only served to remind Lance of the mission he was actually on. He turned again to the boy in the truck, confused for a second, and looked back to Suzy running at him with Roddy beside her. “What the fuck’s he doing in your . . . ?” He flung open the door. “What are you doing in there?” he demanded of Squee. “You kidnapping my son, Suzy? You fucking bitch, are you kidnapping my son from me?”

  Suzy and Roddy reached the truck and hovered there on the driver’s side. “He was on the golf course road, Lance,” Suzy said calmly. “He was out on the road in the middle of the night. I picked him up.”

  This news only refueled Lance’s anger at Squee. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” Lance slammed his fist down on the hood, and Roddy lunged at the sudden movement, the desire to protect Squee overtaking all else.

  “Oh, what? Rodless gonna fight me? You’re gonna fight me, you dickless motherfucker?”

  Roddy fell back immediately, hands raised in surrender. “I don’t want to fight you, Lance. The only thing I want is for Squee to get a good night’s sleep. That’s all, Lance. I just want your son to get some rest.”

  “Oh, now you’re a fucking saint, you dickless piece of . . .”

  “Lance!” Suzy screamed, just as a light in Eden’s bedroom came on. Suzy lowered her pitch. “His mother is . . . He wants to stay here. What is the problem with that?” Suzy’s voice was a low wail, one step from tears.

  “Because I said he’s coming home with me!” Lance bellowed. And then he reached into Suzy’s truck, grabbed Squee around the waist, and hoisted him out of the seat.

  Squee let out one cry of fear, that first, irrepressible wail of panic. It was obvious that he was crying from the way he held his hands over his eyes, but otherwise he let his body go slack, and Lance held him at his side with one arm, like a bag of topsoil. Lance opened the driver’s side door and shrugged Squee inside, then pushed in behind him, slammed the door, and backed down the driveway.

  Eleven

  THE BLESSINGS OF HYPOTHERMIA

  Here be my loves among the feathered things

  The angels lend their tunes to, and their wings.

  —JOHN VANCE CHENEY, “Here Be My Loves”

  SQUEE SAW THE REMAINS of the laundry shack for the first time the next morning from the window of his father’s truck as they drove to his mother’s funeral. It was nine a.m., and the sun was shining through the ruins. He glimpsed it for only a moment, passing, craning back over the seat to see as Lance pealed out onto the black-top. In his mind it had looked different. He’d last seen it ablaze, in the night, and the fire had seemed so whole and so consuming that it was hard to imagine anything surviving. Over the days, thinking about it, he still couldn’t help thinking of the fire specifically as something that his mom would be so sad about, and then it would click in that she had gone with it. Squee had somehow been imagining the burnt site of the laundry room fire that killed his mother as a beautiful place. Or even just like the fire pit left over from when the waiters and housekeepers made a bonfire on the beach at night and sang and danced and held hands and kissed each other in the glow of the flames. If you went down the next morning, kicked at the embers and remains of log with your foot, underneath, sometimes, the coals were still warm, and the black of the pit was so black and so complete, you could look at it and remember what it had been like the night before, how beautiful it—everyone—had been.

  This fire pit wasn’t beautiful. It was awful, a trash heap. Squee realized how much it smelled, the burn. Once, his mom had fallen asleep on the couch in their house, and her cigarette had fallen to the carpet, which melted out around it in a spreading circle. The house had smelled for days like smoking rubber. That’s what it was like. Squee’s stomach twisted on itself, made a rock rise under his diaphragm. When Lance stopped at a red light on Route 11, Squee rolled down his window, leaned out, and vomited quickly onto the pavement below. Lance looked over at him, ready to yell, then saw how Squee was taking such care to lean out far, not to hit the outside of the truck door, and he reached out and patted Squee’s shoulder.

