Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  In 1948, when Bud was twenty, the Bright family came to Osprey Island from Indianapolis to open—with common and foolish optimism—a women’s apparel shop, and by the time the store, like so many others, failed two years later (there were three months of business a year on Osprey, and when the summer folk left each Labor Day they took the economy with them) Bud had already managed to impregnate and marry the Brights’ daughter, Nancy. Her parents folded up their ruined business and moved back to Indiana. By the next year, Bud’s father was dead from cancer and Bud and Nancy Chizek took over proprietorship of the Lodge at Osprey Island.

  They feared the worst two years later when Hurricane Carol raged up the eastern seaboard and swooped down on Osprey Island as if she’d set her mind to stripping it entirely. The Lodge faced west, somewhat protected by the hill, and fared far better than the rest of the island. Bud lost his dock, half the hotel’s front deck, most of the shore-view windows in the Lodge, an aluminum swing set that was lifted and dropped thirty feet downwind, where it lay splayed like an unfurled paper clip until it was removed, and one of the cabins, which was irreparably damaged when a two-hundred-year-old oak uprooted beside it and jacked the structure up as if to catapult it into the bay.

  In 1970, a candle left burning in the staff barracks incinerated it to ashes within hours, thankfully without casualties. Nine years later a grease fire in the kitchen closed the restaurant for the last month of the season: unfortunate, and mildly financially crippling, but the fire hadn’t spread and the Lodge recovered quickly enough. Though the cabins on the hill had been constructed with every fire-retardant material invented in 1939, Bud feared some stupid renter leaving a clothes iron plugged in and sending the place up in flames, but after fifty years and countless renovations, such a calamity had not yet come to pass.

  When Hurricane Gloria threatened the island in 1985 they braced for the worst and were rewarded with clemency: a number of trees lost, but no major damages.

  Still, the island had surely known its share of tragedy. Most summers saw a drowning, a boating accident, some careless kid diving into the shallow end of a pool and snapping his neck. There had been the car crash on Ferry Hill that took George Quincy’s wife and baby, and a few fishing boat accidents over the years. Your occasional electrocution or fatal tumble down a flight of steep cellar stairs. There were house fires—more in the days of woodstoves and kitchen cooking hearths, though even in modern times houses still went up in flames— with babies and old folks, the pre- and postambulatory, trapped inside, succumbing to smoke. But on that June night in 1988, when Lorna Squire died inside the laundry shack as it burned to the ground around her, it was the first documented human death by fire in the Osprey Lodge’s 114-year history.

  Later, when the men from the volunteer fire department said that it had just been a matter of time, it took people a minute to realize they meant the laundry shack, not Lorna. “A fire trap,” Chief McIntire called it: a rotting wooden structure stuffed crevice to crevice with dry cotton sheets and towels, piles of old newspapers, bottles of highly flammable cleaning chemicals, and aerosol cans just ready to blow. No windows to open, no trapdoor through which to escape. All exits but one closed off and sealed. (They might have fined Bud for keeping a structure so far below the fire codes, but it never came to that. He’d suffered enough.) “Probably a cigarette,” said the chief. Bob McIntire also taught third grade at the school and was the track coach and the Boy Scout troop leader and sometimes refereed the varsity and junior varsity football games. “Looks like the origin of the fire was right there on the couch,” he said. The couch on which Lorna had fallen asleep. Drunk, they said. The smoke would have gotten her first, they said. She wouldn’t have felt anything. There was that, at least. She’d have felt no pain.

  Gavin and Jeremy saw the fire first. Jeremy had awakened in the middle of the night to pee, smelled smoke, and thought Gavin must have fallen asleep and dropped his cigarette, probably smoldering in his sheets somewhere, ready to flare. “Gavin,” he called, then louder, “Gavin!” as he approached his roommate’s bed. Gavin jolted awake, and it was at almost the same moment that they both looked out the window beside Gavin’s bed and saw that across the path the laundry shack was quite clearly on fire.

  Jeremy began banging on doors the length of the hall, shouting, “Fire! Fire! Everybody wake up! There’s a fire!” He moved downstairs, banging and hollering: “Everybody get out! There’s a fire!”

