Osprey Island

It explained everything. The high school kids who just drove and drove around and around and around that little island, so fast they squealed the curves, grazing the guardrails. They’d swipe the fence on Sand Beach Road and leave their mark in the whitewash, streaking Daddy’s fender. It made the blaming easy. Citizens in their homes heard the skid: tires screaming on asphalt. They called the police, called the sheriff at home in his bed, said Sheriff, it’s the kids again out joyriding . . . and Davey Mitchell and Sheriff Harty roused themselves from sleep to get out and hunt the hooligans down and haul them in, maybe even keep them overnight in the island jail, which was fine; it was better, really, because for those kids anything was better than sitting still. Anything was better than driving your car up onto that ferry and knowing Chip or Matty or whoever was on duty that night would have a call in to your folks, who’d be down there hauling your ass back to bed before you could even smoke a godforsaken cigarette in peace. It wasn’t worth pulling your car onto the damn ferry, since you knew they were going to make you back it right off again.

Suzy pealed off the asphalt and onto the dirt road that bordered the old golf course. The truck slid in the sand, kicking up a spray of pebbles in its wake. She steered into the skid and barreled on up the hill. Rounding the rise, she could see both Roddy’s truck and Eden’s car in the driveway, and Suzy parked beside them, jumped out, and went down the ravine toward Roddy’s shack. She knocked, poked her head in, then turned, let the door fall shut, and went back up toward Eden’s. Halfway up the path, near the chicken coop, she saw the back door open onto Eden’s porch, and Roddy stepped outside. He raised a hand in tired greeting. Such a sweet man, Suzy thought, and the sight of him there in all his exhaustion was such a comfort. She couldn’t think of the last time a man had inspired comfort in her; she wasn’t sure it was something she’d ever felt. The thought made her desperately sad. If she could have done anything in the world right then— the kind of thing Mia asked constantly: If you could be anybody in the world who would it be? If you could have any candy in the whole world, which kind would you get?—if she could do anything right then, she thought, she’d have loaded herself and Roddy and Mia and Squee into Roddy’s truck, all their bags piled under tarps in back and held down with bailer’s twine. They’d drive to New York, enroll Squee at Mia’s school, find Roddy work easily doing construction, contracting . . . Families had been built on a hell of a lot less than that.

Roddy pulled off his hat, ran a hand over his head, back and forth, rubbing the hair one way and the other so it stuck up like he’d slept on it wrong. She climbed the porch steps and he began to speak, updating her on the latest developments as though he were the one with something to tell. “We’ve got one of your housekeeping girls inside.” He flicked his head toward the door, replaced his hat and secured it down as if preparing to go out into a storm. “Peg?” he said. “Peg, right?” He rolled his eyes slightly. “She’s worried . . .” He said it half-mockingly, then seemed to retract the judgment as it came out of his mouth and just shook his head, saying, “Worried about Squee. About what Lance might do to him.”

It was all the validation and prompting Suzy needed. “He’s dangerous,” she said. “Mia’s been hysterical all day—he is dangerous.” She felt the power in that reiteration; it became truer each time she said it. She felt a blooming sense of freedom, the freedom to say anything, because she was out of there! She was already gone, she was on that ferry, and nothing mattered anymore. She wasn’t going to get up tomorrow and do her father’s bidding another day. She wasn’t going to put her kid through this any longer, no matter how that kid felt about it after a day at the beach and three scoops of pistachio ice cream.

“Lance is dangerous,” she said again. She fought the urge just to keep saying it, over and over and over again. “Of all people, I should know how dangerous Lance Squire really is.”

“What?” Roddy was confused. “What do you . . . ?” And then he commanded himself to stop—all thought, all action, everything— until he understood what she was saying. She could see him shutting down, the way you’d close the doors and batten down the windows in the threat of an oncoming twister. Only it ceased to look like steeliness. It was a slackening, if anything—like the way Squee looked when Lance came at him.