by Roy Freirich
Paused in the main cabin doorway, an upward glimpse stops everything; lying between spare sheets in the makeshift dinette bunk of thin cushions, the Boy’s awake, staring into the darkness, eyes dimly gleaming.
Child is the father. Wordsworth, how random is that?
The ghost of another fear rises, but no, not for now. Turn away, refuse it.
Slowly now, nearer the Boy. Smiling carefully, crouching there to whisper: “Hey, buddy. Still up?”
Nothing, only the Boy’s eyes flickering away, his stillness like an animal’s, sudden and complete, as if at the scent of danger.
“Hey, easy, there. You’re safe here, you’re okay.” What’s more to say, knowing nothing else for certain? There are ways in, always, to begin to discover what silenced him, but a word too far or too soon can seal him in denial, in some solitary, unreachable world. Whatever this boy has witnessed, this place is free of danger, this night is peaceable. If only they would let it be so.
The Boy slowly seems to calm.
Sam dares to continue, “Know how I know? I try to remember to listen to the water, the little sounds of it, rocking the boat. Little sounds. It’s . . . peaceful . . . hear it?”
They share a silent moment of simply regarding each other. Sam keeps his smile faint.
“Smaller . . . quieter sounds . . . shhh . . .”
The Boy’s eyes close, his breaths deepening, fingers uncurling from his little electronic game and a twist of sheet laundered thin and smelling of bleach.
Sam watches, barely breathing himself. The Boy’s short, dark hair is clumpy with sweat and oil, his wrinkled, dirty tee rank, his surfer-style jams rumpled. A sideways smudge of dirt or soot crosses his cheek from the corner of his pale, cracked lip to his temple. Beneath his eyelids there’s a trace of movement, dreams beginning, perhaps, as exhaustion finally pulls him under.
−−−
Back inside his cabin, Kathy waits with her inquisitive look. “Anything?”
Sam shakes his head, gaze veiled. “No, but he’s out like a light. Why not you?”
She shrugs as he doffs his track pants and slips in beside her, into a bed too warm with the muskiness of damp and faintest sweat, traces of sand-grit.
He meets her eye and sees his own thoughts there. Wordlessly, they climb naked from the bed and she pulls the spare sheets from a cupboard as he whips the damp top and bottom sheets off the bunk mattress and makes a wrinkled pile of them on the cabin sole. Breasts swaying, Kathy stretches her arms above the mattress to fling the clean bottom sheet out to float billowing before settling, until she yanks her corners into place, and he his. The sheet tightens, smooth and clean, and they float the top sheet now to let it drift onto the fresh tautness of this bed they share.
She climbs back in, her smile like a child’s at the lightness of fluffed fresh linens. She lifts her lips to his and they kiss, and she pulls away to warn, “Shhhh,” and they fight it but she giggles and finally they laugh outright, the sound carrying faintly out into the night where other, silenter boats float at berth.
Laughter fades and starts again more quietly, and fades again into a kind of thoughtfulness as her lips barely touch his, tasting. By his side, her nipple grazes his chest, her hand his thigh, fleetingly, returning him to their first accidental touch, and the next, sitting inches apart side by side on barstools at Claude’s. Her hand floating up to tuck a strand behind her ear, the small wobble of a breast so slightly lifted beneath her elbow, the delicate arch of her eyebrow, her reticent smile: all of it hollowed him with a new emptiness by showing him how much he had been missing. So helpless and sudden, the pure wanting a heat in his ears and neck.
She turned him into a boy, nearly shivering to dare to imagine touching more of her—accidentally, of course, both pretending not to notice—but tonight just until the tease of her lips is a question he answers with his, tentatively, as if a guess. Her laughter, again, quick murmured low notes, ends with a faint gasp as one hand holds her wrist and the other glides lightly along the draped curve of her hip.
