Osprey Island by Thisbe Nissen

Author:Thisbe Nissen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Mystery & Detective, Community life, Single mothers, Summer resorts, General, Fiction - General, Popular American Fiction, Psychological, Accident victims, Islands, Fiction, Short stories, Custody of children
ISBN: 9780385720625
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2005-06-14T07:00:00+00:00

At the graveside Lance began to weep. There were fewer people around, fewer people in front of whom to act like a show dog, and he began to break. Nancy Chizek passed him tissues, which he grabbed up blindly and then gradually dropped to the ground, so that by the end he stood inside a little ring of white flowers all his own. Every time Lance looked at someone in the crowd at the cemetery, he seemed to realize his loss anew. He looked up, caught someone’s eye, and gasped as the sobs came heaving from his chest. By the time Lorna’s remains were actually lowered into the ground, Lance was leaning against his mother for support in standing. Squee stayed by his side, right between Lance and Penny Vaughn, who had grabbed Squee’s hand in a clammy, powdery grip and would not let go. The angle was wrenched, and partway through Squee’s arm started tingling, then lost feeling altogether. He hung beside her, looking more like a drooping stuffed animal than a boy. His eyes were glazed as a sleepwalker’s. It was days since he’d spent a full night in one bed, and the delirium of sleeplessness was blunting his pain. In the wake of his mother’s death, Squee was like a hypothermic: a person freezing to death actually stops feeling the cold; the body and mind protect themselves like that.

Suzy and Roddy kept their eyes on Squee, and as they left the graveside and Lance seemed to lose all interest in the boy, Suzy and Roddy nabbed Squee and brought him with them to Penny and Art’s for a visitation that Lance would clearly not attend. In the course of one night in Lance’s custody, Squee had gone from seeming to cope pretty admirably for a kid in his situation to looking as if he’d been hypnotized and made to witness unspeakable things. His skin was greenish, and they had him sit all the way on the passenger side against the window in case he had to throw up, which didn’t seem unlikely.

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