Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Well, he doesn’t want to stay with me!” she said certainly.

  Later, Roddy and Suzy waited in the truck while they sent the kids into Shakes for ice cream.

  “We just can’t guarantee that he’ll stay up at my mom’s,” Roddy was saying. “We can’t exactly lock him in. I could lock the door to the shack, but still, it’s weird, if he comes down . . .”

  “You’re right.” Suzy was nodding as Roddy spoke. “You’re right . . . I know, I just wish we could find, like, an hour, just that . . .”

  Roddy was nodding too. “I just don’t know how . . .”

  “This is so stupid. The kid’s mother is dead and I’m trying to stash him somewhere.”

  “He’ll be back with Lance tomorrow night for better or worse. And then you can ditch your own daughter all you want and come share my shack with me.” He smiled.

  “I’m not such a terrible mother as I sound,” she said.

  “I didn’t say you were a terrible mother.”

  “I sound like one, though.”

  “How come you had her?” Roddy asked, too quickly to check himself.

  “I was pregnant . . . ?”

  “Yeah, got that,” Roddy stammered, self-conscious now. “I just wondered, I mean, did you mean to be . . . or . . . ?”

  “I didn’t mean to get pregnant, but . . .”

  “Happens sometimes,” he said.

  “I was on the pill too, even. Different kind than now,” she assured him. “I’m well protected now . . .”

  He smiled. “And you decided to keep it . . . her . . . I guess, obviously . . .”

  Suzy laughed. “Obviously.”

  “Did you . . . Were you . . . with her dad then? Did he . . . ?”

  Suzy chose her words carefully. “I was with someone then. I mean, I was with someone. And I was also . . .”—she spoke slowly, as if testing his reaction to each word, waiting to see how it landed before she spoke the next—“having an . . . well, sleeping with . . . someone . . . else . . . also . . .” Roddy was staring at her intently, waiting for each word as apprehensively as she issued them. “It wound up being kind of messy and yucky.”

  Roddy was shaking his head. “And you didn’t wind up staying with either of them?”

  “I wasn’t exactly anyone’s favorite person at that point.”

  “And so did you ever . . . I mean, do you . . . ?”

  “Know who her father is?” Suzy finished for him. “Yes,” she said definitively, “I do.”

  Roddy just kept looking at her, unsure what she meant.

  “They both left thinking it was the other, and it seemed like that was best for all of us. And I was going to abort anyway, but then I decided I didn’t want to. I have a good job; I could afford it. I knew she’d have good genes. It just seemed like: OK, I could do this.”

  “Wow,” Roddy said.

  “I guess.”

  The door to Shakes swung open and Squee and Mia pushed through, cones in hand, Squee’s already beginning to melt down his arm.

  “Make you not want to sleep with me anymore?” Suzy asked, her face scrunched up in exaggerated worry.

  Roddy snorted. He reached down to conceal his erection before the kids climbed back into the truck.

  He dropped Suzy and Mia at the Lodge, then drove with Squee beside him back up to Eden’s. She wasn’t in the house when they arrived, so Roddy deposited Squee in front of the television and went out to the chicken coop to find her.

  There’d been no henhouse out back while Roddy was growing up. All that had happened in his absence. Eden had a custom-built cement-floor coop with divided nest areas for each of her birds and a separate “coop for one,” as she called it—a darkened, screened-off place for a broody hen to sit on her eggs and ready them for hatching. That spring Eden had mated one of her hens—Lorraine—with a cock from George Quincy’s farm. Now Lorraine got off her eggs only once a day—not more than twenty minutes—to step outside, eat, drink, and do her business. It was Eden’s only chance to get in there and check on things, tidy up. As Roddy approached he could see Lorraine at the food. The gate was made of chicken-wire fencing stapled to a scrap-wood frame. He opened the latch, slipped inside, and secured it closed behind him. It stank of chicken shit.

  “Hey, Ma,” Roddy called.

  Eden’s head poked out the splintering door frame. Lorraine stalked back to her nest, feathers puffed, defensive and proud, and Eden stepped out of her way and into the light. As Lorraine settled on the eggs inside they could hear her buk buk buk, low and constant and somehow contented-sounding.

  Eden was smiling broadly. “I tell you they’re due to hatch ’round the Fourth of July?”

