Osprey Island

taut again and resecure the lock.

“What do they do—just pass round keys to the lot of you who live here?”

Lance grinned. He hadn’t been so animated since the fire. “Nobody gives out anything around here, baby. You want something, you find a way to get it.”

“You’ve a lot of friends, then,” Brigid ventured.

Lance thought about that. “Nope. But I know lots of folks.”

The road was pitted and bumpy, unmaintained and almost never used. Lance went along at a good clip for such conditions, and Brigid wished she hadn’t opened a beer from the case, since she’d have been far abler to enjoy the ride if not for trying to keep herself from getting drenched. She had a go at drinking off a good portion to get the liquid level down, but the truck hit a rut mid-gulp and sloshed half the can onto her face and neck. Lance glanced over and laughed largely. “Ha-ha!” he whooped. “Starting off the day right!” The truck rumbled along, pitching and bucking, Brigid wiping her face on the sleeve of her T-shirt, still attempting to hold the beer can steady. Finally Lance reached over, grabbed the can, and pitched it from the truck, and Brigid watched it arc through the air behind them, giving off a fountain spray of foam before it landed in the woods beside the road. They barreled on. “That’s why you get a case,” Lance declared. “That’s why you get a cheap-ass case! Afford to give one to the raccoons.”

They’d stopped for the beer at the IGA in town, had both gotten out of the truck and gone into the store, ordered sandwiches from the deli, pulled chips from the rack, and Brigid picked up a bottle of sun-tan lotion in the health and beauty aisle. Lance had grandly insisted on paying for it all himself. He was in full social mode, chatting up the cashier, who happened to be the mother of a school buddy of his. It was possible that he didn’t even notice how the people in the store looked at him and at each other as he passed. He was flying, and they were so far below him—specks, dots of fish in the ocean. The cashier looked at Brigid as though she’d have liked to take her into the back room and give her a good talking to, and Brigid felt almost surprised when Lance paid and picked up the beer and they left through a door that slid open and parted before them. The clerks looked on as though Brigid and Lance were shoplifters about to be stopped at the exit. But the door just slid magically open and they walked from the bleak fluorescence back into the bawdy sunshine, leaving nothing more than a wake of gossip.

They parked the truck in a pine clearing where the ground beneath them was rusty with fallen needles, the air infused with a rich, heady evergreen. When a breeze swept in from Dredgers’ Cove—the water was right there, just through the branches—the pine scent swirled with the briny smell of the sea. Lance carried the beer, Brigid the sack of food. Lance had forgotten the fishing poles. Brigid followed him down a narrow path toward the beach. It was strange, that line where the forest turned to seashore, as though someone had trucked a load of sand into the woods and thrown up a trompe l’oeil mural of the ocean horizon.

It was eleven or so, the sun high and hot. Brigid, at Lance’s suggestion, set the food down in the pine- shade.

“Should’ve bought ice . . .” Lance started to say, as he set the beer by the food, but they wouldn’t have had any use for ice, as he’d also neglected to bring a cooler.

Brigid walked toward the water. She took the towel from her beach bag and laid it out on the sand. Lance didn’t appear to have brought anything with him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, work boots, as though it had never dawned on him to wear something different to the beach. He hung back on the periphery of the woods, inspecting things, checking out the place, jumping onto a great chunk of driftwood, kicking a horseshoe crab over onto its back to expose the brown skeletal legs, its underbelly. Another swift soccer kick, a crunching crack, and the shell launched into the air. Lance lost interest then and wandered, picking up bits of sea glass, then tossing them back down, or skipping them out into the bay. He seemed agitated, or nervous, and it made Brigid feel the same. He didn’t even have a towel to sit on, and Brigid wondered how long he’d actually planned on staying. They had food to last them the afternoon, and beer for a lot longer than that, but Brigid feared that maybe she’d misunderstood his intentions for the day. Back at the Lodge, she was the sharp-talker, fearless and crude, the only one who could deal with Lance Squire. But out here she felt like Peg—tentative and vulnerable, and pathetic—and it made her loathe herself a bit. She got up and went for a beer.

She downed half the can as she returned to her towel, then nestled it into the sand where it wouldn’t spill. She lay back, face to the sun, to let on like she couldn’t have cared less what Lance was doing, because that’s what made her feel she had power: not caring. And not thirty seconds later, there he was beside her, plunking himself down, the heels of his boots digging into the sand, arms draped casually over his knees, as if he had all the time in the world to just stare out at that horizon.

All across the beach, mixed among the shells and pebbles and seaweed, there were spent shotgun shells—red or green, big as a man’s thumb, with rusted metal rims—and Lance plucked one up, shook the sand from inside, and then put it to his lips like a reed. “You can whistle ’em,” he said, “like a bottle,” and he blew into it: a hollow, deep, mournful call, like the island ferry’s.

She sat up, reached over, and took the cap from his hand. It was all about proprietorship, she reminded herself. About deciding what was yours and claiming it for yourself. She blew into the gun cap; it left a salty taste on her lips, and she reached for her drink. Such a gorgeous day, she was off from work, there was more than enough beer, and they could stay as long as she liked. And if she decided she wanted to return to the Lodge, then they’d return. It was precisely why the rest of them were such namby-pambies. They didn’t know what they wanted—and if they did, then they’d have to scour up the courage to ask for it. It helped Brigid a good deal in times of stress to isolate the exact ways in which she was far more capable a human being than most. Certainly poor Lance was about as far down the ladder as people came in terms of having control over their lives. Which was probably why he liked spending time with her: she offered him a glimpse of what it was to take charge. It was probably, Brigid thought, why he’d got on with Suzy back when they were young; Brigid definitely saw Suzy as sort of a kindred spirit. She and Suzy were both—in Brigid’s mind—soaring examples of strong, independent women who didn’t stand for the crap that men dished out. Some people might have even agreed with her—no sir, those ladies don’t stand for one ounce of bullshit—but there were other folks who’d say that Brigid and Suzy were girls who wouldn’t know from bullshit if you stuck their pretty noses in it. And still others might contend that some people’s lives were so steeped in bullshit they didn’t even know it stank.

Lance stood. “You want another?”

Brigid shook her can. “Yessir,” she said, and drank the last gulp down.

She watched him walking back with two new cans, and then he stopped ten feet away and lobbed one at her. It sailed past—actually, she pulled her hands away instinctually, as she always did in games in which one was meant to catch things—and skidded into the sand.

“Oopsie,” Lance said. “Oopsie daisy . . .”

Brigid cocked her head. “Bastard.”