pulled a wide, unruly U-turn and drove straight back the way she’d come, as if it were what she’d planned all along.
Peg sat in the very center of Eden’s couch, perching so precisely in the exact middle of the middle cushion, you might have suspected her of some obsessive tendencies. Eden gave the girl a cup of water and sat opposite her. Roddy hovered, filling the doorway, ready to make a hasty escape should the need arise.
“I’ve wanted to know,” Peg said, “if there’d be someone we might talk with about the legal issues involved here, you know? I don’t know about, like, American law . . . but I’d thought if we might talk with a professional . . .” There was something proprietary and hoarding about her concern for Squee’s welfare, as though she were fighting for his custody. When she described what she’d witnessed that day, and in the course of her brief tenure at the Lodge, she seemed to cast blame for Squee’s circumstance not only on Osprey Island as a whole, but on America at large. Nothing so ugly and unfortunate, she seemed to imply, would have come to pass on Irish soil. Peg appeared at once to trust Roddy and Eden while reserving an incredulity that anyone— even if only through inaction—had allowed a man like Lance Squire to have his way about the island. Peg wanted to see something happen, and was loathe to understand why she—an outsider and virtual stranger—was the one making this call to arms.
Roddy heard her out and held his tongue, not out of respect but for fear he might open his mouth and say something befitting a crooked southern sheriff: Well, missy, that’s just not the way things work around these parts . . . Except the girl was right. Lance was a car without breaks, plowing down everything in his path, and he’d probably keep going until he hit something big enough to stop him.
Seventeen
AS THEY FLEE YOU’D THINK THEY FLOAT ON WINGS
He that had been present would have deemed
Their bodies to have hovered up with feathers. As they seemed,
So hovered they with wings indeed. Of whom the one away
To woodward flies, the other still about the house doth stay.
—ARTHUR GOLDING, trans., “Procne’s Revenge,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses
SUZY WAS SITTING ON THE END of her bed when Mia returned from the beach early that evening. Their travel bags were out, unzipped and open-mouthed as though waiting to be fed. Dresser drawers had been pulled out, but were still full, and clothes from the closet sprawled across the bed as if they’d paused there to rest before their internment. Suzy sat immobilized, head in her hands, trying to see every potential decision through to its ultimate outcome. It was impossible; there were too many variables. But thinking kept her from moving, and not moving kept her from deciding. She’d been as she was for most of the afternoon: getting up to collect her soap and shampoo from the shower, then leaving them in the sink and returning to the bed, rising to sort Mia’s laundry but folding only one small T-shirt, which lay in the middle of the floor as if to mark the spot. The rest she left in a wrinkling lump. She felt so incapable of decision she found it hard to understand how she’d managed to leave Osprey Island in the first place. How had she ever just picked everything up and gotten on the ferry? She needed one more push from Mia, one more sob, one more plea. She needed Mia to come in the door and rush at her with relief to see the packing begun, thankful to be reaching the start of the end.
There was shuffling outside, a bump against the door as Mia shifted the contents of her hand to reach for the knob. Suzy felt such gratitude, anticipating the necessity that would emanate from Mia’s very body and provide Suzy a purpose and a direction. But as the door swung open and Mia pushed in from the hallway, the imperative she was to instigate first dwindled and then vanished altogether like the evaporation of a dream. Mia was barefoot, wearing an enormous Stanford T-shirt, the hem of which hit her about mid-calf, the collar slouched, coquettish, over one shoulder. Her arms were loaded down with a hodgepodge of sand-laden accoutrements that seemed to drop away from her as she moved, falling to the carpet like a flower girl’s petals. She was sunny