  Attendance at Lorna Squire’s funeral was not mandatory for Lodge employees, but it was “encouraged.” Gavin, Brigid, and Peg rode in Jeremy’s car to Our Lady of the Island Chapel, a few blocks from town center. The church lot was full, so they parked on the street in front of Bayshore Drug and hoped island police would turn a blind eye to the half-hour parking limit, on account of the occasion. The day was warm, the sky clear, the sun bright. It was the wrong weather for a funeral. Right for a sailing regatta, a pool party.

  Brigid hadn’t wanted to come. The idea of seeing Lance at his wife’s funeral felt creepily wrong to her somehow. But Peg had convinced her that not going would be a lot weirder in the end. And Gavin was going, and she didn’t want to seem callous.

  None of them had anything by way of funeral attire. The closest the boys could get was to wear their work clothes: black pants, white shirts. The girls had come to Osprey with backpacks of beach clothes and bar clothes, and not much of either. They went to Lorna’s funeral in black stretch miniskirts and sandals.

  Lance had in fact barricaded Squee in the night before, in the only windowless room in their cabin, lest he attempt another escape. Squee had slept on the bathroom floor and looked it. Lance let him out five minutes before they left for the chapel to “put on some good clothes.” Squee unearthed a pair of dress pants, hand-me-downs from Reesa’s boy that were already too short in the leg, and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt of a sickly shade of mauve that someone had left behind in a room one summer. Suzy cursed herself later for not having thought to lay something out for him when they’d cleaned the cabin.

  Lance wasn’t showered—what with Squee shut in the bathroom— and he was unshaven. That he’d combed his hair back with water from the kitchen sink and put on a cheap suit (that Lorna’d bought for him to wear to Squee’s graduation from kindergarten a few years back, which he’d bailed on anyway) only made him look more disreputable.

  Understanding had caught up with Penny Vaughn, precipitated by Squee’s midnight flight from her home, and she now looked precisely like the mother of a dead woman. Art had been a wreck for days, and his dark suit wasn’t doing anything to compensate. Merle Squire looked worn—but, then, Merle always looked worn, and she had just spent three days with Lance, which would break anyone down. Nancy Chizek had packed so much makeup onto her face she looked twenty years older than she was, and Suzy and Roddy were doing everything they could just to keep their eyes open. The only one who looked composed in the least was Bud Chizek, who, despite his suit, looked ready to grab a club and tee off.

  Lance kept Squee by his side throughout the ceremony. Neither of them cried. Squee stood baffled, dazed-looking, like he didn’t understand what was happening. Lance, too, looked slightly deranged. He had never been to a funeral before, and was affecting a posture he’d probably seen over Lorna’s shoulder on Dynasty. His gestures and mannerisms were not his own. He was dramatic, which might have been appropriate for the funeral of his young
wife, but he was dramatic about all the wrong things: insisting on being the first one to approach Lorna’s casket, spending ten minutes scraping his shoe violently against the roots of a tree outside the chapel to dislodge a clump of mud from the treads.

  The crowd was thick and dutiful, the minister obliging and uninspired. His service was mercifully short. What was there to say anyway? She was sad. Now we are sad. Actually, we were already sad. She made everyone sad. Now she’s not sad anymore, since she’s dead. So maybe we shouldn’t be sad either? Really: what the hell was there to say?

  After, while parties assembled and the funeral home folks got Lorna packed into the hearse, everyone just milled around, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Lance seemed overwhelmed by the attention being paid him, and at the same time jealous if it was paid to anyone else. When Peg, in her minidress, bent down to talk to Squee after the service, Lance made a joking move as if he was trying to see up her skirt and said loudly, “She was my wife, you know?”

  Peg stood quickly, her hand on Squee as if to shield him. “Of that I’m well aware, Mr. Squire. I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

  “Yeah, I bet you are,” Lance said. “I bet you’re really broken up about it.” And he spun off and walked away.

  Peg turned her face to Squee’s, peered intently into his eyes. “There’s a lot of us at the Lodge who care about you a great deal— you ought to know,” she said. “You can wake me up at any hour should you need—just come to our room and rouse me up, if you need anything at all, all right? It’s room D, in the staff house . . . OK?” Squee nodded blankly, as though he couldn’t quite remember who Peg was.

