Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  Praise for Deprivation

  “A chilling thriller . . . horror fans looking for unconventional scares will be grateful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In this cinematic thriller, crippling insomnia infects the tourists and residents of a small town following the appearance of a mysteriously silent orphan . . . A well-paced action thriller with a wide-eyed premise . . . to shake readers awake.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Be prepared for sleepless nights, because once you start this multi-layered psychological thriller, you'll find it impossible to put down . . . and when you've finished, you won't be able to stop thinking about it!”

  —Linda Hepworth, NB Magazine (5 stars)

  “Freirich delivers thrills and suspense in some of the sharpest writing of any American author working today. The language is so precise, the details and disparate collection of vacation islanders so acutely observed, that when the seemingly impossible happens—no one on the island can sleep—you never doubt for an instant that the living nightmare that follows is terrifyingly real. Insomniacs be warned: this page-turner guarantees a very late night.”

  —David Angsten, author of The Night-Sea Trilogy

  “A twisty psychological thriller that reminds us that the greatest monsters are to be found within.”

  —Tom Epperson, author of Roberto to the Dark Tower Came and The Kind One

  “A rattling read! Claustrophobic, unsettling, visceral.”

  —Alice Clark-Platts, author of The Flower Girls

  “A beautifully crafted trap. At first, the reader imagines that it will be one of those classic horror-thriller books, as all the ingredients are there—a vacation island, likable but life-scarred characters, strange events leading to random violence and satisfying gore. And yes, you can absolutely read Deprivation as a great beach novel, along with the latest Stephen King, Peter Straub or Dean Koontz. But it conveys a much deeper and disturbing reflection on humanity, not far from Albert Camus’s The Plague, José Saramago’s Blindness or Josh Malerman’s Birdbox. Beyond the mystery lies the question on mass hysteria, modern technology and the slowly dissolving of empathy in our society. Extremely well written, with precise and convincing descriptions, realistic characters and deep-reaching plot, Deprivation is a must-read.”

  —Seb Doubinsky, award-winning author of The City-States Cycle series

  “Set in a sleep-starved beach town, Deprivation is a stark psycho-thriller told in prose that’s at once elegant, lucid, and more than a little hypnotic. With deft pacing, hip atmospherics, and above all, his brilliant style, Roy Freirich evokes the sensory distortions that come in transit between wakefulness and dreams. Truly, Deprivation is a rare piece of work, a thriller that succeeds as both art and entertainment.”

  —Kurt Baumeister, author of Pax Americana

  “A smart literary thriller, Deprivation kept me guessing to the end.”

  —Keith Rosson, award-winning author of Smoke City and The Mercy of the Tide.

  DEPRIVATION

  A NOVEL

  ROY FREIRICH

  Meerkat Press

  Atlanta

  #day_two

  #

  Innocently, they come in August to Carratuck Island and the end of sleep. From ferries out of Long Island’s North Fork, or from the south ports of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the sojourners disembark in chattering, impatient lines at the old Bay Haven dock to trudge—with roll-ons and duffels and backpacks, a toddler crying, a dog barking—to their weekly rentals, share houses, motels. On to the broad shining ocean, along gray planks of boardwalk and over the dunes from the sandy lanes, a pilgrimage, a peregrination, they cross the narrow island. In flip-flops, struggling with coolers and umbrellas and mesh bags bearing floppy hats and tubes of sweet-smelling sunblock, they come—the tourists and weekenders, the clusters of couples and friends and families reunited yearly for these last fleeting days of summer.

  From the beachfront Cape Cod or cedar-sided architectural second homes, the ad and publishing executives come, the bond traders and middle-aged trust-fund children, with a folding chaise and towel and a Kindle or tablet, for even just an hour to inhabit a perfect moment of sea, air and light, to cling to, as in a lingering farewell, a moment somehow so lazy, insouciant, redolent of youth.

  A Frisbee seems weightless, coasting slowly and improbably straight through the sodden air, until giving in to gravity to skid into a wet footstep near the tide line. Kids grapple over it, pushing, giggling lazily, all knees and elbows, jams yanked, and taunts muttered like endearments, almost sweetly: “aaassswiiipe,” “biyatch,” “bite me.”

