Osprey Island (22 page)

He said, “My mother . . . Squee . . .”

And she just sobbed harder until finally he had to take her in his arms. It was easier to hold her and feel her sadness than it was to stand by and feel his own. So he held on to her, relieved that he had something to hold on to, at the same time realizing that the real relief would be in letting her go.

BRIGID WAS IN THE ROOM when Peg returned from Eden’s. She was lying on her bed, on her back, in gym shorts and a skimpy tank. It was hard for Peg to know what to say to her. It was hard for Brigid to know what to say to Peg. Peg was well enough aware that Brigid hadn’t come back to work with the rest of the girls after lunch; she’d run off after Lance Squire and never returned to her duties. The way Peg thought of it, she didn’t see Brigid as having run after
Squee
— didn’t even consider that Brigid might be concerned about the boy at all.

Brigid, for her part, had still been sitting on the Squires’ porch with Lance when the other girls had gotten off work, and had seen Peg climb into a car and get whisked away down Sand Beach Road. She hadn’t come to dinner. No one knew where she’d gone, not even Jeremy, who’d passed the meal in a state of demonstrable concern.

“Where’ve
you
been at?” Brigid said, looking off toward the window as if she was merely asking out of politeness and couldn’t have cared less where Peg had spent the last few hours.

“Pardon?” Peg said.

Brigid turned back into the room. “People wondered where you’d gone,” she said.

Peg paused. “The girls were likewise wondering where
you’d
knocked off to this afternoon.”

Brigid’s face went deadpan with annoyance as she tried to stop her eyes from rolling. “I was in plain sight of the lot of you on the Squires’ porch all afternoon. You couldn’t’ve wondered all that much, now could you?”

Peg couldn’t help herself. “How’s the boy?” she said, her tone a mixture of accusation and longing.

“Squee? He’s just fine,” Brigid said quickly. “They took him to the beach, with Mia.”

“
Who
took him to the beach?”

Brigid paused, waiting for the acid to drain back from her lips before she spoke. She forced a terrible smile: “Gavin and his new little hoor.”

“Well, if you’re getting off with
Lance Squire,
what precisely did you expect?”

Brigid sat up. “You’ve bloody got to be kidding.”

“What?”

“You think I’ve passed over
Gavin
in favor of
Lance Squire
?” Brigid took it for granted that no one in her right mind would ever pass over Gavin.

“So you
haven’t,
then?” Peg said casually.

Brigid flopped back down onto the bed and turned to the window.

“Oh, I see, now,” Peg said snidely.

Brigid lay fuming in her bed by the window, words flashing through her brain, retorts and explanations so loud in her skull it seemed Peg should have been able to hear them. She tried to speak, but whatever came to her tongue felt inadequate, and she swallowed a number of beginnings before she managed to sit up and say: “The man’s wife has just passed on. Am I the only one around in this bloody place who thinks he deserves a bit of sympathy? You lot treat him as though he’d killed her himself!”

That struck Peg unexpectedly, for it was true: that was precisely the way she thought of him. “Oh, don’t be thick,” she snapped. “I’ve simply a bit more concern for the welfare of the child who’s been left in his care and’ll likely be scarred for life, or worse, if no one steps in and does a bloody thing about it—”

“Jesus Christ!” Brigid cried. “Who do think you are, then?” She was stammering for the next line when Peg cut her off.

“I’m someone who bloody cares what’ll happen to that child!”

Brigid’s astonishment stopped her from replying. She just sat there blinking at this girl who was her roommate. “My god,” was all she could manage. “Oh my fucking god.”

Peg was riled, every ill feeling she’d ever entertained toward Brigid rising to the surface. “You pass your time licking up to this man and that without opening your eyes and seeing what’s in front of your bloody face! I don’t see how you can so much as sit and
talk
with the man when you’ve seen the way he treats his son—the way he treats bloody everyone!—acting as though it’s altogether just grand!”

Brigid shook her head back and forth, slowly, in utter disbelief. “Heaven forbid,” she said, “that a man who’s just lost his wife doesn’t act like a bloody saint every fucking minute of the day! God forbid you cut the man just the tiniest bit of slack when he’s been through the worst thing you’ll ever imagine!” She stood up, the words jamming in her throat. She held up her hands: there was nothing more she could even think to say to someone so ignorant.

“You must be
blind
!” Peg hissed, but Brigid waved her hands by her ears to say she’d hear no more.

“You’re bleedin’ unbelievable,” Brigid finally managed to say. She stared at Peg another moment as she tried to figure out what she might do with herself at that point. Then, suddenly, she snatched the covers from her bed and grabbed up her pillow with the other hand. “Absolutely unbelievable!” And she slammed out of the room.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Peg cried. And then she heard the outside door slam at the end of the hall, and she was quiet, listening. All she could hear were the crickets.