  Roddy let out a sad snort of a laugh. “Yeah, Ma, you told me.”

  Eden beamed like a grandmother would over brand-new Sears photo studio portraits.

  Roddy’s tone when he spoke was anything but light. “What’d Sheriff Harty want with you, Ma?” Roddy and the Sheriff had passed each other in the driveway that morning.

  Eden wasn’t prepared for such a change of gears, and she stalled a moment.

  “Ma?”

  “Oh, that . . .” She waved a hand away from her body to demonstrate the utter inconsequence of the sheriff’s visit, as though she’d all but forgotten he’d come by.

  “Yeah,” Roddy said, determined, “that.”

  A wash of panic swept Eden’s face suddenly. “Where’s Squee?” She looked toward the house. “You had him . . . ?”

  “He’s watching TV. He’s fine. Don’t change the subject.”

  “Oh ho,” Eden laughed bitterly, shaking her head, a finger pointed at Roddy in reprimand. “Oh, that is the subject, son. That is the subject.”

  “Don’t,” Roddy said. He was growing impatient and frustrated. “Don’t get cryptical—”

  “Well isn’t that the pot calling the kettle—”

  “Ma—”

  “Look, son. I know you’re not going to argue against there being some things best left untold, and I am not going to tell you what I talked about to Sheriff Harty this morning any more than you’re about to sit down and tell me where you’ve been since nineteen sixty-eight. So don’t tell me you don’t know that some things are best kept. There’s no reason to say them, and there’s too many other folks who’d get hurt if you did. OK? So, I am done talking about this, son. Done.”

  Ten

  HOW THE OSPREY TENDS ITS NESTLINGS

  From my canoe on the Connecticut River I have often watched the male enter the eyrie with his catch. After he eats the head, his mate takes the remainder from him and feeds the young the choice center part, bit by bit, saving the tail for herself. But in Florida, Fred Truslow, who photographed ospreys so beautifully for this article, saw a male depart from etiquette. “He brought back a pound-and-a-half weakfish and sat there nibbling,” Fred said. “When he ate beyond the head, the female clucked impatiently. When he reached the halfway mark on the body, she grew strident. And when he ate the tail section, she flew off with an angry scream. A few moments later she was back with a fish of her own. This she divided—center part for the youngsters, head and tail for herself.”

  —ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

  SUZY’S FIRST OFFICIAL ACT as head housekeeper was to clean the Squires’ cottage. Lance would be coming back from Merle’s, and word from Merle was he wanted his son with him, which worried everyone, since Lance had never particularly wanted Squee around when Lorna was alive. Still, they tried to understand. Squee was all Lance had left of his wife. It made sense he’d want to cling to him. Wouldn’t you? they murmured, pausing to chat in the aisles of the IGA, at the bar, as they shuffled out of the Episcopal Church.

  Suzy gathered the housekeeping girls that morning. “Let’s just get in there and do it. A whole crew of us, it shouldn’t take that long.”

  She was wrong. It took six of them all day. “Remember,” Suzy kept saying as they uncovered another den of mouse corpses—trapped on s
ticky-tape, bloody and desiccated—inside a kitchen drawer, “the rest of your work this summer is going to feel like a piece of cake after this.” By afternoon the girls were rolling their eyes, and Suzy shut up about it. When she and Brigid started going through the bedroom, collecting Lorna’s things, folding her clothes into discarded produce-packing boxes from the IGA, they were on their last legs.

  “How well did you know her, then?” Brigid asked, standing at the closet door, surveying the contents, unsure where and how to delve in.

  “In high school, I guess I knew her pretty well . . . better than I wound up knowing her, I guess.” Suzy sighed heavily. “It was hard, with Lance . . . she just kind of cut off other people.”

  Brigid reached for an empty box. “He couldn’t be so altogether dreadful as everyone imagines, could he?” She sat down in the open mouth of the closet and dug in. They had designated a “Lance” mound on the bed, to be dealt with later, and Brigid began riffling through the closet, sorting “Lance” and “Lorna,” bed or box.

  “Yeah, he probably is . . .” Suzy chuckled bitterly a moment, then sobered up. “No,” she revised herself, “he’s probably not . . .”

  “Do you know him well, then?”

  Suzy let out another spurt of hard laughter. She didn’t think very far ahead when she said, “Well, I knew him.”

