Osprey Island

pooled in her lap, then tried again. The mirror was so small it was hard to see much, but she could see enough to know.

She flicked her hair out of the way of her view, and it was the brush of her own fingers across the skin of her neck that did indeed bring the pain to life, animating it as if by a magic so strong and swift it choked her, as if his hand was there again, fingers curled around her neck, pressing purple welts into her throat like a handprint in ink against the white-pink of her flesh. She coughed and the pain spread inward, as if she’d been bruised from the inside as well—the raw, swollen pain of strep throat she’d had as a child, right there on her skin. Where had she been not to notice the pain now clamping down on her airway as if to gag her? She sat in the mouth of the closet, naked but for the towel now fallen to her hips and in her lap, choking as though her throat were swelling shut by the second.

Peg didn’t pause to think. She ran from their room in the staff’s barrack quarters and across the path toward the Squires’ cabin. She did not knock at the door or stop in the doorway but flew straight into the living room of Lance Squire’s home, where he sat drinking down the final can of that case of beer. Peg flew at him, then stopped, yards from Lance’s chair, shouting, hollering as loud as her voice would take her, “You bastard! You bastard! What did you do to her? You answer me! So help me . . . tell me what you did to her, you . . .” and it was only when Lance stood— stumbling backwards as he did so but then holding steady, standing tall. Only then did Peg seem to realize where she was and what she was doing: swearing in the booze-stinking face of a man she feared perhaps more than she’d ever feared a living, breathing person. Lance steadied himself and Peg backed away; for every step she took from him he took another toward her, sneering as though it were a game. The front screen door had closed itself, and now Lance backed Peg up to it. The smell of him nearly made her retch, that sick stink of alcohol blowing out of him in gusts. Peg had not in her life known this desire—a want that felt so much like need—to hurt someone the way she wanted to hurt this man, to beat him bloody with her fists and make him crawl away in shame. She suspected that to slink away was something Lance Squire would never do; he seemed, to Peg, incapable— inhuman, she realized, that’s what he was, and she cried it then: “You’re inhuman! You bastard! You inhuman bastard!”

Which is what she was screaming when Lance stepped back. He took one step away, as if he’d become aware of a terrible smell, something coming from her that made him instinctually retreat. He dropped his chin, narrowed his eyes to slits, glanced around the room as if to check that there was no one to see when he pounded her one. Then he fixed on her, this dishrag of a girl hollering at him as if that blue vein was going to pop right out of the middle of her forehead. Lance said, “Where’s my son?”

Peg stopped yelling.

Lance said it again, every word a stress of its own. “Where. Is. My. Son.” He reclaimed the offense, gave her a fraction of a second to answer, and then laced in: “You’re the one who took him today, you little piece of shit. You tell me where my son is, and you tell me now!”

He was only a few paces back, but her movement was so unexpected he didn’t even have a chance to reach out and grab her before she was gone. She spun, somehow her hand already on the screen door handle, and was out and down the steps and running for the barracks before it slammed again behind her. She ran for her room, then realized Jeremy’s keys were still in the pocket of her shorts and switched course mid-sprint, veered down the hill toward the north parking lot, where she jumped into Jeremy’s boat of a car and drove out of the Lodge and up the hill toward Eden Jacobs’s house in a decidedly more reckless manner than she’d perhaps ever done anything in her eighteen precious, law-abiding years.

Lance saw her run for the parking lot. He heard a big old engine turn over and saw the car itself come over the rise on its way up Island Drive, and it didn’t take much—even for Lance, even after consuming the majority of a case of beer and whatever else he’d put away while no one was there to see—to figure out where she was going. His own car keys were still on his belt. He tore out the door not five minutes behind her.

Peg burst into Eden’s living room with all the gumption that a girl of her sort possessed, which is to say that she knocked hard and waited, her face contorted in anguish, for Eden to open the door. Eden and Squee appeared to be in the midst of a game of cards, which was spread out on the coffee table, and Eden had something cooking in the kitchen for dinner. Peg entered with urgency, urgency instantly drenched with pity: Why, she wanted to know, couldn’t this child just be left alone to eat his dinner and play a bloody hand of rummy? And now that she was there, she didn’t know what to say. Squee had to get out, they had to get him away, hide him, but she’d have to explain why, wouldn’t she? What was the answer to that question— why? Squee had to get away because Lance was coming for him. Lance was coming for him, and he was shit-faced drunk, and he’d probably just beat up or raped or done something horrible to a nineteen-year-old girl who was stubborn and stupid enough to stand there in broad daylight and sneer as if it was Peg who’d done something wrong.

Eden stood waiting for Peg to form words. “Would you like to come in? Sit down?” she said finally, and that managed to jump-start Peg.

“We’ve got to get the boy away from here!” she cried, and Squee looked up at her from the couch. He’d been trying to pretend that this wasn’t anything to do with him, this crazy girl bursting into Eden’s living room, that she had to do with something else entirely. Eden turned to make sure Squee was still where she’d left him, then spun back to Peg, who was spewing out the words now as fast as she could think them. “Something’s happened, and I don’t know what, but something’s happened to Brigid, my roommate, and now Lance wants Squee. He’s probably followed me here . . .” She looked over her shoulder and out the living room window as though she might see him coming up the drive behind her. And then she looked again to the window, and there was a truck coming up the drive toward the house. Peg gasped, and then she hung there, waiting for Eden to make the next move, ready, it seemed, to run.

The truck approached, Peg’s panic mounting, Squee’s heart beginning to beat faster, the voice in Eden’s head telling her to stay calm, watch, wait, see what unfolded. The truck came closer, low sun reflecting off its windows, blurring the color of its flanks. Eden had one foot in front of the other as though she was ready to pivot around, scoop Squee up from the couch, and run him out of there herself, out the back door and down to the ravine, where they’d hide him, swaddled among the rushes, while they went back to the house and waited for Lance, aiming shotguns out the windows like outlaw vigilantes defending their own.

The truck turned to park in the driveway and Eden sighed audibly, the breath rushing out of her lungs as if she’d been holding it longer than she’d realized. It was Roddy, home for the day. The five o’clock whistle had sounded some minutes before. It was only Roddy, and Eden let herself feel, for just a moment, the tremendous sense of relief: it was Roddy. She wasn’t alone. Roddy was back. There were things in the world for which she was thankful. Her son had come home.

He was worried already, just seeing the strange car there in the driveway, and he came straight up the front walk to the door. Knocking but not waiting for a response, Roddy entered the house and pulled his hat from his head penitently. He held it before him in his hands. “What’s going on?”

Peg looked to Eden, as though she, as the elder, were more qualified to address such a question. Eden said, “I can’t say I’m sure, but”— she, in turn, looked to Peg for confirmation—“I think maybe you and Squee need to go out and get some dinner someplace . . . ?”