Osprey Island (23 page)

“Whose baby was it, then?” Roddy asked.

Eden stopped and just stared at him as if she couldn’t rationally comprehend what he was asking. Was he a moron? Had he not heard a damn word she’d said? The look on her face was of utter disbelief. “Bud,” she said. “Bud.”

Roddy’s face bulged like he was going to vomit into his hands.
“Bud
got
Lorna pregnant?”
He spoke as if to lay those words out in plain sight and see if they evaporated like figments or had the weight to sit and submit to scrutiny.

“I’d say she got her
self
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?”

“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.

Roddy hadn’t slept much, and his state of animation was robotic at best. He drove by the Lodge first to get the extra set of keys, then went around to the ferry and parked his truck. The morning was bright, and he scrounged behind the seat of the truck for a hat. There was only the ugly purple one from the laundry company that Suzy’d left there, but it probably looked better than his hair did, so he pulled it on and walked toward the docks. Though the sun promised a warm day, it was windy that morning, the flag whipping against its pole with tireless ferocity. The sound of the halyard smacking up against the mast was a sound that brought Roddy back to a number of different places in his life. Anywhere there was a flagpole there was that sound, rope against metal, clanging in the wind. It was, Roddy thought, both comforting and maddening, if such a thing was possible.

The ferry line at that hour was full of Islanders who worked early morning mainland jobs and drove down every day before five-thirty when the boats started running to be the first ones across. There were two boats on that morning, and Roddy watched them pass each other in the bay. The crossing was hardly more than a mile, took seven minutes, maybe nine in bad weather, poor visibility, ice.

The Osprey Island ferry landing was one slip, with two breaker walls of tall wooden pylons stretching out from the dock like open arms. The pylons were near-rotted, of a wood washed gray with decades of seagull droppings. No two posts were the same height or thickness, but each one had a seagull perched atop like a sentry. Roddy watched as the boat approached, the gulls eyeing it as if they were playing a game of chicken, just daring that tremendous hunk of steel to come within a breath of their roosts before they took off in a cacophonous swarm of flapping screams and cries. The ferry was a behemoth of a raft, a floating platform—like an ice rink, almost— with a watchtower sticking up from the top for the ferryman to see out while he steered. The ferries (there were three, though no more than two ever ran, one or the other perpetually in need of repair) were painted white, buffered around the sides with old truck tires strapped on to protect the ship—and cushion its landings—as she lumbered into the shore, barreling against the pylon walls, which swayed and creaked under the pressure but always managed to bounce the boat to the opposite wall like a pinball, back and forth as she shimmied her way into the slip and the ferrymen secured her to the dock.

Chip Gruder was captaining that morning, and a younger guy whom Roddy didn’t know personally, named Derrick Darlington, was working the dock, directing cars. He swung open a wide chain-link gate and stepped out of the line of traffic as he motioned the first car off the boat, up the ramp, and onto dry land. It was a full ferry, twelve cars or so, engines turning over, drivers refastening seat belts, passengers preparing to disembark. Roddy stood by the ticket shack as the cars filed off and Derrick turned to the line of cars behind him, started motioning them onto the boat. Matty Lux was at the bow, guiding drivers into place, getting them squeezed in tight; it was a puzzle, packing on as many cars as the ferry could hold. Roddy waited until all the vehicles were on before he boarded with a few other foot passengers—two guys with lunch pails and a man in a business suit—who’d come up behind him, as well as two teenage girls who emerged from the ticket shack in waitress uniforms, clearly heading over to work the breakfast shift at Baldy’s in Menhadenport. Derrick Darlington stopped each of the pedestrians, exchanged brief words, and punched tickets for them from the thick rolled pad in his gloved hands. When Roddy got to him, Derrick said, “One way, round trip?”

“One way, on
foot.
”

Derrick lifted his eyes from the ticket book. “You picking up the Lodge truck?”

Roddy nodded.

Derrick flexed the hole-puncher in his grip as if it was cramping his hand. “Trouble with the staff again?” He spoke like a jaded disciplinarian, though he could not have been more than nineteen himself and had the remnants of a nasty-looking black eye on his suntanned face.

Roddy shrugged.

“You know who did it?” the kid said. “Who left the truck?”

Roddy just stood there looking at him. “Yeah,” he said curtly. And then he clamped his jaw shut and stepped onto the boat. His fare would go on the Lodge account.

The water was choppy, waves reflecting sunlight like undulating glass, and the ferry rocked and sloshed in the slip, bucking up against the pylons, which creaked and groaned in response. These were, for Roddy Jacobs, the most familiar sights and sounds in the world. Just the smells of this place—the fishy seaweed rot, the salt-drenched, sun-baked wood, gasoline, engine exhaust—all whipped by the wind and sprayed from the water in a fine mist as the ferry pulled away from the dock. Roddy leaned against the railing and turned his face to the sky, eyes closed against the sun. He heard the honking call of the ferry whistle, the churn of the rudders beneath him, the push of water through the gunwales, the clanking of chains on the gate, and the constant arrhythmic clang of rope against metal as halyard smacked flagpole atop the captain’s tower.

