Osprey Island

by Thisbe Nissen

  Then came the crash that Peg had braced for, Roddy’s brakes squealing as he slammed them, Lance’s truck coming straight for Roddy’s passenger side as though he’d never thought to brake at all. The trucks seemed to hit in the flash of an instant, just a slam: the front of Lance’s truck into the side of Roddy’s. And then everything went slow: the protracted skid of the trucks across the lawn, joined in a lopsided T, Lance’s pushing Roddy’s as if to nudge it along, impeded by the surface of the grass, which tore beneath them and slowed them down as though the ground itself was offering what help it could by way of traction.

  When the trucks stopped altogether, Eden and Peg were running from the house and across the lawn. There was a moment of nothing, no movement from the vehicles whatsoever, just the two women running, their steps nearly silent, across the grass toward the collision. Then, first, the door of Lance’s truck flew open and Lance stepped out, tall, and seemed to hover on his feet for a moment, his face wrenched with fury, before he pitched and stumbled sideways, his expression shifting from anger to confusion as his feet slipped from under him and he buckled to the ground.

  Lance was struggling to stand when Roddy’s door eased open. Roddy stepped out, then leaned back in to pull Squee across the seat toward him. Getting a purchase, he gingerly lifted the boy from the driver’s side of the truck. Squee was balled up into himself, his right arm under his left like a broken wing he was protecting from the wind. Roddy held the boy to him and started toward Eden. He said nothing, just moved, because moving the boy to safety seemed the only imperative. Eden went toward them, but Peg was rooted where she stood. Roddy and Eden came at each other, their focus direct and intent and singular, as if Roddy were going to hand Squee off to her, the next sprinter in this terrible relay. But then Peg screamed and Roddy and Eden broke the lock of their eyes and looked up. From a few feet away Lance was lunging at them. He looked unsteady, drunk and furious, yet he flew toward them with as single a purpose as Eden and Roddy had in rushing to each other. Lance yelled, spitting as he growled, “Stay the fuck away from my son!” and he grabbed for Squee as though a boy were something you could steal like the ball in a game of Keep Away. Roddy was just lifting Squee away from his own body, preparing to pass him off to Eden, when Lance dove and caught them all just off-balance enough that when Lance grabbed he managed to catch what was closest to him: Squee’s upper right arm. As Lance grabbed, Roddy lost his grip and his balance at the same time and went stumbling backwards as Squee was wrenched away.

  Squee screamed. Lance had grabbed his arm, wrenched it hard without any purchase or balance of his own, so in snatching Squee he sent them both down, Lance with a look of surprise turning to annoyance at what he saw as a great injustice keeping him from remaining upright as he tried to go about the business he’d come for. Squee fell between Lance and Roddy with a cry of awful pain, and on the ground he curled tighter into a ball, holding his right arm desperately to him, rocking and crying into the grass.

  Lance and Roddy both struggled to their feet and lunged for the boy. Roddy tried to throw his own body over Squee’s to protect him; Lance went at his son with arms outstretched, ready for a tug-of-war. Lance reached the boy first, grabbed hold of the collar of Squee’s T-shirt, and pulled. The boy screamed. Lance grabbed again, this time with both hands, trying to take Squee by the shoulders and stand him up. He was pulling at him, hollering inches from Squee’s head, “Get up! Get up and get in the truck! Get the fuck up!” and Squee wailed, just trying to curl in and protect the arm that his father kept ripping away from him, and he wailed louder as if trying to out-scream the pain.

  Roddy, unable to throw himself on top of Squee without hurting him even more, instead came around and tried to tackle Lance from behind, tried to pin Lance’s arms behind him and stop him from reaching for Squee. But as Roddy pounced, Lance flung him off and sent Roddy sprawling and stumbling backwards, his legs buckling under him as he landed, ten feet back from where Lance and Squee struggled in the grass of his mother’s lawn.

  Eden, in the midst of it, watched in terror for a moment, then turned and ran for the house, grabbing Peg from where she stood and pulling her as she ran. She pushed the girl up the steps and into the house, then shoved her toward the kitchen door, pointed at the telephone on the wall: “Call the police!” she shouted. Peg looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. Eden’s voice was cold and hard. “Call nine-one-one,” she said. “Call the police.” Then it clicked and Peg understood. She reached for the phone.

