Osprey Island

Eden set the empty glass on the coffee table, bent down, and hefted up the plastic-potted spider plant. “We’ll just put you out for some sunshine, huh?” she said into the spindly green leaves. She opened the front door and set the plant down on the stoop as if it were a cat put out for the night. “There you go.”

Eden made the coffee and whisked up eggs with milk and cinnamon and vanilla extract and set it to soaking with a few slices of a bread she’d baked the week before, which was going stale. Suzy had gone to use the restroom and came back reporting that Squee was asleep on Eden’s bed, his sneakers dangling off the end as if he’d known well enough not to dirty up the bedsheets. Roddy excused himself now that Squee was asleep, retreating from the house that so clearly discomforted him and fleeing for his shed out back. Mia then promptly fell asleep on the couch, the apple juice glass still clutched in her hands, a splotch of it spilled across the belly of her T-shirt. Suzy extracted the glass from her daughter’s grip and set it in the sink. She managed to remove the shirt from Mia’s body and rinse it out in the bathroom without rousing the girl, who slept beneath a quilt Suzy drew over her.

Suzy choked down a few bites of French toast before Eden said, “Baby, if your stomach doesn’t want it, don’t force.” Suzy sighed gratefully. She sipped at her coffee and pushed the plate of food away. “Should I bring something out to Roddy?” she asked.

“Why don’t you.” Eden was already preparing a plate. “I do wish he’d talk more,” she said, as though she were picking up a conversational thread that had been dangling between the two of them for years. “I worry he keeps it all bottled too close.” Eden handed the plate to Suzy. She said, “I’m going to buzz down the hill, see if Art and Penny need anything.” They were both quiet a minute, Roddy’s French toast steaming the air between them. Eden closed her eyes. “God, to lose a child . . .” She shook her head, then snapped back to. “I don’t know how your mother lived through it, Suzanne.” She looked at Suzy with disarming frankness. “I never liked your mother particularly, but my heart went out to her. To lose a child, I can think of no more terrible a thing. Art and Penny . . . not that they’ve been much as parents for the last twenty-odd years, but still . . .” She left off. “I’ll just go see if there’s something they need.”

Suzy took the plate of French toast and went out back toward Roddy’s cabin. It was a good fifty yards behind the house, tucked into some oaks perched just before the hill dipped down into a ravine. She passed the picnic table where she’d done shots of something awful on a night twenty years before, which she didn’t much like to think about. Three cement blocks served as a stoop to Roddy’s shack, and Suzy stood atop them, knocking tentatively, as though she might catch him at something she’d rather not see.

He came to the door, opened it, and stood waiting for her to say something.

She thrust the plate toward him. “Here,” she said, “your mom . . .”

“Thanks.” He took the toast. “Do you want some coffee?” He gestured to the pot warming on a hot plate on an overturned crate beside the bed.

“I think I want some whiskey,” she said.

He reached for a bottle on the shelf above the hot plate.

“No, no, no, I think I’m . . . shit, maybe I do.” She ran a hand through her hair. “Jesus.” She was standing in his one-room house, holding her hair back out of her eyes, slumped like she wanted to crumble to the floor.

Roddy pointed to a chair beside the door. “Why don’t you sit down?” he said. “Why don’t you have some coffee?”

She sat, as directed. She held her head in her hands, eyes closed tightly behind her palms.

Roddy poured coffee from its tin kettle into a small blue plastic mug and held it out to Suzy, but her head was still down and she didn’t see. He stood there, arm outstretched, unnoticed.

“I don’t have milk,” he apologized.

“I couldn’t care less,” she said. She was about to cry for the first time since she’d been awakened by the hollering and commotion outside the laundry shack.

“You should get some sleep,” Roddy said.

Suzy laughed with resignation and resentment. “I feel insane,” she said. “I feel like I am losing my mind. I feel like I want to take Mia and walk down to the ferry and take the first one across and get on a bus and go home and pretend I was never here.”

“Yeah,” Roddy said. “I know.”

“I feel insane,” she repeated, as if maybe he hadn’t believed her the first time.

“I know,” he said again. His desperation was quiet. He looked around the room, his eyes searching frantically, his body moving barely at all. “Do you want to lie down?” He made a gesture toward the camp cot. “Maybe you’d feel better . . .”