Osprey Island

“Except it didn’t work,” Eden said. “And god knows what she’d done, how much she took of what . . . But the risks of birth defects— it’s not even risks, it’s guarantees. I’d told her all that. Before, I mean. And then she came to me hysterical. Confessed what she’d done. Begging me for help: What do I do? What can I do?” Eden paused. She stared down at her hands on the picnic table. “And I did feel responsible. I was angrier than I think I’d ever been at a living person in my life—I swear to you I could have strangled her, I could have—but it felt like my fault, or responsibility, at least. I got her to a doctor on the mainland. Someone to do it surgically.” She paused again. “We didn’t speak for years, me and Lorna. Embarrassment. Anger. We didn’t speak until she got herself pregnant again—with Squee—and she came asking for my help. She said she knew I knew what was right, and all she wanted was to do right by this baby. This miracle baby that she swore up and down was Lance’s, which I believed for all of five minutes. About as long as Lance believed it, I’d guess. But she wanted to do things right, take care of that baby. And that’s when Lorna and I got close, then, when she was carrying Squee. Until he was a year or so and she was back to drinking, and everything else, and avoiding me like the plague since I was the only one who’d say right out, Lorna, what the hell are you doing to yourself?”

Roddy sat at the picnic table a long time, even after his mother had gone up to the house to finally start dinner. He held his head in his hands as if everything inside might come cracking out if he let it go. This was everything he’d tried to steer his life away from. In high school geometry they taught about how parallel lines never intersected, and he’d tried to run his life on that principle: everything on its own separate track. But Osprey Island had too many tracks and not enough acreage to spare each its private orbit.

Nineteen

THE SHORE RECEDES, AND I TOO ON THE SHORE

Much harm has been done by guessing at a bird’s motives, and assuming always that he is in mischief. I have rejected all conjectures of the sort, and accepted only what has been thoroughly proved, and reported by trustworthy witnesses.

—OLIVE THORNE MILLER, The Second Book of Birds

BUD CHIZEK WAS AWAKENED the next morning by a phone call from Chip Gruder down at the ferry. “Don’t suppose you got any idea why one of your trucks is sitting in my No Parking five-a.m.to-midnight zone, mainland side?” Chip said.

“Mainland?” Bud repeated groggily.

“Yes, sir.” Chip’s inquisition voice was practiced; the man had three sons of his own, and he’d seen it all before. “We in for another summer of your staffers running wild, Bud?”

Bud was in no mood for a coy ferryman, especially not before he’d had his morning coffee. He told Chip, “I’ll handle it.” They’d had some problems in the past with this sort of thing. Lodge waiters getting drunk, driving over to the mainland for a movie, or getting a motel room, or getting in a fight, winding up in jail. Once, a Lodge worker had just disappeared altogether, took off, hopped a bus or a train from Menhadenport, had his roommate mail his clothes after him.

“You want I’ll call Lovetsky’s, have her towed back over to you?”

Bud growled, “I’ll have a man on the next boat,” and slammed down the phone.

He tried Cybelle down at the front desk but got no answer and slammed the receiver down again, cursing the girl, until he put on his glasses and saw that the bureau clock said five-thirty-five. Chip Gruder hadn’t wasted any time calling.

In the double bed beside him, Nancy lay on her back, a silk embroidered sleep mask over her eyes, pretending to be dead to the world, as wakefulness could have gotten her name added to the roster of people Bud might send to fetch a truck in Menhadenport. Bud wrestled himself out from under the bed sheets and went hunting for a phone directory. In a cloth-lined basket by the downstairs phone he found an Osprey telephone book—one hundred pages, if that, three by five, spiral-bound, the cover an airbrushed photo of an osprey silhouetted in its nest against an orange and purple sunset, the words Osprey Island 1988 sprawling across the darkened beach as though painted in fire. He looked up Jacobs. If there was anyone you didn’t have to worry about waking up at some ungodly hour of the morning it was Eden Jacobs, who, people were known to say, probably woke up at the first crack of light or before, since it was suspected she took her beloved chickens to bed with her. Bud dialed.