Osprey Island

“Well, what?” Roddy was tired, and unprepared for this welcome home. “What? You want me to come down with you?” It was not what he wanted at all.

“She’s waiting by the road. Just come with me.”

Roddy did as his mother instructed.

Eden wasn’t sure exactly what would happen when they reached the girl at the Lodge, but when they pulled up beside her on Sand Beach Road, Peg tugged open the back door of the Caddy and climbed in gratefully. She was no longer crying, but her pale skin was splotchy red, her eyelashes slick and wet. “I’m so thankful to you,” she said as she pulled the door shut behind her and slid across the seat, “just for getting out of there for a bit, you know? Just to be away from it all?” So Eden pulled a wide, unruly U-turn and drove straight back the way she’d come, as if it were what she’d planned all along.

Peg sat in the very center of Eden’s couch, perching so precisely in the exact middle of the middle cushion, you might have suspected her of some obsessive tendencies. Eden gave the girl a cup of water and sat opposite her. Roddy hovered, filling the doorway, ready to make a hasty escape should the need arise.

“I’ve wanted to know,” Peg said, “if there’d be someone we might talk with about the legal issues involved here, you know? I don’t know about, like, American law . . . but I’d thought if we might talk with a professional . . .” There was something proprietary and hoarding about her concern for Squee’s welfare, as though she were fighting for his custody. When she described what she’d witnessed that day, and in the course of her brief tenure at the Lodge, she seemed to cast blame for Squee’s circumstance not only on Osprey Island as a whole, but on America at large. Nothing so ugly and unfortunate, she seemed to imply, would have come to pass on Irish soil. Peg appeared at once to trust Roddy and Eden while reserving an incredulity that anyone— even if only through inaction—had allowed a man like Lance Squire to have his way about the island. Peg wanted to see something happen, and was loathe to understand why she—an outsider and virtual stranger—was the one making this call to arms.

Roddy heard her out and held his tongue, not out of respect but for fear he might open his mouth and say something befitting a crooked southern sheriff: Well, missy, that’s just not the way things work around these parts . . . Except the girl was right. Lance was a car without breaks, plowing down everything in his path, and he’d probably keep going until he hit something big enough to stop him.

Seventeen

AS THEY FLEE YOU’D THINK THEY FLOAT ON WINGS

He that had been present would have deemed

Their bodies to have hovered up with feathers. As they seemed,

So hovered they with wings indeed. Of whom the one away

To woodward flies, the other still about the house doth stay.

—ARTHUR GOLDING, trans., “Procne’s Revenge,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses

SUZY WAS SITTING ON THE END of her bed when Mia returned from the beach early that evening. Their travel bags were out, unzipped and open-mouthed as though waiting to be fed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out, but were still full, and clothes from the closet sprawled across the bed as if they’d paused there to rest before their internment. Suzy sat immobilized, head in her hands, trying to see every potential decision through to its ultimate outcome. It was impossible; there were too many variables. But thinking kept her from moving, and not moving kept her from deciding. She’d been as she was for most of the afternoon: getting up to collect her soap and shampoo from the shower, then leaving them in the sink and returning to the bed, rising to sort Mia’s laundry but folding only one small T-shirt, which lay in the middle of the floor as if to mark the spot. The rest she left in a wrinkling lump. She felt so incapable of decision she found it hard to understand how she’d managed to leave Osprey Island in the first place. How had she ever just picked everything up and gotten on the ferry? She needed one more push from Mia, one more sob, one more plea. She needed Mia to come in the door and rush at her with relief to see the packing begun, thankful to be reaching the start of the end.

There was shuffling outside, a bump against the door as Mia shifted the contents of her hand to reach for the knob. Suzy felt such gratitude, anticipating the necessity that would emanate from Mia’s very body and provide Suzy a purpose and a direction. But as the door swung open and Mia pushed in from the hallway, the imperative she was to instigate first dwindled and then vanished altogether like the evaporation of a dream. Mia was barefoot, wearing an enormous Stanford T-shirt, the hem of which hit her about mid-calf, the collar slouched, coquettish, over one shoulder. Her arms were loaded down with a hodgepodge of sand-laden accoutrements that seemed to drop away from her as she moved, falling to the carpet like a flower girl’s petals. She was sunny across her cheeks and nose —sunnier than Suzy would have allowed—but she looked beautiful, freckled, as if she’d been dipped in sunset and rolled in stars. She drifted into the room, dropped the remainder of her burdens in a sandy heap at her mother’s feet, and flopped herself down onto the bed as though exhausted.

“Did you know that in Russia they killed the whole family of the czar, who’s like the king, except for his one daughter who had to lie under all her dead brothers and sisters until everybody was gone and she could get out and escape and nobody knew where she was because they never found her body because she escaped and then people, ladies, all came and said they were her so they could be the queen and they were all lying except the one who was really her but they didn’t have fingerprints back then so they had to tell by your ear who you were because every person has different ears than everybody else . . . And in the band the Beatles they got tired of being so famous and one of the men in the band wanted to take a vacation but he couldn’t so they had to pretend he was dead just so he could go on vacation and everybody thought he was really dead because if you listen to a song backwards it says I buried Paul, and in one album the car has the license plate number of the day that they said he died and also the cover of a different record was supposed to have all of them with aprons like a butcher and knives and meat like at the butcher shop and also broken up baby dolls but then they said they couldn’t have that but they had already made them and the people were lazy so they just put the new covers over the old ones instead of making them all new so if you have one that has the new cover over the old, if you put it in steam and take it off then it would be worth a lot a lot of money . . .”

Mia paused then, seemed to breathe in for the first time since she’d entered the room, and actually took notice of her mother, registered her as a separate being who might also, perhaps, have something on her mind. Suzy’s eyes on Mia were fixed and grave, and Mia’s face in sudden response went tight with concern. With a great emphatic gush she said, “Mommy?”

Suzy felt unable to speak. She just stared at her daughter, the words she’d been preparing, perhaps even unconsciously, all afternoon, were stuck in her throat: sweet coos of milky sympathy, whispered assurances of a future frothy with ease.

Mia was confused. She watched as Suzy stood up from the bed with awkward decisiveness and blurted: “OK, get packed. We’re leaving. Hup to.”

Mia lay there, unsure whether this was a joke. Her face tried to smile but couldn’t because her eyes were so