Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Hey-ay,” Lance called as she approached.

  “Hi.” Brigid felt awkward, unsure of what to say to this man. She knew what was only appropriate: “I’m so dreadfully sorry—”

  He cut her off. “You know,” he said, “that’s all I heard today from anyone. Can’t take much more sorry.”

  “I’m sor—” she began, then dropped it with an involuntary laugh.

  “That’s what I need,” Lance said. “I need to see a pretty girl smile.”

  Brigid obliged.

  “Would you like a beer?” Lance asked. “We can shoot the shit here, just talk, just talk, not talk about sorry, about how sorry we all are, just not talking about anything, just shoot the shit . . . Would you do that, gorgeous? Can I get you a beer? Please? Sit and have one beer with an old man?”

  Brigid took the bait. She swiveled her head from side to side. “What old man’s that? Where?”

  Lance veritably leapt from his chair, pulling it back and offering it to her. “You sit. Sit. I’ll get you a beer.”

  Brigid did as she was told.

  When the door slammed again, Lance was placing an icy can of Schlitz in her hand and plunking down a chair for himself beside her. The beer felt exactly like what she wanted. She cracked it open, took a long sip, then rolled the can along her stinging forearms.

  “It’s that cleanser stuff,” Lance said. “Right? It itches?” His eyes were already welling with tears. “Lorna’d rub ice on it.” He flicked at his eyes with the back of his hand, then fumbled to light a cigarette. “God, I’m a fucking mess.” He got the smoke lighted and inhaled deeply.

  “Could I bum one?” Brigid asked.

  “My pleasure, baby.” He handed her the pack and the lighter. As she extracted one and got it lit he was saying, “Tell me something— anything. Tell me some dumb normal thing. Like you’d of told me last week. Some stupid thing about noth—hey,” he remembered, “how’s that boy? That college boy—how’s things with the fucking college boy?” He was extraordinarily pleased with himself for the retention of that small memory outside his own circumstance and pounced on it. “How the fuck goes it with the college boy?” He smiled so wide, it was ghoulish.

  “To tell you the truth,” Brigid said on an exhale of smoke, “he’s a shitty bastard and I should have known it from the outset.”

  “Oh, no,” Lance cooed, enjoying himself now. “What’d he do to hurt you, baby?”

  Brigid brushed hair from her face with calculated nonchalance. “Just found himself another girl to take up with entirely.”

  Lance let his mouth drop open. Then his face contorted in disbelief. “Who?” he said, so vehemently it sounded like a dare: You just try and name someone hotter than you on this island.

  “The one from the beauty salon . . . ?”

  Lance nearly tipped over in his chair. His eyes bulged with laughter. “Reesa?!” he cried incredulously.

  “No, not her,” Brigid said, “the younger one . . . Janna, is it?” Brigid now knew precisely what her name was, but the fact that she gave a fuck was no one’s business but her own.

  Lance’s disbelief abated only slightly. “That fuckhead’s going to take Janna Winger over you? He’s out of his fucking mind, baby! Baby, anyone who’s going slumming with Janna Winger instead of the hottest little girl to hit this shithole in a hell of a time—he’s not in his right mind, baby. That boy’s fucking nuts!”

  Brigid drank her beer eagerly. She didn’t know what to say.

  Lance drank too, marveling at the insanity of the world. “Fucking nutcase. What a dumb stupid fuck.”

  When Brigid had finished her beer, she set it down on the railing and stood to go. “I’ve got to have a shower . . . these chemicals . . .”

  Lance’s eyes lit up. “Oooohhh-ooh! Can I come?”

  And if the look she wanted to give him was the look she’d practiced for Gavin—the What the fuck is your problem, asshole? look—she managed somehow not to. Somehow she managed just to laugh—a hearty, heady, Ha ha ha ha, we’re all so bloody funny, aren’t we? laugh that at least got her down the porch steps and headed toward home.

  SUZY STOPPED INTO the beauty salon when she’d finished in the maid’s room for the day. Reesa, too, was about to close up and head home, and Suzy helped her and Janna tidy the place a bit as they chatted. Reesa had trained a few of the local girls herself—Janna, and Cybelle Schwartz too. They were just past eighteen, and Reesa had invested a great deal of time and energy in trying to persuade both of them to get off Osprey Island and go live in the world before they wound up married or pregnant.

