to go with him—where would they find her? what would her son have to witness?—but it was beginning to seem a bad idea for Squee to stay at the fire scene, where Lance was being physically restrained by two guys from the volunteer squad after he’d tried to rush the burning shack, screaming for Lorna, who he now feared might truly be trapped inside. In the end it was Squee who made the decision when he grabbed on to Roddy’s hand and wouldn’t let go, which was when Suzy—still clutching Mia to her, though the girl was really just too big to be carried—allied herself with the search party and climbed into Roddy’s truck as well.
They drove through the darkness, Mia slumped asleep on Suzy, Squee awake throughout, his eyes wide but trained ahead, as though he could see nothing beyond the windshield. Roddy and Suzy panned the road, their eyes open as if propped. Air blew into the rolled-down truck windows as they drove. All across the island lights were on, people seated at kitchen tables, framed in their picture windows, talking on the phone, peering out as though the laundry shack fire might spread, as though Lorna might come stumbling out of
It was almost light when Roddy drove the truck back to the Lodge. The fire was mostly out. The ambulance was there, but its sirens were quiet, flashers off. People no longer stood on the periphery of the scene, but sat on porches or in tight circles on the ground. Some girls hugged each other, crying softly. Most sat stoic, stunned. Lance had been taken away, sedated. He was at Merle’s now, his mother tending to him. Doc Zobeck had given something to Nancy Chizek too, for her nerves, and she was sleeping it off at the Chizek house up the hill.
Sheriff Harty approached Roddy’s truck. Roddy and Squee climbed out slowly, as if to forestall what was about to happen. Mia was still asleep against Suzy. Squee had Roddy’s hand, was pressed as close to the side of Roddy’s leg as he could get, eyes big and glassy and cold. Sheriff Harty nodded solemnly to Roddy, then squatted down to Squee’s level.
“Squee,” the sheriff said, and then he paused, not knowing how to proceed. He took a breath, tried again.
Squee spoke first, his voice controlled. “My mom was in there,” he said.
Sheriff Harty let out his breath, nodding slowly. He kept looking right at Squee, right in the eye, as if he needed to see if the boy really understood. Squee said nothing more, but his throat and jaw jerked as if he was biting down on the inside of his cheek. Sheriff Harty looked up from Squee to Roddy, planted his hands on his thighs to push himself up. “You OK?” he said to Roddy as he straightened himself, glancing at Squee—
“She’s gone,” the sheriff said, and then his voice caught, as if he was gagging but knew he had to say it. It was his job to say it. “She wouldn’t of felt any pain . . .”
Squee kept nodding, his fingernails digging so hard into the flesh of Roddy’s palm he’d find cuts later, like tooth marks.
The sheriff turned to go, left Roddy and Squee there, and Suzy leaned from the truck window behind him and spoke his name. “We should go tell your mother,” she said.
Roddy lifted Squee from the ground onto his hip. The boy’s body was so rigid and light it was like lifting the hollow skeleton of a bird. He put Squee into the cab, then climbed in himself and started the engine.
Eden Jacobs was a stolid, elusive woman who had taken her own husband’s death and her son’s homecoming the way she took her morning herbs: pennyroyal, sip, swallow; dong quai, sip, swallow; valerian, licorice, skullcap, black cohosh, toss back the head and wash it all down. And, sure, the other Islanders thought it odd that such human dramas should evoke so little response in their own subject, but everyone had known that Eden Jacobs was an odd woman the minute she stepped off the ferry thirty-eight years before, one hand holding a small suitcase, the other enveloped by Roderick Jacobs’s massive paw.
Roddy put the truck in park in Eden’s driveway but left it running as he went and knocked on the front door like a traveling solicitor. He stood and spoke to his mother from the stoop, turning back to gesture to Squee, Suzy, and Mia in the truck. Eden took the news stoically. Pesticide use on the roadsides, and she mounted an immediate offensive. Death of a woman she’d known since that woman was a baby, and Eden said, “Well, why don’t you all come in? I’ll make some breakfast. The children must be hungry.” Roddy nodded, though he wouldn’t likely eat inside himself, and went back to the truck to get Suzy and the kids, who filed across the yard and up the front steps like zombies. Roddy held the door for them. When the others were inside, Eden stood in the doorway. She faced her son. “So this is how it happens in the end.”
He pursed his lips, nodding, and followed his mother reluctantly inside.
Eden Jacobs’s living room was a tidy clutter of doilied end tables and framed photographs. On the coffee table were a covered glass dish of raw sunflower seeds and a floral saucer filled with cellophane-wrapped sesame candies. There was an old electric organ in one corner that Roderick Senior had inherited from his own mother, which hadn’t been played in thirty years. On the far wall, near the bedroom hallway, stood Roderick’s gun case, his old hunting rifles racked inside like good china stored away for special occasions against a lining of bronze-colored velveteen. Neither the window curtains nor the baseboards were dusty. Eden Jacobs had been keeping house here for almost forty years.
“Come, I’ll put up some coffee,” Eden said, and she led Suzy to the kitchen. Suzy glanced back to the kids, who had climbed onto the couch, too stunned and dazed to do anything but sit quietly.
Roddy hovered awkwardly, reluctant to sit down. Eden poured apple juice into two small glasses and carried them to the living room.
“Thank you,” said Mia, her voice small.
“Thank you,” Squee echoed. His voice was strange as well, unnatural, as though grief had made him, both of them, polite and quiet and scared. Mia held her juice without drinking it. Squee gulped his down in four swallows, without breathing, handed the cup back to Eden, and then turned and vomited into the leaves of the potted spider plant beside the couch. “I’m sorry,” he choked out.
“Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart,” Eden said. She handed the boy a color-printed cocktail napkin—a squirrel nibbling acorns—and Squee wiped his mouth. Mia watched, terrified.
“Do you feel better?” Eden asked Squee.
Squee said, “I don’t know,” and Eden asked if he’d like to use the bathroom. The boy nodded.
“Through the bedroom there, on the left,” she directed. “Just do your best to ignore all the old lady stuff. The basic appliances are the same as you’ll find anywhere.”
Squee nodded again and walked toward Eden’s bedroom door.
Eden set the empty glass on the coffee table, bent down, and hefted up the plastic-potted spider plant. “We’ll
