Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Just get in. You have lunch?”

  She shook her head no. She got in.

  “Mia’s with the girls?”

  She nodded.

  “Squee too.” Roddy pulled the truck out onto Sand Beach Road and headed north. They rode without speaking, each sorting their own thoughts all the way to the Luncheonette on Old Post Office Road. Suzy leaned to check her face in the rearview mirror but bumped the bill of her baseball cap on the way. She tore off the hat as if she’d just discovered the ugly thing to be the root of all that was wrong, and she shoved it behind the seat of the truck.

  Sixteen

  A LONG TIME HELPLESS IN THE NEST

  This is a typical predator’s foot, better for gripping than for walking.

  —“Function Forms the Foot,” Life Nature Library’s The Birds

  LANCE WAS NOT A GOOD FATHER. He knew that. It didn’t take a genius. He could see himself, sometimes—the way you catch a glimpse of something from the corner of your eye—as the kind of father Lorna wanted him to be: a father out of a pancake syrup commercial, or from those sepia stories old people told about their back-in-the-day Norman Rockwell childhoods. Lance occasionally caught a moment’s understanding of fatherhood, but then it would slip from him and he’d be back to being Lance Squire, whose fatherly instinct was a sentimental hiccup.

  Sometimes he wanted to kill the kid. The desire was almost physical, and Lance had to hold himself back some days from beating the living shit out of Squee just for looking like Lorna, reminding him of Lorna, being a pain in the ass, always in the way, always causing trouble, always making other people think Lance was some kind of villain Squee needed to run away from. Lance never knew what Squee was going to go and do, what stunt he might pull. The boy, in Lance’s opinion, was damn spoiled. Lorna doted on him, did everything for him; Lance was surprised the kid could wipe his own ass. And that made him angry at Lorna: What had she thought she was doing? Had she thought about what would happen if she acted like the kid’s servant and let him grow up thinking the world was his? Lance—in rare moments—tried to show his son what the world was really like, how you had to fight for the things that were due you and beat out the people who’d inevitably try to take away what you’d won for yourself.

  The coffee urn in the Lodge kitchen was empty, Jock was nowhere to be found, and it was Tito’s favorite thing in the world to pretend he didn’t speak enough English to understand what Lance wanted when he pointed at the urn, made the international symbol of drinking from a teacup, and shouted, “Coffee! Is there any coffee? Make. The. Coffee.” Tito just smiled, shook his head, waved a hand by his ears to indicate either incomprehension or deafness, and continued to chop his garlic, swaying slightly, as though the music inside his head was so lovely he couldn’t bear to tear himself away.

  Lance slammed through the swinging doors into the dining room toward the bar to pour himself a Coke from the fountain. At a table near the windows a group of the Irish girls were gathered, some sitting, some presiding, spreading peanut butter and jelly on napkin-white bread they pulled from a bright plastic sleeve. Brigid was there, looking spacey and sullen and, Lance thought, sexy as shit. And there amid the twittering, officious, bored, giggling, hyperactive girls were Squee and Mia, seated at the table, getting fussed over and catered to as though they were some Egyptian king and queen, child rulers of a great dynasty.

  Lance approached the table. Movement among the girls tapered, then stopped as they noticed him and turned to look. Brigid half raised a hand in greeting and Lance nodded in her direction, then made motion with two fingers at his son, like a coach calling his player off the field: Come with me. “Grab a sandwich and let’s go,” he said, and started to turn from the table again until it dawned on him that Squee wasn’t moving, wasn’t jumping to follow his command, instead was just sitting there like a fucking retard. Like a little fag, Lance feared, all happy to be a little girly-girl with all the girlies, trotting around like a prissy chambermaid. Lance stopped mid-pivot, turned back to Squee, and said, loudly this time, “Get your fucking ass out of that chair and get back to the house now before I make you do it.”

  There was a heavy pause, as though everything—the future—was about to be decided. And then Squee slid off his chair and walked toward Lance with the look of a cartoon character who’s been hypnotized and brainwashed by aliens. Lance let Squee pass before he stepped up to the table himself, the girls parting as he approached. He took two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from what they’d prepared, then turned and followed his son.

