Osprey Island

SQUEE SAW THE REMAINS of the laundry shack for the first time the next morning from the window of his father’s truck as they drove to his mother’s funeral. It was nine a.m., and the sun was shining through the ruins. He glimpsed it for only a moment, passing, craning back over the seat to see as Lance pealed out onto the black-top. In his mind it had looked different. He’d last seen it ablaze, in the night, and the fire had seemed so whole and so consuming that it was hard to imagine anything surviving. Over the days, thinking about it, he still couldn’t help thinking of the fire specifically as something that his mom would be so sad about, and then it would click in that she had gone with it. Squee had somehow been imagining the burnt site of the laundry room fire that killed his mother as a beautiful place. Or even just like the fire pit left over from when the waiters and housekeepers made a bonfire on the beach at night and sang and danced and held hands and kissed each other in the glow of the flames. If you went down the next morning, kicked at the embers and remains of log with your foot, underneath, sometimes, the coals were still warm, and the black of the pit was so black and so complete, you could look at it and remember what it had been like the night before, how beautiful it—everyone—had been.

This fire pit wasn’t beautiful. It was awful, a trash heap. Squee realized how much it smelled, the burn. Once, his mom had fallen asleep on the couch in their house, and her cigarette had fallen to the carpet, which melted out around it in a spreading circle. The house had smelled for days like smoking rubber. That’s what it was like. Squee’s stomach twisted on itself, made a rock rise under his diaphragm. When Lance stopped at a red light on Route 11, Squee rolled down his window, leaned out, and vomited quickly onto the pavement below. Lance looked over at him, ready to yell, then saw how Squee was taking such care to lean out far, not to hit the outside of the truck door, and he reached out and patted Squee’s shoulder.

Attendance at Lorna Squire’s funeral was not mandatory for Lodge employees, but it was “encouraged.” Gavin, Brigid, and Peg rode in Jeremy’s car to Our Lady of the Island Chapel, a few blocks from town center. The church lot was full, so they parked on the street in front of Bayshore Drug and hoped island police would turn a blind eye to the half-hour parking limit, on account of the occasion. The day was warm, the sky clear, the sun bright. It was the wrong weather for a funeral. Right for a sailing regatta, a pool party.

Brigid hadn’t wanted to come. The idea of seeing Lance at his wife’s funeral felt creepily wrong to her somehow. But Peg had convinced her that not going would be a lot weirder in the end. And Gavin was going, and she didn’t want to seem callous.

None of them had anything by way of funeral attire. The closest the boys could get was to wear their work clothes: black pants, white shirts. The girls had come to Osprey with backpacks of beach clothes and bar clothes, and not much of either. They went to Lorna’s funeral in black stretch miniskirts and sandals.

Lance had in fact barricaded Squee in the night before, in the only windowless room in their cabin, lest he attempt another escape. Squee had slept on the bathroom floor and looked it. Lance let him out five minutes before they left for the chapel to “put on some good clothes.” Squee unearthed a pair of dress pants, hand-me-downs from Reesa’s boy that were already too short in the leg, and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt of a sickly shade of mauve that someone had left behind in a room one summer. Suzy cursed herself later for not having thought to lay something out for him when they’d cleaned the cabin.

Lance wasn’t showered—what with Squee shut in the bathroom— and he was unshaven. That he’d combed his hair back with water from the kitchen sink and put on a cheap suit (that Lorna’d bought for him to wear to Squee’s graduation from kindergarten a few years back, which he’d bailed on anyway) only made him look more disreputable.

Understanding had caught up with Penny Vaughn, precipitated by Squee’s midnight flight from her home, and she now looked precisely like the mother of a dead woman. Art had been a wreck for days, and his dark suit wasn’t doing anything to compensate. Merle Squire looked worn—but, then, Merle always looked worn, and she had just spent three days with Lance, which would break anyone down. Nancy Chizek had packed so much makeup onto her face she looked twenty years older than she was, and Suzy and Roddy were doing everything they could just to keep their eyes open. The only one who looked composed in the least was Bud Chizek, who, despite his suit, looked ready to grab a club and tee off.