Suzy gave a panicky shrug: Where was he? She didn’t know.
“We’ll find him,” Janna assured them.
“He might be up with Lance?” Suzy suggested.
“OK.” Janna took the keys.
“In which case, it’ll be a good thing it’s you, not me,” Suzy said.
Reesa nodded ruefully. “Oh, he likes Janna, all right.”
Janna started toward the door. “When’d you want ’em home, Suzy?”
“You keep them away as long as you can.” Suzy dug in her pocket, thrust some bills at Janna. “Go for clam rolls for dinner . . . something . . . whatever . . . You want to go off-island to a movie, great. Keep Squee out of here as long as you can.”
Janna paused by the door. She looked back at them with the first signs of her own worry. “Is everything OK?”
“Yes,” said Reesa.
“No,” said Suzy, at the exact same time.
Janna looked warily at them both. “Gotcha.” And then she turned and fled before Reesa could have a change of heart.
“What the fuck am I going to do?” Suzy said aloud.
“What’re you thinking about doing?”
Suzy waited, then said it, as if it had only just come to mind. “Leaving?”
Now was when Reesa had to pretend that Suzy didn’t say that very thing every summer she came back to Osprey. Patiently, she asked, “Would it solve anything?”
Suzy thought. “I’ve never felt scared before. I’ve been pissed as shit—I’ve been livid!—but I don’t think I’ve ever been scared. It’s always been about me, not about Mia. Not about safety.”
“What’re you scared of, you think?”
Suzy mumbled, “I don’t know.” Then she said: “My dad’s not even looking for someone to replace Lorna. He thought I’d just step right in, take over, spend the summer cleaning toilets.”
Reesa only nodded sympathetically. There was little for her to actually say. Suzy had never been willing to be a part of her family’s business, which was her right, surely, except that you also got the sense she was expecting to inherit the place someday but had no intention to lift a hand at the Lodge until that day came, when she’d probably put it up for sale.
Suzy said, “Mia wants to leave.”
“She does?”
“She’s scared.”
“Of?”
“Lance, I think. That’s what she says. I think I’d go, too . . . I think if it were just me and Mia I’d go. But now with Lorna . . . Mia’s afraid for Squee, I think. I think I am too. I don’t know how I’m going to do him any good.”
“You do,” Reesa said. “Like now . . . getting him out.”
“It’s a Band-Aid.”
“They can be useful,” Reesa said.
“I think I’ve been Band-Aiding myself,” Suzy admitted.
Reesa smiled. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Jesus! Really? Christ, you can’t have a conversation with someone around here without . . .”
Reesa was laughing, but not unkindly.
“I want to leave,” Suzy said. “Just leave: get Mia out of here, leave my father in the lurch—which he totally deserves—but . . . leave this thing with Roddy . . .”
“Is it a thing?” Reesa asked. “Or a Band-Aid?”
There was an awkward pause. Then Suzy looked right at Reesa as though she were surfacing into another conversation entirely. “You ever worry that you don’t know what’s right for your kids? Like you try to do right by them, but what if you don’t even know what right is?”
JANNA TRUDGED a sniffling Mia up the hill, prepared to drop her in Gavin’s care at the staff barracks while she went and wrested Squee away from Lance, but as the Squires’ cottage came into view she could see Lance on the front porch with one of the Irish girls, and Janna shifted direction and walked toward them, waving as she approached. No one waved back. Lance’s head was down, and as they got closer he lifted his eyes, caught sight of Janna and Mia, and started fumbling fast to light a cigarette, turning his face away as though they’d come in on a strong wind. Janna smiled at Brigid. Brigid made no reciprocal gesture. She appeared to be at once ministering to and covering for Lance. From a good twenty feet away Janna made her voice offhandedly casual. “Squee want to come to the beach?”