  At the graveside Lance began to weep. There were fewer people around, fewer people in front of whom to act like a show dog, and he began to break. Nancy Chizek passed him tissues, which he grabbed up blindly and then gradually dropped to the ground, so that by the end he stood inside a little ring of white flowers all his own. Every time Lance looked at someone in the crowd at the cemetery, he seemed to realize his loss anew. He looked up, caught someone’s eye, and gasped as the sobs came heaving from his chest. By the time Lorna’s remains were actually lowered into the ground, Lance was leaning against his mother for support in standing. Squee stayed by his side, right between Lance and Penny Vaughn, who had grabbed Squee’s hand in a clammy, powdery grip and would not let go. The angle was wrenched, and partway through Squee’s arm started tingling, then lost feeling altogether. He hung beside her, looking more like a drooping stuffed animal than a boy. His eyes were glazed as a sleepwalker’s. It was days since he’d spent a full night in one bed, and the delirium of sleeplessness was blunting his pain. In the wake of his mother’s death, Squee was like a hypothermic: a person freezing to death actually stops feeling the cold; the body and mind protect themselves like that.

  Suzy and Roddy kept their eyes on Squee, and as they left the graveside and Lance seemed to lose all interest in the boy, Suzy and Roddy nabbed Squee and brought him with them to Penny and Art’s for a visitation that Lance would clearly not attend. In the course of one night in Lance’s custody, Squee had gone from seeming to cope pretty admirably for a kid in his situation to looking as if he’d been hypnotized and made to witness unspeakable things. His skin was greenish, and they had him sit all the way on the passenger side against the window in case he had to throw up, which didn’t seem unlikely.

  A GROUP OF YOUNGER PEOPLE—locals and Lodge staff—caravanned over to the Luncheonette after the funeral. The sun cut in the windows, bleaching out their faces, illuminating acne scars, chin hairs, the sallow remains of purple bruises on pale skin. Gavin thought it was depressing how bad everyone looked, sweaty and bulging and pinched, as if all their clothes were too small. They wolfed omelet platters, not knowing what else to do. Brigid sat near one end of the tables they’d pushed together, no longer looking voluptuous, but stocky, her skin pasty and mottled with freckles, like rust-stained linen. Peg looked bluish, and Jeremy pimply.

  Gavin felt a discomfort he knew from childhood: Thanksgiving dinner, too hot, overdressed, trapped at an overcrowded table. To make things worse, Brigid kept stroking his leg under the table, and Gavin thought he might run for his life from that luncheonette were it not for a girl sitting diagonally across the table among some other locals. He’d seen this girl at the funeral. He’d seen her because she’d stopped to talk to Heather Beekin, who was there with her parents, and Chandler, and his parents, and everyone. What had surprised Gavin, as he watched, was how it wasn’t Heather he was fixating on, but the other girl, who was thin and a little vampiry-looking, hair dyed black, skin pale. Somehow, even in this terrible diner-window light, she looked almost regal, sort of untouchable and interesting. She had bony arms with a tendency to flail, and hips Gavin could think to describe only as womanly, and he kept finding himself picturing her with a little kid hitched to her side, one deceptively strong, skinny arm wrapped around the chubby baby.

  The story coalesced in Gavin’s mind as not merely logical, but inevitable: He’d come to Osprey for one girl, but really it was another he was meant to meet. Heather became a sort of inadvertent Cupid in the story, Gavin’s anger melting to nothing. In the years to come, they’d all be friends—Heather and Chandler and Gavin and this girl—and their children would all be playmates! There’d be no hard feelings, no grudges, just the sheer good fortune of their good, loving lives. The girl kept catching him staring across the table, kept giving him a look, a profile, a demurred eye that said, You looking at me? Yes—he smiled bashfully—yes, you! And she came back at him confidently, pleased, seeming to say, Well, let’s introduce ourselves once this is all over, how about? And Gavin signed back yes with his eyes. If the girl was aware of Brigid’s fingers picking at the inner seam of Gavin’s pant leg as if searching for a secret way inside them, she did not let on. Gavin would have to squeeze himself out of this Brigid thing somehow. He sensed it wasn’t going to be pretty. He was tired of dealing with messes. He just wanted to go and do what he wanted to do. He wanted to know: Was that so unreasonable?