Brigid hadn’t a clue where she was going except that she was going
away
from that self-righteous, arrogant, preachy little priss she’d been unlucky enough to get lodged with. It was dark out, and the first thing Brigid saw were the lights of the Squire cottage across the way. People were still out on the porch of the Lodge, but Brigid didn’t want to see any of them. She walked across the path and up the steps. Through the window she could see Lance sitting in his easy chair, a beer in hand. Squee was on the couch, his legs crossed under him, playing with an action figure of some sort. They were watching TV. Like any normal, regular, American family, Brigid thought—even a normal, regular American family who’ve recently lost one of their own!— peacefully watching the television in their own bloody living room! She hated Peg with all the ire in her. She knocked on the door, heard Lance call, “C’min,” and opened the door.

“Hi,” said Squee, looking up briefly from his play.

“Hey there,” Lance said, waving her inside.

“Could I knock about with you lot a bit this evening?” Brigid said bitterly. “My roommate’s a bloody mulchie wanker!”

Lance’s face broke into a wide, winning grin. “I don’t know what the fuck that means, but our casa is your casa.” With his old magnanimous flair Lance swept an arm broadly across the room. “Beer’s in the fridge.”

She got herself a can, and as she shuffled toward the couch to curl up beside Squee with her blanket and pillow, Brigid could honestly say that she felt welcome and grateful and at home for the first time since she’d arrived on Osprey Island. And as they watched mindless American blather, Brigid settled into an oblivion of comfort for which she was enormously thankful.

Eighteen

WWCD?

One July day in 1957, when Great Island should have been a scene of
activity with young birds at the flying stage, I scanned the marsh
through my telescope. I saw the usual number of adults about—but
where were the young?
The nesting season obviously had been a failure. The next year confirmed my suspicions. Although young ospreys ordinarily pip the shell
in about 5 weeks, many adults sat on unhatched eggs for 60 to 70
days. Other eggs mysteriously disappeared. One bird brought a rubber ball to the nest and faithfully sat on it for six weeks!

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

WHEN EDEN RETURNED HOME after dropping Peg back at the Lodge, she went straight down to the henhouse. The lamp was on at Roddy’s place and Suzy’s truck was gone. Eden went first to Lorraine’s coop to check on her. They weren’t far from her hatching date now, and Lorraine was viciously defensive about her clutch. Only when Lorraine was off the nest could Eden get in there to make sure she had enough nesting material, stick in a few sprigs of wormwood to deter insects and pests. Eden poked her head into the coop for one, and before her eyes could even adjust, Lorraine was letting out a terrible
crrrrrrawk crrrrrrrrrrrawk,
loud and screeching. As far back as she and Eden went, if anyone tried to mess with those eggs, Lorraine’d peck their hands into bloody stumps before she’d let them have at her unhatched babies.

In the main coop old Margery lumbered off her roost the minute Eden entered and wobbled over to say hello. She was like a dog. Eden sank down into an old half-broken chair she’d set by the door, and lifted Margery up onto her lap. Eden stroked the hen’s feathers.

Once upon a time Eden had tried to teach Lorna how to care for the chickens, and the girl had been happy enough to cuddle the feather-puff babies but hadn’t really taken to it beyond that. Seemed you couldn’t teach a woman to mother any more than you could make a hen go broody. Lorna’d been willing enough to go walking with Eden, to help out with the osprey nesting platforms. The thing Lorna lacked, Eden thought, was initiative. Then she thought about why it was that people were always trying to figure out what it was that Lorna was lacking. Maybe they felt if they could isolate what made Lorna who she was they could more easily assure themselves that they weren’t like her, couldn’t be like her, that they were immune. It was that easy. There. Done. Eden—a veritable Napoleon of initiative— could look at Lorna and say,
There, that’s it, that’s what she’s missing.
That’s what
she’s
missing and that’s what
I’ve
got in spades! Therefore
I am different from Lorna. Therefore I am safe.

It was all so flawed. So inherently and fundamentally and selfservingly flawed. And it helped them all through another day of their problems and kids and strife and grief. It was hard to imagine what the Islanders were going to do without Lorna. Who was going to step in to come up short in every comparison and make them all feel relatively better about their own pathetic lives? It was Osprey’s system of moral certitude. Sure, you could ask, What Would Jesus Do? But that was often a tough question to answer, because Jesus’ life, well, it was pretty different from their own. But at any time you could ask yourself, What Would Lorna Do? and it was pretty much certain that if you could manage to accomplish the exact opposite of whatever that was, you’d probably be just fine.