  Gavin ran outside. The night was oddly still, and it was warm, no breeze at all rising from the shore below. Under the glare of the safety lights he looked at the laundry shack and then to the Squires’ cottage next door. It was the only other building nearby. Dashing up the steps, he reached the door in seconds and banged on the screen—the real door wasn’t even shut—then went inside, hollering, his voice high and panicky. He ran to an inner door, shouting, pounding. He tried the knob. It gave. “Fire!” he shouted. “There’s a fire!” In the room, clothing and crap were piled everywhere—dishes, cups, cracker boxes, Styrofoam to-go containers, lotions and nail polish and all sorts of women’s things, towels, packing bubbles, a double bed, empty. Gavin whirled around to the other door and took up pounding. “Fire!” He hammered the flimsy door. “Fire!” Gavin paused, listened, heard nothing, and tried the knob and found it locked. He shouted louder, kicking at the door now to rest his fists. He leveled his kick at the doorknob and let go. There was a splintering sound, but the latch held. Gavin glanced around him. Lying there on its side on the floor was, of all things, a fire extinguisher. He hefted the red cylinder, got his grip, and swung it at the knob, which folded into itself as if made of tinfoil. The door, light as cardboard, swung inward. In the twin bed, still fully dressed, Squee’s body was just beginning to twitch awake. His head was tucked under a pillow, which he held around his ears with a grip so insistent it seemed incongruous to sleep. Gavin grabbed the kid by the middle and hoisted Squee over his shoulder— the boy still clasping the pillow to his ears—and carried him through the cabin and down the steps outside to safety.

  A few lights had gone on in the Lodge, and Suzy was dashing up the hill barefoot, in a tank top and underwear, clutching Mia as if rushing her to an emergency room in the middle of the night, the girl’s skinny legs dangling limply from beneath her oversize T-shirt.

  One of the waiters had raced up the hill to get Bud, who came tearing down moments later in a pair of thin pajama trousers and a white V-neck. He held a broad-beam flashlight and was struggling into a bathrobe as he ran.

  Bud’s wife, Nancy, called the fire department from their house up the hill, then came tripping down toward the motley crowd assembled by the staff barracks. The fire was hot, but contained—it looked as though it was going to take out the laundry shack and leave it at that. Still, the waiters and housekeepers stood before the barracks as if they might somehow shield their new home from danger. Squee was just like the rest of them, staring at the fire, glowing in the firelight.

  Nancy clutched her robe about her, scanning the crowd. She saw Squee and stopped. “Where are Lance and Lorna?” she shouted. Then something in her tripped over to the hysterical. Her voice screeched and broke: “Where are Lance and Lorna?!”

  Bud wheeled around, scolding his wife for her noise. “For god’s sake, no one’s in the laundry at two a.m.!”

  Gavin, who was standing beside Squee, spoke: “I checked their room, their house.” He gestured toward the Squires’ cabin with his chin. “They weren’t there. Just Squee.”

  Nancy stared at Gavin. “Squee!” she cried. “Where are your parents?!”

  Squee shrugged absently, unconcerned. That his mom and dad might be inside hadn’t crossed his mind.

  “No one’s in the laundry in the goddamn middle of the night!” Bud hollered again, and what Squee was realizing was how sad his mom was going to be when she saw what had happened to her laundry shack.

  It was the scream of the fire engines that woke Lance from his whiskey sleep on the porc
h of the Lodge, jolted him awake and sent him running up the hill toward the lights, the people, the scene, his own scream rising as he ran, as though he knew—already knew—that his life was over.

  RODDY JACOBS LEFT HIS PLACE behind Eden’s house and jumped into his truck at two in the morning to follow the sirens down Sand Beach Road to find out what the hell was going on. Firefighters were stretching hose lines toward the shack when Roddy drove up. A primary search into the laundry shack had been attempted and aborted soon thereafter. It was such a close space, engulfed in flames—impossible to get in, let alone see anything.

  Squee saw Roddy’s truck and dashed for him as he stepped to the ground, yelling as he ran: “Have you seen my mom? My mom! Do you know where she is?” The initial resolve that there was certainly no one inside the laundry shack had given way to fearful speculation when Lorna Squire could not be found. The one hope they all held but did not say was that maybe Lorna was just drunk somewhere, passed out and too blitzed for even the sirens to wake her. They may have hoped it would turn out that Lorna was off fucking someone’s brains out, or curled asleep against some man’s tattooed chest on the other side of the island. They hoped the thing they’d be dealing with the next day would be scandal. They hoped they’d be keeping Lance from tearing the guy’s throat out, keeping Squee entertained while Lance and Lorna fought and screamed and cried until they hurt each other so badly that they had to make up and make love and forgive each other everything, again.

