Osprey Island

Mia paused then, seemed to breathe in for the first time since she’d entered the room, and actually took notice of her mother, registered her as a separate being who might also, perhaps, have something on her mind. Suzy’s eyes on Mia were fixed and grave, and Mia’s face in sudden response went tight with concern. With a great emphatic gush she said, “Mommy?”

Suzy felt unable to speak. She just stared at her daughter, the words she’d been preparing, perhaps even unconsciously, all afternoon, were stuck in her throat: sweet coos of milky sympathy, whispered assurances of a future frothy with ease.

Mia was confused. She watched as Suzy stood up from the bed with awkward decisiveness and blurted: “OK, get packed. We’re leaving. Hup to.”

Mia lay there, unsure whether this was a joke. Her face tried to smile but couldn’t because her eyes were so tied up in trying to understand what was happening before her.

Suzy regarded her daughter. “I’m glad you had a good time at the beach, baby. But that doesn’t change anything. Not really.”

“But . . . but I don’t want to leave anymore . . . I changed my mind,” she cried, the tears of frustration on their way.

“Well,” Suzy said, “so have I. I’ve been thinking all afternoon, and I feel like it’s not safe to stay here, and I’m not letting you stay somewhere that isn’t safe.”

Mia wailed: “But it is safe! It is!” She was panicking now, that profound desperation of being misunderstood.

“Mia,” Suzy said in a studied and patronizing calm to which Mia was entirely unaccustomed. “There are some times when you’re a parent when you have to make a decision that a kid maybe doesn’t understand. But it’s my job to take care of you, and there are going to be times when I have to do what I think is right, and now is one of those times, and you can hate me if you want to, but I’m not doing this to make you mad. I’m doing this because I feel like it’s the best option we have right now.” She was softened somewhat by her own speech, and she broke in the end and became, for a moment, the mother Mia thought she knew. “You’ve got to trust me, babe, OK? I’m sorry, but you’ve got to trust me.”

Mia stood up from the bed, her body and her expression rigid with indignation. She was livid, and incredulous too, unable to believe this was really happening. She faced her mother down with as much rage as Suzy had ever seen in the child, and said with a vehemence she could only have inherited from the woman she was saying it to: “I don’t care. I’m staying here.”

“No, actually,” Suzy countered, “actually, you’re not.”

“I am. You can go. I’m staying.”

“No, Mia, you’re coming with me.”

And they went at it like that for some time, until Mia locked herself in the bathroom, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” at the top of her lungs, and Suzy stormed from the room.

She went downstairs, found a housekeeper to post outside the room upstairs to watch Mia, and then went straight for the office and grabbed the keys to a Lodge truck. In the parking lot she tried the keys in three vehicles before she found the right one, cursing herself, the trucks, her father, her daughter, Osprey Island, and everything that had ever conspired to get her born there in the first place. When the engine of the old tan Ford finally turned over, Suzy sank down in the seat, put her head back, and squeezed her eyes shut.

She swung out of the parking lot onto Sand Beach Road and sped up the hill. It felt good to drive, to move that fast, the whipping of wind, the adrenaline of speed. She wanted to stay with that speed, just to drive away, far. And what struck her was the dreadful familiarity of that sensation. It was high school. It was dying for flight, anything just to drive and keep driving. The preposterous, insidious envy she felt for people who lived in open spaces, who could put their car on I-80 in Pennsylvania or Illinois and keep driving until they hit the Pacific. God! The freedom in that! You dreamed of flight on Osprey Island. You dreamed of getting in your father’s Chrysler and gunning for the docks. Dreamed of how it would feel when the wheels lifted off the cobbled planks and took air.