  Eden dashed for the living room. She rummaged frantically in the organ bench through old musical scores and polishing rags, came up with a key and set across the room. Her late husband’s gun case stood by the entrance to the hall, virtually untouched since his death that spring. She fumbled with the key in its cheap tin lock, flimsy as the clasp on a child’s diary. Her hands slipped and the key fell to the carpet. She bent to find it in the shag, then stopped and spun around, her eyes on a bookend, a marble pedestal topped with one bronzed baby shoe. Roddy’s. She picked it up and hurled it through the glass door of the gun case, drawing her hands back over her face as it struck. Then she peeked out, saw the bookend on the ground, the shattered glass, more glass still falling around it, and she stuck her hand out, grabbed the barrel of a shotgun and yanked it out. It was heavier than she’d expected, and she faltered under its weight. Her arm slipped, slicing into broken glass, but she hardly noticed, just reestablished her grip farther down the long shaft and hefted it to her chest. She was running back out the door then, both hands on the gun, lifting to aim it as she ran.

  Outside, Lance had left Squee writhing in the grass while he went after Roddy, who’d come at him again from behind. Lance threw him off, then staggered to where Roddy’d fallen and kicked him, hard, in the stomach and the ribs. Roddy curled into himself, fetal, like Squee across the yard. He tried to catch Lance’s leg, but Lance kept kicking, sent a hard-toed boot flying into Roddy’s back someplace that shot a blinding pain through him, and his back spasmed, and then he blacked out.

  He came to seconds later on the ground, and lifted his head to see Lance dragging Squee by the arm across the lawn toward his truck. Squee was limp, blacked out too, just a body being dragged across the ground. Roddy struggled to stand. Lance fell against the truck, lost his grip on Squee, then got himself turned around and pulled the dead weight of the boy up against him and flung him into the cab. He pushed Squee’s legs inside, then wedged himself into the driver’s seat, pausing to look for his keys. He found them right there in the ignition, and fumbled to start the engine. The truck had stalled where it hit Roddy’s so the key was still in the on position and wouldn’t turn. Lance was confused, tried again, then wrested the key out of the ignition and started from scratch.

  When the front door of Eden’s house shut behind her she was already halfway across the lawn, coming at Lance with the shotgun raised to fire. Lance was so absorbed in trying to get the keys into the starter and turn over the engine that he didn’t even see her coming, hadn’t remembered Eden at all until the shotgun butted through the open truck window and into his shoulder. He lifted his head from the ignition, shoving the gun aside as he rose. Eden tightened her grip on the stock, her finger ready on the trigger, and replaced the gun at Lance’s chest. He was surprised, almost tickled, to see her there—Eden Jacobs, the lady who’d fed him cheese and crackers after school—with a shotgun aimed at his breastbone.

  Eden saw Squee slumped beside his father and nearly dropped the gun. She didn’t want Lance—she wanted the child. She wanted the child out of the way of harm. Now that she had Lance stopped against the nose of her dead husband’s shotgun, she wasn’t sure she knew what to do. Should she say something? Threaten him? Or just stand there with her finger on the trigger and wait for the mercy of sirens to round the crest of Island Drive? She moved her eyes from Lance to Squee inside the truck, his arm twisted, she now saw, at an angle that made Eden cry out. And as she did, Lance started to speak, and she turned
back to him and saw his dirty, drunken, stinking face curl into a smile, his watery eyes lit with what Eden could only think to call merriment. He laughed then, a choke of a laugh, false and patronizing. He laughed and said, “Why don’t you shoot me, Eden? Why don’t you just kill me?” The stale beer stench of him was enough to make Eden draw her face away instinctually, and Lance laughed at that too, made as if he was going to inhale and blow a whole gust of his foul breath right at her, but then he faked, reached up, brushed aside her gun, and leaned back down to resume his fumbling with the keys in the ignition.

