Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  She sat up, reached over, and took the cap from his hand. It was all about proprietorship, she reminded herself. About deciding what was yours and claiming it for yourself. She blew into the gun cap; it left a salty taste on her lips, and she reached for her drink. Such a gorgeous day, she was off from work, there was more than enough beer, and they could stay as long as she liked. And if she decided she wanted to return to the Lodge, then they’d return. It was precisely why the rest of them were such namby-pambies. They didn’t know what they wanted—and if they did, then they’d have to scour up the courage to ask for it. It helped Brigid a good deal in times of stress to isolate the exact ways in which she was far more capable a human being than most. Certainly poor Lance was about as far down the ladder as people came in terms of having control over their lives. Which was probably why he liked spending time with her: she offered him a glimpse of what it was to take charge. It was probably, Brigid thought, why he’d got on with Suzy back when they were young; Brigid definitely saw Suzy as sort of a kindred spirit. She and Suzy were both—in Brigid’s mind—soaring examples of strong, independent women who didn’t stand for the crap that men dished out. Some people might have even agreed with her—no sir, those ladies don’t stand for one ounce of bullshit—but there were other folks who’d say that Brigid and Suzy were girls who wouldn’t know from bullshit if you stuck their pretty noses in it. And still others might contend that some people’s lives were so steeped in bullshit they didn’t even know it stank.

  Lance stood. “You want another?”

  Brigid shook her can. “Yessir,” she said, and drank the last gulp down.

  She watched him walking back with two new cans, and then he stopped ten feet away and lobbed one at her. It sailed past—actually, she pulled her hands away instinctually, as she always did in games in which one was meant to catch things—and skidded into the sand.

  “Oopsie,” Lance said. “Oopsie daisy . . .”

  Brigid cocked her head. “Bastard.”

  He held his own beer to his heart, drooped his eyes and mouth in puppy-dog innocence. “Me?”

  Brigid rolled her eyes. This was how she liked things. With him fetching, eager to please. And herself: sarcastic, mocking, entirely in control. She flipped over and stretched to retrieve the wayward beer without having to stand. It was a sexy maneuver for a girl in short shorts, and she was well aware of it. She reached the beer with her fingertips, managed to roll it toward her and grab hold. Then she sat up and began turning to Lance, who’d sat himself down beside her again. She had one hand around the beer and one on the flip top, and when she cracked it she caught Lance dead on in the spray. He jerked back, sloshing some of his own beer onto himself as well. “Whoaho!” he cried, his shirt and face splattered, wet with dots of foam. “So she’s playing dirty now, is she?” he jeered, half mocking, half sinister. He lifted his chin toward her: “Got yourself there too, darlin’.”

  Brigid set her beer in the sand. “But I,” she began, “have dressed for our outing appropriately,” and she pulled off her beer-splotched T-shirt, then wriggled out of her shorts. She stood, reclaimed her beer can, spun on her heel in the sand, and stalked down the shore and into the surf wearing a striped bikini, about which even Lance was sharp enough to call after her: “There’s nothing in the world appropriate about what you got on, angel.” She laughed without looking at him, and raised her can in the air to toast her agreement, calling “Cheers!”

  Brigid kicked around the shallows for a time, can raised above her head as she improvised a one-handed backstroke. On shore, Lance polished off his own beer and fetched another from the pine-tree stash. When Brigid came dripping back up the beach toward her towel, he was sitting on it, eating generic-brand sour cream and onion chips. He offered her the bag. Shaking a spray from her hair, she declined, indicating her desire, rather, for the towel, and when he understood what it was she wanted he clambered to his feet—no easy task with both hands full, and on a surface of sand—and then he set down his burdens and tried to pick up the towel for her. He seemed to want to wrap her in it, the way a parent might greet a child emerging from a bath, but the towel was covered in sand, and as he raised it a breeze caught and lifted it like a sail, whipping Brigid with a small sandstorm. She looked down at herself, dredged like a cutlet ready for frying, and let out a burst of laughter. “Thank you very much,” she said, snatched the towel, and left him chuckling as she went back down to the water to rinse off.