  Brigid turned around to see Suzy’s face, and grinned. “Oh, did you . . . ?”

  “It’s a really small island,” Suzy said. “You grow up here and it can get a little incestuous.”

  “So, you and Mr. Squire . . . you were a couple, then?”

  “Me and Lance? Oh, god no.” Suzy tried to laugh, but her discomfort was growing.

  Brigid stopped what she was doing. “But you . . . ?” she prompted.

  Suzy shook her head regretfully, swallowing hard. She was an idiot to have said anything. “Unfortunately,” Suzy managed to get out, “very unfortunately, yes.”

  Brigid let her jaw drop as she attempted to picture the scene of it. She wasn’t just going to let the subject go.

  Suzy reached for the packing tape. “It was such a huge mess . . .” She had to dig herself back out of this somehow. “I mean, Lance and Lorna, they’d been together for a couple years at that point. And not that Lance didn’t fuck . . . Not that Lance didn’t mess around, back then at least . . .”

  Brigid was about to speak, but then didn’t.

  “Oh, it was such a big mess,” Suzy said. She wanted the conversation to be over. She wanted it never to have begun. “I was friends with Lorna. It never should have happened. And then my brother—my brother was like Lance’s best friend. He found out and got furious . . . And then he went off and died . . .” Suzy peered at a plastic bag she’d discovered under the bed; she held it up to the light to discern what might be inside.

  “Your brother?” Brigid said.

  “Yeah. Vietnam. That glorious war.” Suzy opened the bag, sniffed at it tentatively, and pitched it into the industrial garbage bag in the far corner. “It’s just one goddamned drama after another around here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brigid said softly.

  They were quiet then, for a time, sorting clothes. Brigid thought about the ethics of going through someone’s closets—Lorna might have been dead, but Lance wasn’t, and the closets were half his. Did being married to a dead person suddenly mean that the whole world could go riffling through your underthings? Brigid thought in some ways that living on this island seemed to simply imply that the guy pumping your gas had probably changed your diaper, and the woman serving your burger was likely sleeping with your dad. Dirty laundry was public domain. Which was either a terribly healthy, out-in-the-open, no-secrets-here sort of a thing, or it wasn’t. And what seemed most likely was that no matter how soiled the laundry hanging out on the clothesline, you could be altogether sure there was something far dirtier balled up and festering in a plastic bag in a corner of the basement where even the snoopiest didn’t think, or dare, to go.

  If Brigid had wanted to ask more of Suzy—about Lance, about Chas, about the island dramas Suzy had known—she either refrained or was too caught up thinking about how she might find her own way into Osprey lore: as the girl who took up with the fellow who almost came between Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane. So now Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane could go on and pump out their nineteen children who’d all grow up hearing the stories of how their ma had nearly gone off with a college boy from California, but didn’t, and, well, so now here they all were. Brigid was entirely pleased with the role she might play: the Irish chambermaid whom Gavin had taken up with, with whom he had a torrid and passionate affair, while Heather and Chandler got soft and fat and ever more local.

  Brigid wasn’t stupid. She could see quite well—in herself, for fuck’s sake—why a place like Osprey Island could be addictive, why it might be dead hard to break away from it entirely. Your life mattered enough here that people would be talking about you long after you’d gone. And there was something lovely about that. Yes, all right, Brigid conceded, big fish, small pond and all. Yet she was altogether gratified to be making her way into island history as she was. You didn’t hear anyone on Osprey Island talking about her sister Fiona, now did you?

  LANCE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, with Merle, in time for dinner that night, but he didn’t eat with the rest of the staff in the dining room or on the porch. Merle made up an invalid’s sick tray and brought it to him at the cabin. He sat in that newly sanitized home, barely noticing the work that had been done. It struck him as somehow logical, or at least right, that his world should be suddenly swept clean, all evidence of Lorna stacked along the wall in boxes marked CREAMED CORN and MALT-O-MEAL. The cottage looked as empty as Lance felt, yet just because everything had gotten picked up and wiped down and vacuumed away didn’t mean that nothing had ever been there. You could erase mess, but not history. Lance just sat in the armchair, poured himself a stiff glass of bourbon, and demanded his son. “Where is he?” Lance asked Merle. “Where’s my boy?”

