Osprey Island

Nancy jumped on him: “You can’t tell me you think we don’t know what’s . . . going on between the two of you.” She gestured back and forth with her dish towel, as though pointing between Roddy and an invisible Suzy she’d decided to seat beside him. “Christ Almighty, you’re smarter than that!” Nancy spat out her words, and the effort turned her ugly, made her mouth large and gummy. She looked, Roddy realized, like her son. She looked—he could see the resemblance so clearly now—like Chas. Her mouth open in shock, she just kept looking at him, expecting something.

Finally he said, “She came by my mother’s last night to say good-bye.” And maybe during that moment’s admission Nancy could see for herself—maybe it was written right there on his face?—the magnitude of the loss that he was suffering in the wake of Suzy’s departure. Something in her shifted, as if she’d lost her train of thought and instead of searching just decided to shake it off and move along. There was a moment more of silence while they got their bearings and reclaimed their places in the world, and then Nancy took off her apron and went toward the staircase. Halfway to the bedroom, where she would take to her bed for the day like an invalid, she paused on the step and turned back to Roddy. She said, “Don’t let your breakfast get cold.” He took it as a blessing, for which he was thankful, and he poured the syrup and began to eat, realizing something as he chewed. Suzy’d left a note for her father, and she’d come by Eden’s place to say good-bye to Roddy before she left. Her mother hadn’t gotten anything at all.

Twenty

GRIEF-SPURRED, SWIFT-SWOOPING

“Bird” in Greek and Latin also means “omen.”

—DR. EDGAR HAMILTON, PH.D., “How Our Island Was (Mis)Named”

BRIGID WOKE EARLY THAT MORNING on the Squire cottage sofa to the smell of frying bacon wafting up the hill from the Lodge kitchen. The doors to both Lance’s and Squee’s bedrooms were closed, and Brigid could remember drifting to sleep on the couch with Squee curled beside her. She remembered vaguely the television station signing off and Lance coming by to lift Squee from her arms and carry him to bed, and how she’d been touched, even through the wash of sleep, by a tenderness in Lance, and wished she could have invited them all in—Peg and Jeremy and the lot of them—to bear witness. Lance put Squee into bed, closed the boy’s door, and came back toward Brigid on the couch. She’d been quite awake by then. She felt a rush of fear and caught her breath, the act of which took that fear and transformed it, took her quickened heartbeat and moved the pulse of blood down between her legs in an arousal that in turn both scared and excited her. She lay on the couch beneath her own dorm blanket, eyes closed as if in sleep, and waited for what Lance would do. A waft of sweat and cigarettes traveled with him, emanating from his clothes when he got near, and he stopped by her head and bent down toward her, and then she could only smell the sweet yeast of beer clouding hot and dense out of his mouth as he put his lips, hot and cracked, to the bare skin of her forehead and said, “G’night, angel,” before he stood again, walked to the bathroom, and pissed for what seemed a very long time. And then he’d flushed the toilet, flipped off the light, gone into his own room, and shut the door. And the next thing Brigid knew it was morning and there was bacon on the griddle down at the Lodge.

She was hungry. Wrapped in the blanket, pillow in hand, Brigid hurried back to the staff building. She walked into the room without knocking—it was her room too, wasn’t it?—and found Peg and Jeremy asleep in Peg’s bed. Even in sleep, Jeremy seemed to be trying to envelop Peg’s body like a human cocoon. He stirred as Brigid entered and struggled to focus. He lifted his head, a nod of greeting or acknowledgment. Brigid flashed a split-second mockery of a smile and proceeded to change her clothes without giving a bloody fuck whether he watched or not. She found some flip-flops under her bed, took a sweatshirt from the hook on the back of the door.