  She dropped the towel near the shore, walked out waist deep, held her nose, and dunked under, arching her neck as she rose so the hair slicked back over her head. When she reclaimed the towel from its slump on the beach, she lifted it exaggeratedly in a display for Lance: Correct beach-towel procedure, sir, please watch as I demonstrate. She shook the sand away from her body, then wrapped herself dramatically, a game show hostess modeling the prize mink. Lance just stood there watching her from a distance, laughing, and it felt grand—it was grand, Brigid told herself—to bring laughter to a man who’d been through so much. He truly seemed to be enjoying himself. Whether Brigid was enjoying herself was another matter entirely, which—some people might have been inclined to point out—was something you’d expect might concern a strong, independent woman like Brigid, a woman who didn’t stand for any bullshit. A claim—the same folks might say—which was in itself a crock of bullshit big enough to sink an island.

  The beers were growing warmer by the can, but they’d drunk enough that they didn’t much care. It was cheap, shitty beer—piss-water, Brigid teased, saying her friends in Dublin would be horrified—and it went down just like water, pretty much. They ate their sandwiches, and Brigid went in the water again, not because she felt like a swim but because she had to pee. Lance had already gotten up a few times to piss in the woods, and it seemed that every time he got up he sought out a closer tree, so the last time Brigid could literally hear his urine streaming and hitting the ground. She paddled a bit, floated around while she emptied her bladder, then splashed about to dispel the impression that she might’ve only gone in the water to pee. The bay felt grand anyway, refreshing, though it made her feel drunker than she’d thought she was, the way you might stand up from your table in a bar not feeling scuttered at all, but when you go to use the toilet, the bathroom starts to spin. When Brigid came out of the bay—water sweeping off her body, evaporating almost instantly under the intensity of the early-afternoon sun—she was overcome with tiredness: the night before, and the beers, and the heat all catching up with her at once in that kind of postlunch, postexercise exhaustion that might have felt rather glorious if she hadn’t been drunk, except she was.

  Lance was squinting, laughing at her as she came up the beach, and as she flopped down onto her towel—facedown, her limbs sprawling out from her, useless as jellyfish—he said, “Siesta time, señorita?” all the while chuckling, mocking her for such alcohol intolerance. All Brigid could get out in response, her mouth already mashed sideways into the ground, was a muffed “Mmmmnn.” She would be asleep in seconds, one side of her face dangerously exposed to the sun, the other cheek growing warm with drool bleeding slowly from her open mouth as she slept.

  The sun crept across the sky toward the west, and by early mid-afternoon shade had begun to overtake Dredgers’ Cove, spreading from the tree line out as the sun moved behind the pine woods. Brigid was still asleep as their spot on the beach lost its sun, first dappled by the leaves, then shaded altogether, and in her sleep she was growing chilly. The first thing she would remember feeling—remember being conscious of at all—was warmth, and she was grateful for it, as though someone had noticed her there, shivering in that tiny striped bikini, and thought to drape something over her—a jacket, or some clothes that were lying about. But there was weight to the covering, a warm, heavy pressing-in that came up beside her, curling around, cupping, and she curled into it, letting the warmth come over her like a dream, a good dream, an erotic dream where everything is warm and wet, everything coming t
ogether as though under warm bath water. But then, wrongly, the weight was on her, not around her, heavy on top of her, and it was too heavy, like a carpet unrolled over her back flattening her into the sand with not enough room for her lungs to inflate inside.

  And then she was awake, and he was moving on top of her and though she felt cold, her sunburned skin was noticeably warm under his hand, which was cool as it came under the fabric at the bottom of her suit, tracing the crack of her ass down like he was going to push his cool hand in and warm it up inside of her. She knew what was happening; her head was still swirly from beer and sun, but she knew what was happening, had enough sense about her to think it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever done, and Brigid wasn’t averse, necessarily, to doing things that were a bit bad. No one was cheating on anyone, and his wife had died, and didn’t people seek human contact in times of grief to try to get through their pain and claim a life for themselves in the face of death? Isn’t that what people did?

