Osprey Island

Peg settled back into the crook of Jeremy’s arm. She watched Suzy go. “I’d be unable to do that myself, I imagine.”

“Do what?” Jeremy nuzzled her hair.

“Go off and leave my child at such a . . . time, you know? I imagine I’d be unwilling to separate altogether.” Peg’s voice held a certain disdain.

“I guess,” Jeremy said. He cuddled her closer.

Suzy took a Lodge truck. She parked in Eden Jacobs’s driveway, then took the path out back and knocked on the door of Roddy’s shed.

Roddy’s voice said, “It’s not locked,” as though he knew who it was. She pulled open the door but didn’t enter. He sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing his work pants and boots, the dirty pale blue T-shirt he’d been wearing since the night before. She stood in the doorway: “Can I come in?”

He said nothing immediately, but sat surveying her in a way that might have been insulting—this moment at which he seemed to be deciding something, thoughts flying through his head like numbers across a stock ticker as he tried to sort them, each idea in its place somewhere inside his flashing cortex. He was plotting the route they’d take once she stepped across that threshold, and Suzy could almost tell when he’d mapped it, because his face cleared and edged over into resolve. He took a breath, a swimmer ready to plunge, and said, “OK.”

Suzy stepped in and pulled the door behind her, then hovered above him in the close confines, the bare walls of unfinished wood, the smoky air.

“It’s not a very comfortable bed,” he told her.

“That’s OK,” she said. “I didn’t really come to sleep.”

He smiled, slightly, then pushed himself up. “Why don’t you sit down?”

She took his place on the cot, which was firmer than it looked; he’d laid a board between the mattress and the springs. He stood above her a moment, then knelt before her and parted her knees, edging himself between them. He watched her, his eyes over her clothes as if he was planning the order of their removal. His fingers were shaking, his breath infrequent, as if he had to remind himself: Breathe. He grabbed on to her T-shirt with both hands and pulled it straight up, inside-out, over her head, then brought the shirt to his face and inhaled before dropping it to the floor. He reached around her then to unhook her bra. It took a minute, but he got it, let the straps fall forward and slide from her arms. She watched his face while he held her breasts, closing his eyes again, memorizing the feel of them. She reached out and pulled his T-shirt off him then and dropped it to the bed beside her. The tan on his arms and neck stopped at the edges of where the shirt had been; his torso was pale and oddly hairless. Suzy reached out a hand, let her fingers graze his skin. He jumped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No,” he said. “No.” He drew his breath. She lifted her hand slowly. When her skin touched his he shuddered again but held his ground, eyes closed. She kept her hand on him, flattened her palm to his stomach.

She traced her finger over a broad scar that spread across his side and disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. “Where’s this from?”

“War wound,” he said, then stood abruptly, slipped out of his jeans, and rounded the bed. He raised the cover like a wing and beckoned her beneath it. She pulled off her shorts and slid in, and he curled her body into his. He held her too tightly, but that seemed right somehow.

THE GUEST ROOM AT Art and Penny Vaughn’s was Lorna’s old bedroom, which Penny had never been able to bring herself to redo. It hadn’t actually seemed all that ludicrous a notion that Lorna might return to it one day, that she might need a place to run to. But she’d never run.

The day after Lorna’s death, while Art sobbed to himself in the other room, Penny took a box of Hefty bags and a stack of cardboard boxes from the IGA into her daughter’s bedroom and did what she should have done twenty years before. She went through, removing photographs from the vanity mirror, stuffed animals from the bed and shelves. She folded and packed up the clothes of a seventeen-year-old girl to bring to the secondhand shop off-island, moth holes notwithstanding. Books she boxed for the library. The curtains Squee would have to live with, but she stripped the bed and remade it with plain white sheets and Art’s old army blankets for a more masculine feel. It was as though, for that day, Penny Vaughn had decided to adopt a different life as her own. She was preparing for a visit from her beloved grandson—not eradicating Lorna, just welcoming Squee.

If Penny thought it strange that Squee uttered not a single word as she ushered him through the house and the rituals of bedtime, both of which were somewhat alien to him, she said nothing of it. She tucked him to bed without much flutter, as she’d tucked Lorna in for the better part of seventeen years, closed the door, and went across the hall to join poor Art in his heartbroken slumber.