  About one second after the back kitchen door slammed shut, Mia burst into tears. And about one second after that, Brigid stood up and hurried away, leaving the others to stare after her and then exchange among themselves the looks of maternal suspicion and judgment they practiced like disciples of a biddy schoolmarm.

  Brigid went through the kitchen, ignoring Tito’s eyes on her, then stopped by the door and watched through the screen as father and son went up the hill and into their cottage. She opened the walk-in, grabbed a package of Oreos from one shelf and a six-pack of cola from another. She carried these with her into the pantry, where she took a large bag of potato chips not marked for individual sale, before she started back to the screen door, shooting Tito a look just daring him to say a single word.

  She knocked at the door of the Squire cottage with her elbow, her hands full. She could not have been more than two minutes behind them, but when Lance opened the door it seemed that something had already happened. Squee was at the table in the exact spot he’d occupied when Roddy was there half an hour earlier. There was a bowl on the table in front of him. In the bowl were two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The table was covered with milk and bloated Cheerios, which looked like piles of cat vomit. A trail of milk led to a spoon that lay where it had landed on the opposite edge of the table. Squee’s shirtfront was spattered, and droplets fell down his face as though he were crying milk tears. He did not even move to wipe his face with his hand.

  Lance held the door as if he couldn’t decide whether to invite Brigid in or slam it in her face. He looked at her a good long moment before he said, with both pride and righteousness, “We don’t need your charity here.” It was something he’d likely heard on television.

  Brigid took her own long moment before responding. She fixed Lance with a stare that was impassive and feisty at the same time. And then she plowed right past him and into the room, depositing the chips and cookies on the table. “If the charities are doling out food of this sort,” she said, ripping cans from their plastic tether and placing them one by one into the empty fridge, “it’s hardly a bloody wonder your country’s full of fatties with rotted teeth.”

  Lance, still standing at the open door, relaxed his posture and now stood with his weight bearing down on the knob, watching her. “I like you,” he said. “I always knew I liked you right off.”

  Brigid glanced around the room. “Do you have a fag?” she asked. “A cigarette?”

  He jerked his head toward a pack and lighter on the windowsill. She retrieved them, then gestured out the door he still held ajar. “Shall we?” she said, and he gallantly motioned her through ahead of him.

  On the porch, they sat in chairs and smoked in silence. It was too sunny out, and the smoke seemed to bellow from their mouths in an affront to the light, as though they were asserting themselves in opposition to it.

  Lance rubbed his eye with the heel of the hand in which he held his cigarette, and for a moment the smoke seemed to pour from the top of his head. He squinted as if trying to make out something far off on the horizon. They finished their cigarettes, then lit up again. After a while, Lance said, “She was so pretty . . .”

  Brigid waited, quiet.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Tiny—a tiny, tiny little thing. But built too. Perfect . . . first time I remember seeing her was on the bleachers at some game. I was fifteen years old, and I took one look at that girl and I knew I was gonna spend
. . .” He let it go. He couldn’t say the words. He saw Lorna, and he knew. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

  After a time Brigid said, “May I ask a question, then?”

  Lance didn’t speak, but gestured grandly in front of him as though to indicate a stage that was all hers.

  “You’ll not yell at me, will you?”

  “Not you, angel. Why would I do a thing like that to you?”

  “You do it to the others,” she offered.

  “You’re not them.”

  Brigid held on to her words for another moment. “Sitting here, you know, having a chat, you—you come across as rather an understandable sort of a man.” She paused. “It’s not my place to speak. Only it seems as though life might be a terrible lot easier, you see?” She spoke all these words to her hand and the cigarette it held. “You know, if you were kind like this, with the others . . .” When she finished and heard no response from Lance, no sudden movement to force her attention to him, she finally turned to look and see what she’d done.

  Tears he was trying very hard to hold back were pooling out of his eyes despite him, and he was bearing them stoically. When he could speak he managed to say, “That’s just what Lorna’d ask me . . .” And then he couldn’t say any more. Lance’s arms were laid across the armrests of the peeling whitewashed Adirondack-style chair in which he sat, and Brigid instinctively, and compassionately, reached out a hand and laid it across his forearm. He stiffened, shut his eyes. It made Brigid feel strange, and a bit frightened. She thought, This is a man whom no one touches.

