Brigid stopped what she was doing. “But you . . . ?” she prompted.
Suzy shook her head regretfully, swallowing hard. She was an idiot to have said anything. “Unfortunately,” Suzy managed to get out, “very unfortunately, yes.”
Brigid let her jaw drop as she attempted to picture the scene of it. She wasn’t just going to let the subject go.
Suzy reached for the packing tape. “It was such a huge mess . . .” She had to dig herself back out of this somehow. “I mean, Lance and Lorna, they’d been together for a couple years at that point. And not that Lance didn’t fuck . . . Not that Lance didn’t mess around, back then at least . . .”
Brigid was about to speak, but then didn’t.
“Oh, it was such a big mess,” Suzy said. She wanted the conversation to be over. She wanted it never to have begun. “I was friends with Lorna. It never should have happened. And then my brother—my brother was like Lance’s best friend. He found out and got furious . . . And then he went off and died . . .” Suzy peered at a plastic bag she’d discovered under the bed; she held it up to the light to discern what might be inside.
“Your brother?” Brigid said.
“Yeah. Vietnam. That glorious war.” Suzy opened the bag, sniffed at it tentatively, and pitched it into the industrial garbage bag in the far corner. “It’s just one goddamned drama after another around here.”
“I’m sorry,” Brigid said softly.
They were quiet then, for a time, sorting clothes. Brigid thought about the ethics of going through someone’s closets—Lorna might have been dead, but Lance wasn’t, and the closets were half his. Did being married to a dead person suddenly mean that the whole world could go riffling through your underthings? Brigid thought in some ways that living on this island seemed to simply imply that the guy pumping your gas had probably changed your diaper, and the woman serving your burger was likely sleeping with your dad. Dirty laundry was public domain. Which was either a terribly healthy, out-in-the-open, no-secrets-here sort of a thing, or it wasn’t. And what seemed most likely was that no matter how soiled the laundry hanging out on the clothesline, you could be altogether sure there was something far dirtier balled up and festering in a plastic bag in a corner of the basement where even the snoopiest didn’t think, or dare, to go.
If Brigid had wanted to ask more of Suzy—about Lance, about Chas, about the island dramas Suzy had known—she either refrained or was too caught up thinking about how she might find her own way into Osprey lore: as the girl who took up with the fellow who almost came between Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane. So now Heather Beekin and Chandler Crane could go on and pump out their nineteen children who’d all grow up hearing the stories of how their ma had nearly gone off with a college boy from California, but didn’t, and, well, so now here they all were. Brigid was entirely pleased with the role she might play: the Irish chambermaid whom Gavin had taken up with, with whom he had a torrid and passionate affair, while Heather and Chandler got soft and fat and ever more local.
Brigid wasn’t stupid. She could see quite well—in herself, for fuck’s sake—why a place like Osprey Island could be addictive, why it might be dead hard to break away from it entirely. Your life mattered enough here that people would be talking about you long after you’d gone. And there was something lovely about that. Yes, all right, Brigid conceded, big fish, small pond and all. Yet she was altogether gratified to be making her way into island history as she was. You didn’t hear anyone on Osprey Island talking about her sister Fiona, now did you?
LANCE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, with Merle, in time for dinner that night, but he didn’t eat with the rest of the staff in the dining room or on the porch. Merle made up an invalid’s sick tray and brought it to him at the cabin. He sat in that newly sanitized home, barely noticing the work that had been done. It struck him as somehow logical, or at least right, that his world should be suddenly swept clean, all evidence of Lorna stacked along the wall in boxes marked CREAMED CORN and MALT-O-MEAL. The