  It was nearly three when Roddy went back to his truck to set out to find Lorna. It seemed a bad idea for Squee to go with him—where would they find her? what would her son have to witness?—but it was beginning to seem a bad idea for Squee to stay at the fire scene, where Lance was being physically restrained by two guys from the volunteer squad after he’d tried to rush the burning shack, screaming for Lorna, who he now feared might truly be trapped inside. In the end it was Squee who made the decision when he grabbed on to Roddy’s hand and wouldn’t let go, which was when Suzy—still clutching Mia to her, though the girl was really just too big to be carried—allied herself with the search party and climbed into Roddy’s truck as well.

  They drove through the darkness, Mia slumped asleep on Suzy, Squee awake throughout, his eyes wide but trained ahead, as though he could see nothing beyond the windshield. Roddy and Suzy panned the road, their eyes open as if propped. Air blew into the rolled-down truck windows as they drove. All across the island lights were on, people seated at kitchen tables, framed in their picture windows, talking on the phone, peering out as though the laundry shack fire might spread, as though Lorna might come stumbling out of their woods, past their woodsheds, like some stricken heroine, and they’d give her hot coffee and wrap her in an afghan before getting on the phone to pass along the word that she was fine.

  It was almost light when Roddy drove the truck back to the Lodge. The fire was mostly out. The ambulance was there, but its sirens were quiet, flashers off. People no longer stood on the periphery of the scene, but sat on porches or in tight circles on the ground. Some girls hugged each other, crying softly. Most sat stoic, stunned. Lance had been taken away, sedated. He was at Merle’s now, his mother tending to him. Doc Zobeck had given something to Nancy Chizek too, for her nerves, and she was sleeping it off at the Chizek house up the hill.

  Sheriff Harty approached Roddy’s truck. Roddy and Squee climbed out slowly, as if to forestall what was about to happen. Mia was still asleep against Suzy. Squee had Roddy’s hand, was pressed as close to the side of Roddy’s leg as he could get, eyes big and glassy and cold. Sheriff Harty nodded solemnly to Roddy, then squatted down to Squee’s level.

  “Squee,” the sheriff said, and then he paused, not knowing how to proceed. He took a breath, tried again.

  Squee spoke first, his voice controlled. “My mom was in there,” he said.

  Sheriff Harty let out his breath, nodding slowly. He kept looking right at Squee, right in the eye, as if he needed to see if the boy really understood. Squee said nothing more, but his throat and jaw jerked as if he was biting down on the inside of his cheek. Sheriff Harty looked up from Squee to Roddy, planted his hands on his thighs to push himself up. “You OK?” he said to Roddy as he straightened himself, glancing at Squee— Can you stay with him? Take care of the boy for right now?—and Roddy nodded.

  “She’s gone,” the sheriff said, and then his voice caught, as if he was gagging but knew he had to say it. It was his job to say it. “She wouldn’t of felt any pain . . .”

  Squee kept nodding, his fingernails digging so hard into the flesh of Roddy’s palm he’d find cuts later, like tooth marks.

  The sheriff turned to go, left Roddy and Squee there, and Suzy leaned from the truck window behind him and spoke his name. “We should go tell your mother,” she said.

  Roddy lifted Squee from the ground onto his hip. The boy’s body was so rigid and light it was like lifting the hollow skeleton of a bird. He put Squee into the cab, then climbed in himself and started the engine.

  Eden Jacobs was a stolid, elusive woman who had taken her own husband’s death and her son’s homecoming the way she took her morning herbs: pennyroyal, sip, swallow; dong quai, sip, swallow; valerian, licorice, skullcap, black cohosh, toss back the head and wash it all down. And, sure, the other Islanders thought it odd that such human dramas should evoke so little response in their own subject, but everyone had known that Eden Jacobs was an odd woman the minute she stepped off the ferry thirty-eight years before, one hand holding a small suitcase, the other enveloped by Roderick Jacobs’s massive paw.

