Osprey Island

“I’d say she got herself pregnant, by Bud,” Eden countered. “I’d say Lorna Vaughn got that man through the worst spring of his goddamn life. Chas was dead, killed over there . . .” She paused, as if mere mention of that war rendered her exhausted beyond speech. “That news,” she said, “it came pretty damn close to killing Bud and Nancy themselves. On Nancy you could see it—I mean, she very near lost her mind. But with Bud it was all on the inside. And maybe that’s no excuse—I’d never heard him do anything like it before and I’ve never heard about anything since . . .”

“Did he . . . ?” Roddy cut in, then stopped, sat on his hands and shook his head to stop himself from speaking.

“The thing is,” Eden said, as though in reply to the question he hadn’t asked, “it was Lorna who went to him. I’m not excusing. She was seventeen; he was a grown man. I’m just saying. Here’s a man whose son is dead. Again, I’m not excusing, but to lose a child . . .”

And Roddy knew that for Eden such a loss did not excuse, but it did perhaps explain something.

“Here was a man out of his mind with grief. Not right, not seeing the world through right eyes. And here was this beautiful girl. You remember how Lorna was then? Just a sprite, you know, a little spirit. Oh she was so pretty.”

Roddy nodded silently. He watched Eden’s eyes well up for the first time since the fire. And he watched as she swallowed, ordered the tears back down their ducts. “She just showed up one day—and I know this from after. She only told me later, years—I didn’t know at the time. It was only after when she came to me. Otherwise maybe I’d have been able to stop—oh, I don’t know. Anything’s easy to say now, I guess . . .

“She went to him.” Eden picked up her pace. “Showed up one day that spring after Chas died, this girl Bud’d known since she was in diapers showing up one day asking, Mister Chizek, could I have a ride out to Scallopshell Beach? I’m sure it’s where I lost my necklace in the parking lot last night . . . or some such thing . . .”

Roddy breathed in audibly. He squinted, as though in pain.

“I’m sure Bud knew the whole time it wasn’t right. But he’d been angling toward something. Something bad and wrong. Like he could get back at the universe that killed his son. Something like that, you know?

“Lorna’s a smart girl. You look at what she did. She had a plan how she was going to get out of her folks’ house, and if it was going to take her being pregnant to do it . . . And she’d been trying with Lance—not that Lance knew . . .” Eden scowled. “Not that the idiot took any protection against knocking her up! Look what she did: she didn’t go to some high school boy—someone who wouldn’t be able to keep his trap shut about it. No: she found someone who couldn’t tell. Bud was married, had children—OK, a child, then—he was grieving. She got him at his weakest.”

“That sounds a hell of a lot like an excuse to me,” Roddy said, and his voice was not without disdain.

“I’m not saying he was innocent,” Eden said quickly, “just that she was smart. I’m saying she knew what she was doing. Bud had money . . . But when it turned into Bud, I’m pregnant, it wasn’t money for an abortion she wanted—which is what he thought, of course—it was just his word that he’d never try to make a claim on that baby.”

“But that was . . . that wasn’t Squee . . .”

“Way before,” Eden said. “It must have been spring of her junior year. She knew she was pregnant early as a girl can know. She’d been waiting on it for months. And don’t think Penny Vaughn didn’t have her daughter into Doc Zobeck for a test the first morning she heard that girl retching in the toilet. They had her married off to Lance Squire before she was eight, ten weeks gone. It was a few weeks more before she came to me asking could she have some of the special tea— but it was too late for that. I wouldn’t do it past three weeks. Well, now. Back then I did. Six weeks at the latest, even then. Never any guarantee it’s going to work, and if it doesn’t you pretty much don’t have a choice but for a surgical abortion, what with how likely it is you’ll have birth defects from trying to do it with the herbs. It was after the wedding that Lorna came to me. She needed the pregnancy to get herself that far. She came to me when she didn’t want to go any farther.”

“And you said no . . .” Roddy prompted.

She was nodding. “And I said no. And we talked about it,” Eden spoke bitterly; she still castigated herself over the events that had followed. “And then Lorna—and I do blame myself for this, I do, because I had it there, in the house, I shouldn’t have, I was too easy about it . . . Lorna let herself in one day when your father and I were out, helped herself to what she needed, and did it on her own. That was the last. I got rid of everything. That was it.”

“So she did it herself?”