Osprey Island

pushing her binoculars at Lorna, telling her, Look. Eden tried to get Lorna involved in the henhouse too, but that wasn’t really Lorna’s thing, raising chickens and worrying who was eating whose eggs and who was sitting on whose nest and picking whose feathers. It was enough building the osprey platforms. It was actually enough just taking care of herself, let alone every winged thing that managed to land itself on Osprey.

Lorna knew she’d let Eden down in ways that had nothing to do with birds. It was hard for Lorna to see Eden now, the disappointment on her face. On her own mother’s, Lorna had gotten used to that pinched look of dread and hopefulness. But from Eden, who’d had so much faith in Lorna . . . from Eden it was pure judgment. Eden called her on it, plain and simple. You’re drunk, Lorna. Don’t you think of Lance Jr., Lorna? How can you do that to yourself and think of him at the same time?

Sometimes Lorna really did want to live a different life. The thing was, she knew better. Unfortunately, knowing better didn’t in any way mean she was going to do better, just that she knew more clearly how wrong she was. Lorna had, she knew, done a lot of bad things. For her, the choice to do good or bad was the same sort of dilemma as when there was a platter of finger foods out in front of you and you knew you should eat the carrot stick but you also knew that it was the sausage roll that was going to hop right into your mouth. Soothe the biggest greasy hankering and leave you feeling nasty the rest of the night. When a choice like that presented itself to Lorna, she’d start to deliberate: Which path should I follow? And then it was like her body would just lurch forward. Lorna and Lance had laughed when they’d heard about a guy—a fisherman who lived just across the bay—who had a disease that made him all of a sudden, all the time, unexpectedly and uncontrollably yell things out. And though they’d laughed, Lorna couldn’t help but wonder what her own life would be like if all the terrible thoughts inside her rose to the surface like dead bodies and made themselves known. Lorna thought that if all people like that fisherman did was yell out “cunt” in the supermarket or “motherfucker” from the church pew, then those people weren’t even the tiniest bit as bad a person as she was.

On that late June Sunday, while the rest of the staff got to work readying the Lodge for the season, Lorna hid in the laundry shack. A few minutes after the blare of the five o’clock whistle at the ferry dock, she heard a truck pull up outside. She stood from the couch and stowed her notebook and vodka bottle in the minifridge. Lance never came into the laundry shack—literally gagged at the smell of the place—so her secrets were relatively safe inside. Lorna pushed bravely out into the sunshine, her hand shielding her eyes from the light. She didn’t see Roddy, but Squee sat in the passenger seat of the truck, patiently running a Matchbox car along the dashboard.

Lorna hung her hands on the open truck window and leaned there the way she once had in the window of Lance’s car, when he’d stop in the high school parking lot to talk to her. “Hey, sweet son,” she said.

Squee’s smile opened slowly and fully. “Mom!”

Lorna held on to the window of the truck. Sometimes, with her son, love felt to Lorna like barbecue coals with too much lighter fluid and the flick of a match: love for Squee knocked her like a flare of heat so powerful she had to wait for the blow to pass before she was good for anything again.

From around the back of the staff barracks, Roddy appeared, toting a few long pieces of lumber. He slid them into the bed of the pickup. Lorna lifted a hand in greeting, and Roddy nodded, but his brow was furrowed. He went to the driver’s side and fumbled behind the seat.

“You getting hungry?” Lorna asked Squee. Her voice was tired.

Squee was nodding as Roddy reemerged with some orange plastic ribbon, which he tied to the boards that stuck off the end of the truck bed.

Lorna sighed. “Guess I better think about some dinner for you then, huh?”

Roddy looked up at her again, the way she was leaning on the truck. Her skin looked too pale, and the hollows of her face too dark. “I’m heading to Morey’s,” he told Lorna, though he’d had no such plans until that moment.

Lorna looked relieved. “You want to go with Roddy?”

Squee shrugged his acquiescence.

“You come too, Lorna,” Roddy suggested.

“Oh, I’ve got work left . . .” she lied, gesturing vaguely toward the laundry shack. “You men go. Let me give you some money, Roddy.” She began to reach into her jeans pocket but Roddy held up a hand to stop her. “I got him,” he said. Lorna paused. She let her hands drop back to her sides. “Thank you.” She nudged Squee: “Thank you, Roddy.”

“Thank you, Roddy,” Squee repeated.

“Welcome.” And when he’d secured the lumber in the truck with some twine and a bungee cord, Roddy climbed in beside Squee, who blew his mother a last kiss.

Morey’s Dinghy was an old fisherman’s shanty fifty yards up the beach from the Lodge and across a small footbridge. It perched on a curved lip of land where the beach cut back on one side into a swampy inlet of reeds where lurking heron were often spotted in the twilight hours. Old fishing nets threaded with colored Christmas lights and cast-off buoys hung from the rafters. The kitchen consisted of a freezer and a deep fryer; Morey served only food that cooked in a vat of boiling oil. Everything came on a grease-soaked slip of wax paper nestled at the bottom of a red plastic basket, all without so much as a sheaf of iceberg lettuce to soften the blow.

Morey presided over the bar daily from noon, when he opened, until about seven, when Merle Squire, Lance’s mother, showed up for her shift. The Lodge staff were traditionally renowned for copious drinking, often starting out the night at Morey’s, then returning to the porch of the Lodge when the bar closed, by legal decree, at one a.m. The bar had four taps—Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite—but when the Irish girls arrived in June Morey switched one tap over to Guinness. His local crowd was steady and loyal, more family than clientele, since his was one of only three island bars, not including restaurants that served bottled beer and wine, and his was the only one that stayed open through the off-season, which was everything but the summer. For three months a year, renters from New York City and its moneyed environs invaded Osprey with their private-schooled children and their au pairs and their Volvo wagons, and pumped enough cash into the island economy to keep it nominally running for the nine intervening months until they came crashing back for another season.

When Roddy and Squee walked in that evening, Suzy and Mia were seated at the bar. Squee swung himself up beside Mia, who was rationing sips of a tall Shirley Temple, climbing up onto her knees to drink from the straw and then ducking down to check the level of pink in the glass. Roddy hovered awkwardly, then finally took the stool next to Suzy.

“What do you want?” Roddy called to Squee. Morey stood behind the bar twitching his mustache.

“Chicken fingers.” Squee didn’t take his eyes from Mia and her glass. “And a Coke.”