“Doesn’t anyone care at all?” Peg asked.
“Yeah, but you know . . .” Jeremy stammered. “I mean, what can you do, you know?” They were all quiet then for a moment, sipping their Pabsts, thinking, God, yeah, what could you do, really? The air smelled of sea salt and smoke, the breeze from the shore delicious.
Peg leaned in closer to Jeremy. “And the boy?” she whispered. Little Squee was swinging his legs back and forth off the side of the deck.
“It’s messed up,” Jeremy said, “but, you know, he seems OK. He’s a pretty well adjusted kid, you know, in spite of everything.”
“It’s wrong, isn’t it . . . ?” Peg said.
Brigid looked again to Squee, his skinny legs still waggling off the edge of the deck. She turned back to her beer and drained it.
Half an hour later, Brigid excused herself—jet lag—from the porch party. Gavin, the dark, smoking waiter, had disappeared, and with him had gone Brigid’s motivation to stay awake any longer. She cut through the Lodge, the fastest route to the staff quarters, but as she crossed the lobby she heard something—an animal, she thought at first—hiss from the far side of the room. She stopped where she was and spun around. The lights were all off for the night, and the moon glared in at Brigid like a spotlight. It shone through the sliding glass doors and obscured the far half of the large room in darkness.
The hiss came again, this time decidedly human. Brigid wasn’t a scared sort of a girl, and it was her romantic imagination that kicked in first: the sultry-eyed waiter was calling from the shadows! She peered off in the direction of the noise, smelled cigarette, and watched as a tiny dot of orange glowed bright for a moment, then subsided. As her eyes began to distinguish shapes, she could make out the old grand piano in the corner and the figure seated nearby in a low-slung armchair. There was something eerily exciting about it. Brigid wanted that—some strange and overwhelming indiscretion in this new place. “In the habit of hissing at girls across dark rooms, are you?” she said coyly.
From the corner came a snort, a hack thick with phlegm. “Only the ones with tits like yours,” he said.
Brigid thought at first that she must have misunderstood, but her eyes were adjusting to the dark and the man’s features began to come together and coalesce. She turned without another word and walked away, leaving Lance to finish out his cigarette alone in the empty Lodge lobby. And as she passed through the kitchen exit, Brigid thought for the first time that perhaps she wasn’t quite as ready as she’d thought. Or maybe she was ready, but for something a bit less strange and overwhelming than she’d previously considered. A brooding waiter was one thing; the crude, married, alcoholic handyman another entirely. He was rather attractive, she thought—quite attractive, really, in a sad, brutish sort of a way. But no. No, she told herself firmly. It was an altogether stupid idea to fuck the father of anyone at all.
Four
TO WHAT DIRECTION WILL YOUR CHICKS TAKE WING?
Ah! mother bird, you’ll have weary days.
—MARGARET E. SANGSTER, “The Building of the Nest”
IN THE BACK OF THE nonfunctional minifridge in the laundry shack Lorna kept a bottle of vodka (Lance would likely have killed her if he knew) and a purple spiral notebook she’d bought at the drugstore when she was pregnant with Squee and Eden Jacobs had told her to write down her thoughts and feelings. Lorna and Eden had gone for walks together in the mornings back then, Eden pointing out every downy woodpecker and Carolina wren, pushing her binoculars at Lorna, telling her, Look. Eden tried to get Lorna involved in the henhouse too, but that wasn’t really Lorna’s thing, raising chickens and worrying who was eating whose eggs and who was sitting on whose nest and picking whose feathers. It was enough building the osprey platforms. It was actually enough just taking care of herself, let alone every winged thing that managed to land itself on Osprey.
Lorna knew she’d let Eden down in ways that had nothing to do with birds. It was hard for Lorna to see Eden now, the disappointment on her face. On her own mother’s, Lorna had gotten used to that pinched look of dread and hopefulness. But from Eden, who’d had so much faith in Lorna . . . from Eden it was pure judgment. Eden called her on it, plain and simple. You’re drunk, Lorna. Don’t you think of Lance Jr., Lorna? How can you do that to yourself and think of him at the same time?
Sometimes Lorna really did want to live a different life. The thing was, she knew better. Unfortunately, knowing better didn’t in any way mean she was going to do better, just that she knew more clearly how wrong she was. Lorna had, she knew, done a lot of bad things. For her, the choice to do good or bad was the same sort of dilemma as when there was a platter of finger foods out in front of you and you knew you should eat the carrot stick but you also knew that it was the sausage roll that was going to hop right into your mouth. Soothe the biggest greasy hankering and leave you feeling nasty the rest of the night. When a choice like that presented itself to Lorna, she’d start to deliberate: Which path should I follow? And then it was like her body would just lurch forward. Lorna and Lance had laughed when they’d heard about a guy—a fisherman who lived just across the bay—who had a disease that made him all of a sudden, all the time, unexpectedly and uncontrollably yell things out. And though they’d laughed, Lorna couldn’t help but wonder what her own life would be like if all the terrible thoughts inside her rose to the surface like dead bodies and made themselves known. Lorna thought that if all people like that fisherman did was yell out “cunt” in the supermarket or “motherfucker” from the church pew, then those people weren’t even the tiniest bit as bad a person as she was.
On that late June Sunday, while the rest of the staff got to work readying the Lodge for the season, Lorna hid in the laundry shack. A few minutes after the blare of the five o’clock whistle at the ferry dock, she heard a truck pull up outside. She stood from the couch and stowed her notebook and vodka bottle in the minifridge. Lance never came into the laundry shack—literally gagged at the smell of the place—so her secrets were relatively safe inside. Lorna pushed bravely out into the sunshine, her hand shielding her eyes from the light. She didn’t see Roddy, but Squee sat in the passenger seat of the truck, patiently running a Matchbox car along the dashboard.
Lorna hung her hands on the open truck window and leaned there the way she once had in the window of Lance’s car, when he’d stop in the high school parking lot to talk to her. “Hey, sweet son,” she said.
Squee’s smile opened slowly and fully. “Mom!”
Lorna held on to the window of the truck. Sometimes, with her son, love felt to Lorna like barbecue coals with too much lighter fluid and the flick of a match: love for Squee knocked her like a flare of heat so powerful she had to wait for the blow to pass before she was good for anything again.
From around the back of the staff barracks, Roddy appeared, toting a few long pieces of lumber. He slid them into the bed of the pickup. Lorna lifted a hand in greeting, and Roddy nodded, but his brow was furrowed. He went to the driver’s side and fumbled behind the seat.
“You getting hungry?” Lorna asked Squee. Her voice was tired.
Squee was nodding as Roddy reemerged with some orange plastic ribbon, which he tied to the boards that stuck off the end of the truck bed.
Lorna sighed. “Guess I better think about some dinner for you then, huh?”
Roddy looked up at her again, the way she was leaning on the truck. Her skin looked too pale, and the hollows of her face too dark. “I’m heading to Morey’s,” he told Lorna, though he’d had no such plans until that moment.