Osprey Island (9 page)

“Did you want some peanuts or anything?” he asked.

She gaped. “You are really one of the oddest people I think I have ever met.” His expression sank. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s OK. Not like I haven’t heard that before.” He came toward the table she’d chosen, the bottle of Maker’s under his arm and a glass in either hand. He went to pour, and his grip was visibly shaky. Suzy laughed again. “You need a drink more than I do.”

“You’re right.”

She took the bottle, poured both glasses, passed one to him, and they drank. The large room was strangely still: a fleet of empty tables, a few sconces glowing dimly along the far wall. Outside, through the panoramic sliding glass doors, the lights across the bay in Menhadenport were beginning to go on as the sky pitched from blue to black. Suzy took a sip from her glass, then set the drink down decisively. “You
kissed
me this morning.”

Roddy sucked his lips. He was nodding continuously, almost rocking. “I guess I did.”

She waited for more. They drank.

“Is that . . .”—she pawed for words—“is it something I should be on the lookout for . . . something I should be warned you might do again?”

He rocked. He didn’t answer.

She sent a quick push of air through her nostrils. A minute passed. “What exactly are we doing here?” she said.

“Having a drink.”

“Why?”

He waited. “Because you said you wanted one . . . ?”

“Why’d you stay away so long?” she asked him suddenly.

He bristled. “I don’t really want to talk about that, OK?”

She felt a little cowed and covered it with brassiness. “Why’d you come back, then?”

He looked at her. “It’s home . . .”

“Not
my
home,” Suzy said.

“You can
say
that.”

“You don’t know me,” she said, her tone meaner than she’d intended.

“You’re right.” He stood up. “I don’t.” He pushed in his chair. “Sorry to bother you.” He turned away.

“Wait,” Suzy said. “Wait!” Her voice got louder. “Please . . .”

Roddy stopped and faced her again. “What?” It came out sounding like,
What more do you want from me?

“Come back.” Her voice was gentle, but awkward. “Stay. It’s not the kind of night to be alone.”

Roddy snorted a laugh. “You mean,
you
don’t want to be alone.”

“I
don’t,
” she agreed.

He nodded once. “Yeah. I’m not some guy to fill in the time for you. Sorry.” He turned again and went out the sliding door.

Suzy stared for a minute. Then she got up and went after him.

Suzy found Roddy sitting in his truck in the north parking lot. The keys were in the ignition, but he hadn’t turned the engine over, was just sitting there, hand at the starter, one leg bouncing like crazy, his body hunched forward as if he were driving in a snowstorm, struggling to see the road ahead. The windows were open. Suzy knocked on the passenger door, then opened it and climbed in. “What the hell is going on?”

His leg stopped for a few seconds as he paused to look at her, then resumed as he spoke. “OK, let’s not even do this.” He tried to hurry the words out of himself and will them far away. “No one kissed anyone, OK? I can’t be thinking about that, all right? Lorna’s dead. We’ve got to build the new laundry. Guests might as well start arriving in ten minutes for how ready we’ll be. I don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen to Squee. To fucking Lance. The poor pathetic bastard. What the fuck is going to happen to Lance?” Roddy’s voice was breaking.

Suzy stared down at her hands in her lap. She said, “I don’t know.” Then she lifted her head, unclasped her hands, and turned on the seat to face Roddy, who was still staring straight ahead, navigating that imaginary dark and winding road.

She slid over, took his head in both her hands, turned his face to hers and kissed his mouth. She pulled back, looked in his eyes, then did it again.

He pulled away. “We’re in the
parking
lot . . .”

Suzy’s hands slumped to her lap. “I’m sorry.” She reached for the door. “Good night.”

Roddy sat alone in the truck for a long minute before he turned the keys in the ignition and drove home.

On the porch of the Lodge, the staff members were drinking as usual. Suzy nodded as she passed, a sad, acknowledging smile. Jeremy raised a hand. He was sitting on the deck, close with Peg, their backs propped against a pillar. Suzy lifted her hand to return the greeting, but it was Peg who spoke. “It’s true, is it, that you’re taking over for Lorna, then, Miss Chizek? As the head of housekeeping?”

