Osprey Island

He had trouble understanding what truth meant. He had lived with secrets, and secrets were just lies of omission and as hard to live with as any other lie. For there was no such thing as a solitary lie. It wasn’t that lies begot more lies; the casting of one lie merely brought into focus and relief a sprawling net of other lies. Roddy had been living those lies—a whole world of them—for twenty years, which was long enough for the world of lies to become its own truth. Or reality, at least. Maybe there’d been a time when he could have acknowledged the lie and stepped away from it, stepped back into the truth, but that time was long gone. That lie was now part of a foundation upon which other things had grown, and truth and fiction were entwined, which meant that there was no such thing as truth anymore. Nor had there ever been. What Roddy had once seen as truth—the truth of his childhood, for instance, before his lie—had only seemed like truth, when, really, it was as much of a lie as everything else. It was only in lying himself that he’d learned of the nature of the structure of a lie. And now that he could see it, he could see how everything was built of lies and how the world was a city of pick-up sticks raised on quicksand.

To acknowledge his lie to Suzy may have meant a good many things, but it meant one thing very clearly to Roddy: He knew he couldn’t undo the reality spawned from the lie, couldn’t ever return to the truth he’d left behind. But he could, at least, make sure that Suzy knew the lie for what it was. He could tell her. And he started to.

He told her what it was like to turn eighteen on August 8, 1968. He told her some things she already knew: like what it was like to live in a place where certain things didn’t get questioned—if you were a man and your country went to war, then you, as a man, went to fight in that war. End of story. Unless you happened to have a mother unlike every other mother you’d ever known. A mother who swore she’d burn your draft card herself if you didn’t do it first. A woman who begged you, whatever you did, not to fight that filthy, wrong, horrible war.

Suzy listened. She understood.

Roddy’s father had been a weak man who lived by a rigid set of codes, not smart enough to face the world without them. A man who told his son: You burn that draft card, you’ll be on the next ferry off of Osprey and never coming back, you hear? A man who said: You don’t fight in that war, you’re no son of mine, while his wife screamed and cried: No son of mine is fighting in that war. You had until you turned eighteen, and that had bought Roddy time—a few months past graduation—but not peace. What they’d done was effectively demand that he choose: Your country or your mother? Your mother or your father? Roddy’d had a war waged through himself.

“I couldn’t register. I couldn’t not register. I couldn’t talk to anyone.” Who would he have talked to? There were no draft counselors on Osprey Island. There were no hippies. Aside from Eden’s, there was only one point of view to be had.

“I left,” he said. “I had to. Whatever I did, it had to be my decision. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have a home anymore.” Eden and Roderick had managed to both lose their son and erode their marriage to a civil arrangement of household tasks and finances. That lasted a year, until National Geographic and the plight of the osprey served to render their relationship nothing more than legal. But until then, Eden cooked dinner, dusted, hung the laundry up to dry. Roderick cut the lawn and put out the trash.

Roddy hadn’t cared what people thought. They thought he’d fled. Never imagined that once he left their world he’d have gone anywhere but north, all the way. “Canada?” he said. “What the fuck was I going to do in Canada?” He’d never been anywhere in his entire life. “It wasn’t about right and wrong,” he told Suzy. “I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. Or even if I knew . . . it was about what I could live with. It’s impossible to say, to talk about now, knowing . . . you know? Understanding. Then? I wasn’t like Eden . . .”

Suzy’s hand left Roddy’s scar for the first time since he’d begun. She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at him in a way that Roddy would never be able to forget as long as he lived. She said, “Oh my god, you fought.”

He didn’t answer.