Osprey Island

You see how careful you have to be?”

Roddy nodded dully. It made sense. Someone on-island had to have been helping those girls; it figured it’d be Eden.

“But back then,” Eden was saying, “an herbal abortion was the safest way there was. It might still be.” She should have been a politician: such conviction. Except that her conviction was never about anything that anyone else on Osprey supported.

“You said Suzy wasn’t pregnant,” Roddy said, his tone more accusatory than he intended. “I thought she wasn’t—because of Lance . . .”

Now it was Eden’s impatience that showed. “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we all toiled with the power of hindsight! What I knew then was that Suzy Chizek was sixteen years old and might have been on a nine-month course from virginity to motherhood because of a boy who had about as much right to be a father then as he does now!

“She was lucky. Suzy. What I could get from her then, she knew at least that she was due on her period soon, and that, that was just lucky. God, she was scared. And I tried explaining what it was I knew we could do. I don’t honestly remember what I gave her. There’s lots of things to take into account—a person’s health, everything. Honestly. I don’t remember. But we did it. Started her on infusions— nothing easy for a high school girl to manage, but she did it, went through with the herbs, and a few days later she was bleeding normal, and that was that.” Eden stopped.

“And that was that? No wonder you’re such a friggin’ outcast on this island! Did Dad know? Did everybody know? What, so when Lorna got pregnant you did the same thing then too?”

“No!” Eden snapped. “No. And don’t you dare blow this into something it was not. I helped people who needed help at a time when their government would have rather seen those girls die than let them—”

“Please, not the protest rally—”

“I helped individuals in individual circumstances that they needed help getting out of.”

“Yeah? So why’d Lorna need out of her situation?”

“I did not help Lorna then. Not like that,” Eden said, and there were years of bitterness in her voice. “I did not help Lorna. And she turned around and she threw it in my face. It was after Lorna I stopped everything. Nineteen sixty-nine. After that, the girls who came, I gave them the name of someone off-island.”

“Why wouldn’t you help her? Why was it any different? You’d help Suzy but not Lorna—how’s that fair?”

“How it’s fair,” Eden shrilled, “is that Suzy was a sixteen-year-old virgin who got raped out back of my house. And Lorna was a calculating young woman who got herself knocked up on purpose so she could marry Lance Squire and get the hell out of Art and Penny’s house. And then once she’d gotten what she wanted she decided she didn’t want it. Because it wasn’t Lance’s baby. And she got mad at him for something, and told him that. Just to hurt him, I’m sure. Told him that she’d been trying to get herself pregnant by him as long as they’d been having sex and it just plain didn’t work, and she had to see was it him or her or what? So she did what she had to do. And she’s saying to him, hadn’t she gotten it so they could get married? And didn’t they have a good deal there now at the Lodge, with a place to live and a job that took no work and how she’d done it all for him and he wasn’t even grateful, and she didn’t want a baby, she just wanted him, and to marry him and to be with him, and she’d done everything it took to make that so, and look how he showed his gratitude . . .”

“Whose baby was it, then?” Roddy asked.

Eden stopped and just stared at him as if she couldn’t rationally comprehend what he was asking. Was he a moron? Had he not heard a damn word she’d said? The look on her face was of utter disbelief. “Bud,” she said. “Bud.”

Roddy’s face bulged like he was going to vomit into his hands. “Bud got Lorna pregnant?” He spoke as if to lay those words out in plain sight and see if they evaporated like figments or had the weight to sit and submit to scrutiny.

“I’d say she got herself pregnant, by Bud,” Eden countered. “I’d say Lorna Vaughn got that man through the worst spring of his goddamn life. Chas was dead, killed over there . . .” She paused, as if mere mention of that war rendered her exhausted beyond speech. “That news,” she said, “it came pretty damn close to killing Bud and Nancy themselves. On Nancy you could see it—I mean, she very near lost her mind. But with Bud it was all on the inside. And maybe that’s no excuse—I’d never heard him do anything like it before and I’ve never heard about anything since . . .”

“Did he . . . ?” Roddy cut in, then stopped, sat on his hands and shook his head to stop himself from speaking.

“The thing is,” Eden said, as though in reply to the question he hadn’t asked, “it was Lorna who went to him. I’m not excusing. She was seventeen; he was a grown man. I’m just saying. Here’s a man whose son is dead. Again, I’m not excusing, but to lose a child . . .”

And Roddy knew that for Eden such a loss did not excuse, but it did perhaps explain something.

“Here was a man out of his mind with grief. Not right, not seeing the world through right eyes. And here was this beautiful girl. You remember how Lorna was then? Just a sprite, you know, a little spirit. Oh she was so pretty.”

Roddy nodded silently. He watched Eden’s eyes well up for the first time since the fire. And he watched as she swallowed, ordered the tears back down their ducts. “She just showed up one day—and I know this from after. She only told me later, years—I didn’t know at the time. It was only after when she came to me. Otherwise maybe I’d have been able to stop—oh, I don’t know. Anything’s easy to say now, I guess . . .

“She went to him.” Eden picked up her pace. “Showed up one day that spring after Chas died, this girl Bud’d known since she was in diapers showing up one day asking, Mister Chizek, could I have a ride out to Scallopshell Beach? I’m sure it’s where I lost my necklace in the parking lot last night . . . or some such thing . . .”

Roddy breathed in audibly. He squinted, as though in pain.

“I’m sure Bud knew the whole time it wasn’t right. But he’d been angling toward something. Something bad and wrong. Like he could get back at the universe that killed his son. Something like that, you know?