Mia stood up from the bed, her body and her expression rigid with indignation. She was livid, and incredulous too, unable to believe this was really happening. She faced her mother down with as much rage as Suzy had ever seen in the child, and said with a vehemence she could only have inherited from the woman she was saying it to: “I don’t care. I’m staying here.”
And they went at it like that for some time, until Mia locked herself in the bathroom, shouting, “I hate you! I hate you!” at the top of her lungs, and Suzy stormed from the room.
She went downstairs, found a housekeeper to post outside the room upstairs to watch Mia, and then went straight for the office and grabbed the keys to a Lodge truck. In the parking lot she tried the keys in three vehicles before she found the right one, cursing herself, the trucks, her father, her daughter, Osprey Island, and everything that had ever conspired to get her born there in the first place. When the engine of the old tan Ford finally turned over, Suzy sank down in the seat, put her head back, and squeezed her eyes shut.
She swung out of the parking lot onto Sand Beach Road and sped up the hill. It felt good to drive, to move that fast, the whipping of wind, the adrenaline of speed. She wanted to stay with that speed, just to drive away, far. And what struck her was the dreadful familiarity of that sensation. It was high school. It was dying for flight, anything just to drive and keep driving. The preposterous, insidious envy she felt for people who lived in open spaces, who could put their car on I-80 in Pennsylvania or Illinois and keep driving until they hit the Pacific. God! The freedom in that! You dreamed of flight on Osprey Island. You dreamed of getting in your father’s Chrysler and gunning for the docks. Dreamed of how it would feel when the wheels lifted off the cobbled planks and took air.
It explained everything. The high school kids who just drove and drove around and around and around that little island, so fast they squealed the curves, grazing the guardrails. They’d swipe the fence on Sand Beach Road and leave their mark in the whitewash, streaking Daddy’s fender. It made the blaming easy. Citizens in their homes heard the skid: tires screaming on asphalt. They called the police, called the sheriff at home in his bed, said Sheriff, it’s the kids again out joyriding . . . and Davey Mitchell and Sheriff Harty roused themselves from sleep to get out and hunt the hooligans down and haul them in, maybe even keep them overnight in the island jail, which was fine; it was better, really, because for those kids anything was better than sitting still. Anything was better than driving your car up onto that ferry and knowing Chip or Matty or whoever was on duty that night would have a call in to your folks, who’d be down there hauling your ass back to bed before you could even smoke a godforsaken cigarette in peace. It wasn’t worth pulling your car onto the damn ferry, since you knew they were going to make you back it right off again.
Suzy pealed off the asphalt and onto the dirt road that bordered the old golf course. The truck slid in the sand, kicking up a spray of pebbles in its wake. She steered into the skid and barreled on up the hill. Rounding the rise, she could see both Roddy’s truck and Eden’s car in the driveway, and Suzy parked beside them, jumped out, and went down the ravine toward Roddy’s shack. She knocked, poked her head in, then turned, let the door fall shut, and went back up toward Eden’s. Halfway up the path, near the chicken coop, she saw the back door open onto Eden’s porch, and Roddy stepped outside. He raised a hand in tired greeting. Such a sweet man, Suzy thought, and the sight of him there in all his exhaustion was such a comfort. She couldn’t think of the last time a man had inspired comfort in her; she wasn’t sure it was something she’d ever felt. The thought made her desperately sad. If she could have done anything in the world right then—