Osprey Island

Brigid thought of her own throat. It might have been someone else’s throat, for she could not feel its attachment to her body, could not even lift her hand to touch it, as if doing so would bring it to life on her body, the way everything turns to color as Dorothy cracks open the farmhouse door in Oz. She sank down, the towel slipping from her body as she bent into the closet, rummaging, riffling, tearing open the travel bags that lined the floor. There was a makeup case somewhere filled with stuff she hadn’t even thought to use since she’d arrived on the island; not even through the courting of Gavin had it seemed a place where one would brush on a little gloss. She felt the case there, under her hand, a nylon zippered sack crammed and stretched full of bottles and tubes the authorities had searched at customs not two weeks before, as if they might have been sticks of dynamite. She tore it open, dumped its contents on the unfinished wooden floor. There was a compact, square and brown, which she grabbed and flipped open. The towel was falling from her head, and she pulled it off, loose from her hair, and let it drop to the floor beside her. The compact’s mirror was dusted with powder, and she rubbed it clean with her thumb, held it up, tried to angle it right, to see her throat, pulled it away, rubbed the mirror with the towel that was pooled in her lap, then tried again. The mirror was so small it was hard to see much, but she could see enough to know.

She flicked her hair out of the way of her view, and it was the brush of her own fingers across the skin of her neck that did indeed bring the pain to life, animating it as if by a magic so strong and swift it choked her, as if his hand was there again, fingers curled around her neck, pressing purple welts into her throat like a handprint in ink against the white-pink of her flesh. She coughed and the pain spread inward, as if she’d been bruised from the inside as well—the raw, swollen pain of strep throat she’d had as a child, right there on her skin. Where had she been not to notice the pain now clamping down on her airway as if to gag her? She sat in the mouth of the closet, naked but for the towel now fallen to her hips and in her lap, choking as though her throat were swelling shut by the second.

Peg didn’t pause to think. She ran from their room in the staff’s barrack quarters and across the path toward the Squires’ cabin. She did not knock at the door or stop in the doorway but flew straight into the living room of Lance Squire’s home, where he sat drinking down the final can of that case of beer. Peg flew at him, then stopped, yards from Lance’s chair, shouting, hollering as loud as her voice would take her, “You bastard! You bastard! What did you do to her? You answer me! So help me . . . tell me what you did to her, you . . .” and it was only when Lance stood—stumbling backwards as he did so but then holding steady, standing tall. Only then did Peg seem to realize where she was and what she was doing: swearing in the booze-stinking face of a man she feared perhaps more than she’d ever feared a living, breathing person. Lance steadied himself and Peg backed away; for every step she took from him he took another toward her, sneering as though it were a game. The front screen door had closed itself, and now Lance backed Peg up to it. The smell of him nearly made her retch, that sick stink of alcohol blowing out of him in gusts. Peg had not in her life known this desire—a want that felt so much like need—to hurt someone the way she wanted to hurt this man, to beat him bloody with her fists and make him crawl away in shame. She suspected that to slink away was something Lance Squire would never do; he seemed, to Peg, incapable— inhuman, she realized, that’s what he was, and she cried it then: “You’re inhuman! You bastard! You inhuman bastard!”

Which is what she was screaming when Lance stepped back. He took one step away, as if he’d become aware of a terrible smell, something coming from her that made him instinctually retreat. He dropped his chin, narrowed his eyes to slits, glanced around the room as if to check that there was no one to see when he pounded her one. Then he fixed on her, this dishrag of a girl hollering at him as if that blue vein was going to pop right out of the middle of her forehead. Lance said, “Where’s my son?”

Peg stopped yelling.

Lance said it again, every word a stress of its own. “Where. Is. My. Son.” He reclaimed the offense, gave her a fraction of a second to answer, and then laced in: “You’re the one who took him today, you little piece of shit. You tell me where my son is, and you tell me now!”