Lance, still turned away, waved a hand and jerked his head toward the cottage door—Go ask him yourself. Mia stayed where she was, unwilling to come any closer. Janna went up the steps and leaned in the door: “Hey, Squee, get your suit! We’re going to the beach!” She paused for a response. Her eyes were adjusting to the inside light, and for a minute all she could see were splotches and shadows. Then she made out Squee, still sitting, stonelike, at his chair. “Come on! Move it, grab your suit!” She watched as he slowly collected himself and got up from the table to follow her orders. On the porch Lance started to speak. He was looking straight out at Mia. From where she now stood on the porch, Janna could see that Lance had been crying.
“You know what pisses me off the most?” Lance said to Mia, his voice ugly and threatening. Mia said nothing, just stood there, frozen. “They think I’m stupid. Send Janna,” he cooed in a singsong mimicry. “He liiikes Janna. Send Janna over to get the little fucker . . .”
Mia just took it in, rooted to the ground in her fear. Janna went inside to hurry Squee. Brigid reached her hand out and pressed it to Lance’s upper arm in consolation. He turned at her touch, put his elbows on his knees, and bent over them, shaking his head at the floorboards as if they’d let him down once again. And just when it looked as if he was giving up, he raised his head to Mia again and spat as he spoke. “Your mother is a back-stabbing cunt.” He stood, quickly—Brigid jerked back in alarm—and slammed inside.
PEG SPENT THE ENTIRE AFTERNOON worrying herself nearly sick over the fate of the little Squire boy. Someone else might have excused herself from the maid’s room, gone down to the office, looked up Roddy’s home telephone number, and called him the minute Lance had ordered Squee away from the lunch table. But it was important to Peg to be dutiful, obedient, and—perhaps above all—blameless in all that she undertook, and thus she agonized through her chores until the five o’clock whistle blew down at the ferry docks, whereupon she dashed with breathless determination to the Lodge office and found Cybelle Schwartz behind the desk, reading a dog-eared, three-year-old issue of Cosmopolitan.
“May I . . .” Peg began, “please, can I ring someone?”
Cybelle eyed her suspiciously.
“I’ve . . . I’ve got to—you—I’ve got to make a call . . . on the telephone!”
“Staff’s supposed to use the pay phone downstairs.”
“Please!” Peg cried. “It’s desperately important!”
“Is it long distance? I can’t let you call long distance.”
“No—it’s right here! Do you . . . can you get the number, for the man, the one who fixes things . . . Roddy?”
Cybelle was nodding, haughty and self-important. “That’s Roddy Jacobs. He doesn’t have a phone himself, but you can sometimes get him here.” She dialed the number at Eden’s and passed the receiver to Peg.
Someone answered, and Peg asked for Roddy. He wasn’t in—an obstacle Peg hadn’t anticipated. She paused for such a long time that Eden asked, “Hello? Can I help you with something?”
“Oh,” wailed Peg. She looked to Cybelle nervously, unsure of how she might proceed. “I don’t know . . . I . . . I’m working here at the Lodge and I’ve . . . I’ve got to talk with Mr. . . . with Roddy.” She said his name as if it were a foreign word. “I’m terribly, I’m afraid . . . with Squee . . . I’m just entirely . . .”
“Squee?” Eden said sharply. “What happened to Squee?”
“What?” said Peg. “No, I don’t . . . I’ve just . . .” And then she burst into tears.
Cybelle, embarrassed, disappeared into the back room.
“Please, sweetheart,” Eden said on the line, “please calm down. Did something happen to S
quee? I’m Roddy’s mother,” she explained to the sobbing girl. “Can you tell me what happened, please?”
Peg’s tears abated slightly. “Do you . . . ? You know the Squire . . . Squee? You know Squee?”
“What happened?” Eden’s voice was rip-cord tense. “I’m his god-mother,” she said, and though it wasn’t true, she couldn’t find words that were, some way to explain her relationship to the child. “Please,” Eden said shrilly. “Please, is he all right?”
Peg took a gulp of air, and when she let it out inside another sob, all she could think to say was “It’s really that I don’t know . . .”
Eden broke in. “You’re at the Lodge? Why don’t I come there? I’m coming down there.”
Peg’s next sob conveyed acquiescence.
