Osprey Island

Lance kept Squee by his side throughout the ceremony. Neither of them cried. Squee stood baffled, dazed-looking, like he didn’t understand what was happening. Lance, too, looked slightly deranged. He had never been to a funeral before, and was affecting a posture he’d probably seen over Lorna’s shoulder on Dynasty. His gestures and mannerisms were not his own. He was dramatic, which might have been appropriate for the funeral of his young wife, but he was dramatic about all the wrong things: insisting on being the first one to approach Lorna’s casket, spending ten minutes scraping his shoe violently against the roots of a tree outside the chapel to dislodge a clump of mud from the treads.

The crowd was thick and dutiful, the minister obliging and uninspired. His service was mercifully short. What was there to say anyway? She was sad. Now we are sad. Actually, we were already sad. She made everyone sad. Now she’s not sad anymore, since she’s dead. So maybe we shouldn’t be sad either? Really: what the hell was there to say?

After, while parties assembled and the funeral home folks got Lorna packed into the hearse, everyone just milled around, trying to figure out what to do next.

Lance seemed overwhelmed by the attention being paid him, and at the same time jealous if it was paid to anyone else. When Peg, in her minidress, bent down to talk to Squee after the service, Lance made a joking move as if he was trying to see up her skirt and said loudly, “She was my wife, you know?”

Peg stood quickly, her hand on Squee as if to shield him. “Of that I’m well aware, Mr. Squire. I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Lance said. “I bet you’re really broken up about it.” And he spun off and walked away.

Peg turned her face to Squee’s, peered intently into his eyes. “There’s a lot of us at the Lodge who care about you a great deal— you ought to know,” she said. “You can wake me up at any hour should you need—just come to our room and rouse me up, if you need anything at all, all right? It’s room D, in the staff house . . . OK?” Squee nodded blankly, as though he couldn’t quite remember who Peg was.

At the graveside Lance began to weep. There were fewer people around, fewer people in front of whom to act like a show dog, and he began to break. Nancy Chizek passed him tissues, which he grabbed up blindly and then gradually dropped to the ground, so that by the end he stood inside a little ring of white flowers all his own. Every time Lance looked at someone in the crowd at the cemetery, he seemed to realize his loss anew. He looked up, caught someone’s eye, and gasped as the sobs came heaving from his chest. By the time Lorna’s remains were actually lowered into the ground, Lance was leaning against his mother for support in standing. Squee stayed by his side, right between Lance and Penny Vaughn, who had grabbed Squee’s hand in a clammy, powdery grip and would not let go. The angle was wrenched, and partway through Squee’s arm started tingling, then lost feeling altogether. He hung beside her, looking more like a drooping stuffed animal than a boy. His eyes were glazed as a sleepwalker’s. It was days since he’d spent a full night in one bed, and the delirium of sleeplessness was blunting his pain. In the wake of his mother’s death, Squee was like a hypothermic: a person freezing to death actually stops feeling the cold; the body and mind protect themselves like that.

Suzy and Roddy kept their eyes on Squee, and as they left the graveside and Lance seemed to lose all interest in the boy, Suzy and Roddy nabbed Squee and brought him with them to Penny and Art’s for a visitation that Lance would clearly not attend. In the course of one night in Lance’s custody, Squee had gone from seeming to cope pretty admirably for a kid in his situation to looking as if he’d been hypnotized and made to witness unspeakable things. His skin was greenish, and they had him sit all the way on the passenger side against the window in case he had to throw up, which didn’t seem unlikely.

A GROUP OF YOUNGER PEOPLE—locals and Lodge staff—caravanned over to the Luncheonette after the funeral. The sun cut in the windows, bleaching out their faces, illuminating acne scars, chin hairs, the sallow remains of purple bruises on pale skin. Gavin thought it was depressing how bad everyone looked, sweaty and bulging and pinched, as if all their clothes were too small. They wolfed omelet platters, not knowing what else to do. Brigid sat near one end of the tables they’d pushed together, no longer looking voluptuous, but stocky, her skin pasty and mottled with freckles, like rust-stained linen. Peg looked bluish, and Jeremy pimply.