“
Suzy,
please. Please:
Suzy,
” she said. Then, “Looks like it. At least until we find someone else.” She shifted her weight. “I feel bad for
you
guys,” she said. “I’m no housekeeper . . .”

Peg laughed a little. They were all self-conscious: Was it ruthlessly inappropriate to smile when someone was dead? Peg glanced around, noticing Suzy was alone. “Mia?” Peg said. “How’s she been holding up, then?”

“She’s OK, I think. She seems OK. I’m not sure how she’s supposed to be dealing, really. She’s sleeping upstairs.” Suzy gestured in the direction of the Lodge above them.

Peg was extraordinarily poised and efficient. Even lounging on her boyfriend, she held herself in good posture, straightening even taller as she spoke. “Please,” she said to Suzy, “if you’re ever in need of someone to mind her, I’d be pleased to. She’s a lovely girl.”

“That’s very sweet of you.” Suzy was used to such offers at the Lodge. She pushed it aside in her mind. Babysitters weren’t particularly necessary when you had your mother living up the hill. Except perhaps if that mother was temporarily, incapacitatingly drugged up and knocked out. Or when you didn’t much feel like explaining to your mother, as was often required, where it was you thought you were going at such an hour and when exactly you expected to be home. “Actually,” Suzy said, taking a step closer to Peg and Jeremy. “Actually, were you planning on hanging out here awhile tonight?”

Peg looked to Jeremy, who met her glance. They turned back to Suzy simultaneously, faces wide and blank, heads wagging,
yeah, no,
no plans, why?

“Mia’s asleep,” Suzy said. “Chances are she’ll stay that way. I could really stand to get out for a few hours. Just to clear my head a little.”

Peg was already waving her off. “Yeah, grand, go on. We’ll look in on her.”

“That’d be great,” Suzy said. “Thanks.” She was already moving back toward the parking lot.

Peg settled back into the crook of Jeremy’s arm. She watched Suzy go. “I’d be unable to do that myself, I imagine.”

“Do what?” Jeremy nuzzled her hair.

“Go off and leave my child at such a . . . time, you know? I imagine I’d be unwilling to separate altogether.” Peg’s voice held a certain disdain.

“I guess,” Jeremy said. He cuddled her closer.

Suzy took a Lodge truck. She parked in Eden Jacobs’s driveway, then took the path out back and knocked on the door of Roddy’s shed.

Roddy’s voice said, “It’s not locked,” as though he knew who it was. She pulled open the door but didn’t enter. He sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing his work pants and boots, the dirty pale blue T-shirt he’d been wearing since the night before. She stood in the doorway: “Can I come in?”

He said nothing immediately, but sat surveying her in a way that might have been insulting—this moment at which he seemed to be deciding something, thoughts flying through his head like numbers across a stock ticker as he tried to sort them, each idea in its place somewhere inside his flashing cortex. He was plotting the route they’d take once she stepped across that threshold, and Suzy could almost tell when he’d mapped it, because his face cleared and edged over into resolve. He took a breath, a swimmer ready to plunge, and said, “OK.”

Suzy stepped in and pulled the door behind her, then hovered above him in the close confines, the bare walls of unfinished wood, the smoky air.

“It’s not a very comfortable bed,” he told her.

“That’s OK,” she said. “I didn’t really come to sleep.”

He smiled, slightly, then pushed himself up. “Why don’t you sit down?”

She took his place on the cot, which was firmer than it looked; he’d laid a board between the mattress and the springs. He stood above her a moment, then knelt before her and parted her knees, edging himself between them. He watched her, his eyes over her clothes as if he was planning the order of their removal. His fingers were shaking, his breath infrequent, as if he had to remind himself:
Breathe.
He grabbed on to her T-shirt with both hands and pulled it straight up, inside-out, over her head, then brought the shirt to his face and inhaled before dropping it to the floor. He reached around her then to unhook her bra. It took a minute, but he got it, let the straps fall forward and slide from her arms. She watched his face while he held her breasts, closing his eyes again, memorizing the feel of them. She reached out and pulled his T-shirt off him then and dropped it to the bed beside her. The tan on his arms and neck stopped at the edges of where the shirt had been; his torso was pale and oddly hairless. Suzy reached out a hand, let her fingers graze his skin. He jumped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “No,” he said. “No.” He drew his breath. She lifted her hand slowly. When her skin touched his he shuddered again but held his ground, eyes closed. She kept her hand on him, flattened her palm to his stomach.