  When she was younger, everyone thought Reesa would be the kid discovered by some movie director spending a weekend on Osprey, plucked out and whisked away to turn her all-American good looks into someone’s pretty penny. No one thought she’d be on Osprey past her sixteenth birthday. But sixteen, eighteen, twenty, all came and went, and there was Reesa, lovely as ever, waiting tables at the Island Grill or Tubby’s Fishhouse. She’d gone with Abel Delamico since before anyone could remember, and they’d married just after high school. Abel’s fishing business did well, and they had a nice house out near the point at Scallopshell Cove. Four beautiful kids. There was nothing in Reesa Delamico’s life to indicate that she was anything but content. She was the pride of Osprey: she could’ve flown away at any time, but never had.

  Instead, she made sure that others took the sort of opportunities she hadn’t. Jasper, Reesa’s oldest, was eighteen and gone already, off to college a year early. She missed the hell out of him, and that was exactly the way she wanted it. Reesa wanted Jasper to have choices. She wanted him to do whatever he did because he’d chosen it, not because he’d never known enough to see a choice. If, after college, Jasper chose to come back home to Osprey, it’d be because Osprey was where he wanted to be, not because he didn’t know how to get to anywhere else.

  It was just past five o’clock when Gavin appeared outside the salon’s glass door. Janna took off her smock, checked her face in the styling station mirror, checked it again in the next styling station mirror, said “ ’Bye,” and dashed out to meet him. They paused self-consciously on the deck to kiss, and Reesa and Suzy just watched, too interested to feign otherwise. If you’d looked in through the glass door at those two old friends inside the beauty shop, you’d have thought they were watching two entirely different scenes. Reesa beamed with pride— pride mixed with nostalgia. Janna was something of a second daughter to her, and she feared the girl might never muster the incentive to leave Osprey. But now—a boy from California! Even if it didn’t work out in the long run, he might at least induce Janna to see something of the world.

  Suzy, on the other hand, might as well have been watching some graphic nature documentary, staring in horror as though a cannibalistic mating ritual were being enacted on the deck of the Osprey Lodge.

  And then, in a flurry of twenty-four-hour-old love, Gavin and Janna were down the stairs and disappearing up the beach. It was Reesa who spoke first, wagging her head in marvel. “How about that?” she said. “I introduced them at Art and Penny’s yesterday . . . who’d’ve thought? I’ve never seen her like this—she’s usually harder, you know? Harder to crack. What?” Reesa noticed the look on Suzy’s face. “What? Suze? What’s the . . . ?”

  Suzy shuddered off the feeling that had overcome her. “I just . . . I was just hearing . . . I mean, do you know him?”

  “He’s the one . . . Gavin, the Stanford one . . . Heather’s . . .”

  “No, I know that,” Suzy said. “I was just hearing about him, from Brigid.”

  Reesa shook her head; the name meant nothing to her.

  Suzy’s dislike of this Gavin kid surged. “The girl after Heather and before Miss Janna. Brigid. She’s one of the Irish.”

  Reesa’s face registered amusement and confusion. “There was a girl between Heather and Janna? For how long—three days?”

  “Not even, I don’t think,” Suzy said.

  Reesa�
�s good humor soured. Her hands went to her hips and her smile puckered in. She was awfully protective of Janna. “So, he’s a player.”

  Suzy nodded ruefully. “Apparently he just disappeared on Brigid yesterday . . . One night he’s inviting her to sleep with him on the beach—” Both women shook their heads, rolled their eyes. People came from off-island and thought it romantic to camp on the beach, while Islanders knew far too well that it was neither romantic nor comfortable, and between the sand crabs and the mosquitoes it ranked up there as one of the more regrettable experiences to be had on Osprey. “—And the next night he’s nowhere to be found. Not a word of anything, Brigid says—no explanation, no apology, nothing . . . She’s sort of crushed,” Suzy said. “I feel for her.”