  She could have paused things, she thought, maybe just for that moment, to focus and get her bearings, but she was groggy, and it felt so nice, anticipating the coolness of his finger sliding its way up inside of her, pushing up and making her aware of herself inside, the way you could only be aware of inside when something came from outside and touched the inside and made you realize what was there and how empty it had been, how much you wanted something there, pushing through, feeling out the dimensions and making a space from a void, creating the space as it was entered, as though the walls appeared only as he made them with his touch. She breathed in, ready to feel the coolness of his hand, her inside warmth taking it over and transforming it, making it warm within her. He shifted awkwardly, and fell more on top of her, a greater crush of weight that pushed the breath back out of her and jerked her one notch further into wakefulness, aware suddenly of the sand pasted with spit to the side of her cheek, and the angle of one arm pinned underneath her, asleep, stiff, and painfully inert beneath her body. And as she became aware of these discomforts, on top of her back he shifted heavily again, one hand pressed into the sand beside her as though he might do a push up from where he was propped. But then, at once, the full weight of his body seemed to come crushing down on her from behind, and in the same motion he caught her from below and with one thrust had shoved the whole of himself, erect, inside her.

  The shock she felt first was the shock of what was not happening— the shock that what was inside her was not the slim pencil-cool of his finger, as though that was something she’d been anticipating for hours or days, and not just seconds, fragments of seconds. It hit her like disappointment first—the largeness, the hotness of it—and then she felt the dig of the zipper on his jeans into her ass, and the sand from his jeans grinding into her skin. She tried to say something but couldn’t, like in a dream when you scream and nothing comes from your mouth, the horror of that, her mouth crammed down into the sandy towel, lips scraping grit as she tried to move but couldn’t shape a word with all the weight from above. And though she could breathe, somehow, through her nose, she panicked, her body seizing up in terror like one drowning, and she thrashed, trying to lift her head and open her mouth to the air.

  He should have rolled off her then. He should have rolled off when she jerked like that, realized from that spasm that something was wrong—she couldn’t breathe!—rolled off her and checked to make sure she was OK: Honey, what’s the matter, oh, jeez, sorry, was I crushing you there? In fact, if she’d heard his voice, alone, with no accompanying movement, she’d have actually thought he meant to soothe her, because that’s what it sounded like when he whispered, “Shhhh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” blowing those shushes into her ear like reassurance. But as he shushed, his breath hot, she felt his hand clamp down on the back of her neck, hard, like he meant to hold her there, his fingers around the side of her neck pressing in too deeply. It panicked her further, the desperation of being unable to breathe, her face pushed into a towel, her throat constricted under the pressure of his grip, and she thrashed harder, and he held her harder, his grip tightening as he braced himself, kicking a foot deeper into the sand for purchase, all the while cooing “Shhh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” in her ear, the sound changing into something lordly and dominant, a farmer trying to calm a struggling chicken as he holds its neck steady against the chopping block.

  Brigid squirmed under the weight of his body, tried to wrench her head around with such force—such impeded force—that she bit down fiercely on her own tongue and that absolute, terrible, thudding pierce of pain replaced everything else the way a scream shuts down a roomful of conversation, the pain in her mouth filling with hot blood, stopping everything else in her body. When she stopped kicking he let up the pressure on her neck, and she found she could turn her head into a pocket of air, and the pocket of air calmed her enough that she could breathe and feel the blood drain from her mouth, hot into the sand under her face. The blood-pulse in her tongue seemed to match the one inside her, hot throbbing mixed with gritting sand, sand in her mouth, sand inside, rubbing as he thrust, grating against her, and it seemed that she just lived inside that pain, the rhythm and tear of it, until somewhere something changed and he arched his back up as he came, and then fell again into her, gratefully this time. He lifted his hand from her neck and moved it through her hair, combing and rubbing and kissing the side of her face and her neck as he rubbed, still kissing, nuzzling, cooing, “Angel, angel, angel,” as he pulled himself out of her and rolled away, onto his back, breathing hard. She lay on her stomach, almost as she’d fallen asleep, almost nothing changed— just the towel wrenched away, one arm dead beneath her, her tongue swelling in her mouth, her crotch grated raw, and her bathing suit bottom hitched to one side and wedged up in the crack of her ass. She couldn’t move her arm to pull it down. She couldn’t move at all. She lay there, and she breathed.