Now, What Would
Chickens
Do?
That
was a question that got you somewhere. Because what
they
’d do was actually about what
you
did. If you did what you were supposed to, the chickens followed in turn. You took care of them, gave them everything they needed: food, shelter, vitamins, place to run around, games to play—a head of lettuce in a netted bag on a string, say: tether-lettuce! They loved it!—mates to mate with, a job to do, eggs to lay, babies to raise . . . The occasional egg-eater notwithstanding, if you treated a chicken right, it treated you right in return. And to Eden’s way of thinking about things, that was exactly as it should be, and there was no reason for such a philosophy to stop with chickens. It hurt Eden’s heart to think of the havoc people wreaked through their own offhandedness, their own laxity, their own systems of ignorance and denial and fear. There were ways to live in the world that kept the world spinning! Why couldn’t people see that? And if they saw it—and this was Eden’s greatest heartsickness—if they saw it, why couldn’t they live it? Why wasn’t it cut and dried? If something was wrong with the chickens, you went in and figured out what was causing the trouble—Why were they eating their eggs? Why were they plucking out their vent feathers?—and you corrected the problem! Why—and this was maybe all that Eden had ever really wanted to know—why couldn’t we be more like the birds?

“Ma?” Roddy was calling from outside the coop. Margery hopped off Eden’s lap and flapped back to her roost. Eden pushed herself up from the chair and went outside.

Roddy looked anxious, in a sad way—a way that made Eden want to take her son in her arms—but when he spoke, his voice was flattened out. He kept his eyes down. “They’re leaving,” he said, “Suzy and Mia. She’s going back to New York.”

Eden waited, silent. Roddy was packing the ground with the heel of his boot. He said, “Everything I hear makes me more scared for Squee, about what Lance’s going to do.” He looked up at his mother. “Suzy said I should ask you about something, and I’m afraid you’re not going to give me a straight answer, and I need you to give me a straight answer on this. Suzy said you could probably tell me better than she could what happened to her . . . in high school? Out back here . . . down the ravine? With Lance?” Roddy paused to let his mother answer, but he was preparing the further assault of his interrogation. He wasn’t going to let her squirm away.

“She told you that?” Eden was saying, nodding her head in consideration as she spoke, as though this information meant something particular to her. “Suzy told you that,” she said again, not a question but confirmation of the facts as they stood.

Roddy nodded. “She said you’d tell me.” He looked at the ground. “She’s
afraid
of him, Ma.”

“Well, Christ!” Eden swore. “You’re talking about something that happened twenty years ago, and suddenly she’s so terribly afraid!” Then something struck her. This “fear” they were talking about, this fear Suzy was calling her reason to flee—who knew what was really driving that girl? Suzy could well be leaving to get away from
Roddy
for all Eden knew, and that thought roused in her a sudden and vicious anger toward Suzy—for being a coward and a conniver, and mostly for not loving Eden’s son the way he deserved to be loved. “I’ll tell you,” she said to Roddy, “I’ll tell you, but I don’t know it’ll shed any light on anything at all.”

They sat across from each other at the picnic table, mother and son, and she talked. It had been some sort of a party, maybe, Eden dimly recalled. There’d been people over, friends, kids from the school. Suzy had come with Chas, but he’d been unable to find her when he was ready to drive home and figured she’d left earlier, walked home. He took off alone. It was Eden who found her, just past midnight, soon after Chas had gone. She was behind the old woodshed, holding her knees to her chest, crying.

“I got it out of her, what had happened, to some degree. Enough to understand it hadn’t been something she’d particularly wanted to do . . .”

“So he did rape her?” Roddy asked cautiously.

Eden sighed. “Sure what I’d’ve called it. Then
and
now. Now maybe people’d agree with me.
Then?
Then she was more a girl who got herself in a bad situation. Nineteen sixty-eight, on this island? They’d for certain blame that one on her.”

“She got pregnant?” he asked skeptically. “You said Lance was . . . that he couldn’t, you know . . . so she
didn’t
get pregnant, right?”

Eden shook her head sadly. “But I didn’t know that—about Lance— for a good ’nother year later from Lorna.” She spoke hesitantly, measuring the words, still trying not to let go of more than she absolutely had to.

“What?” Roddy’s thoughts lurched to words and then broke uncertainly. “What, did every pregnant girl on this island get routed through you? I don’t . . .”

“I don’t think Suzy was ever pregnant then. Though we took precautions just in case—”

“Wait,” Roddy commanded. The even-tempered keel of her voice angered him, made him feel accused, irrational. He was struggling to understand, and every word out of his mother’s mouth confused him further. “Wait,” he said again, “that’s not the point. What do you mean,
precautions
? How’d they wind up with you?” All the words were wrong, his thoughts too incomplete for articulation. He was fighting himself.

