Osprey Island

DELIVERED his housekeeping lecture to the Irish girls, it was late that night and they were on the side porch, downing beers with the equally underage waiters. How could you ask an Irish girl not to drink? For the most part no one bothered them about it, except Lance, a raging alcoholic incapable of letting so much as a vial of vanilla extract pass under his nose without delivering a speech on the evils of alcohol. “Wouldn’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole,” Lance declared. “Not a twenty-foot pole! That juice is poison. Poison.” The girls sipped at their cans, wiped their lips afterward. They listened politely to Lance, although Roddy had pretty much already told them everything they needed to know about the Lodge, and far more coherently.

“He’s married, isn’t he?” Peg asked Brigid once Lance was safely out of earshot. Brigid shrugged. One of the waiters standing nearby overheard and shushed them with a wag of his head toward Squee, who sat cross-legged on the edge of the porch. It was the dark-haired waiter, Gavin, the one with the sleepy, hooded eyes. He leaned his long frame against the porch rail and smoked a cigarette, squinting, and casting—Brigid was almost sure—a few furtive glances in her direction. Brigid had been watching him; she watched people in a way that they could see they were being watched. About this Gavin fellow the rumors were already circulating: he’d followed a girl here, an Islander he’d met at college in California, had followed her home for the summer only to get dumped on arrival when the girl had gotten back with her Island High beau. It was said that Gavin was not a happy boy these days.

Another waiter, Jeremy, a skinny boy with pimples in his neck stubble, slid into the chair beside Brigid and set his beer down with an emphatic thud. His voice was conspiratorially low. “Lance is Squee’s dad. His mom’s Lorna. She’s pretty much a drunk.” Jeremy took a sip of his beer.

“Is she here?” Peg asked, waving a hand toward the cabins.

“Yeah, you’ll see her around every so often. She’s in bad shape. It’s really sad.” Jeremy’s display of sensitivity was embarrassingly over-earnest.

“So she’s just about the place, and drunk, and no one cares a thing about it?” Peg asked.

“What’re you going to do?” Jeremy had worked summers at the Lodge before, as a busboy. He knew what things went unquestioned.

“And Lance?” Brigid pressed him. “What about him?”

Peg said, “He’s a bit of dosser, eh?”

“A what?” said Jeremy.

Brigid cut in: “A doss—a fellow who just lays about, like a bit of a waste, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy concurred. “He’s a dick. The whole teetotaler thing’s a total sham. Mostly he’s totally rocked too.”

“Doesn’t anyone care at all?” Peg asked.

“Yeah, but you know . . .” Jeremy stammered. “I mean, what can you do, you know?” They were all quiet then for a moment, sipping their Pabsts, thinking, God, yeah, what could you do, really? The air smelled of sea salt and smoke, the breeze from the shore delicious.

Peg leaned in closer to Jeremy. “And the boy?” she whispered. Little Squee was swinging his legs back and forth off the side of the deck.

“It’s messed up,” Jeremy said, “but, you know, he seems OK. He’s a pretty well adjusted kid, you know, in spite of everything.”

“It’s wrong, isn’t it . . . ?” Peg said.

Brigid looked again to Squee, his skinny legs still waggling off the edge of the deck. She turned back to her beer and drained it.

Half an hour later, Brigid excused herself—jet lag—from the porch party. Gavin, the dark, smoking waiter, had disappeared, and with him had gone Brigid’s motivation to stay awake any longer. She cut through the Lodge, the fastest route to the staff quarters, but as she crossed the lobby she heard something—an animal, she thought at first—hiss from the far side of the room. She stopped where she was and spun around. The lights were all off for the night, and the moon glared in at Brigid like a spotlight. It shone through the sliding glass doors and obscured the far half of the large room in darkness.

The hiss came again, this time decidedly human. Brigid wasn’t a scared sort of a girl, and it was her romantic imagination that kicked in first: the sultry-eyed waiter was calling from the shadows! She peered off in the direction of the noise, smelled cigarette, and watched as a tiny dot of orange glowed bright for a moment, then subsided. As her eyes began to distinguish shapes, she could make out the old grand piano in the corner and the figure seated nearby in a low-slung armchair. There was something eerily exciting about it. Brigid wanted that—some strange and overwhelming indiscretion in this new place. “In the habit of hissing at girls across dark rooms, are you?” she said coyly.

From the corner came a snort, a hack thick with phlegm. “Only the ones with tits like yours,” he said.

Brigid thought at first that she must have misunderstood, but her eyes were adjusting to the dark and the man’s features began to come together and coalesce. She turned without another word and walked away, leaving Lance to finish out his cigarette alone in the empty Lodge lobby. And as she passed through the kitchen exit, Brigid thought for the first time that perhaps she wasn’t quite as ready as she’d thought. Or maybe she was ready, but for something a bit less strange and overwhelming than she’d previously considered. A brooding waiter was one thing; the crude, married, alcoholic handyman another entirely. He was rather attractive, she thought—quite attractive, really, in a sad, brutish sort of a way. But no. No, she told herself firmly. It was an altogether stupid idea to fuck the father of anyone at all.

Four

TO WHAT DIRECTION WILL YOUR CHICKS TAKE WING?

Ah! mother bird, you’ll have weary days.

—MARGARET E. SANGSTER, “The Building of the Nest”

IN THE BACK OF THE nonfunctional minifridge in the laundry shack Lorna kept a bottle of vodka (Lance would likely have killed her if he knew) and a purple spiral notebook she’d bought at the drugstore when she was pregnant with Squee and Eden Jacobs had told her to write down her thoughts and feelings. Lorna and Eden had gone for walks together in the mornings back then, Eden pointing out every downy woodpecker and Carolina wren,