Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  Chief clinches it, asking, “Said he was mute, right? Or . . . special needs? So if there is one . . . anything medical . . . or, you know, psychological . . .”

  Sam can’t possibly treat this boy overnight, though that’s the expectation here, and one he needs to counter, quickly and completely. “Chief, I’m just not set up to deal with this boy. He needs familiarity, peace and quiet—”

  “For a few more hours until someone turns up for him.”

  Sam looks doubtful, but Chief claps him on the shoulder with a quick wink. “Thanks, Sam.”

  −−−

  As dusk finally softens and cools the day, tourists stroll along the boardwalk. Among these, Sam walks his bike and the Boy almost idly back to the docks, hoping someone will stop them, recognize the Boy, and the mystery might be solved on the spot.

  He’s warned Kathy with a call, but when they reach the boat, she still has to resist gawking at their guest. Wide-eyed, she whispers to Sam, “No one?”

  He shakes his head no and can’t stop her from crouching before the Boy with her big smile and cheery salute, “Welcome aboard! I’m Kathy!”

  The Boy takes a half-step back, a twitch in his cheek and his gaze flitting. Her smile relaxes and she lets out a breath, as if to calm herself, too. “Okay, well. Anyone . . . hungry?”

  She turns away for the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she’s readied, a staple of her own diet, though without an extra ounce on her lean frame to show for it.

  Sam finds himself smiling absurdly at the Boy, too. “Dinette, right here. Kitchen table, on a sailboat.”

  Eyes averted, the Boy hesitates, but slides in.

  Too quickly and with too much clatter, Kathy sets out heavy plastic plates.

  The Boy seems to flinch again, eyes darting, but the sandwich draws him, and he calms and chews slowly, almost pensively, while Sam and Kathy trade a glance.

  “We’re going topside, just up there,” Sam points up the companionway steps. “For just a second. Okay?”

  The Boy doesn’t so much as nod, intent on his sandwich.

  Out in the cockpit, Sam and Kathy confer in urgent whispers. The worst has already occurred to her, even sooner than he envisioned, and she can’t help but ask, “What if something happened to his parents? You think he saw something?”

  He hears it edging upward, from under the surface of her concern: another attempt to corner him into the role of therapist. He quickly borrows the chief’s calculated nonchalance, shrugging. “His folks are probably just sleeping one off. They’ll probably bang on our door before morning.”

  She shakes her head. “Must’ve been one hell of a bender. He hasn’t seen a washcloth lately.” She looks about to head inside, find one and dampen it, to try to scrub the Boy.

  “Better not try, just yet. He’s still skittish.”

  Their gazes drift from each other’s, down the companionway steps to the grimy Boy sitting at the galley table, watching them. He jerks his face sideways, hiding his eyes, as if from an interrogator’s.

  #

  Dusk comes to Carratuck from the eastern sea, violet shadow by shadow as lights come on in houses and motel rooms, and the clatter of ice trays and glasses carries across the sandy lanes of Pines Beach and the gently bobbing float of the Bay Haven Marina. There’s the low murmur of television, and the faint throb of bass as music begins from the bars and share house patios strung with lights. Mosquitoes swarm in little clouds, folks curse softly and slap at their arms, and the smoke of citronella candles rises and hangs in the windless air, dank with the scent of the tide.

  −−−

  Just before closing at Roscoe’s Market, Maxine Kinnis sets a cheap electric fan down on the checkout counter, complaining, “Gotta be two hundred degrees in the shitbox I snagged last minute. Cannot sleep a wink this year.”

  In line behind her, Ken Oberst steps up with a clever little air-travel kit of earplugs and eyemask, and a bottle of Melatonin, and Maxine eyes these as he chimes in: “I got a halogen security light from next door, no blinds.”

  −−−

  At Claude’s Clam Shack for his nightly Long Island Iced Tea, Doug Raymond ticks off the shortcomings of his Airbnb to a small, sympathetic crowd: “Sheets like sandpaper, neighbors who need couples’ therapy, and did I say damp? Mold on the ceiling. I know from staring up at it ’til dawn.”

  −−−

  Carla Mott doesn’t care what Kira or Beth thinks; no help for her headache, she went to bed early, fuck Happy Hour and those guys from SUNY sexting nonstop and the prude label she’ll get slapped with by the Pi Delts and their ignorant slut posse who have been posting their vicious bitch craziness every few seconds the last few days, on some Red Bull and whip-it binge, probably, and whining about it nonstop, too, how tired, how they just want to crash already.

  So it isn’t all the sugar in the White Russians she didn’t have at that share house mixer she skipped, for a change, so much as the parade of shames in her nonstop guilt reel, rewinding and replaying, turning her one way and then the other in her twin bed: the tuition her dad pays for her cut classes; the four hundred dollar Kate Spade purse she borrowed and forgot to tell Hunter about and can’t use anyway now without her knowing; the loser she didn’t quite sleep with (everything but) after all the Jäger in his crappy, clove cigarette-stinky car; the promise she made to Marco to go with to Italy and maybe Istanbul instead of taking her work-study required soph semester interning for that (sorry, but honestly kill-me-now terminally nerd) public policy advocacy liaison dot org; oh, all of it, the entire endless downer season of episodes she cannot pause or fast forward or ever delete.

