Osprey Island

left. Her mother hadn’t gotten anything at all.

Twenty

GRIEF-SPURRED, SWIFT-SWOOPING

“Bird” in Greek and Latin also means “omen.”

—DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

BRIGID WOKE EARLY THAT MORNING on the Squire cottage sofa to the smell of frying bacon wafting up the hill from the Lodge kitchen. The doors to both Lance’s and Squee’s bedrooms were closed, and Brigid could remember drifting to sleep on the couch with Squee curled beside her. She remembered vaguely the television station signing off and Lance coming by to lift Squee from her arms and carry him to bed, and how she’d been touched, even through the wash of sleep, by a tenderness in Lance, and wished she could have invited them all in—Peg and Jeremy and the lot of them—to bear witness. Lance put Squee into bed, closed the boy’s door, and came back toward Brigid on the couch. She’d been quite awake by then. She felt a rush of fear and caught her breath, the act of which took that fear and transformed it, took her quickened heartbeat and moved the pulse of blood down between her legs in an arousal that in turn both scared and excited her. She lay on the couch beneath her own dorm blanket, eyes closed as if in sleep, and waited for what Lance would do. A waft of sweat and cigarettes traveled with him, emanating from his clothes when he got near, and he stopped by her head and bent down toward her, and then she could only smell the sweet yeast of beer clouding hot and dense out of his mouth as he put his lips, hot and cracked, to the bare skin of her forehead and said, “G’night, angel,” before he stood again, walked to the bathroom, and pissed for what seemed a very long time. And then he’d flushed the toilet, flipped off the light, gone into his own room, and shut the door. And the next thing Brigid knew it was morning and there was bacon on the griddle down at the Lodge.

She was hungry. Wrapped in the blanket, pillow in hand, Brigid hurried back to the staff building. She walked into the room without knocking—it was her room too, wasn’t it?—and found Peg and Jeremy asleep in Peg’s bed. Even in sleep, Jeremy seemed to be trying to envelop Peg’s body like a human cocoon. He stirred as Brigid entered and struggled to focus. He lifted his head, a nod of greeting or acknowledgment. Brigid flashed a split-second mockery of a smile and proceeded to change her clothes without giving a bloody fuck whether he watched or not. She found some flip-flops under her bed, took a sweatshirt from the hook on the back of the door.

In the dining room she sat alone at a table near the windows. The other girls weren’t yet up—which was fine with Brigid, as she’d decided that they were, to a one, boring and insipid—and she’d certainly no intention of sitting at the long east wall table with the lot of Neanderthal construction workers who looked about ready to whip out their waggling cocks whenever she passed by. Hello, she had a mind to tell them, did not mean oh please let me blow you. She thought she’d rather sit about with Jock, the cook, who liked to tell them all to suck his fat French dick but at the end of the day was really quite a sweet man, who’d been a young widower and raised, on his own, two teenage girls, whose photographs hung in plastic-wrapped frames by Jock’s workstation in the kitchen. Once Brigid had inquired about his “girlfriends up there,” and Jock had wiped his hands on his apron, motioned Brigid over, and told her all about Margeaux and Jeanine, both married now, one in Cleveland, the other in France, with a grandchild on the way. “The first,” he beamed, thumping his chest.

When she finished eating, Brigid picked a cheap paperback from a shelf of guests’ discards in the office and went out onto the deck to smoke. The novel turned out to be in Italian, so she just smoked and watched the birds instead. There looked to be ospreys in two of the nests she could see from the Lodge, busy with their breakfast as well, taking off from the nest and looping out over the water, just swooping and gliding, hardly any motion to their wings at all. Even after two cups of Jock’s industrial coffee, the broken night of sleep on the Squires’ couch caught up with her, and Brigid began to doze off in the deck chair, Italian novel open face-down on her lap, half-smoked cigarette falling limply from her fingers and onto the deck, where it went out, unnoticed and meaningless.

When she woke again, the girls were all inside, eating around a circular center table with the waiters. The construction workers had gone up the hill, and soon the boys went to join them, leaving the girls to clean up the mess of the meal while they waited for Suzy to come down and give them the day’s directions.

At eight-fifteen when Suzy still hadn’t shown, Peg was dispatched to go knock on her door upstairs, and returned reporting no answer. She sat back down, and someone dealt her in to a hand of rummy.

At eight-thirty Reesa Delamico came in, and when someone asked if she knew where Suzy might be, she got a funny, mischievous look on her face and went into the office to make a phone call. She got Eden, who said that no, the driveway was empty and as far as she knew she was home alone. Reesa reentered the dining room, frowning, shaking her head with a shrug, saying, “I’m sure she’s on her way,” but she didn’t look sure at all as she left them to their vigil and went about her own business in the salon. Cybelle Schwartz and Janna Winger got to the Lodge a few minutes behind Reesa, but neither of them had any idea where Suzy Chizek might be. Peg—as she was wont— began to worry.

At eight-forty-five Bud Chizek came down the hill, through the back kitchen door, and into the dining room on his way to the salon to see if Reesa was in yet, when he came upon the table of card-playing Irish girls. He stopped in his tracks, as though he’d happened on some infestation of vermin he’d forgotten to exterminate. Bud stood there in the middle of the dining room, trying to say something, with a look on his face that was—a number of the girls would later note—just this side of sheer hatred. He stammered, then finally spat out: “Take the day off—all of you!” He scowled, as if his words alone should have succeeded in removing them from his sight instantaneously. “Just get out of here!” he cried, and then he stormed toward the salon, leaving the girls with a distinct sense that when he reemerged they’d better have been long gone.

They conferred quickly among themselves. A moment later Peg stepped from the group and came tentatively through a sliding door and onto the deck toward Brigid, who stared her down as she approached. Peg said, “You heard that, did you? Bud’s told us to knock off work for the day . . . We thought we’d go to a different beach, if you’d like to come . . . ?”

It was a peace offering in which Brigid had little interest. “No thanks,” she said coolly, and picked up the novel on her lap as though eager to get back to reading.

But Peg didn’t leave. She just kept standing there, with something else she wanted to say but didn’t know how. Brigid slapped the book back down: “What?”

Peg looked as if she were swallowing a lemon. “I suppose,” she began, “that I’m the last person you’d want to do a favor for . . .”

Brigid lifted the corners of her mouth into a mean smile that conceded the point.

“It’s not for me,” Peg qualified, then inhaled deeply and let the breath out in a slow wash as if to steady herself. “We’d like to bring Squee—have him come to the beach with us today—and if you might ask his father for us, ask if the boy might come along. It would seem . . .” Oh, she was trying so desperately not to spoil it! “We thought, as you’re . . . perhaps he’d be more inclined to agree if it was you who asked, don’t you