  Reesa frowned. “And here I was getting all psyched for Janna. I’m plotting the wedding, packing her up, shipping her off to California.” She’d spent the day envisioning it all: the dress (strapless, with a full skirt, in something darker, not white, something to set off Janna’s paleness—maybe red, deep red), the reception (here, at the Lodge, in fall, when the summer folk were gone, as the leaves began to change— maybe the dress would be a burnt orange, or an autumn red, like Japanese maple), the sweet farewells, the infrequent visits home, just for the weekend, a baby or two in tow . . .

  Suzy said, “I don’t think he’s looking to take someone away with him.”

  Reesa didn’t get it.

  “I think he’s looking for a way onto Osprey.”

  “What is he, insane?” Now Reesa was worried. Understanding lit her face. “He’s just looking for a way back to Heather! I’m such an idiot!” She smacked her own forehead in emphasis. “Here I am, just thinking, La la la, a love story for Janna . . . He’s just trying to stay close to Heather! Oh Jesus . . . poor Janna! What a little shit.”

  Suzy, coming quickly to regret the leaps of logic being made from her nuggets of gossip, began to hedge. “I don’t know, Reese. For all we know it could all be in earnest. They’re kids. He’s probably not scheming to—”

  “Scheming or not,” Reesa said, firm conviction in her voice, “I don’t need some stupid college boy messing with Janna. That’d be just enough to scare her off the outside world. And I wonder why will no one leave this place?”

  Suzy softened. “They leave,” she said quietly. “Some do, some leave . . .”

  But Suzy was really talking about herself, and now Reesa was thinking of Jasper. Suzy had made it off, but so many of them— always the ones who were dying to get off—they’d last six months, maybe a year, and then they were back. Most of them. Suzy joked that it was like prison: you spent too long in that once you got out you were so scared you started making trouble just to land yourself back. But that was Suzy. Most people, if you asked them seriously, would say that if you grew up on Osprey you had ideas about how it would be to live out in the world across the bay. Osprey was your childhood; it was your troubled teen years. It was what you knew to want to escape. Then you got out and saw how things were out there, and then you understood how good you had it on that idyllic little island, where people knew who you were and what you came from, where it was safe to walk at night, where people took care. On Osprey you had credit at every store in town, and someone would always find you a job in construction, or helping out at the church, the school, the dump. You didn’t spend so much time deciding things on Osprey Island: You wanted coffee, you went to the Luncheonette. Prescriptions were filled at Bayshore Drug. You needed cigarettes, you stopped at Lovetsky’s. A haircut, Reesa’s. Life on Osprey was easier. Sure, there were things you missed out on, but if you’d grown up on Osprey you’d never had them, so you couldn’t really miss them much. And all those things out there in the world didn’t help if what you really missed was home.

  Reesa folded a smock under her arm. “Thank fucking god Jasper didn’t have a girl here!” she said.

  Suzy let out a laugh and held up both her hands, fingers crossed. “He’s going to make it, Reese. He’ll make it.”

  Reesa closed her eyes, shook her head, and held up her hands in a short prayer for her son.

  Thirteen

  THE NATURE OF THE STRUCTURE OF A LIE

  If the osprey passes from the American scene, we will lose a majestic and unique bird. Alone in a family between the hawks and the falcons, the osprey, unlike those numerous tribes, has but one genus, one species.

  —ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

  THEY LAY ON THE MATTRESS on the floor of Roddy’s shed. An old upright aluminum fan buzzed and whirred and blew out the sound of the crickets. Roddy lay on his back, stretched long, longer than the mattress, hands crossed behind his head. Suzy curled in toward his body, head in the crook of his underarm, knees at his hip, finger tracing the length of his torso, collarbone to pelvis, shoulder to hip bone. She ran her fingers along the scar on his side, her eyes closed.

  “I never worked at a sawmill,” he said.

  “Huh?” She opened her eyes.

  “I didn’t get it working at a sawmill.”

  “I guess I figured.” She closed her eyes again. She lay very still, just the fingers, tracing.

  He was quiet a long while.