  Eden stood there, her shotgun now pointed into the seat-back cushion. She had a shotgun in her hands and felt more impotent than she’d ever felt in her life. She had no words to use. She stood dumbly as Lance fiddled under the dashboard, his total concentration on the gadgetry. He was so blind drunk he couldn’t even line up the key in its slot, but he fought on stubbornly, a child trying to force the round peg into the square hole. And then it worked: as if by accident the key slipped into the ignition. Lance sat up, gratified. He grinned at Eden. And as he turned the key he laughed and said, “You think I don’t want you to shoot me?” His words were slurred. He said, “What the fuck do I care?” and then the engine turned over and Lance’s sick smile broadened, and Eden thought of this piss-drunk bastard driving that boy down the hill on a goddamn dirt road, and she could already see the truck, its front end bashed in, flipped and smoking on the burnt-out turf of the abandoned golf course, Squee’s body thrown limp against the ceiling, and that was all it took for Eden to lift the gun again and jab it at the side of Lance’s smiling face.

  The truck stalled. Lance doubled over onto Squee, his hand flying up to his face to cup it where the gun had slashed. When he rose again, the shock on his face was mixed with pride, as though he were somehow responsible for the nerve of this old lady. The angle had been awkward, the swipe relatively ineffective, like a pool shot slipped at the last second, the cue just glancing the ball and nudging it aside. Lance lifted his head as if to congratulate Eden on a brave try there, only to find that in the seconds he’d been down she’d managed to turn the gun around. She had one hand on the barrel, the other on the stock, and as Lance opened his mouth to speak, she steadied herself, and with the kind of force she’d only ever used to bring an ax down across the neck of a chicken, Eden Jacobs slammed the butt of that shotgun into Lance Squire’s forehead.

  Twenty-two

  NIGHT IS THE SUREST NURSE OF TROUBLED SOULS

  Carl Jenkins, 67, of Strawberry Lane reported a speeding car on South Ferry Road. Police responded to the call and were unable to locate the alleged vehicle . . . Firefighters responded to an anonymous call reporting the smell of smoke in the vicinity of Wickham Beach; a homeowner was found burning leaves with a valid burn permit . . . Police jump-started a car on the Osprey Island Ferry line . . . A Scallopshell Beach resident reported a deer in the woods, but was uncertain as to whether the deer was sleeping or dead. Police were unable to locate the alleged animal.

  —from the police blotter, Island Times, 1988

  LANCE FELL OVER SQUEE on the truck seat; neither of them moved or made a sound. Yards off, Roddy gave up the struggle to stand and just lay there breathing at the sky. Peg peered out from behind the door of the house, which she had employed as a full-body shield. Beside Lance’s truck, Eden had gotten the shotgun turned back around so that it was once again aimed at Lance’s chest. She had no idea whether or not the gun was loaded—had always been somewhat afraid to check, envisioning the headline: “WIDOW DIES AT OWN HAND—LATE HUSBAND’S HUNTING RIFLE TO BLAME.” At the very least she could see herself in the Island Times weekly police blotter: “Eden Jacobs, 56, summoned police to her home on Island Drive after a shotgun accidentally misfired, causing damage to her living room wall and sofa. Mrs. Jacobs claimed to have been attempting to unload the gun, which belonged to her late husband, Roderick, when it went off.” She’d always made Roderick promise to keep them empty in the gun case, but she knew he lied to her and kept a few loaded for raccoons on the property, a deer down by the ravine, the occasional stray pheasant in the driveway. In either case, loaded or not, she felt safer standing there with the more dangerous part of the gun pointed away. She had no idea how hard she’d hit Lance in the forehead. As she waited those painfully long minutes for the sirens to come up the hill, she feared that she had killed him—envisioned a trickle of blood right now running out from his ear and onto his son beneath him. Such things happened. Agatha Christie killed people off with candlestick and statuette blows to the head all the time.

  Eden realized then that she didn’t much care if Lance Squire was lying dead in the truck in front of her. Which is what she contemplated during those eternal minutes as she stood there and watched Lance breathe: If he were to stop, what would I feel then? She’d have rather seen Lance Squire die by his own hand, drive his old truck as fast as it would go and plunge it off the cliffs at the far end of Sand Beach Road. He’d been driving in circles so long that when finally the ground lapsed and the wheels hit air, you could only imagine he’d feel some gratification at the sheer difference of it. Time would stretch then too, and when the steel nose of that truck hit the water off of Sand Beach Cove like it was slamming a wall of solid stone, and then crumpled, sinking, time would stretch out so thin that it snapped— pop!—one last breath before the truck just disappeared, one sigh of relief for Lance Squire—maybe the first true breath of respite of his short, sad life before he exited the world. An exhalation that would free him, divest him, allow him one flash of unencumbered existence. One pure sigh with which to end his life as he slid beneath the surface of the water and was gone.