  “I’m sure they’ll bring him over in a bit,” Merle said, calming him. She’d never talked to Lance a whole lot, hadn’t known intimately what went on in his and Lorna’s life; nonetheless, she felt strangely hopeful. Maybe that was something you never lost as a parent: the hope that your kid might do something right someday. She’d certainly had more than enough discouragement on that front, but you wanted to believe that people always had the capacity to change. Especially your children.

  “He wants Squee back at the Lodge tonight?” Eden’s incredulity was matched only by the ferocity of her anger at Lance’s sheer, arrogant, ignorant, selfish gall.

  “That’s what I was told,” Roddy repeated. “Bring him back after dinner.”

  “No!” Eden cried. She stamped her foot into the ground between garden rows. She held a bushel basket to her chest defensively. She’d been harvesting snap peas.

  “Ma, you can’t keep the man’s son against his will. He’s got rights. A man wants his son with him, you can’t deny him that . . .”

  “His son!”

  “Look, he’s no model parent, I’ll give you that, but the man’s grieving, you know? He just wants what he’s got left of family . . .”

  “Oh for the love of god!” Eden cried. “His family? He wants his son? Lance Squire’s been denying his paternity since the day Lorna told him she was pregnant! Goddamn it, Lorna!” Eden swore as though it was Lorna, not Roddy, standing in the garden beside her. “Goddamn it!”

  Roddy stood by, helpless.

  “Let me tell you something, son,” Eden said, and her voice was low, as if she was afraid that Squee might hear them from the house, over the babble of the television. “Let me tell you that that man would have no claims on that child if Lorna’d done what she ought to have done and put Father Unknown on Squee’s birth certificate and made a goddamn will and put someone else as legal guardian in case something ever happened to her—Art and Penny, me, Reesa Delamico and Abel, any
one, anyone’d have done it. But no, that was too much for Lorna to manage. She didn’t want to hurt Lance. Swore up and down it was Lance’s baby—” Eden paused, her face twisted with emotion. “Do you see how hard it was to be any part of that girl’s life? Can you see what it was like to sit by and watch her ruin every chance she ever got to right herself? She was a smart girl—I don’t even know if you know how smart of a girl she was. But so stupid ! So goddamn stupid about things. Goddamn it, Lorna!” she swore again, gripping her green pea basket to her body as if it were the child she’d protect at any cost.

  Roddy’s own anger at that point was growing less focused on Lance and more on Eden. “You planning on telling me what in hell you’re talking about?”

  Eden ignored the question. “Go talk to him, Roddy. Go over there and talk to Lance—maybe he’ll listen to you . . .”

  “Not if I don’t know why I’m talking to him or what I’m talking about! No.”

  “Roddy,” she begged. “I tell you: it’s too complicated to open up that sack of worms without letting out every other question that comes along with it. Too many things you don’t need—and you don’t want to know. Could you trust your mother, please? Just take my word and talk to Lance . . . ?”

  Roddy stood his ground.

  “For Squee’s sake, Roddy,” she pleaded. “Please, for the sake of that child . . .”

  “How about for the sake of that child you tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Eden saw her defeat, her mind already calculating how much he’d need to know. She would reveal the bare minimum of what there was. “You,” she accused her son, “have turned out to be a very stubborn and unforgiving man, Roddy Jacobs.”

  Roddy almost smiled. “Just like you raised me to be.”

  Eden narrowed her eyes. She spoke quickly, as though she’d agreed to say it once and only once, and he could catch what he caught and forever after hold his peace.

  “I’m no doctor,” Eden said, her voice so low it was nearly lost. “And I’ve surely never examined the man, but as far as I can tell you, I’m pretty damn sure that it’s a medical impossibility for Lance Squire to have children. I’m pretty sure he’s infertile, or some such, and never has been anything but. He’s well aware of that fact. And whatever Lorna said, I know Lance doesn’t believe for a second that any part of him went into making Squee. He’s certainly held that over her head in every way he could. So now he’s gung ho about being the boy’s father all of a sudden. But I know what that man’s capable of. He’s been rough with Lorna and he’s been rough with others. Lorna and I broke not too long after Squee was born, you know, so I don’t know if Lance ever lays his fist into that boy, but I don’t want to find out now. Please go talk to him, Roddy, and stop wasting time asking me questions, please . . .” She waited, breathing hard.