Reesa’s face registered amusement and confusion. “There was a girl between Heather and Janna? For how long—three days?”
“Not even, I don’t think,” Suzy said.
Reesa’s good humor soured. Her hands went to her hips and her smile puckered in. She was awfully protective of Janna. “So, he’s a player.”
Suzy nodded ruefully. “Apparently he just disappeared on Brigid yesterday . . . One night he’s inviting her to sleep with him on the beach—” Both women shook their heads, rolled their eyes. People came from off-island and thought it romantic to camp on the beach, while Islanders knew far too well that it was neither romantic nor comfortable, and between the sand crabs and the mosquitoes it ranked up there as one of the more regrettable experiences to be had on Osprey. “—And the next night he’s nowhere to be found. Not a word of anything, Brigid says—no explanation, no apology, nothing . . . She’s sort of crushed,” Suzy said. “I feel for her.”
Reesa frowned. “And here I was getting all psyched for Janna. I’m plotting the wedding, packing her up, shipping her off to California.” She’d spent the day envisioning it alclass="underline" the dress (strapless, with a full skirt, in something darker, not white, something to set off Janna’s paleness—maybe red, deep red), the reception (here, at the Lodge, in fall, when the summer folk were gone, as the leaves began to change— maybe the dress would be a burnt orange, or an autumn red, like Japanese maple), the sweet farewells, the infrequent visits home, just for the weekend, a baby or two in tow . . .
Suzy said, “I don’t think he’s looking to take someone away with him.”
Reesa didn’t get it.
“I think he’s looking for a way onto Osprey.”
“What is he, insane?” Now Reesa was worried. Understanding lit her face. “He’s just looking for a way back to Heather! I’m such an idiot!” She smacked her own forehead in emphasis. “Here I am, just thinking, La la la, a love story for Janna . . . He’s just trying to stay close to Heather! Oh Jesus . . . poor Janna! What a little shit.”
Suzy, coming quickly to regret the leaps of logic being made from her nuggets of gossip, began to hedge. “I don’t know, Reese. For all we know it could all be in earnest. They’re kids. He’s probably not scheming to—”
“Scheming or not,” Reesa said, firm conviction in her voice, “I don’t need some stupid college boy messing with Janna. That’d be just enough to scare her off the outside world. And I wonder why will no one leave this place?”
Suzy softened. “They leave,” she said quietly. “Some do, some leave . . .”
But Suzy was really talking about herself, and now Reesa was thinking of Jasper. Suzy had made it off, but so many of them— always the ones who were dying to get off—they’d last six months, maybe a year, and then they were back. Most of them. Suzy joked that it was like prison: you spent too long in that once you got out you were so scared you started making trouble just to land yourself back. But that was Suzy. Most people, if you asked them seriously, would say that if you grew up on Osprey you had ideas about how it would be to live out in the world across the bay. Osprey was your childhood; it was your troubled teen years. It was what you knew to want to escape. Then you got out and saw how things were out there, and then you understood how good you had it on that idyllic little island, where people knew who you were and what you came from, where it was safe to walk at night, where people took care. On Osprey you had credit at every store in town, and someone would always find you a job in construction, or helping out at the church, the school, the dump. You didn’t spend so much time deciding things on Osprey Island: You wanted coffee, you went to the Luncheonette. Prescriptions were filled at Bayshore Drug. You needed cigarettes, you stopped at Lovetsky’s. A haircut, Reesa’s. Life on Osprey was easier. Sure, there were things you missed out on, but if you’d grown up on Osprey you’d never had them, so you couldn’t really miss them much. And all those things out there in the world didn’t help if what you really missed was home.
Reesa folded a smock under her arm. “Thank fucking god Jasper didn’t have a girl here!” she said.
Suzy let out a laugh and held up both her hands, fingers crossed. “He’s going to make it, Reese. He’ll make it.”
Reesa closed her eyes, shook her head, and held up her hands in a short prayer for her son.
Thirteen
THE NATURE OF THE STRUCTURE OF A LIE
If the osprey passes from the American scene, we will lose a majestic and unique bird. Alone in a family between the hawks and the falcons, the osprey, unlike those numerous tribes, has but one genus, one species.
—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”
THEY LAY ON THE MATTRESS on the floor of Roddy’s shed. An old upright aluminum fan buzzed and whirred and blew out the sound of the crickets. Roddy lay on his back, stretched long, longer than the mattress, hands crossed behind his head. Suzy curled in toward his body, head in the crook of his underarm, knees at his hip, finger tracing the length of his torso, collarbone to pelvis, shoulder to hip bone. She ran her fingers along the scar on his side, her eyes closed.
“I never worked at a sawmill,” he said.
“Huh?” She opened her eyes.
“I didn’t get it working at a sawmill.”
“I guess I figured.” She closed her eyes again. She lay very still, just the fingers, tracing.
He was quiet a long while.
He hadn’t intended to tell her. He’d intended to tell no one. But none of this was foreseeable, and circumstances dictated their own imperatives. He had sense enough to have learned that much. He had sense enough to be afraid. Afraid that to give up a secret to one person on Osprey Island was to lose that secret to the world. And it wasn’t that the walls had ears or the trees had eyes, or that the birds overhead overheard your confessions and whispered them into the wind. It was that people just couldn’t help themselves.
He felt it in himself, that desire to talk. Perhaps it was his vigilant check of that desire that kept him so unnaturally quiet much of the time. He wanted to tell her, though. He wanted to give her something he’d never given anyone: a truth, of sorts.
He had trouble understanding what truth meant. He had lived with secrets, and secrets were just lies of omission and as hard to live with as any other lie. For there was no such thing as a solitary lie. It wasn’t that lies begot more lies; the casting of one lie merely brought into focus and relief a sprawling net of other lies. Roddy had been living those lies—a whole world of them—for twenty years, which was long enough for the world of lies to become its own truth. Or reality, at least. Maybe there’d been a time when he could have acknowledged the lie and stepped away from it, stepped back into the truth, but that time was long gone. That lie was now part of a foundation upon which other things had grown, and truth and fiction were entwined, which meant that there was no such thing as truth anymore. Nor had there ever been. What Roddy had once seen as truth—the truth of his childhood, for instance, before his lie—had only seemed like truth, when, really, it was as much of a lie as everything else. It was only in lying himself that he’d learned of the nature of the structure of a lie. And now that he could see it, he could see how everything was built of lies and how the world was a city of pick-up sticks raised on quicksand.
To acknowledge his lie to Suzy may have meant a good many things, but it meant one thing very clearly to Roddy: He knew he couldn’t undo the reality spawned from the lie, couldn’t ever return to the truth he’d left behind. But he could, at least, make sure that Suzy knew the lie for what it was. He could tell her. And he started to.