Osprey Island

closets—Lorna might have been dead, but Lance wasn’t, and the closets were half his. Did being married to a dead person suddenly mean that the whole world could go riffling through your underthings? Brigid thought in some ways that living on this island seemed to simply imply that the guy pumping your gas had probably changed your diaper, and the woman serving your burger was likely sleeping with your dad. Dirty laundry was public domain. Which was either a terribly healthy, out-in-the-open, no-secrets-here sort of a thing, or it wasn’t. And what seemed most likely was that no matter how soiled the laundry hanging out on the clothesline, you could be altogether sure there was something far dirtier balled up and festering in a plastic bag in a corner of the basement where even the snoopiest didn’t think, or dare, to go.

If Brigid had wanted to ask more of Suzy—about Lance, about Chas, about the island dramas Suzy had known —she either refrained or was too caught up thinking about how she might find her own way into Osprey lore: as the girl who took up with the fellow who almost came between Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane. So now Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane could go on and pump out their nineteen children who’d all grow up hearing the stories of how their ma had nearly gone off with a college boy from California, but didn’t, and, well, so now here they all were. Brigid was entirely pleased with the role she might play: the Irish chambermaid whom Gavin had taken up with, with whom he had a torrid and passionate affair, while Heather and Chandler got soft and fat and ever more local.

Brigid wasn’t stupid. She could see quite well—in herself, for fuck’s sake—why a place like Osprey Island could be addictive, why it might be dead hard to break away from it entirely. Your life mattered enough here that people would be talking about you long after you’d gone. And there was something lovely about that. Yes, all right, Brigid conceded, big fish, small pond and all. Yet she was altogether gratified to be making her way into island history as she was. You didn’t hear anyone on Osprey Island talking about her sister Fiona, now did you?

LANCE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, with Merle, in time for dinner that night, but he didn’t eat with the rest of the staff in the dining room or on the porch. Merle made up an invalid’s sick tray and brought it to him at the cabin. He sat in that newly sanitized home, barely noticing the work that had been done. It struck him as somehow logical, or at least right, that his world should be suddenly swept clean, all evidence of Lorna stacked along the wall in boxes marked CREAMED CORN and MALT-O-MEAL. The cottage looked as empty as Lance felt, yet just because everything had gotten picked up and wiped down and vacuumed away didn’t mean that nothing had ever been there. You could erase mess, but not history. Lance just sat in the armchair, poured himself a stiff glass of bourbon, and demanded his son. “Where is he?” Lance asked Merle. “Where’s my boy?”

“I’m sure they’ll bring him over in a bit,” Merle said, calming him. She’d never talked to Lance a whole lot, hadn’t known intimately what went on in his and Lorna’s life; nonetheless, she felt strangely hopeful. Maybe that was something you never lost as a parent: the hope that your kid might do something right someday. She’d certainly had more than enough discouragement on that front, but you wanted to believe that people always had the capacity to change. Especially your children.

“He wants Squee back at the Lodge tonight?” Eden’s incredulity was matched only by the ferocity of her anger at Lance’s sheer, arrogant, ignorant, selfish gall.

“That’s what I was told,” Roddy repeated. “Bring him back after dinner.”

“No!” Eden cried. She stamped her foot into the ground between garden rows. She held a bushel basket to her chest defensively. She’d been harvesting snap peas.

“Ma, you can’t keep the man’s son against his will. He’s got rights. A man wants his son with him, you can’t deny him that . . .”

“His son!”

“Look, he’s no model parent, I’ll give you that, but the man’s grieving, you know? He just wants what he’s got left of family . . .”

“Oh for the love of god!” Eden cried. “His family? He wants his son? Lance Squire’s been denying his paternity since the day Lorna told him she was pregnant! Goddamn it, Lorna!” Eden swore as though it was Lorna, not Roddy, standing in the garden beside her. “Goddamn it!”

Roddy stood by, helpless.

“Let me tell you something, son,” Eden said, and her voice was low, as if she was afraid that Squee might hear them from the house, over the babble of the television. “Let me tell you that that man would have no claims on that child if Lorna’d done what she ought to have done and put Father Unknown on Squee’s birth certificate and made a goddamn will and put someone else as legal guardian in case something ever happened to her—Art and Penny, me, Reesa Delamico and Abel, anyone, anyone’d have done it. But no, that was too much for Lorna to manage. She didn’t want to hurt Lance. Swore up and down it was Lance’s baby—” Eden paused, her face twisted with emotion. “Do you see how hard it was to be any part of that girl’s life? Can you see what it was like to sit by and watch her ruin every chance she ever got to right herself? She was a smart girl—I don’t even know if you know how smart of a girl she was. But so stupid ! So goddamn stupid about things. Goddamn it, Lorna!” she swore again, gripping her green pea basket to her body as if it were the child she’d protect at any cost.

Roddy’s own anger at that point was growing less focused on Lance and more on Eden. “You planning on telling me what in hell you’re talking about?”

Eden ignored the question. “Go talk to him, Roddy. Go over there and talk to Lance—maybe he’ll listen to you . . .”

“Not if I don’t know why I’m talking to him or what I’m talking about! No.”

“Roddy,” she begged. “I tell you: it’s too complicated to open up that sack of worms without letting out every other question that comes along with it. Too many things you don’t need—and you don’t want to know. Could you trust your mother, please? Just take my word and talk to Lance . . . ?”

Roddy stood his ground.

“For Squee’s sake, Roddy,” she pleaded. “Please, for the sake of that child . . .”

“How about for the sake of that child you tell me what the hell is going on.”

Eden saw her defeat, her mind already calculating how much he’d need to know. She would reveal the bare minimum of what there was. “You,” she accused her son, “have turned out to be a very stubborn and unforgiving man, Roddy Jacobs.”

Roddy almost smiled. “Just like you raised me to be.”

Eden narrowed her eyes. She spoke quickly, as though she’d agreed to say it once and only once, and he could catch what he caught and forever after hold his peace.