  Women frown down at their shoulder straps, melted ice sloshes in coolers as their lids creak open, and there’s the snap and hiss of a pop-top, the smells of baloney sandwiches gone warm, yellow cheese cubes in baggies, peeled oranges.

  Teenagers thumb cells, texting each other from yards away. Laughter erupts, dies. Tinny music leaks from earbuds, chunky thrash guitars, sibilance of cymbals, angry indecipherable vocals.

  A young mother lies on a spread towel; she stares up at nothing, her eyes wide, unblinking, the tender skin beneath darkly bruised. Her fingers absently clutch and release the hot terrycloth, holding on, letting go, holding on.

  Nearby, her little boy sits cross-legged in the sand. His hair is tufted to a point on one side by dried salt, his trunks are crooked and the skin on one hip is pink and etched by the damp waistband; his eyes are bluer than the ocean, fixed on the bright little flashing square in his hand—his GameBox—and the funny, tiny figure there leaping and dodging glowing balls, fleeing, or to the rescue. Points! Sparkles! A bouncy song of bleeps!

  A gull floats nearby, hovering in the scantest breeze, wingtips trembling.

  On his screen, the little hero leaps a platform, a cloud.

  A wave hesitates, and spills lazily ashore.

  #day_four

  1

  Carratuck Island’s local surfers like to call themselves the Dawn Patrol; when they find the Boy standing mute and staring seaward, day has barely begun on their pale stretch of beach, or across the lanes of share houses, or at the Bay Haven Marina where Sam lies aching in the bunk of his forward cabin, watching the deck hatch brighten above him.

  The sheets cling, damp with humidity, a hint of mildew under the tang of bleach. It’s already too hot, too airless. Weighing the throb in his head against last night’s excesses, he’s lucky to feel no worse.

  Was it three or four plastic cupfuls of Chateauneuf-du-Pape? After the half-joint of indica, the hour of easy chatter and laughs and another of enthusiastic sex, he had lain back and waited, and waited, for the usual dependable sounds—the idle slosh of current on keel, the creak of dock lines in cleats—to lull him into unconsciousness and a few blessed hours of forgetting.

  He would turn over to face the close mahogany wall along his bunk, just to trade the pressure on one hip and shoulder for the other, but he might wake Kathy there beside him, her sleep deep and trusting, beautiful to see. His own eludes him too often of late, but from triple shifts at med school to the wakeful nights of these past months, he’s learned to hope; a kind of purposeful drifting can sometimes almost work, and end the endlessness, if only for a while.

  Unbidden, randomly, the faces of the summer’s patients come back to him, the tourists gathered at Carratuck’s day clinic in jams and tees and faux-batik beach wraps, with an ear infection, or the heaves from a bad steamer clam, or alcohol poisoning. Most present with a sheepish sense of their maladies as minor or self-inflicted: the Hannah or Heather with itching mosquito bites, Frank from Rhode Island with an angry sunburn, tipsy college kid Max with a foot cut on a horseshoe crab’s broken she
ll. More than the usual absent regard, though, lately a few seem to offer a commiserating look, as if for a kindred weary soul. Or maybe worse: almost a kind of recognition, in glances met and slid away. And what about that other girl? The plain-faced teenager, Cindy or Cynthia, in for a headache, whose pupils when he checked seemed to darken and dilate, as if some faintest shadow had passed between them? Stoned, likely, and who wouldn’t want to be at her age, trapped in an Airbnb with her parents bored or bickering?

  Faint chiming begins. His cell? He climbs quickly, silently, out of bed. Kathy barely stirs behind him, one ankle nudging her other’s tattooed bracelet of thorns, as he pads naked through the cabin and its clutter of last night’s detritus.

  Where is it? He spots and plucks the little cell from where he has forgotten it on the companionway shelf, and answers with a finger swipe. From its tiny speaker, as it sometimes has over the last few days, a wave of static surges and disappears. A word becomes audible, like something surfacing, a question: “Sam?” It’s Paula, his clinic nurse, voice harsh, too loud and too soon on this day to bring good news.