  After a time Lance sat up. He tucked himself in and closed his pants, and then he leaned over to her, and pressed his face into the flesh of her exposed buttocks and breathed in deep before he tucked a finger inside the elastic and pulled it out for her, settling it around the curve of the cheek as though with that act, that gesture, he could make it fine. Snapping the elastic back into place, he pushed himself to his feet. She could hear him walking back toward the trees, then the sound of a flip top cracking. She could hear him return, flop down into the sand again beside her, and then she felt him place a beer, the can warm, on her back, try to balance it there on her as if he was playing a game. When he took his hand away the beer stayed upright for a second as she breathed, then toppled and fell, rolled off into the sand.

  There was still sun on the water, and Lance unlaced his boots, strode down to the shore, pulled his shirt over his head, slipped off his jeans, and went naked into the salty sea at Dredgers’ Cove.

  Brigid heard the splash and summoned the strength she had to pull on her shorts and shirt, slip into her beach shoes, and gather her things. She would have been thankful to dive into that water. It would have made the ride back easier somehow if they’d both been clean. But to follow him, naked, into the water was not an option, so neither was cleaning herself. She stood and walked into the woods, past the food and the beer to the truck, and she climbed in the passenger side and slammed the door and waited.

  Lance dove shallowly, then twisted around under water and came back to where he’d begun. With both hands he rubbed his face with water and then stood and marched back onto the beach. He shook himself off like a dog, paused to judge the results, then shook again before shimmying back into his clothes.

  And then he was there, opening the driver’s side door, pushing in the rest of the beer and the bag of food and climbing in behind them. Brigid was grateful for those packages on the seat between them; they were something in the way—not much, but something. He hoisted his hips up from the seat to reach in his pocket for the keys while Brigid watched him, aware of every move he made as though she ha
d to keep track of it all from now on. She watched him as if it was the only thing that mattered: to account for every single thing Lance Squire did from the moment he got into the truck. This focused her second to second, gave her a purpose then, second to second to second. It took a great deal of focus, this accounting, to notice every detail, every twitch and glance, and Brigid was able to lose her sense of herself. In her awareness of him she was able to forget a bit of who she was, what she might look like, how she was sitting, what sort of expression she wore. As she watched, she lost her self. She made herself invisible; she watched him like prey.

  He put the keys in the ignition, turned the engine over, put the truck in reverse, and began a five-point turn to get them headed back in the other direction down the logging road. A few minutes along, when he’d gotten the feel of the ruts and bumps again, he looked to her, then back at the road, and said, “You pissed at me now, Pissed-Off Girl?”

  Brigid said nothing. She watched. She did not know how he might read her expression. She did not know what her expression was.

  “Hey,” he said, like a plea for clemency, “you don’t have to worry: nobody ever gets pregnant off me.” He laughed a little, smiled over at her winningly.

  Brigid turned away, realized she was mashed up against the passenger door, putting as much space between herself and Lance as the truck allowed. She leaned her head out the window and let the wind rush by, blowing back her hair, the air heavier with pine the deeper inland they traveled. She would go back and take a shower—a very hot shower—and she’d sober up, and sleep. She concentrated on the shower without imagining it too fully, because imagining the water scalding on her body made her want it so badly she thought she might cry out.