“Go down to the Sand Beach Road entrance,” Eden instructed. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Roddy, who’d also finished up work at the Lodge at five, pulled into the driveway at home just as Eden was pulling out. She saw him and bristled: What in god’s name was Roddy doing home when something was wrong with Squee down at the Lodge? Then she felt relief: if Roddy was home, it could be nothing too bad down there. And then the relief turned to fear: Roddy was home to tell her about whatever terrible thing had happened down at the Lodge. They stopped their vehicles in the driveway and spoke through the windows. In the confusion it took some moments before they were able to make themselves clear.
“I was just there,” Roddy said. “Nothing’s wrong down at the Lodge. Not more than usual. Now . . .”
“She wanted to talk to you,” Eden said.
“Well, what?” Roddy was tired, and unprepared for this welcome home. “What? You want me to come down with you?” It was not what he wanted at all.
“She’s waiting by the road. Just come with me.”
Roddy did as his mother instructed.
Eden wasn’t sure exactly what would happen when they reached the girl at the Lodge, but when they pulled up beside her on Sand Beach Road, Peg tugged open the back door of the Caddy and climbed in gratefully. She was no longer crying, but her pale skin was splotchy red, her eyelashes slick and wet. “I’m so thankful to you,” she said as she pulled the door shut behind her and slid across the seat, “just for getting out of there for a bit, you know? Just to be away from it all?” So Eden pulled a wide, unruly U-turn and drove straight back the way she’d come, as if it were what she’d planned all along.
Peg sat in the very center of Eden’s couch, perching so precisely in the exact middle of the middle cushion, you might have suspected her of some obsessive tendencies. Eden gave the girl a cup of water and sat opposite her. Roddy hovered, filling the doorway, ready to make a hasty escape should the need arise.
“I’ve wanted to know,” Peg said, “if there’d be someone we might talk with about the legal issues involved here, you know? I don’t know about, like, American law . . . but I’d thought if we might talk with a professional . . .” There was something proprietary and hoarding about her concern for Squee’s welfare, as though she were fighting for his custody. When she described what she’d witnessed that day, and in the course of her brief tenure at the Lodge, she seemed to cast blame for Squee’s circumstance not only on Osprey Island as a whole, but on America at large. Nothing so ugly and unfortunate, she seemed to imply, would have come to pass on Irish soil. Peg appeared at once to trust Roddy and Eden while reserving an incredulity that anyone— even if only through inaction—had allowed a man like Lance Squire to have his way about the island. Peg wanted to see something happen, and was loathe to understand why she—an outsider and virtual stranger—was the one making this call to arms.
Roddy heard her out and held his tongue, not out of respect but for fear he might open his mouth and say something befitting a crooked southern sheriff: Well, missy, that’s just not the way things work around these parts . . . Except the girl was right. Lance was a car without breaks, plowing down everything in his path, and he’d probably keep going until he hit something big enough to stop him.
Seventeen
AS THEY FLEE YOU’D THINK THEY FLOAT ON WINGS
He that had been present would have deemed
Their bodies to have hovered up with feathers. As they seemed,
So hovered they with wings indeed. Of whom the one away
To woodward flies, the other still about the house doth stay.
—ARTHUR GOLDING, trans., “Procne’s Revenge,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses
SUZY WAS SITTING ON THE END of her bed when Mia returned from the beach early that evening. Their travel bags were out, unzipped and open-mouthed as though waiting to be fed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out, but were still full, and clothes from the closet sprawled across the bed as if they’d paused there to rest before their internment. Suzy sat immobilized, head in her hands, trying to see every potential decision through to its ultimate outcome. It was impossible; there were too many variables. But thinking kept her from moving, and not moving kept her from deciding. She’d been as she was for most of the afternoon: getting up to collect her soap and shampoo from the shower, then leaving them in the sink and returning to the bed, rising to sort Mia’s laundry but folding only one small T-shirt, which lay in the middle of the floor as if to mark the spot. The rest she left in a wrinkling lump. She felt so incapable of decision she found it hard to understand how she’d managed to leave Osprey Island in the first place. How had she ever just picked everything up and gotten on the ferry? She needed one more push from Mia, one more sob, one more plea. She needed Mia to come in the door and rush at her with relief to see the packing begun, thankful to be reaching the start of the end.
