Osprey Island (25 page)

“You’ve a lot of friends, then,” Brigid ventured.

Lance thought about that. “Nope. But I know lots of folks.”

The road was pitted and bumpy, unmaintained and almost never used. Lance went along at a good clip for such conditions, and Brigid wished she hadn’t opened a beer from the case, since she’d have been far abler to enjoy the ride if not for trying to keep herself from getting drenched. She had a go at drinking off a good portion to get the liquid level down, but the truck hit a rut mid-gulp and sloshed half the can onto her face and neck. Lance glanced over and laughed largely. “Ha-ha!” he whooped. “Starting off the day
right
!” The truck rumbled along, pitching and bucking, Brigid wiping her face on the sleeve of her T-shirt, still attempting to hold the beer can steady. Finally Lance reached over, grabbed the can, and pitched it from the truck, and Brigid watched it arc through the air behind them, giving off a fountain spray of foam before it landed in the woods beside the road. They barreled on. “That’s why you get a case,” Lance declared. “That’s why you get a
cheap-ass
case! Afford to give one to the raccoons.”

They’d stopped for the beer at the IGA in town, had both gotten out of the truck and gone into the store, ordered sandwiches from the deli, pulled chips from the rack, and Brigid picked up a bottle of sun-tan lotion in the health and beauty aisle. Lance had grandly insisted on paying for it all himself. He was in full social mode, chatting up the cashier, who happened to be the mother of a school buddy of his. It was possible that he didn’t even notice how the people in the store looked at him and at each other as he passed. He was flying, and they were so far below him—specks, dots of fish in the ocean. The cashier looked at Brigid as though she’d have liked to take her into the back room and give her a good talking to, and Brigid felt almost surprised when Lance paid and picked up the beer and they left through a door that slid open and parted before them. The clerks looked on as though Brigid and Lance were shoplifters about to be stopped at the exit. But the door just slid magically open and they walked from the bleak fluorescence back into the bawdy sunshine, leaving nothing more than a wake of gossip.

They parked the truck in a pine clearing where the ground beneath them was rusty with fallen needles, the air infused with a rich, heady evergreen. When a breeze swept in from Dredgers’ Cove—the water was right there, just through the branches—the pine scent swirled with the briny smell of the sea. Lance carried the beer, Brigid the sack of food. Lance had forgotten the fishing poles. Brigid followed him down a narrow path toward the beach. It was strange, that line where the forest turned to seashore, as though someone had trucked a load of sand into the woods and thrown up a trompe l’oeil mural of the ocean horizon.

It was eleven or so, the sun high and hot. Brigid, at Lance’s suggestion, set the food down in the pine-shade.

“Should’ve bought ice . . .” Lance started to say, as he set the beer by the food, but they wouldn’t have had any use for ice, as he’d also neglected to bring a cooler.

Brigid walked toward the water. She took the towel from her beach bag and laid it out on the sand. Lance didn’t appear to have brought anything with him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, work boots, as though it had never dawned on him to wear something different to the beach. He hung back on the periphery of the woods, inspecting things, checking out the place, jumping onto a great chunk of driftwood, kicking a horseshoe crab over onto its back to expose the brown skeletal legs, its underbelly. Another swift soccer kick, a crunching crack, and the shell launched into the air. Lance lost interest then and wandered, picking up bits of sea glass, then tossing them back down, or skipping them out into the bay. He seemed agitated, or nervous, and it made Brigid feel the same. He didn’t even have a towel to sit on, and Brigid wondered how long he’d actually planned on staying. They had food to last them the afternoon, and beer for a lot longer than that, but Brigid feared that maybe she’d misunderstood his intentions for the day. Back at the Lodge, she was the sharp-talker, fearless and crude, the only one who could deal with Lance Squire. But out here she felt like Peg—tentative and vulnerable, and pathetic—and it made her loathe herself a bit. She got up and went for a beer.

She downed half the can as she returned to her towel, then nestled it into the sand where it wouldn’t spill. She lay back, face to the sun, to let on like she couldn’t have cared less what Lance was doing, because
that’s
what made her feel she had power: not caring. And not thirty seconds later, there he was beside her, plunking himself down, the heels of his boots digging into the sand, arms draped casually over his knees, as if he had all the time in the world to just stare out at that horizon.