  Brigid didn’t want to go to the Vaughns’ after brunch. Neither did Peg or Jeremy. And what was Gavin supposed to say? No, I really feel like I should pay my respects and eat coffee cake with the parents of a dead woman I never met? He had no choice but to return with the others to the Lodge.

  Jeremy parked in the staff lot, and they climbed from the car, sleepy and hot and cranky as children. The asphalt under their feet was pitted and cracked with sand-filled fissures. All pavement on Osprey looked like it was made of tar mixed with pebbles and sand and shells, and it split and crumbled apart like the top of an overcooked sheet cake. They stood around and against the car, stretching, stalling. No one knew what to do next. “A swim’d be grand,” Peg suggested, and Brigid said, “I wish the baths were open, you know . . .”

  “The pool, you mean?” Jeremy asked. “Should we go down to the water?” he suggested, as if it were his idea to begin with.

  The girls shrugged their assent.

  Gavin scratched his head, then rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and middle finger as though he had a headache coming on. “I think maybe I need to go take a walk, just clear my head . . .” He tried to make himself say alone, I need to go take a walk, alone, but it seemed too cruel. He knew Brigid was waiting for an invitation. He tried to make himself look as beat as possible, tried to show her that what he really needed was solitude. There were a few strained moments when they all seemed to be waiting for him to ask her along. When he didn’t, Brigid turned to Peg, lifted her head toward the barracks, and said, “I’ll fetch my swimming costume.” She reached out a hand and rubbed Gavin’s sternum—an intimate gesture, something to show she was cool. Not clingy, not resentful. Cool. “Enjoy your walk,” she said, and started up the hill. Jeremy wrapped an arm around Peg, and they followed Brigid, nodding to Gavin as they passed.

  Gavin leaned against Jeremy’s car, the sun bearing down on him, heat from the car pressin
g up through his clothes. He waited until he heard the barracks door slam on its hinges. Then he stood decisively, looked around him, and walked toward the Lodge. In the dark basement, Gavin closed himself up inside the old-fashioned telephone booth and pulled the Osprey phone book from its resting place. Vaughn, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur. And there was a foldout island map on the inside cover. He found the street, studied it a moment, and then tore out the map and shoved it in his pocket.

  Sand Beach Road curved away from the shore past Morey’s Dinghy and became Island Drive as it looped up behind the Chizeks’ house. As Island Drive climbed, the road wound, serpentine, up the hill, the canopy of trees growing thick, densely netted with leafy vines as insidious as kudzu. Down on the beach, the island felt hot, bare, and exposed, but just a few minutes inland and the woods were lush and green, the air damp and rich with the smell of rotting leaves and dark soil. Every so often a long, snaking dirt drive led away from the main road toward an old weather-beaten farmhouse.

  Gavin imagined himself living up here, tucked away in one of those houses. He’d always be working on the place, painting and repairing, and his wife would say to him over breakfast, You think you’ll get to that rain gutter today? He’d take the kids outside with him when they were big enough to help hold the rusty coffee can full of nails and hand him the hammer when he needed it. Heather had always talked about the gingerbread Victorians closer to town, and they were beautiful, with their curlicues and porticoes and screened-in hammock porches surrounded by blooming hydrangea bushes. But Gavin liked it better up here, hidden away from the summer people, not packed in clusters like sleepover-camp cabins, where you could look over and see what the neighbors were barbecuing for supper. He liked the notion of living up here, out of sight of the world.