  THE REST OF THE IRISH GIRLS were still down in the dining room playing cards amid their PB&J detritus when Suzy returned from lunch. They’d managed (actually, Tito’s butterscotch pudding had managed) to get Mia to stop crying, but the second she laid eyes on her mother coming through the sliding glass door Mia burst into tears, bounded from her chair, sending her rummy hand scattering, and rushed at Suzy, who squatted and caught her just as Mia let out a terrible sob.

  “Baby . . . baby,” Suzy cooed. “Shhhhhh, shhhhhh . . . What’s the matter, Mia? Sweetie? What?” She stroked Mia’s hair, looking over the girl’s head to the Irish girls, asking with her eyes, What’s up with her? What’d I miss?

  But Mia wasn’t talking, wasn’t doing anything except burrowing into Suzy as if looking for someplace to hide. Suzy stood, scooping the girl up with her, and Mia wrapped her legs around her mother’s waist instinctually, arms around her neck. For Suzy, a child’s miniature crisis was more than welcome right then—a scrape, a lost game, a perceived injustice—something to supplant, or at least distract her from, all the larger crises at hand. It made Suzy feel strong: here was something she could make better again.

  Suzy said, for the Irish girls as much as for Mia, “Why don’t you and I take this upstairs, ma’am?” She sent a knowing look to the girls over there at their card game table, a look to apologize for Mia— I know, I’m sorry, I know she can be a pain. To say, Thanks, be back soon—but her look wasn’t met with anything akin. The girls were worried, their brows furrowed. It was then Suzy realized that Squee wasn’t at the table and that this was no kissable, soothable, manageable problem. She hugged Mia to her, spoke softly into her hair. “Where’s Squee, baby? Did he have lunch with you?” At which Mia only began to sob more ferociously. “OK,” Suzy breathed, “OK.” Her pulse began to race. “OK, baby, OK, let’s just go up to our room and calm down a little. It’s going to be all right.” Like a mantra: “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  In the room, Suzy set Mia down on the end of one of the beds and knelt before her on the floor. She tried for patience—she’d dealt enough with crying children to know that her own anxiety wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She tried to slow herself down.

  “What’s going on, babe?” She rubbed Mia’s arms at her sides as if to warm her, though the sun shone in brightly through the window shades and Suzy was sweating with fear. “Can you try to tell me what’s going on, Mia-belle? Maybe I can help if you tell me what’s wrong.”

  Mia wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand and tried to sniffle through her clogged nose, but couldn’t and choked, coughing instead. Suzy reached for a tissue on the bed stand. “Here, baby.” She held the tissue around Mia’s nostrils. “Blow. Give a good blow— good!” Mia honked into the tissue. Suzy refolded it and let her blow again, then wiped Mia off and tossed the tissue toward a wastebasket, which she missed by a hair.

  Mia straightened and breathed in and opened her mouth to speak, but in the time it took for the words to get from her brain to her lips, the realization of their meaning came slamming back at her, so that as she said, “I hate Squee’s dad,” her face was already contorting, the tears beginning anew, flooding out as if they had never paused at all.

  Another tissue. More blowing. “Did something happen, Mi? Why do you hate Lance? Did he yell at you? Did he do something that was mean? Did he do something mean to you?” And suddenly she was struck with what felt like a clear and full revelation of the extent to which Lance Squire was capable of doing something mean. Lorna had kept him in check to some degree—but Lorna was gone.

  When she spoke it was far too angrily, and though she was clearly castigating herself, not her daughter, it might have appeared otherwise. She grabbed Mia’s shoulders with enough force to scare the girl out of her crying. “Did Lance Squire do anything bad to you, Mia? You have to tell me right now, Mia: you have to tell me if Lance Squire ever did anything bad to you!” She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. This was not what her life was supposed to be! She’d gotten away! Suzy Chizek had left Osprey Island! What the hell was she doing in an upstairs room at the Osprey Lodge, yelling into the face of her sweetest, only, baby daughter? “Mia, you have to answer me right now—did Lance Squire make you do something you didn’t want to do?” She was pleading, her hands pulling at Mia’s small arms, kneading, as if she could wring out the truth and the evil all at once.