All across the beach, mixed among the shells and pebbles and seaweed, there were spent shotgun shells—red or green, big as a man’s thumb, with rusted metal rims—and Lance plucked one up, shook the sand from inside, and then put it to his lips like a reed. “You can whistle ’em,” he said, “like a bottle,” and he blew into it: a hollow, deep, mournful call, like the island ferry’s.

She sat up, reached over, and took the cap from his hand. It was all about proprietorship, she reminded herself. About deciding what was yours and claiming it for yourself. She blew into the gun cap; it left a salty taste on her lips, and she reached for her drink. Such a gorgeous day, she was off from work, there was more than enough beer, and they could stay as long as she liked. And if she decided she wanted to return to the Lodge, then they’d return. It was precisely
why
the rest of them were such namby-pambies. They didn’t know what they wanted—and if they did, then they’d have to scour up the courage to ask for it. It helped Brigid a good deal in times of stress to isolate the exact ways in which she was far more capable a human being than most. Certainly poor Lance was about as far down the ladder as people came in terms of having control over their lives. Which was probably why he liked spending time with her: she offered him a glimpse of what it was to take charge. It was probably, Brigid thought, why he’d got on with Suzy back when they were young; Brigid definitely saw Suzy as sort of a kindred spirit. She and Suzy were both—in Brigid’s mind—soaring examples of strong, independent women who didn’t stand for the crap that men dished out. Some people might have even agreed with her—
no sir, those ladies don’t stand for one ounce of
bullshit
—but there were other folks who’d say that Brigid and Suzy were
girls who wouldn’t know from bullshit if you stuck their pretty
noses in it.
And still others might contend that some people’s lives were so steeped in bullshit they didn’t even know it stank.

Lance stood. “You want another?”

Brigid shook her can. “Yessir,” she said, and drank the last gulp down.

She watched him walking back with two new cans, and then he stopped ten feet away and lobbed one at her. It sailed past—actually, she pulled her hands away instinctually, as she always did in games in which one was meant to catch things—and skidded into the sand.

“Oopsie,” Lance said. “Oopsie daisy . . .”

Brigid cocked her head. “Bastard.”

He held his own beer to his heart, drooped his eyes and mouth in puppy-dog innocence. “Me?”

Brigid rolled her eyes. This was how she liked things. With him fetching, eager to please. And herself: sarcastic, mocking, entirely in control. She flipped over and stretched to retrieve the wayward beer without having to stand. It was a sexy maneuver for a girl in short shorts, and she was well aware of it. She reached the beer with her fingertips, managed to roll it toward her and grab hold. Then she sat up and began turning to Lance, who’d sat himself down beside her again. She had one hand around the beer and one on the flip top, and when she cracked it she caught Lance dead on in the spray. He jerked back, sloshing some of his own beer onto himself as well. “Whoaho!” he cried, his shirt and face splattered, wet with dots of foam. “So she’s playing dirty now, is she?” he jeered, half mocking, half sinister. He lifted his chin toward her: “Got yourself there too, darlin’.”

Brigid set her beer in the sand. “But I,” she began, “have dressed for our outing appropriately,” and she pulled off her beer-splotched T-shirt, then wriggled out of her shorts. She stood, reclaimed her beer can, spun on her heel in the sand, and stalked down the shore and into the surf wearing a striped bikini, about which even Lance was sharp enough to call after her: “There’s nothing in the world
appropriate
about what you got on, angel.” She laughed without looking at him, and raised her can in the air to toast her agreement, calling “Cheers!”

Brigid kicked around the shallows for a time, can raised above her head as she improvised a one-handed backstroke. On shore, Lance polished off his own beer and fetched another from the pine-tree stash. When Brigid came dripping back up the beach toward her towel, he was sitting on it, eating generic-brand sour cream and onion chips. He offered her the bag. Shaking a spray from her hair, she declined, indicating her desire, rather, for the towel, and when he understood what it was she wanted he clambered to his feet—no easy task with both hands full, and on a surface of sand—and then he set down his burdens and tried to pick up the towel for her. He seemed to want to wrap her in it, the way a parent might greet a child emerging from a bath, but the towel was covered in sand, and as he raised it a breeze caught and lifted it like a sail, whipping Brigid with a small sandstorm. She looked down at herself, dredged like a cutlet ready for frying, and let out a burst of laughter. “Thank you very much,” she said, snatched the towel, and left him chuckling as she went back down to the water to rinse off.