Eden watched him, her eyes steady. She took a breath. She said, “Things are different now from how they used to be.”

Roddy waited, his leg jackhammering beneath the table.

“We’re talking about nineteen sixty-eight, ’sixty-nine. We’re talking about a very different world here, OK? And then with the chances a girl had to take—” She broke off.

“What? You doing abortions out back to every knocked-up girl on—?”

“No,” Eden snapped. “Not like that. Not like you mean.” She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts, focusing her argument. “There are herbal methods of—”

“Oh Christ, Ma—”

“Wait!” Eden snapped. “You just listen now. Listen to what I’m telling you.”

Roddy closed his eyes and bowed his head. He clasped his hands together between his knees.

Eden began again, slowly. “There are certain herbs that have been used for centuries for certain curative effects.” Her voice was controlled and cautionary. “Certain herbs that have certain effects on different systems in the body. There are particular herbs with beneficial effects on the female reproductive organs. So much we take in in this world is poison to us. Certain herbs help the body to expel and rejuvenate.”

Roddy listened.

“Certain herbs—pennyroyal, for instance, black cohosh—these certain herbs—herbs I take regularly, mind you—they help a woman my age with the troubles of being a woman my age. Many other uses at other times of life, different preparations and doses.

“Now, some of these have been used to stimulate an abortion— stimulate the body to abort. And wait, now, before you say anything: listen to me. These can be dangerous, dangerous things unless you know what you’re doing. And these are procedures that you’ve
got
to do early on—I’m talking about the first day a girl’s late on her period—once you’re six days late it’s too dangerous. OK? You see what I’m talking about? You see how careful you have to be?”

Roddy nodded dully. It made sense. Someone on-island had to have been helping those girls; it figured it’d be Eden.

“But back then,” Eden was saying, “an herbal abortion was the safest way there was. It might still be.” She should have been a politician: such conviction. Except that her conviction was never about anything that anyone else on Osprey supported.

“You said Suzy wasn’t pregnant,” Roddy said, his tone more accusatory than he intended. “I thought she wasn’t—because of Lance . . .”

Now it was Eden’s impatience that showed. “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we all toiled with the power of hindsight! What I knew
then
was that Suzy Chizek was sixteen years old and might have been on a nine-month course from virginity to motherhood because of a boy who had about as much right to be a father then as he does now!

“She was lucky. Suzy. What I could get from her then, she knew at least that she was due on her period soon, and that, that was just lucky. God, she was scared. And I tried explaining what it was I knew we could do. I don’t honestly remember what I gave her. There’s lots of things to take into account—a person’s health, everything. Honestly. I don’t remember. But we did it. Started her on infusions— nothing easy for a high school girl to manage, but she did it, went through with the herbs, and a few days later she was bleeding normal, and that was that.” Eden stopped.

“And
that was that
? No wonder you’re such a friggin’ outcast on this island! Did Dad know? Did
everybody
know? What, so when Lorna got pregnant you did the same thing then too?”

“No!” Eden snapped. “No. And don’t you dare blow this into something it was not. I helped people who needed help at a time when their government would have rather seen those girls die than let them—”

“Please, not the protest rally—”

“I helped individuals in individual circumstances that they needed help getting out of.”

“Yeah? So why’d Lorna need out of her situation?”

“I did not help Lorna then. Not like that,” Eden said, and there were years of bitterness in her voice. “I did not help Lorna. And she turned around and she threw it in my face. It was after Lorna I stopped everything. Nineteen sixty-nine. After that, the girls who came, I gave them the name of someone off-island.”

“Why wouldn’t you help her? Why was it any different? You’d help Suzy but not Lorna—how’s that fair?”

“How it’s
fair,
” Eden shrilled, “is that Suzy was a sixteen-year-old virgin who got raped out back of my house. And Lorna was a calculating young woman who got herself knocked up on purpose so she could marry Lance Squire and get the hell out of Art and Penny’s house. And then once she’d gotten what she wanted she decided she didn’t want it. Because it wasn’t
Lance’s
baby. And she got mad at him for something, and told him that. Just to hurt him, I’m sure. Told him that she’d been trying to get herself pregnant by him as long as they’d been having sex and it just plain didn’t work, and she had to see was it him or her or what? So she did what she had to do. And she’s saying to him, hadn’t she gotten it so they could get married? And didn’t they have a good deal there now at the Lodge, with a place to live and a job that took no work and how she’d done it all for him and he wasn’t even grateful, and she didn’t want a baby, she just wanted him, and to marry him and to be with him, and she’d done everything it took to make that so, and look how he showed his gratitude . . .”