She traced her finger over a broad scar that spread across his side and disappeared beneath the waistband of his pants. “Where’s this from?”

“War wound,” he said, then stood abruptly, slipped out of his jeans, and rounded the bed. He raised the cover like a wing and beckoned her beneath it. She pulled off her shorts and slid in, and he curled her body into his. He held her too tightly, but that seemed right somehow.

THE GUEST ROOM AT Art and Penny Vaughn’s was Lorna’s old bedroom, which Penny had never been able to bring herself to redo. It hadn’t actually seemed all that ludicrous a notion that Lorna might return to it one day, that she might need a place to run to. But she’d never run.

The day after Lorna’s death, while Art sobbed to himself in the other room, Penny took a box of Hefty bags and a stack of cardboard boxes from the IGA into her daughter’s bedroom and did what she should have done twenty years before. She went through, removing photographs from the vanity mirror, stuffed animals from the bed and shelves. She folded and packed up the clothes of a seventeen-year-old girl to bring to the secondhand shop off-island, moth holes notwithstanding. Books she boxed for the library. The curtains Squee would have to live with, but she stripped the bed and remade it with plain white sheets and Art’s old army blankets for a more masculine feel. It was as though, for that day, Penny Vaughn had decided to adopt a different life as her own. She was preparing for a visit from her beloved grandson—not eradicating Lorna, just welcoming Squee.

If Penny thought it strange that Squee uttered not a single word as she ushered him through the house and the rituals of bedtime, both of which were somewhat alien to him, she said nothing of it. She tucked him to bed without much flutter, as she’d tucked Lorna in for the better part of seventeen years, closed the door, and went across the hall to join poor Art in his heartbroken slumber.

Ten minutes later, Squee had his shorts and sneakers back on and was out the window and on his way back up the hill toward Eden’s.

GIVEN AN OPTION, it’s not likely that either Suzy or Roddy would have chosen sex on a camp cot. But sometimes such constraints render certain couplings more urgent. Roddy and Suzy were restricted by space, by time, and by circumstance, and driven by a desire that felt like necessity. It made such sense, and felt, for both of them, so good that they found themselves surprised, laughing afterward at how their bodies were like dogs, that they were the owners watching their puppies gallop and play.
They sure seem to like each other, don’t they?
Yeah, they sure do.

And then the world came back to them, and they remembered in earnest the things that had led them to the place they were in.

“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” Roddy asked.

“What do you mean?” Suzy balked.

“I guess I start clearing . . . debris . . .” He said it as if it were an unfamiliar word, difficult to speak. “Make way for that new-and-improved laundry!”

Suzy said, “Please don’t hate me because my father’s such a . . .”

Roddy propped himself on an elbow, touched her hair. “That hasn’t ever been much of a problem,” he said, laughing a little.

She craned up and kissed him, ran her hand across his chest, down his side. “Really, how’d you get this scar?” She traced her fingertips over its surface again. “It’s a nasty one, huh?”

“Yup,” Roddy said. He pulled the sheet up to cover himself, bent in to kiss her.

She pulled away. “Not your favorite thing in the world to discuss, huh?”

“No.” He paused, then relented. “I was working out West at a sawmill for a while . . . You don’t really want the details.”

“OK,” she said, though it was clearly not.

The air outside was awhirl with early-summer crickets. “What’s your tomorrow like?” he asked.

“I could check my appointment book.”

“That was a joke, right?”

“Yeah.” She lay back down, ran both hands through her hair and held it by the ends away from her head as if to yank it from the scalp. “Jesus, I guess depending on Mia, how she is, I guess I take on my new and illustrious position as head housekeeper! I guess I might get called on to help plan a funeral.”

Roddy closed his eyes, shook his head back and forth.

“I should get back,” she admitted.

“Yeah.”

“I’d rather stay . . .”

Roddy nodded. “Your bed back at the Lodge’ll give you a hell of a better night’s sleep than here.”

“A little lonely, though . . .”

Roddy went back to shaking his head. “Oh boy,” he said. “Oh boy, am I in for it now . . .”

Suzy grinned mischievously. “And why’s that?”