  “I admit it.” He does a half-turn, aiming his lowered voice out the cabin door so Kathy can sleep in, her luxury since quitting her waitress job at the local Coffee Spot.

  “Sorry to rush you this morning.”—the line is clear now, her voice sharp—“but we got a little boy here, surfers found on the beach, alone. He won’t talk, or can’t.”

  An image floating up: silhouettes against the gleam of the ocean, leading a smaller one away. The lost child, found. Not news in a summer resort town like Pines Beach, but a boy with a disability, or purposely silent, suggests more amiss. “Huh. His parents—?”

  “Nothing, Sam. Who he belongs to, where he’s staying, nothing. He bolted a Cup o’ Noodles and a bag of chips, but shied at a washcloth.”

  He makes his eyes wide, rubs the bridge of his nose. “On my way.”

  “Say hi to Kathy.”

  He clicks off, and behind him she appears—a glimpse of nude hip by the stateroom door, her wry sleepy eyes and teasing smile. “Whatcha got? Bee sting? Sunburn?”

  He hesitates, torn, but grabs her sweatshirt from the dinette and flings it across to her. “Hi to Kathy.”

  −−−

  Sam rushes his routine, skipping the shave and finding a tee and cargo shorts. Unimpressive, but clean enough for work.

  Kathy’s already set for her morning—iced coffee in one hand, eReader with Destination: Tuscany cued up in the other, the little galley TV tuned to The View—when Sam bends to brush her lips with his own, and a small hint of lingering.

  “I realized, we’ve got it all wrong,” she says. “I’m supposed to pine away on shore for you, while you take to the deep blue sea.”

  They trade their crooked smiles and he heads up the cockpit steps to work the tarnished latch and open up on gray-white daylight, blinking as his eyes adjust. The world sharpens into verticals and horizontals—stays and masts and blue canvas-covered furled mainsails, down the long multi-fingered float of Bay Haven Marina—fifty-odd slips filled this time of year by weekenders from Greenport, Nantucket, Hyannis.

  He steps into the day, from the cockpit onto the deck to leap a bit jarringly down to the float. He climbs onto his rusting five speed Rudge and pedals up the ramp for the dock, sun warm on his back.

  Through the open gate, he glides onto the quay where tourists are slowed as usual in idle groups before Carratuck’s kitschy clip joints, ogling the same stacked tee shirts and coffee mugs, the laminated faux-nautical charts, the cheap bikinis and Chinese Ray-Ban knockoffs. There’s enough belly fat for twice as many people here, on what looks like a whole bowling team, outer borough or Jersey commuters with Bluetooth headsets and big showy laughs, taking their summer ease from middle-class city jobs—police, transit, fire.

  A clutch of teenagers whispers urgent business, probably trading pot for Ritalin or mom’s Flexeril, or just gossip: who’s back this year, who’s hooking up, who’s a total bitch or, forever unforgivable, just lame. A few clients back in Boston were teens suffering the slings and arrows of high school, anointed or exiled on a dime, self-medicating with anything handy, or hiding in their cluttered bedrooms, tweaking their online profiles, counting their friends and followers, lost in the data cloud.

  Among these, the girls of summer stand giggling, fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with salty, tangled hair, mahogany tans, fleeing childhood in the uniform of the day—cutoffs and unbuttoned, baggy sheer shirt over a two-piece, flip-flops, rawhide bracelets, pale lip gloss. He recognizes one he treated weeks ago—Cody, or Cortney? Was it food poisoning? Smirking and aggrieved, redolent of menthol cigarettes, her mother had dragged in the mortified girl, whose eyes now find his again in a fleeting glance. Her hand tips vaguely upward, before she’s nudged by a girlfriend and they all bend closer to a cell phone one holds, exclaiming, “Oh my God, could I just die, please?” and “Oh my God, I have so gone longer!” Whatever it means, they crowd in, twitching with the eager joys of bragging rights or schadenfreude.