  And then, in the midst of—or maybe in reaction to—Suzy’s sudden outburst of desperate and incredulous fear, Mia miraculously regained self-control. In a voice so adult and with such calm presence of mind it was eerie and horrible, she said: “No, Mom, it was nothing like that at all. It’s just he’s so mean to Squee. That’s what’s upsetting me. He’s so mean to Squee, and Squee is my best friend. I’m scared . . . I want to go home.”

  Suzy sat there a moment, still, holding Mia’s arms and staring at her daughter as though she’d just been the vehicle of an otherworldly transmission, a voice speaking through this girl from someplace beyond. Suzy’s eyes were grave, and she was nodding her head. “OK,” she said to Mia slowly. “OK.”

  Suzy carried Mia back downstairs and left her in the care of the Irish girls again. Then she went to find Reesa in the salon, which looked, as she entered, as though it had been ransacked. Reesa sat in the middle of the linoleum floor, surrounded by ten thousand bottles, tubes, and aerosol cans.

  “Jesus,” Suzy said.

  Reesa tilted her face toward the door. “And I’ve got a shipment coming in today!” She looked around, trying to figure out where she might possibly store anything else. “I have to keep reminding myself how much spray those ladies like, and what a pain in the ass it is to deal with orders coming in midsummer. I’m planning ahead. Tell me it’s a good thing.” She looked to Suzy, then registered the concern on her face. “What?” Reesa glanced around her again. “It’s not so bad . . . Really, you’d be amazed how fast it goes. Suzy! What? What’s going on?” Reesa was getting it now: something was wrong. She started to her feet.

  “No.” Suzy shook her head, waved Reesa back down. “No, no, you’re busy. I just . . . I need to get Mia . . . and Squee . . . You’re waiting for a shipment?”

  “Yeah, why? Suze, what’s going on?” Reesa had gotten up anyway and was coming toward Suzy, wiping her hands on her jeans as she walked.

  Suzy ran a hand through her hair, felt the scrap of cloth that was hol
ding it back. “No, I just . . . you don’t know what time, do you? When they’re coming? I need to get the kids out of here, Reese. I need to go deal with things. Lance is . . . I don’t know what he is. He’s been at Squee, yelling, whatever, I don’t even know . . . Mia’s a wreck. I just want to get them away from him, just out of here for the afternoon. Just anywhere. I’m probably being totally melodramatic. Mia freaked me out though.” Suzy gestured vaguely with a hand in the direction of their room upstairs. “I don’t know what to do, but while I figure it out I don’t want my kid in his line of fire.”

  Reesa put a hand on Suzy’s arm to still her: Hang on a minute, don’t move. She went toward the back of the shop. “Janna? Jan . . . you there?”

  A head poked out from the storage closet. “Yes, ma’am,” Janna chirped.

  “Why don’t you and that boyfriend of yours go to the beach this afternoon?”

  “Um . . .” Janna regarded her quizzically, as if Reesa might be going a little off in the head. “Um, because I’m working . . . ? Is this a trick question?”

  Reesa spoke slowly, letting out each word as she struck together a plan in her mind. “Why . . . don’t . . . you and Mister California”— Reesa had become markedly skeptical about Gavin since hearing of his dalliances with Brigid—“take the afternoon, and take Squee and Mia to the beach? Not Sand . . . take them over across the island . . . Wickham, or Scallopshell . . . Why don’t you guys do that?” She peered at Janna, waiting for an answer.

  “You providing the vehicle, boss lady?”

  “Ah, shit, that’s right . . . yeah, no, take the truck. That’s fine . . . I don’t need it . . . Do I? No, that’s fine.” Reesa leaned toward the counter, pawed around for her keys. “Here . . . OK, so Mia’s . . . ? Suze? Where?” Suzy pointed toward the dining room. “And Squee?”