Osprey Island

The thing was, they did care. And it wasn’t that sex didn’t feel good, but about three seconds after it stopped feeling like the most amazing thing you ever felt in your life, about three seconds later they did care about the children and the laundry and the dead people and the live people and everything-the-fuck-else there was to worry about. So they got up. They went back to the world. And then they scrambled back to Roddy’s shack as soon as they possibly could, because that was the only way they were getting through any of it.

It was past twelve that night when Suzy left Roddy and drove back to the Lodge, not much more than a five-minute drive on the dirt road that cut between the back of the hill into which the Jacobses’ place was wedged and the beach below. The night was warm, the air alive with crickets and fireflies. You felt it outside of you, inside of you, everywhere, that kind of summer night.

Suzy took the Lodge truck down that rutted, pitted road, bouncing in the seat, stressed about getting back to Mia, about having to get up at the crack of dawn when Mia inevitably got up, stressed about whatever else she might have done wrong, since that’s what being on Osprey made her feel: as if she had done something wrong but didn’t know what it was yet. Whether or not her father and mother were actually watching her, her father and mother were always watching her, and she had always done something wrong.

To the right of the road were woods—if you bushwhacked through you’d hit the ravine down beyond Eden’s place. On Suzy’s left, the old golf course stretched out, overgrown, unused, except as a sledding hill in the winter. They’d built a new eighteen-hole course out by Wickham Beach, let this one go to seed. The dirt road had begun its life as a golf cart path, then became trafficked by locals when they realized what a shortcut it was. It pounded the shit out of the underside of a car, but the locals drove trucks mostly, and it kept the summerers in their Saabs out of the way and on the pavement, since they didn’t know how to drive dirt anyway and were more nuisance than the raccoons who got plowed down nightly as they went scampering across from the golf course to the woods. Bam. There were always a few good raccoon carcasses sprawled across the dirt road, their insides baking into the sand.

Coming over the first rise and around the sharp bend by what was once the seventh hole, Suzy spotted in the headlights, on the side of the road, what looked to be a raccoon. She slowed. They always waited, then dashed out in front of your car at the last second, like the kamikaze squirrels in autumn who got drunk on fallen fermented fruit from crab apple trees and started racing zigzags across Route 11. Suzy peered out, straining to see farther than her headlights’ range. She prepared to brake, anticipating the raccoon’s mad dash. And then as she got closer, she realized it wasn’t a raccoon. And as she got closer still, she realized it was Squee.

She swerved to a stop, yanked the emergency brake, leaving the engine running, and jumped down from the truck. Squee stood, frozen, off to the side of the headlights’ beam as though he couldn’t decide whether to run toward Suzy or away from her. Suzy managed to quell her alarm and slowed as she approached him.

“Just out for a stroll?” she said, her voice modulated.

Squee didn’t say anything.

“You . . . um . . . need a ride or something?” she asked nonchalantly.

Squee shrugged, suspicious.

She got close and squatted down to his level. “Pretty late to be out alone, huh?”

Squee shrugged again, but there was concession to it. He knew she was right.

“You going anywhere in particular, or just walking?”

In the half-lit, overgrown field, Squee scratched at his shin. His fingers came away touched with blood, a mosquito-bite scab. He wiped them on his T-shirt.

“Come on,” Suzy said, beginning to stand again, “let me give you a ride. I’d hate to leave you walking up that hill in the dark. Come on. Hop in. Where to?” She started toward the truck, as if to assume he’d follow. He did.

“Seat belt, please,” she instructed. Squee complied. “So, where can I drop you off?”

Squee gestured with one limp hand up the hill, reluctantly, as though he hadn’t had a destination in mind, but since Suzy was asking, well, he guessed he might as well go to Roddy’s. She pulled a U-turn on the old golf course and drove back the way she’d come.

Pulling into Eden’s driveway, Suzy shut the truck’s lights. “You wait here a sec?” she asked Squee. “I’ll see who’s up?”

Roddy was already at the door when she got there. He looked puzzled.

“I’ve got Squee in the truck . . .” She lifted her chin toward the driveway.

Roddy interrupted, stepped out onto the stoop, as if he didn’t believe her. “What?” It was too far for him to see.

“He was coming up the golf course road.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“This is clearly where he was headed.”

“Good thing he didn’t make it about half an hour earlier!”