  Roddy put the truck in park in Eden’s driveway but left it running as he went and knocked on the front door like a traveling solicitor. He stood and spoke to his mother from the stoop, turning back to gesture to Squee, Suzy, and Mia in the truck. Eden took the news stoically. Pesticide use on the roadsides, and she mounted an immediate offensive. Death of a woman she’d known since that woman was a baby, and Eden said, “Well, why don’t you all come in? I’ll make some breakfast. The children must be hungry.” Roddy nodded, though he wouldn’t likely eat inside himself, and went back to the truck to get Suzy and the kids, who filed across the yard and up the front steps like zombies. Roddy held the door for them. When the others were inside, Eden stood in the doorway. She faced her son. “So this is how it happens in the end.”

  He pursed his lips, nodding, and followed his mother reluctantly inside.

  Eden Jacobs’s living room was a tidy clutter of doilied end tables and framed photographs. On the coffee table were a covered glass dish of raw sunflower seeds and a floral saucer filled with cellophane-wrapped sesame candies. There was an old electric organ in one corner that Roderick Senior had inherited from his own mother, which hadn’t been played in thirty years. On the far wall, near the bedroom hallway, stood Roderick’s gun case, his old hunting rifles racked inside like good china stored away for special occasions against a lining of bronze-colored velveteen. Neither the window curtains nor the baseboards were dusty. Eden Jacobs had been keeping house here for almost forty years.

  “Come, I’ll put up some coffee,” Eden said, and she led Suzy to the kitchen. Suzy glanced back to the kids, who had climbed onto the couch, too stunned and dazed to do anything but sit quietly.

  Roddy hovered awkwardly, reluctant to sit down. Eden poured apple juice into two small glasses and carried them to the living room.

  “Thank you,” said Mia, her voice small.

  “Thank you,” Squee echoed. His voice was strange as well, unnatural, as though grief had made him, both of them, polite and quiet and scared. Mia held her juice without drinking it. Squee gulped his down in four swallows, without breathing, handed the cup back to Eden, and then turned and vomited into the leaves of the potted spider plant beside the couch. “I’m sorry,” he choked out.

  “Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart,” Eden said. She handed the boy a color-printed cocktail napkin—a squirrel nibbling acorns—and Squee wiped his mouth. Mia
watched, terrified.

  “Do you feel better?” Eden asked Squee.

  Squee said, “I don’t know,” and Eden asked if he’d like to use the bathroom. The boy nodded.

  “Through the bedroom there, on the left,” she directed. “Just do your best to ignore all the old lady stuff. The basic appliances are the same as you’ll find anywhere.”

  Squee nodded again and walked toward Eden’s bedroom door.

  Eden set the empty glass on the coffee table, bent down, and hefted up the plastic-potted spider plant. “We’ll just put you out for some sunshine, huh?” she said into the spindly green leaves. She opened the front door and set the plant down on the stoop as if it were a cat put out for the night. “There you go.”

  Eden made the coffee and whisked up eggs with milk and cinnamon and vanilla extract and set it to soaking with a few slices of a bread she’d baked the week before, which was going stale. Suzy had gone to use the restroom and came back reporting that Squee was asleep on Eden’s bed, his sneakers dangling off the end as if he’d known well enough not to dirty up the bedsheets. Roddy excused himself now that Squee was asleep, retreating from the house that so clearly discomforted him and fleeing for his shed out back. Mia then promptly fell asleep on the couch, the apple juice glass still clutched in her hands, a splotch of it spilled across the belly of her T-shirt. Suzy extracted the glass from her daughter’s grip and set it in the sink. She managed to remove the shirt from Mia’s body and rinse it out in the bathroom without rousing the girl, who slept beneath a quilt Suzy drew over her.

  Suzy choked down a few bites of French toast before Eden said, “Baby, if your stomach doesn’t want it, don’t force.” Suzy sighed gratefully. She sipped at her coffee and pushed the plate of food away. “Should I bring something out to Roddy?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you.” Eden was already preparing a plate. “I do wish he’d talk more,” she said, as though she were picking up a conversational thread that had been dangling between the two of them for years. “I worry he keeps it all bottled too close.” Eden handed the plate to Suzy. She said, “I’m going to buzz down the hill, see if Art and Penny need anything.” They were both quiet a minute, Roddy’s French toast steaming the air between them. Eden closed her eyes. “God, to lose a child . . .” She shook her head, then snapped back to. “I don’t know how your mother lived through it, Suzanne.” She looked at Suzy with disarming frankness. “I never liked your mother particularly, but my heart went out to her. To lose a child, I can think of no more terrible a thing. Art and Penny . . . not that they’ve been much as parents for the last twenty-odd years, but still . . .” She left off. “I’ll just go see if there’s something they need.”