Osprey Island

Sheriff Harty let out his breath, nodding slowly. He kept looking right at Squee, right in the eye, as if he needed to see if the boy really understood. Squee said nothing more, but his throat and jaw jerked as if he was biting down on the inside of his cheek. Sheriff Harty looked up from Squee to Roddy, planted his hands on his thighs to push himself up. “You OK?” he said to Roddy as he straightened himself, glancing at Squee— Can you stay with him? Take care of the boy for right now?—and Roddy nodded.

“She’s gone,” the sheriff said, and then his voice caught, as if he was gagging but knew he had to say it. It was his job to say it. “She wouldn’t of felt any pain . . .”

Squee kept nodding, his fingernails digging so hard into the flesh of Roddy’s palm he’d find cuts later, like tooth marks.

The sheriff turned to go, left Roddy and Squee there, and Suzy leaned from the truck window behind him and spoke his name. “We should go tell your mother,” she said.

Roddy lifted Squee from the ground onto his hip. The boy’s body was so rigid and light it was like lifting the hollow skeleton of a bird. He put Squee into the cab, then climbed in himself and started the engine.

Eden Jacobs was a stolid, elusive woman who had taken her own husband’s death and her son’s homecoming the way she took her morning herbs: pennyroyal, sip, swallow; dong quai, sip, swallow; valerian, licorice, skullcap, black cohosh, toss back the head and wash it all down. And, sure, the other Islanders thought it odd that such human dramas should evoke so little response in their own subject, but everyone had known that Eden Jacobs was an odd woman the minute she stepped off the ferry thirty-eight years before, one hand holding a small suitcase, the other enveloped by Roderick Jacobs’s massive paw.

Roddy put the truck in park in Eden’s driveway but left it running as he went and knocked on the front door like a traveling solicitor. He stood and spoke to his mother from the stoop, turning back to gesture to Squee, Suzy, and Mia in the truck. Eden took the news stoically. Pesticide use on the roadsides, and she mounted an immediate offensive. Death of a woman she’d known since that woman was a baby, and Eden said, “Well, why don’t you all come in? I’ll make some breakfast. The children must be hungry.” Roddy nodded, though he wouldn’t likely eat inside himself, and went back to the truck to get Suzy and the kids, who filed across the yard and up the front steps like zombies. Roddy held the door for them. When the others were inside, Eden stood in the doorway. She faced her son. “So this is how it happens in the end.”

He pursed his lips, nodding, and followed his mother reluctantly inside.

Eden Jacobs’s living room was a tidy clutter of doilied end tables and framed photographs. On the coffee table were a covered glass dish of raw sunflower seeds and a floral saucer filled with cellophane-wrapped sesame candies. There was an old electric organ in one corner that Roderick Senior had inherited from his own mother, which hadn’t been played in thirty years. On the far wall, near the bedroom hallway, stood Roderick’s gun case, his old hunting rifles racked inside like good china stored away for special occasions against a lining of bronze-colored velveteen. Neither the window curtains nor the baseboards were dusty. Eden Jacobs had been keeping house here for almost forty years.

“Come, I’ll put up some coffee,” Eden said, and she led Suzy to the kitchen. Suzy glanced back to the kids, who had climbed onto the couch, too stunned and dazed to do anything but sit quietly.

Roddy hovered awkwardly, reluctant to sit down. Eden poured apple juice into two small glasses and carried them to the living room.

“Thank you,” said Mia, her voice small.

“Thank you,” Squee echoed. His voice was strange as well, unnatural, as though grief had made him, both of them, polite and quiet and scared. Mia held her juice without drinking it. Squee gulped his down in four swallows, without breathing, handed the cup back to Eden, and then turned and vomited into the leaves of the potted spider plant beside the couch. “I’m sorry,” he choked out.

“Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart,” Eden said. She handed the boy a color-printed cocktail napkin—a squirrel nibbling acorns—and Squee wiped his mouth. Mia watched, terrified.

“Do you feel better?” Eden asked Squee.

Squee said, “I don’t know,” and Eden asked if he’d like to use the bathroom. The boy nodded.

“Through the bedroom there, on the left,” she directed. “Just do your best to ignore all the old lady stuff. The basic appliances are the same as you’ll find anywhere.”

Squee nodded again and walked toward Eden’s bedroom door.