Osprey Island

was full, so they parked on the street in front of Bayshore Drug and hoped island police would turn a blind eye to the half-hour parking limit, on account of the occasion. The day was warm, the sky clear, the sun bright. It was the wrong weather for a funeral. Right for a sailing regatta, a pool party.

Brigid hadn’t wanted to come. The idea of seeing Lance at his wife’s funeral felt creepily wrong to her somehow. But Peg had convinced her that not going would be a lot weirder in the end. And Gavin was going, and she didn’t want to seem callous.

None of them had anything by way of funeral attire. The closest the boys could get was to wear their work clothes: black pants, white shirts. The girls had come to Osprey with backpacks of beach clothes and bar clothes, and not much of either. They went to Lorna’s funeral in black stretch miniskirts and sandals.

Lance had in fact barricaded Squee in the night before, in the only windowless room in their cabin, lest he attempt another escape. Squee had slept on the bathroom floor and looked it. Lance let him out five minutes before they left for the chapel to “put on some good clothes.” Squee unearthed a pair of dress pants, hand-me-downs from Reesa’s boy that were already too short in the leg, and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt of a sickly shade of mauve that someone had left behind in a room one summer. Suzy cursed herself later for not having thought to lay something out for him when they’d cleaned the cabin.

Lance wasn’t showered—what with Squee shut in the bathroom— and he was unshaven. That he’d combed his hair back with water from the kitchen sink and put on a cheap suit (that Lorna’d bought for him to wear to Squee’s graduation from kindergarten a few years back, which he’d bailed on anyway) only made him look more disreputable.

Understanding had caught up with Penny Vaughn, precipitated by Squee’s midnight flight from her home, and she now looked precisely like the mother of a dead woman. Art had been a wreck for days, and his dark suit wasn’t doing anything to compensate. Merle Squire looked worn—but, then, Merle always looked worn, and she had just spent three days with Lance, which would break anyone down. Nancy Chizek had packed so much makeup onto her face she looked twenty years older than she was, and Suzy and Roddy were doing everything they could just to keep their eyes open. The only one who looked composed in the least was Bud Chizek, who, despite his suit, looked ready to grab a club and tee off.

Lance kept Squee by his side throughout the ceremony. Neither of them cried. Squee stood baffled, dazed- looking, like he didn’t understand what was happening. Lance, too, looked slightly deranged. He had never been to a funeral before, and was affecting a posture he’d probably seen over Lorna’s shoulder on Dynasty. His gestures and mannerisms were not his own. He was dramatic, which might have been appropriate for the funeral of his young wife, but he was dramatic about all the wrong things: insisting on being the first one to approach Lorna’s casket, spending ten minutes scraping his shoe violently against the roots of a tree outside the chapel to dislodge a clump of mud from the treads.

The crowd was thick and dutiful, the minister obliging and uninspired. His service was mercifully short. What was there to say anyway? She was sad. Now we are sad. Actually, we were already sad. She made everyone sad. Now she’s not sad anymore, since she’s dead. So maybe we shouldn’t be sad either? Really: what the hell was there to say?

After, while parties assembled and the funeral home folks got Lorna packed into the hearse, everyone just milled around, trying to figure out what to do next.

Lance seemed overwhelmed by the attention being paid him, and at the same time jealous if it was paid to anyone else. When Peg, in her minidress, bent down to talk to Squee after the service, Lance made a joking move as if he was trying to see up her skirt and said loudly, “She was my wife, you know?”

Peg stood quickly, her hand on Squee as if to shield him. “Of that I’m well aware, Mr. Squire. I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Lance said. “I bet you’re really broken up about it.” And he spun off and walked away.

Peg turned her face to Squee’s, peered intently into his eyes. “There’s a lot of us at the Lodge who care about you a great deal— you ought to know,” she said. “You can wake me up at any hour should you need—just come to our room and rouse me up, if you need anything at all, all right? It’s room D, in the staff house . . . OK?” Squee nodded blankly, as though he couldn’t quite remember who Peg was.

At the graveside Lance began to weep. There were fewer people around, fewer people in front of whom to act like a show dog, and he began to break. Nancy Chizek passed him tissues, which he grabbed up blindly and then gradually dropped to the ground, so that by the end he stood inside a little ring of white flowers all his own. Every time Lance looked at someone in the crowd at the cemetery, he seemed to realize his loss anew. He looked up, caught someone’s eye, and gasped as the sobs came heaving from his chest. By the time Lorna’s remains were actually lowered into the ground, Lance was leaning against his mother for support in standing. Squee stayed by his side, right between Lance and Penny Vaughn, who had grabbed Squee’s hand in a clammy, powdery grip and would not let go. The angle was wrenched, and partway through Squee’s arm started tingling, then lost feeling altogether. He hung beside her, looking more like a drooping stuffed animal than a boy. His eyes were glazed as a sleepwalker’s. It was days since he’d spent a full night in one bed, and the delirium of sleeplessness was blunting his pain. In the wake of his mother’s death, Squee was like a hypothermic: a person freezing to death actually stops feeling the cold; the body and mind protect themselves like that.

Suzy and Roddy kept their eyes on Squee, and as they left the graveside and Lance seemed to lose all interest in the boy, Suzy and Roddy nabbed Squee and brought him with them to Penny and Art’s for a visitation that Lance would clearly not attend. In the course of one night in Lance’s custody, Squee had gone from seeming to cope pretty admirably for a kid in his situation to looking as if he’d been hypnotized and made to witness unspeakable things. His skin was greenish, and they had him sit all the way on the passenger side against the window in case he had to throw up, which didn’t seem unlikely.

A GROUP OF YOUNGER PEOPLE—locals and Lodge staff—caravanned over to the Luncheonette after the funeral. The sun cut in the windows, bleaching out their faces, illuminating acne scars, chin hairs, the sallow remains of purple bruises on pale skin. Gavin thought it was depressing how bad everyone looked, sweaty and bulging and pinched, as if all their clothes were too small. They wolfed omelet platters, not knowing what else to do. Brigid sat near one end of the tables they’d pushed together, no longer looking voluptuous, but stocky, her skin pasty and mottled with freckles, like rust-stained linen. Peg looked bluish, and Jeremy pimply.

Gavin felt a discomfort he knew from childhood: Thanksgiving dinner, too hot, overdressed, trapped at an overcrowded table. To make things worse, Brigid kept stroking his leg under the table, and Gavin thought he might run for his life from that luncheonette were it not for a girl sitting diagonally across the table among some other locals. He’d seen this girl at the funeral. He’d seen her because she’d stopped to talk to Heather Beekin, who was there with her parents, and Chandler, and his parents, and everyone. What had surprised Gavin, as he watched, was how it wasn’t Heather he was fixating on, but the other girl, who was thin and a little vampiry-looking, hair dyed black, skin pale. Somehow, even in this terrible diner-window light, she looked almost regal, sort of untouchable and interesting. She had bony arms with a tendency to flail, and hips Gavin could think to describe only as womanly, and he kept finding himself picturing her with a little kid hitched to her side, one deceptively strong, skinny arm wrapped around the chubby baby.