  −−−

  What time is it? In her Surf Beach Sun Motel efficiency unit, Mrs. Frank Talavaro of Weehawken, New Jersey, wakes to see Frank crouched in the dark with a flashlight, on hands and knees, bent over the upside-down kitchen table, disassembling it. His face is greasy with the sunburn cream the clinic doctor gave him, his cell phone blares from the counter—80’s rock he downloaded for the beach, all edgy treble—and he shouts above it:

  “Hey, all they have here is a screwdriver, but this table is wobbly. Almost got it. Hey, are there pliers in that other drawer? Remember when we got that media stand from Ikea? Pliers. Vise grips, whatever. What time is it? Maybe a shim. Or saw a little off the other legs.”

  She has gone still, staring. “Frank . . .?” she asks, as if to be certain it’s still his name.

  −−−

  Grace Feltch cannot stand the gnats anymore but has discovered that stretched pantyhose can form a kind of homemade mosquito netting over any bed, though she had to buy out Roscoe’s entire stock of L’eggs and five rolls of duct tape to achieve it. She smiles, admiring her handiwork, imagining the coming night free of the faint buzzing in her ears and of the lightest disgusting tickle of no-see-ums and blue flies and mosquitoes and other flying insect pests she’s looked up on Wikipedia, too.

  5

  In their aging, modest Cape Cod-style cottage, Chief’s wife Jan has achieved a good-natured accommodation with the daily realities of Carratuck—the salt film on all things glass, the grit under bare feet on the hickory planks of their floors, the inevitability of rust. Chief loves any reminder of the luck that’s led them to this wild edge of the land; it makes him feel less ordinary, in the way children can still believe they’re different—at least until life traps them in a cubicle and rules them with a calendar.

  Jan sweeps at the traces of sand idly of late, absently; though tonight as he returns from his day and sets gun and keys on the foyer table, her smile and gaze seem fully present and accounted for.

  A dependable enough peace has found them, each safe in the other’s charitable regard. They trade a quick kiss, and he has a quick thought of her as another man might: Jan with her traces of rosacea and her floppy gardening hats, her body gone soft but still inviting, her eyes shar
p with a ready glint of amusement.

  A new edginess hollows his stomach, and he eyes the bourbon bottle in a cluster of others on an open shelf. He will not on a weekday night, of course—that indulgence had become a vice and added pounds and dimmed his wits for too many years, late and loathe as he was to admit it. He turns in place, briefly: what now?

  The day clings. The Boy’s silence is a question without an answer, an affront, a failure.

  Chief checks his cell phone: there’s no notification on the home screen, but maybe a text or email from State Police or FBI or Homeland somehow failed to appear there, or sound his alert. He flicks at the apps, scrolls the promos from discount sites, the pitches from charities, the spam, endless. How are we all so easily found?

  In the bedroom, he changes quickly into sweats and tee and sits on the bed with his open laptop to search NAMUS, the national missing persons database. He scrolls with impatient taps, annoyed. Without a name or address, he has only the approximate age of whichever parent is missing—useless. Carolyn Koenig, Robert Shulmeyer, David Hurst. Connecticut, Massachusetts, or New York? What does “missing” even mean? To not be seen in one’s usual places, at first. And then, as the hours turn into days and the absence becomes unaccountable, to be seen nowhere at all. None of the reasons are good: kidnapping, death, dementia, or flight. None suggest happy endings.

  Over dinner, Jan shakes her head at the story, quick to remind: “Two years ago, that little girl’s father missing? Shacked up on a bender with some coed, in the Airbnb right next door. Foster care turned out to be worse. Hard to get it right.”

  He remembers their own girl Linda at ten years old, waking one morning into a nightmare of abandonment, crying loud enough to bring him in at a run from pulling seagrass by the porch. Now he listens in vain to her voice on her cell for a hint of homesickness beneath the wry quips and complaints of the self-assured New York City college girl she has become, and overnight, it seems.

  Stunned by time: for all the careful forgetting of it, who isn’t jarred by their own face in a Facebook group picture, or by the obituary of a college friend, or a chance meeting on the boardwalk with a high school classmate, worn beyond recognition?

  And if not by time, then stunned by the end of it, looming as ever-present possibility, somehow larger of late. Glimpses return of abrupt bad luck: the storm at sea, human accident, roar of wind and crashing tons of water to drown out human shouts. The old disaster, years ago. And you worry: the more time gone by, the less of it left before the next?

  But why think that? Each of the Boy’s parents thinks the other has him, simple as that.

  He flexes his neck, scratches his jaw, focusing back on Jan and her beautiful, typical, insignificant chatter: “—ran into her in Roscoe’s, complaining about getting a permit for the add-on again, Harry up all night worrying, had to pry myself away and then there she was at the checkout counter . . .”

  And here, also, are the same bistro-style dishes after all, the thirty-odd-year-old stemware from their wedding registry, the butcher block countertops, the beaded white walls and solid beams of good wood. He holds the heavy cutlery, another gift, grateful for its weight and dim sheen, as if for reassurance.

