Osprey Island

But Suzy was really talking about herself, and now Reesa was thinking of Jasper. Suzy had made it off, but so many of them— always the ones who were dying to get off—they’d last six months, maybe a year, and then they were back. Most of them. Suzy joked that it was like prison: you spent too long in that once you got out you were so scared you started making trouble just to land yourself back. But that was Suzy. Most people, if you asked them seriously, would say that if you grew up on Osprey you had ideas about how it would be to live out in the world across the bay. Osprey was your childhood; it was your troubled teen years. It was what you knew to want to escape. Then you got out and saw how things were out there, and then you understood how good you had it on that idyllic little island, where people knew who you were and what you came from, where it was safe to walk at night, where people took care. On Osprey you had credit at every store in town, and someone would always find you a job in construction, or helping out at the church, the school, the dump. You didn’t spend so much time deciding things on Osprey Island: You wanted coffee, you went to the Luncheonette. Prescriptions were filled at Bayshore Drug. You needed cigarettes, you stopped at Lovetsky’s. A haircut, Reesa’s. Life on Osprey was easier. Sure, there were things you missed out on, but if you’d grown up on Osprey you’d never had them, so you couldn’t really miss them much. And all those things out there in the world didn’t help if what you really missed was home.

Reesa folded a smock under her arm. “Thank fucking god Jasper didn’t have a girl here!” she said.

Suzy let out a laugh and held up both her hands, fingers crossed. “He’s going to make it, Reese. He’ll make it.”

Reesa closed her eyes, shook her head, and held up her hands in a short prayer for her son.

Thirteen

THE NATURE OF THE STRUCTURE OF A LIE

If the osprey passes from the American scene, we will lose a majestic and unique bird. Alone in a family between the hawks and the falcons, the osprey, unlike those numerous tribes, has but one genus, one species.

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

THEY LAY ON THE MATTRESS on the floor of Roddy’s shed. An old upright aluminum fan buzzed and whirred and blew out the sound of the crickets. Roddy lay on his back, stretched long, longer than the mattress, hands crossed behind his head. Suzy curled in toward his body, head in the crook of his underarm, knees at his hip, finger tracing the length of his torso, collarbone to pelvis, shoulder to hip bone. She ran her fingers along the scar on his side, her eyes closed.

“I never worked at a sawmill,” he said.

“Huh?” She opened her eyes.

“I didn’t get it working at a sawmill.”

“I guess I figured.” She closed her eyes again. She lay very still, just the fingers, tracing.

He was quiet a long while.

He hadn’t intended to tell her. He’d intended to tell no one. But none of this was foreseeable, and circumstances dictated their own imperatives. He had sense enough to have learned that much. He had sense enough to be afraid. Afraid that to give up a secret to one person on Osprey Island was to lose that secret to the world. And it wasn’t that the walls had ears or the trees had eyes, or that the birds overhead overheard your confessions and whispered them into the wind. It was that people just couldn’t help themselves.

He felt it in himself, that desire to talk. Perhaps it was his vigilant check of that desire that kept him so unnaturally quiet much of the time. He wanted to tell her, though. He wanted to give her something he’d never given anyone: a truth, of sorts.