There was shuffling outside, a bump against the door as Mia shifted the contents of her hand to reach for the knob. Suzy felt such gratitude, anticipating the necessity that would emanate from Mia’s very body and provide Suzy a purpose and a direction. But as the door swung open and Mia pushed in from the hallway, the imperative she was to instigate first dwindled and then vanished altogether like the evaporation of a dream. Mia was barefoot, wearing an enormous Stanford T-shirt, the hem of which hit her about mid-calf, the collar slouched, coquettish, over one shoulder. Her arms were loaded down with a hodgepodge of sand-laden accoutrements that seemed to drop away from her as she moved, falling to the carpet like a flower girl’s petals. She was sunny across her cheeks and nose—sunnier than Suzy would have allowed—but she looked beautiful, freckled, as if she’d been dipped in sunset and rolled in stars. She drifted into the room, dropped the remainder of her burdens in a sandy heap at her mother’s feet, and flopped herself down onto the bed as though exhausted.
“Did you know that in Russia they killed the whole family of the czar, who’s like the king, except for his one daughter who had to lie under all her dead brothers and sisters until everybody was gone and she could get out and escape and nobody knew where she was because they never found her body because she escaped and then people, ladies, all came and said they were her so they could be the queen and they were all lying except the one who was really her but they didn’t have fingerprints back then so they had to tell by your ear who you were because every person has different ears than everybody else . . . And in the band the Beatles they got tired of being so famous and one of the men in the band wanted to take a vacation but he couldn’t so they had to pretend he was dead just so he could go on vacation and everybody thought he was really dead because if you listen to a song backwards it says I buried Paul, and in one album the car has the license plate number of the day that they said he died and also the cover of a different record was supposed to have all of them with aprons like a butcher and knives and meat like at the butcher shop and also broken up baby dolls but then they said they couldn’t have that but they had already made them and the people were lazy so they just put the new covers over the old ones instead of making them all new so if you have one that has the new cover over the old, if you put it in steam and take it off then it would be worth a
lot a lot of money . . .”
Mia paused then, seemed to breathe in for the first time since she’d entered the room, and actually took notice of her mother, registered her as a separate being who might also, perhaps, have something on her mind. Suzy’s eyes on Mia were fixed and grave, and Mia’s face in sudden response went tight with concern. With a great emphatic gush she said, “Mommy?”
Suzy felt unable to speak. She just stared at her daughter, the words she’d been preparing, perhaps even unconsciously, all afternoon, were stuck in her throat: sweet coos of milky sympathy, whispered assurances of a future frothy with ease.
Mia was confused. She watched as Suzy stood up from the bed with awkward decisiveness and blurted: “OK, get packed. We’re leaving. Hup to.”
Mia lay there, unsure whether this was a joke. Her face tried to smile but couldn’t because her eyes were so tied up in trying to understand what was happening before her.
Suzy regarded her daughter. “I’m glad you had a good time at the beach, baby. But that doesn’t change anything. Not really.”
“But . . . but I don’t want to leave anymore . . . I changed my mind,” she cried, the tears of frustration on their way.
“Well,” Suzy said, “so have I. I’ve been thinking all afternoon, and I feel like it’s not safe to stay here, and I’m not letting you stay somewhere that isn’t safe.”
Mia wailed: “But it is safe! It is!” She was panicking now, that profound desperation of being misunderstood.
“Mia,” Suzy said in a studied and patronizing calm to which Mia was entirely unaccustomed. “There are some times when you’re a parent when you have to make a decision that a kid maybe doesn’t understand. But it’s my job to take care of you, and there are going to be times when I have to do what I think is right, and now is one of those times, and you can hate me if you want to, but I’m not doing this to make you mad. I’m doing this because I feel like it’s the best option we have right now.” She was softened somewhat by her own speech, and she broke in the end and became, for a moment, the mother Mia thought she knew. “You’ve got to trust me, babe, OK? I’m sorry, but you’ve got to trust me.”
Osprey Island Page 21