She dropped the towel near the shore, walked out waist deep, held her nose, and dunked under, arching her neck as she rose so the hair slicked back over her head. When she reclaimed the towel from its slump on the beach, she lifted it exaggeratedly in a display for Lance:
Correct beach-towel procedure, sir, please watch as I demonstrate.
She shook the sand away from her body, then wrapped herself dramatically, a game show hostess modeling the prize mink. Lance just stood there watching her from a distance, laughing, and it felt grand—it
was
grand, Brigid told herself—to bring laughter to a man who’d been through so much. He truly seemed to be enjoying himself. Whether Brigid was enjoying herself was another matter entirely, which—some people might have been inclined to point out—was something you’d expect might concern a
strong, independent
woman like Brigid, a woman
who didn’t stand for any bullshit.
A claim—the same folks might say—which was in itself a crock of bullshit big enough to sink an island.

The beers were growing warmer by the can, but they’d drunk enough that they didn’t much care. It was cheap, shitty beer—
piss-water,
Brigid teased, saying her friends in Dublin would be horrified—and it went down just like water, pretty much. They ate their sandwiches, and Brigid went in the water again, not because she felt like a swim but because she had to pee. Lance had already gotten up a few times to piss in the woods, and it seemed that every time he got up he sought out a closer tree, so the last time Brigid could literally hear his urine streaming and hitting the ground. She paddled a bit, floated around while she emptied her bladder, then splashed about to dispel the impression that she might’ve only gone in the water to pee. The bay felt grand anyway, refreshing, though it made her feel drunker than she’d thought she was, the way you might stand up from your table in a bar not feeling scuttered at all, but when you go to use the toilet, the bathroom starts to spin. When Brigid came out of the bay—water sweeping off her body, evaporating almost instantly under the intensity of the early-afternoon sun—she was overcome with tiredness: the night before, and the beers, and the heat all catching up with her at once in that kind of postlunch, postexercise exhaustion that might have felt rather glorious if she hadn’t been drunk, except she was.

Lance was squinting, laughing at her as she came up the beach, and as she flopped down onto her towel—facedown, her limbs sprawling out from her, useless as jellyfish—he said, “Siesta time, señorita?” all the while chuckling, mocking her for such alcohol intolerance. All Brigid could get out in response, her mouth already mashed sideways into the ground, was a muffed “Mmmmnn.” She would be asleep in seconds, one side of her face dangerously exposed to the sun, the other cheek growing warm with drool bleeding slowly from her open mouth as she slept.

The sun crept across the sky toward the west, and by early mid-afternoon shade had begun to overtake Dredgers’ Cove, spreading from the tree line out as the sun moved behind the pine woods. Brigid was still asleep as their spot on the beach lost its sun, first dappled by the leaves, then shaded altogether, and in her sleep she was growing chilly. The first thing she would remember feeling—remember being conscious of at all—was warmth, and she was grateful for it, as though someone had noticed her there, shivering in that tiny striped bikini, and thought to drape something over her—a jacket, or some clothes that were lying about. But there was weight to the covering, a warm, heavy pressing-in that came up beside her, curling around, cupping, and she curled into it, letting the warmth come over her like a dream, a good dream, an erotic dream where everything is warm and wet, everything coming together as though under warm bath water. But then, wrongly, the weight was
on
her, not around her, heavy on top of her, and it was
too
heavy, like a carpet unrolled over her back flattening her into the sand with not enough room for her lungs to inflate inside.

And then she was awake, and he was moving on top of her and though she
felt
cold, her sunburned skin was noticeably warm under his hand, which was cool as it came under the fabric at the bottom of her suit, tracing the crack of her ass down like he was going to push his cool hand in and warm it up inside of her. She knew what was happening; her head was still swirly from beer and sun, but she knew what was happening, had enough sense about her to think it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but it wasn’t the worst thing anyone had ever done, and Brigid wasn’t averse, necessarily, to doing things that were a bit bad. No one was cheating on anyone, and his wife
had died,
and didn’t people seek human contact in times of grief to try to get through their pain and claim a life for themselves in the face of death? Isn’t that what people did?