  He hadn’t intended to tell her. He’d intended to tell no one. But none of this was foreseeable, and circumstances dictated their own imperatives. He had sense enough to have learned that much. He had sense enough to be afraid. Afraid that to give up a secret to one person on Osprey Island was to lose that secret to the world. And it wasn’t that the walls had ears or the trees had eyes, or that the birds overhead overheard your confessions and whispered them into the wind. It was that people just couldn’t help themselves.

  He felt it in himself, that desire to talk. Perhaps it was his vigilant check of that desire that kept him so unnaturally quiet much of the time. He wanted to tell her, though. He wanted to give her something he’d never given anyone: a truth, of sorts.

  He had trouble understanding what truth meant. He had lived with secrets, and secrets were just lies of omission and as hard to live with as any other lie. For there was no such thing as a solitary lie. It wasn’t that lies begot more lies; the casting of one lie merely brought into focus and relief a sprawling net of other lies. Roddy had been living those lies—a whole world of them—for twenty years, which was long enough for the world of lies to become its own truth. Or reality, at least. Maybe there’d been a time when he could have acknowledged the lie and stepped away from it, stepped back into the truth, but that time was long gone. That lie was now part of a foundation upon which other things had grown, and truth and fiction were entwined, which meant that there was no such thing as truth anymore. Nor had there ever been. What Roddy had once seen as truth—the truth of his childhood, for instance, before his lie—had only seemed like truth, when, really, it was as much of a lie as everything else. It was only in lying himself that he’d learned of the nature of the structure of a lie. And now that he could see it, he could see how everything was built of lies and how the world was a city of pick-up sticks raised on quicksand.

  To acknowledge his lie to Suzy may have meant a good many things, but it meant one thing very clearly to Roddy: He knew he couldn’t undo the reality spawned from the lie, couldn’t ever return to the truth he’d left behind. But he could, at least, make sure that Suzy knew the lie for what it was. He could tell her. And he started to.

  He told her what it was like to turn eighteen on August 8, 1968. He told her some things she already knew: like what it was like to live in a place where certain things didn’t get questioned—if you were a man and your country went to war, then you, as a man, went to fight in that war. End of story. Unless you happened to have a mother unlike every other mother you’d ever known. A mother who swore she’d burn your draft card herself if you didn’t do it first. A woman who begged you, whatever you did, not to fight that filthy, wrong, horrible war.

  Suzy listened. She understood.

  Roddy’s father had been a weak
man who lived by a rigid set of codes, not smart enough to face the world without them. A man who told his son: You burn that draft card, you’ll be on the next ferry off of Osprey and never coming back, you hear? A man who said: You don’t fight in that war, you’re no son of mine, while his wife screamed and cried: No son of mine is fighting in that war. You had until you turned eighteen, and that had bought Roddy time—a few months past graduation—but not peace. What they’d done was effectively demand that he choose: Your country or your mother? Your mother or your father? Roddy’d had a war waged through himself.

  “I couldn’t register. I couldn’t not register. I couldn’t talk to anyone.” Who would he have talked to? There were no draft counselors on Osprey Island. There were no hippies. Aside from Eden’s, there was only one point of view to be had.

  “I left,” he said. “I had to. Whatever I did, it had to be my decision. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have a home anymore.” Eden and Roderick had managed to both lose their son and erode their marriage to a civil arrangement of household tasks and finances. That lasted a year, until National Geographic and the plight of the osprey served to render their relationship nothing more than legal. But until then, Eden cooked dinner, dusted, hung the laundry up to dry. Roderick cut the lawn and put out the trash.

  Roddy hadn’t cared what people thought. They thought he’d fled. Never imagined that once he left their world he’d have gone anywhere but north, all the way. “Canada?” he said. “What the fuck was I going to do in Canada?” He’d never been anywhere in his entire life. “It wasn’t about right and wrong,” he told Suzy. “I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. Or even if I knew . . . it was about what I could live with. It’s impossible to say, to talk about now, knowing . . . you know? Understanding. Then? I wasn’t like Eden . . .”

  Suzy’s hand left Roddy’s scar for the first time since he’d begun. She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at him in a way that Roddy would never be able to forget as long as he lived. She said, “Oh my god, you fought.”