  6

  Cort’s glad she talked her mom into getting her the fast LTE cell with its customizable home screen notifications, so she can see the tweets coming in (shorter and shorter, with more deeply dopey emoticons, of course) all night long while she whispers with Tay, who has finally given up and joined the contest, with five other new names toward dawn.

  “Hang on, I gotta switch ears.” Tay’s voice sounds rough with tiredness, like someone waking up from a nap.

  Cort giggles a little to think she has kept him up, maybe in more ways than one, which doesn’t make her a slut anyway, really, just not completely lame. “I would, too, but . . .”

  “Show-off, I got ’buds too, but I forgot they were in my Shorty zip, they’re fucked.” His voice fades a little and then comes back, with a loud digital rustling as he presses his cell to his other ear.

  “Am I on speaker?” She imagines him in a tiny room like a closet, humid and musty, much like her tiny “other” bedroom in this weekly efficiency unit shitbox she and her mom rent every August. It’s cramped, even with just her single cot and rickety white dresser with faded Alpine trim. The walls are warped painted plywood, the floorboards gritty with sand from bare feet, shadowed by moonlight from the small smudged window.

  “Oh, no way, man, they’re in like the next room, and these walls are like cardboard. Thinner than.”

  “Our place too, but with gross water stains.”

  “Swanky.”

  “I know, right? The water comes out rusty, too.”

  “Got mildew? A ship painting?”

  “Wait, have you been in here?”

  “When?”

  “What, when? Ever?”

  “You told me, Cort. You described it.”

  “When?”

  “Before I switched ears? Hello?”

  She giggles again, confused. “How long have we been on, anyway?”

  “Look forward, always. We got maybe two hours ’til daylight. We can make it. Keep talking.”

  It’s crazy, because it’s not a question; her eyelids have not once felt heavy, his voice never unheard. Alert, maybe a little hyper, she heard her mother’s footsteps a few hours ago, saw her shadow dim the edge of light beneath her door, heard the creak of their shared dingy bathroom’s door and the sink tap run, the faint bell of a neighbor’s windchime. The living night.

  A moth flutters in the porchlight out her window; the surf falls onto the beach two lanes over, seems to pause and do it again. A dog barks somewhere a few share houses down, stops as if thinking about it, then starts up again, too. The island is quiet enough this year—maybe too much, like each sound is pressing back against so much quiet, on purpose, to fill it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello yourself, I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “You did. You just fell asleep, for just a second.”

  “Did not.” She giggles, again.

  How wrong can he be? To miss a single word from his raspy sleepy voice? To not hear him breathing into her ears, the rise and fall of the sound of his living almost inside of her?

  She checks her battery icon to make sure she’s still charging. The cord’s a little short, but it still reaches from the outlet and the buds won’t pull from her ears if she lies just so. They could fit better; it seems like an easy thing to get right, unless her ears are just weird.

  Has he drifted off? “Hello?”

  “What are you thinking about now?”

  “Ohhhh . . . ummm . . . what are you thinking about?”

  They laugh.

  Her cell starts buzzing softly, intermittently, and she checks the time: 4:45 a.m. The first quarter hour #sleepless43 tweets are coming in from the game. For a few, it’s rounding day one, and they compare symptoms, as if they’ve never had an all-nighter. Evi (evilady26) is already whining:

  fuzzy aching like bad period

  “See ‘Evilady’? She’s staying out past Glade Point. Same school. Year ahead, but she’s nice.”

  “See ‘MicroMickey4’? Such a pussy.”

  She scrolls and spots the tweet, one of about twenty now:

  cuervo hangover

  Tay’s tweet comes in:

  Aw, nut up GF

  Cort smirks and adds her own to the feed:

  molly crash

  7

  With the plexiglass hatch open above them and Sam’s little fan whirring, still the air hangs heavily, the damp sheets entangle. Kathy lies turned away beside him, and as he has become accustomed, he tries to be still and float for an hour, letting sleep find him instead of searching for it.

  There’s fatigue, sure, the heavy ache of it weighing, but more a sensat
ion than a demand, or at least it seems that way, if the difference is other than semantic in this case, or in general. The eyes close, the eyes open. The heartbeat is regular, until you think about it too much.

  What the fuck.

  Up, quick and quiet, out of the bunk, into track pants, to maybe head out and up to the cockpit just to breathe, see the stars. He pauses, remembering to grab his cell off the bunk-side utility shelf.

  When wasn’t it so—when didn’t he reach reflexively for this addictive little dark rectangle, displaying nothing short of everything? Sometimes more than distracting, it’s become an urge—to know, to double-check, to have already read that, to be instanter. Or just as often, to escape. Kathy’s take, though, is that these things regress us back to the magical state of intimate play, of solitary child and shiny toy.

  His lock screen picture is this yacht, his own beamy Hong Kong-built yawl, close-hauled and heeling on a gusty fall day, shot from another boat. Finger swipe, unlock, blinking at the sudden brightness to check the time: 3:20. It’s pixel addiction, all this digitized data, the binary bits and bytes, millions of black/white blunt approximations instead of the infinite curves and chiaroscuro of the actual world.