If there were other places like this in the world, Roddy Jacobs hadn’t found them. And he’d traveled plenty. Two decades, and travel was mostly what he’d done. He’d been up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, through Canada, and down to Mexico and below. He’d even ridden ferries—every ferry he could find—all over Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, across Lake Michigan and Lake Champlain and through the locks of Sault Sainte Marie. He’d been to Cape Cod, and Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and St. Simon’s. Block Island, Shelter Island, Staten Island, Fire Island. And all of them were nice—he was sure that the people who’d grown up in Vineyard Haven and Vinalhaven cherished their ferries the way he cherished Osprey’s and thought their island the
most
beautiful,
most
breathtaking,
most
comforting place in the world. He was glad for those people who had their places. Because he had his. Roddy Jacobs had longed for his home every day he’d spent elsewhere. It was only on returning that he fully realized—a gulp of ocean air pounding into his lungs as though he hadn’t really breathed for twenty years—how much will it had taken to keep himself away.

He knew very well who’d left the truck illegally parked in Menhadenport, though he was finding it hard to get his mind to focus on what that really meant. Bud hadn’t even known which truck it was, told Roddy to take all the spare keys, but Roddy’d gone to the vehicle shed and grabbed only the set for the tan Ford, though he suspected he’d find the truck unlocked, keys on the floor just beneath the seat. He didn’t expect there’d be a note—she couldn’t know who’d be the first to see it—and, after all, she’d already come to say good-bye. And then, after good-bye, he imagined she’d gone back to the Lodge. She’d have thrown everything into their luggage. Probably even stripped the beds to make less work for the Irish girls. She’d have coaxed Mia out of the bathroom with promises she probably never planned to make good on. Or Mia would have come out on her own, teary-eyed and sleepy and just wanting her mother, all that anger replaced by the simple need to be held in her mother’s arms. And to that end, Suzy would have obliged, hauling down all the bags by herself, then going back upstairs to lift Mia to her chest and carry her, floppy-limbed and docile, to the waiting truck.

It would have been late, Roddy imagined. But how late? Before midnight, all those waiters and housekeepers still lounging on the deck? Would they have seen her? Wondered what was going on? Or had it been very late, the Lodge silent but for Suzy’s patter up and down the central stairs? Had they missed the last ferry, twelve a.m., and slept in the truck on the Osprey side, right by where his own truck was parked now, Mia breathing softly on the seat, Suzy dozing off, then waking every few minutes to a rumble in the running engine or a car on Ferry Road? Had anyone come by—police, security, the usual nosy Islander—to see why on earth someone—
My goodness!
Not just
someone
! Suzy Chizek!
—was sleeping in a beat-up truck in the Osprey Island Ferry lot? Or had they slept there peacefully until the horn awakened them? Or maybe Suzy set an alarm, making sure they were on the first ferry across, in time to catch the six o’clock train for New York? No, he realized, they had to have gone over the night before; the guys on the morning boat didn’t know who’d left the truck; they hadn’t seen her go over. That she’d left it in a No Parking zone was nothing but a final
fuck you
to her father. Even through his confusion, Roddy was able to see that Suzy Chizek was the kind of person who really did need to have the final
fuck you.
He had at least that much objectivity left.

What was he supposed to have done? Begged her to stay? Agreed to go with her? Watched her sail off toward the other shore, then realized—
I cannot let you go!
—and dived into the water after the ferry, trying to grab on to something that was already half gone? That wasn’t Roddy. Truth be told, it would have been just like Roddy to waffle and hedge, agonize over the decision, entertain every option: stay, leave, stay, leave . . . And then he’d finally say,
Yes! I’ll come with
you! I’m coming!
They’d board the boat together for their final crossing. And then, about halfway across the bay he’d realize,
I can’t do
this.
A moment later he’d be leaping from the back of the ferry, going down in the foam and waves, choking, sputtering, and then finding his breath as the boat moved on, left him treading water, exhausted, in the middle of the bay, with a lot to explain to a whole lot of people on both shores.

Stuck between the steering wheel and dashboard she’d left a note on a folded flier from the Harbor Department Store, Menhadenport. The outside was not addressed. Roddy unfolded the paper. As he read the note, and read it over again, and again, conflicting emotions vied inside him. He didn’t know whether he felt more heartbroken or disappointed.

Dad—Please try to forgive me. I’m sorry. Suzy

Suzy Chizek couldn’t let a burning bridge burn.

It was seven before Roddy got back to the Lodge, parked the truck, and went up the hill to find Bud to ask for a lift down to the ferry to retrieve his own truck. He found the Chizeks eating breakfast at their kitchen table. If they had any inkling of what their daughter had just done to them they didn’t betray it; they looked just as discontented as usual.

Nancy was already standing as he came in the door. “Coffee, Roddy? I’m sure you haven’t eaten. You want some pancakes?”

Roddy looked to Bud. “I could use a ride down to pick up my truck at the ferry.”

Bud nodded squarely at the table, mouth full, jaw working. When he finished chewing he said, “Sure, sure, have a bite first,” and pointed his chin toward an empty chair.

“Thank you,” Roddy told Nancy. He took a seat, removed his cap, hung it on the back of the chair, and smoothed his hair down with his hands. Nancy brought him a Pyrex mug of coffee, weak but hot.

Bud wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Lance?” he said.

Roddy waited a moment for more, but nothing came. “Lance?” He shook his head, not understanding.

Bud looked back, confused by Roddy’s confusion. “Was it Lance that left the truck in Menhadenport?” He said it the way they all did, fast, and dulled: m’NAYdnpore.

“No, sir,” said Roddy. Nancy passed him a plate of pancakes and bacon, which made him feel even stranger. It didn’t seem likely he’d get to eat a bite of it. It was hard to imagine that once the news had been sprung Bud was going to stay at the table sipping coffee. Or that he’d leave Roddy there to finish breakfast.