  They cuffed him for the trip off-island to the hospital, though he didn’t come to until the ferry was halfway across the bay. The ambulances turned off their sirens for the ride; no sense polluting everyone’s ears when—at least for that stretch of the trip—they could go only as fast as they could go. The sirens resumed their blare at the Menhadenport shore: two ambulances crying for the hospital in Fishersburg. They’d put Roddy in with Lance; Squee rode in the other with Eden.

  And back on Osprey, Peg was left to drive herself back to the Lodge in Jeremy’s car and spend the rest of the night—and the rest of the summer, and probably the rest of her dun-colored life—telling of what had happened up on that hill during her stay on Osprey Island.

  WHEN THE MORNING SUN ROSE on Osprey Island it was almost as if nothing had happened there at all. The air was sea-cool and the island had that scrubbed-clean feel, as though everything had been washed in salt spray and scoured with sand. Stones and pebbles along the shoreline glimmered, drying in the early sun, the sand beneath them still cold from the night before. Scrolls of dark seaweed lay unraveled across the beach like tremendous clumps of ruined cassette tape scattered with shards of clamshell, some chalky and white as bone, some tide-polished and glistening like teeth. Smaller shells rested like eggs in seaweed nests, with tiny inhabitants curled and protected inside. On Sand Beach Road, an osprey patrolled the shore, riding the wind back and forth like a bored kid riding his bicycle up and down the street, just waiting for something to happen.

  Epilogue

  AN EYRIE OF OSPREY

  What is a bird family? In life, a bird family is exactly like a human family. It consists of father, mother, and children. But in the books a family means quite another thing.

  —OLIVE THORNE MILLER, The Second Book of Birds

  IT WAS NOT A GOOD SEASON for the Lodge at Osprey Island. A fire was one thing; a fire, and a death, and a family rift, and a restraining order were quite another. Not to mention rumors of a rape too, but the girl wouldn’t press charges or even admit she’d been harmed in any way. It was her roommate who’d started the rumors, and she’d fled home to Ireland, too shaken by the whole incident to remain at the Lodge. The alleged rapist—a longtime staffer and head of maintenance at the Lodge—got taken in on a drunk and disorderly. When further charges were filed aga
inst him—trespassing, reckless endangerment, child abuse, assault—there was no one willing to put up bail, so he sat in jail on the mainland. They couldn’t be sure how long he’d stay away, but that didn’t keep people from speculating. Some said he’d never return to Osprey Island, that they’d never hear from him again. Nope, said others, they’d hear about him, all right, when he got himself killed in a bar fight or died midwinter on a subway grating in some large eastern city, all the liquor in his veins not enough to keep him from freezing to death. A few Islanders who’d been around a long while were on hand during such speculation to remind folks that the man in question had never spent a night— let alone lived—anywhere but Osprey Island in his entire life, and it didn’t take a great mind to guess that regardless of what he’d done, the minute he could he’d come straight back to Osprey Island, where his mother’d probably take pity and let him live in a trailer out back of her own house, and it would be there that he’d die, by his own hand if the alcohol didn’t take him first, or by the hand of whomever he managed to piss off badly enough. There might not have been a lot of people on Osprey Island that summer, compared to usual, but there was more than enough talk.

  The Lodge lost plenty of guests—not a lot to recommend it that year. They lost staff too: a few waiters who wanted out of the whole deal, out of that place and away from everything that had happened there. Plus two other Irish housekeepers who felt frightened and uncomfortable and just wanted to go home. Service in the dining room was inconsistent and rampant with neglect. Housekeeping was shoddy at best; at worst it was nonexistent. The swimming pool was leafy, the tennis courts weedy, the lawns overgrown with dandelions. The laundry machines ran smoother than ever—when you could find someone to operate them—and the food was the same as it had always been—it was, some said, maybe even a bit better, as the chef had fewer people to cook for and could afford to take time with his preparation and presentation. There were certainly fewer complaints that summer about hotel staff out drinking on the porch late at night.