Osprey Island

world that kept the world spinning! Why couldn’t people see that? And if they saw it—and this was Eden’s greatest heartsickness—if they saw it, why couldn’t they live it? Why wasn’t it cut and dried? If something was wrong with the chickens, you went in and figured out what was causing the trouble—Why were they eating their eggs? Why were they plucking out their vent feathers?—and you corrected the problem! Why—and this was maybe all that Eden had ever really wanted to know—why couldn’t we be more like the birds?

“Ma?” Roddy was calling from outside the coop. Margery hopped off Eden’s lap and flapped back to her roost. Eden pushed herself up from the chair and went outside.

Roddy looked anxious, in a sad way—a way that made Eden want to take her son in her arms—but when he spoke, his voice was flattened out. He kept his eyes down. “They’re leaving,” he said, “Suzy and Mia. She’s going back to New York.”

Eden waited, silent. Roddy was packing the ground with the heel of his boot. He said, “Everything I hear makes me more scared for Squee, about what Lance’s going to do.” He looked up at his mother. “Suzy said I should ask you about something, and I’m afraid you’re not going to give me a straight answer, and I need you to give me a straight answer on this. Suzy said you could probably tell me better than she could what happened to her . . . in high school? Out back here . . . down the ravine? With Lance?” Roddy paused to let his mother answer, but he was preparing the further assault of his interrogation. He wasn’t going to let her squirm away.

“She told you that?” Eden was saying, nodding her head in consideration as she spoke, as though this information meant something particular to her. “Suzy told you that,” she said again, not a question but confirmation of the facts as they stood.

Roddy nodded. “She said you’d tell me.” He looked at the ground. “She’s afraid of him, Ma.”

“Well, Christ!” Eden swore. “You’re talking about something that happened twenty years ago, and suddenly she’s so terribly afraid!” Then something struck her. This “fear” they were talking about, this fear Suzy was calling her reason to flee—who knew what was really driving that girl? Suzy could well be leaving to get away from Roddy for all Eden knew, and that thought roused in her a sudden and vicious anger toward Suzy—for being a coward and a conniver, and mostly for not loving Eden’s son the way he deserved to be loved. “I’ll tell you,” she said to Roddy, “I’ll tell you, but I don’t know it’ll shed any light on anything at all.”

They sat across from each other at the picnic table, mother and son, and she talked. It had been some sort of a party, maybe, Eden dimly recalled. There’d been people over, friends, kids from the school. Suzy had come with Chas, but he’d been unable to find her when he was ready to drive home and figured she’d left earlier, walked home. He took off alone. It was Eden who found her, just past midnight, soon after Chas had gone. She was behind the old woodshed, holding her knees to her chest, crying.

“I got it out of her, what had happened, to some degree. Enough to understand it hadn’t been something she’d particularly wanted to do . . .”

“So he did rape her?” Roddy asked cautiously.

Eden sighed. “Sure what I’d’ve called it. Then and now. Now maybe people’d agree with me. Then? Then she was more a girl who got herself in a bad situation. Nineteen sixty-eight, on this island? They’d for certain blame that one on her.”

“She got pregnant?” he asked skeptically. “You said Lance was . . . that he couldn’t, you know . . . so she didn’t get pregnant, right?”

Eden shook her head sadly. “But I didn’t know that—about Lance— for a good ’nother year later from Lorna.” She spoke hesitantly, measuring the words, still trying not to let go of more than she absolutely had to.

“What?” Roddy’s thoughts lurched to words and then broke uncertainly. “What, did every pregnant girl on this island get routed through you? I don’t . . .”

“I don’t think Suzy was ever pregnant then. Though we took precautions just in case—”

“Wait,” Roddy commanded. The even-tempered keel of her voice angered him, made him feel accused, irrational. He was struggling to understand, and every word out of his mother’s mouth confused him further. “Wait,” he said again, “that’s not the point. What do you mean, precautions ? How’d they wind up with you?” All the words were wrong, his thoughts too incomplete for articulation. He was fighting himself.

Eden watched him, her eyes steady. She took a breath. She said, “Things are different now from how they used to be.”

Roddy waited, his leg jackhammering beneath the table.

“We’re talking about nineteen sixty-eight, ’sixty-nine. We’re talking about a very different world here, OK? And then with the chances a girl had to take—” She broke off.

“What? You doing abortions out back to every knocked-up girl on—?”

“No,” Eden snapped. “Not like that. Not like you mean.” She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts, focusing her argument. “There are herbal methods of—”

“Oh Christ, Ma—”

“Wait!” Eden snapped. “You just listen now. Listen to what I’m telling you.”

Roddy closed his eyes and bowed his head. He clasped his hands together between his knees.

Eden began again, slowly. “There are certain herbs that have been used for centuries for certain curative effects.” Her voice was controlled and cautionary. “Certain herbs that have certain effects on different systems in the body. There are particular herbs with beneficial effects on the female reproductive organs. So much we take in in this world is poison to us. Certain herbs help the body to expel and rejuvenate.”

Roddy listened.

“Certain herbs—pennyroyal, for instance, black cohosh—these certain herbs—herbs I take regularly, mind you —they help a woman my age with the troubles of being a woman my age. Many other uses at other times of life, different preparations and doses.

“Now, some of these have been used to stimulate an abortion— stimulate the body to abort. And wait, now, before you say anything: listen to me. These can be dangerous, dangerous things unless you know what you’re doing. And these are procedures that you’ve got to do early on—I’m talking about the first day a girl’s late on her period—once you’re six days late it’s too dangerous. OK? You see what I’m talking about?