like I want to take Mia and walk down to the ferry and take the first one across and get on a bus and go home and pretend I was never here.”
“Yeah,” Roddy said. “I know.”
“I feel insane,” she repeated, as if maybe he hadn’t believed her the first time.
“I know,” he said again. His desperation was quiet. He looked around the room, his eyes searching frantically, his body moving barely at all. “Do you want to lie down?” He made a gesture toward the camp cot. “Maybe you’d feel better . . .”
“I don’t think I want to feel better,” she cut him off. “I think I want to feel worse, like I want to make it so bad that it breaks . . . that it breaks me or something and then I don’t have to be responsible for what I do or say or don’t. Or taking care of Mia or anyone else. Doc Zobeck could just shoot me full of something that’d make all the decisions for me. Jesus. I just want someone to knock me out.” Suzy stood suddenly. She looked as if she wanted to pace, but there was no room for it in the little cabin and her momentum stalled once she was upright. It seemed briefly that she might topple. She glanced around, looked to Roddy, flapped her arms awkwardly, then wrapped them around herself as if to contain something, to hold herself back from some downward tumble. Roddy watched her, afraid for what she might do. She hugged herself tightly, her tears finally breaking. “What are we supposed to do ?”
It wasn’t a choice Roddy made then, not something he could say he decided to do and then did. He just moved. Here was Suzy, breaking, and there he was, feet away, moving to her. She held herself tight and small, and he enveloped her, the way his father used to envelop his mother, by his sheer size. He held her, his chin nearly level with the top of her head, and when she looked up at him he kissed her tears, and her eyes, and her cheeks, and everywhere the tears touched, because it was the only thing he could possibly do.
Seven
IN THE SHADOW OF THY WINGS WILL I MAKE MY REFUGE
Lorna Marie Vaughn Squire died early Tuesday morning in a tragic fire at the Osprey Lodge laundry. She was thirty-six years old. The daughter of Arthur and Penelope Vaughn of Island Drive, Lorna was a 1970 graduate of Island High. She had been the head housekeeper at the Osprey Lodge since 1969 and was beloved by all. Lorna is survived by her husband, Lance Squire, 38, and a son, Lance Jr., 8. May she rest in peace.
—Island Times
ART VAUGHN WAS INCONSOLABLE. He’d been holding off mourning the loss of his daughter for more than twenty years, keeping alive the hope that she’d return to him someday. Now there was nothing more to put between himself and the pain, between the fact of the world with Lorna and the fact of the world without her. There were no maybes, no more possibilities, no more roads that led his daughter back to him. She was just gone, and Art Vaughn sat on his living room sofa and cried as he should have cried on Lorna’s wedding day.
Art and Penny Vaughn had been unable to conceive. But they had adopted Lorna in infancy, and Osprey Island was the only home she ever knew. The Vaughns were cut and dried: they acted according to the dictates of the Church, ate ground beef, Kraft Singles, and Rice-a-Roni, and lived in an aluminum-sided ranch house, blue ducks and pink cows stenciled on the walls, wicker baskets of syrupy potpourri and stitched quilt samplers festooning every cranny. Lorna’s parents loved her as a streak down the center of their otherwise eventless lives. They distrusted Lance even before they knew him, had always looked down on Merle Squire and the disgraces that defined her. When Lorna met Lance she was not yet thirteen years old—a child!— and Lance’s mere existence seemed to grant Lorna all the permission she needed to break into the lawless limbo of adolescence.
On an autumn evening in 1965, Lance had arrived at the Vaughns’ nest of faux-country charm to pick up Lorna for their first official date. It was his first and last encounter with Lorna’s father.
Lance was formal and officious, standing militarily at ease beside a framed cross-stitch of the Lord’s Prayer