Osprey Island

Brigid said nothing. She watched. She did not know how he might read her expression. She did not know what her expression was.

“Hey,” he said, like a plea for clemency, “you don’t have to worry: nobody ever gets pregnant off me.” He laughed a little, smiled over at her winningly.

Brigid turned away, realized she was mashed up against the passenger door, putting as much space between herself and Lance as the truck allowed. She leaned her head out the window and let the wind rush by, blowing back her hair, the air heavier with pine the deeper inland they traveled. She would go back and take a shower—a very hot shower—and she’d sober up, and sleep. She concentrated on the shower without imagining it too fully, because imagining the water scalding on her body made her want it so badly she thought she might cry out.

When Lance stopped for cigarettes at the gas station and paused outside the truck to lean back in the window and smile at her and ask, offhandedly, “You need anything, darlin’?” and she shook her head no and watched him turn and enter the store, heard the ding-ding of the door, saw it fan slowly closed behind him, she was cognizant enough to marvel at the macabre absurdity of the moment. She thought: I’ve lost my mind. She thought about simply saying to him, when he got back to the truck and offered her a smoke, which she might accept— she thought she might let him light it for her, inhale, then simply say: Is it my imagination, or did you just hold me by the neck and fuck me? But when he did get back with his pack of Merits and offer one to her, leaning across the packages on the seat to light it, she said nothing. If someone asked, later, she’d have said 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 themany 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.