  Up ahead, there’s already a line at the Coffee Spot window, with its peeling redwood sills and red-eyed, hungover barista trying to keep up. It’s the only restaurant with a service window on the boardwalk, and no doubt the owner lobbied one alderman or another with the usual inducements for the honor—a cut of the till, a campaign contribution—more than free coffee, it’s a safe bet.

  As Sam passes, a tourist in pricey Gore-Tex “walking gear”—everything but the goofy ski-poles, it seems—chides the barista in stagey, confiding tones: “Hey, I know it isn’t Starbucks, but that latte yesterday wasn’t decaf. My fiancée was up all night. Just a heads-up, between us, right?” Sam’s heard a thousand iterations of it—the uneasy tolerance between sulky islanders trapped in service jobs and finicky, demanding tourists who have planned and saved for a few days of having their way, right now and just so.

  No time for the usual iced grande today, Sam presses on.

  “Doctor Sam, hey,” a voice floats out, mild and lilting, and Sam lifts a hand in a casual wave to Carlo slouched in his beach chair, under his striped umbrella, beside his cooler-cart of bottled water and ices.

  Now he coasts by a pair of local fishermen, Dwayne and Hank, both too leathery-looking before their time, sunblasted as boys on their dad’s charter boat, chumming off the stern without a shirt or hat in the halcyon days before anyone connected sun and melanoma.

  “Yo, doc,” Hank offers.

  “Gentlemen.” Sam indulges them with customary, dry subtext; these two will never qualify as such and take full pride in it. Dwayne will tell anyone how he coldcocked a Soho performance artist at the bar at Claude’s for whining about all the Guns n’ Roses on the jukebox. Today he has a bucket in one hand and his surf rig in the other, a ball cap low on his forehead, eyes shadowy, downcast.

  A flash turns Sam to see sun glinting off the chrome of Chief’s patrol Jeep, slowly cruising the town’s last straightaway of boardwalk. Should he stop and tell him about the foundling at the clinic? Better a quick nod and keep on; chances are the parents have already shown up to claim the child, and he and Chief are glad to keep things need-to-know, both wary of false alarms and wasted time.

  After a last hundred yards of sandy lane, past stands of dusty bayberry and mildewed bungalows, Sam pulls up outside the clinic with its peeling sign, PINES BEACH URGENT CARE. He leans his bike against the rough-hewn cedar siding, and through the plate-glass storefront window (the place was another kitschy gift shop before the township eminent-domained it), he can already see med tech Andrew laughing into the phone behind the check-in counter, and nurse Paula nowhere in sight—probably in an exam room debriefing the foundling’s embarrassed, contrite parents.

  Inside, the waiting room’s empty. Magazines are scattered, the place could use a dusting, and the TV silently displays a commercial for nothing short of happiness, apparen
tly: a mom and dad and child in their kitchen high-fiving, laughing. The image freezes and scattered, solid-colored squares flicker, and then the picture recovers and becomes a talk show. After just a few months on the island, Sam already knows: a gull has built its nest in the island’s cable TV head-end again, probably, or someone needs to check the TV inputs for corrosion, not the first time. Andrew, as usual, ducks his head and whispers last words into the phone with a sideways nod.

  Sam pauses to wash up, and then steps around the doorway of Exam One to see Paula and the Boy there. In baby-blue shapeless scrubs and her glasses-on-a-chain, she’s a trim, Black, no-nonsense sixty-one from Medford, ever on alert, always appraising.

  The Boy’s skin is smudged with grime, his hair dark and matted with sweat, but his eyes stop Sam with a look Sam knows—haunted, from someplace well past grief.

  “Well, we’ve made friends, I guess.” Paula peers over her glasses at Sam. “But he doesn’t want to tell us who he is or write it down. Do you?” She smiles winningly back at the Boy, whose gaze has never left Sam’s, and now holds a glint of something deeper, unsettling, almost accusing.

  Sam’s shoulders tense, an odd reflex he shakes off, trying a smile of his own. “That so? Can’t get you to write anything down?”

  The Boy’s silence is filled, it seems, with other sounds: the phone gently ringing out at the admittance counter, the murmur of voices there, the distant sighing of the ocean a few sandy lanes away, broad and deep but barely audible.