Osprey Island

she was in shock. For it was shocking, she’d explain, to understand—to truly understand for the first time in your life—that what has happened to you is really only what you think has happened. There was a truth: she and Lance Squire had had sex on the beach at Dredgers’ Cove. Beyond that, how was she supposed to account for anything? If two people looked at each other, who was to say which one was the watcher?

Twenty-one

THAT FLESH OF HIS OWN FLESH

As in the life experience of man, so in the life of birds, some of the many accidents which befall the birds may easily be averted by man, by means of a little forethought.

—B. S. BOWDISH, “Bird Tragedies: Even Birds’ Lives Are Not Exempt from the Tragic Element”

LANCE PARKED IN THE NORTH LOT, and he and Brigid walked together up the path, then parted between their respective residences. He waved, turning back to her as they separated, calling, “I’ll put these beers in the fridge—come by later if you get thirsty.”

Brigid went to the room in the barracks that she and Peg shared. The building was mercifully empty, the other girls not yet back from their day at the beach, the boys still down the hill working on the new laundry. Brigid dropped her bag, took a couple of towels from her hook behind the door, and went to the shower room, toward the water she could finally allow herself the desperation of wanting.

While Brigid was in the shower—sitting on the floor of the stall, just letting the water spray over her, hot as it could go, because it seemed right to feel the burn of her burned skin, as if she’d been pricked by a million needles and the water flowed not just over but into her, the scald of it turning her inside out with pain so insistent and encompassing she could lose herself in it—Peg and the girls returned.

Six housekeepers, plus Squee, had crammed into Jeremy’s car, which they’d borrowed for the trip to the beach. Peg—in what had to be the most undeniably unconscionable thing she’d ever done—drove. Even Jeremy, who was superhumanly tolerant of Peg’s monstrous sense of propriety, ribbed Peg, in his own inimitable fashion: “The day you get arrested on Osprey Island for driving without a valid international license is the day I’ll . . . I don’t even know what.” On the way back from the beach, it was Peg’s idea to drop Squee off at the Jacobses’ place, to keep him away from Lance as long as they could, and she’d been pretty sure she could find her way to Eden and Roddy’s, and back to the Lodge from there. She was good with directions, she told the others. She had an uncanny memory, an instinctual knack.

Brigid heard a few girls come in to use the toilets; she had the water so hot that when they flushed and all the cold disappeared for a minute there was barely a difference. She dried herself inside the stall behind the mildewed vinyl curtain and wrapped her hair in one towel, the other around her body, for the walk across the hall to their room, which she sincerely hoped was empty. There were few people she’d have liked to see less, just then, than Peg.

But, of course, there she was—seated at the desk, penning her eighty-seven thousandth Hi! How are you? I’m fine postcard of the summer. She turned at the sound of the door shuffling open like the lid of a cardboard box, saw Brigid enter, started in horror, looked again more closely, and let out a scream—short and sharp, worthy, perhaps, of an aging Agatha Christie heroine, but a bona fide scream all the same.

“Christ, it’s only me,” Brigid said. She shot Peg a look of deadly annoyance and turned toward her shelves for something to wear.

Peg was practically on top of her in seconds. “My god—oh, god, Brigid, what’s he done? Oh, Jesus god!”

“What is your problem?” Brigid shrilled. She shoved past Peg to the closet, where she didn’t need anything. The room was so tight there wasn’t anywhere to go, and Peg kept coming at her, her hands outstretched as if she were ready to grab Brigid by the throat and throttle her.

“Have you lost your mind?” Brigid screeched. “Stay the fuck away from me!”

Peg stopped, stood trembling, her voice a quiver; “My god, Brigid, your face . . .”

Brigid paused then, for the first time since she’d entered the room. She looked down at the thready fuchsia of her old bath towel, her too-pink legs sticking out from beneath—sunburned, and reddened too from the heat of the shower. There was no mirror in their shoe-box room. She tried to look at her shoulders. She’d been out in the sun a good long while and never had put on any of the sunblock she’d bought. It would be just like Peg to fly into fits over a sunburn. Brigid fixed her roommate with the most patronizing look she had and spoke in a voice so saccharine and mean she surprised even herself: “It’s called a sunburn.” Sunburn: as though it were a new vocabulary word on educational television. “It’s caused by the sun . . . ?” Sun. Is that a word you understand, you stupid, annoying little tool? Sun? Sunburn? “Most victims survive them.” And then she turned from Peg and opened the closet door.

“No!” cried Peg—and Brigid thought for a second that Peg was telling her, No, under penalty of death, please god I beg you don’t open that closet! “No . . . your neck . . . your throat . . .” and Peg dissolved again.

Brigid stood before the open closet door, wrapped in her sister’s hand-me-down beach towel, her back to her roommate and their tacky hole of a room, and it was, in that moment, as though she were naked, completely, in the open and exposed, a wash of shame like urine running down her legs in public, and there was nowhere to run. All she could do in the panic-rush of her brain was scream at the top of her voice, the pitch cracking and breaking as it rose: “Get out of here! Get away from me! Get out! Get out now!” The sound of Brigid’s voice was terrible, and Peg was terrified, and she ran.

Brigid thought of her own throat. It might have been someone else’s throat, for she could not feel its attachment to her body, could not even lift her hand to touch it, as if doing so would bring it to life on her body, the way everything turns to color as Dorothy cracks open the farmhouse door in Oz. She sank down, the towel slipping from her body as she bent into the closet, rummaging, riffling, tearing open the travel bags that lined the floor. There was a makeup case somewhere filled with stuff she hadn’t even thought to use since she’d arrived on the island; not even through the courting of Gavin had it seemed a place where one would brush on a little gloss. She felt the case there, under her hand, a nylon zippered sack crammed and stretched full of bottles and tubes the authorities had searched at customs not two weeks before, as if they might have been sticks of dynamite. She tore it open, dumped its contents on the unfinished wooden floor. There was a compact, square and brown, which she grabbed and flipped open. The towel was falling from her head, and she pulled it off, loose from her hair, and let it drop to the floor beside her. The compact’s mirror was dusted with powder, and she rubbed it clean with her thumb, held it up, tried to angle it right, to see her throat, pulled it away, rubbed the mirror with the towel that was