From wanting to needing, needing to having. All else falling away. He brings her to him, pulling her in with his fingertips sliding the sheet clean along her skin until it’s gone and she’s cool against him, twisting a little back and forth to sweep her fullness here, her taut firmness there, until the pressure in his chest becomes a moan. Her breath damp on his neck, he rolls and lifts himself over her, hovering as her hands gently on his hips at first finally tense and pull until they’re hard against each other, balancing on a small fulcrum of heat with shallow, knowledgeable motions, slowly deepening, slowly hastened.
Both wait for and find the other’s urging everywhere, in a gently bitten lip, a shuddering sigh, a gripped shoulder, a foot tangled in the top sheet for purchase. Freed in each other’s quickening grasp.
Oh, if he had more to give, he would promise it; she deserves an unwavering, braver heart. But for this sweet moment, the fear—that he has too little of surety to offer—fades.
How it fades.
#day_five
1
“They think I belong here,” the Australian kid said, in his broad accent, syllables stretched into twangy dipthongs. “Dorm counselor, a mate.” Pronounced “mite.”
He stood in the doorway of Sam’s campus office, not nineteen, smirking and slouching in mall-bought “alternative” rock clothes: dark skinny jeans, boxy glasses, layered shirts over a silk-screened T, revealing a band name, Weezer or Geezer or Guster. Scalp showing through shorn hair, such vulnerable white. Prickled scrim of blemishes fading along his jaw. His eyes sliding away, bruise-colored skin beneath.
“Yeah? What do you think?”
That day’s Sam was a blind man, to believe for even a moment that Gabriel’s was just another face among the year’s patients, one with another litany of longing for lost mother’s love, for father’s pride, with any of the usual catalogue of childhood hurts, tenderly nursed, tearfully confided.
To have the day back, to be a different man in the moment: what would he not give?
−−−
Overhead, light pales the plexiglass deck hatch again. Faint sounds already clutter the morning—the padding of bare feet along the float as somebody heads for the showers, the hollow slap and hiss of a sailor hosing salt from a deck, a radio softly playing.
Turning now, Sam finds Kathy awake, too, facing him, her eyes faintly, oddly amused.
“Hey . . . you’re up?” His voice is hoarse, as if he has been asleep.
“Before the sun, like I still had early shift at the Coffee Spot. Just laying here. Didn’t really sleep at all. It sucks.”
No explanation for her complaint occurs to him, and he shakes off a strange, pointless twinge of unease, but admits, “Me too. Found every lump in the mattress twice. Feels like back in med school, on a triple shift.”
“Well, I thought you were asleep. So I kept quiet.”
“Me too. Funny.”
It isn’t, really. He’ll be even further off his game, spacey and edgy, and it’ll likely cost him. Already, he’s hoping for a light day, with few complications and fewer judgment calls. He’s begun too many days here with the same hope, now vain.
Chateauneuf-du-Pape and indica have served him well since spring; he’s clocked some hours of sleep on nearly most nights, and happily enough without other pharmaceutical aids, since even the non-benzodiazepines come with a discouraging list of possible side effects and contraindications. Another night like the last, though, suggests they may be the lesser evil, compared to the diminished capacity of too much wine and weed.
He rubs his eyes, sits up.
“Sam . . .?” she begins.
He preempts her. “Sure, I’ll go check.”
He slips out of bed and finds fresh sweats and T, the mothball scent of camphor from the open drawer, stubborn hint of mildew beneath. He’ll need to
clean out the drawers one of these days, search out the spot of dampness taking root, treat it before it spreads.
Out in the main cabin, he stops short, seeing what he wishes were otherwise: the Boy awake, lying there with his little electronic game held again in front of his face, like a window into another world. Faintly, Sam hears the beeps and whistles.
“Hey, Admiral! Get some shut-eye?” It’s laying it on, but some light cheer can help provide what common sense suggests: consistent, dependably non-threatening interaction.
The Boy glances up and looks quickly away, traces of exhaustion around eyes faintly reddened, the tender skin swollen. Sam steps closer, the question one he needs to ask himself: has he slept at all? Has anyone?
Sam’s cell buzzes on the chart table. He grabs it, fast, hopeful. “Hello?”
But no, nothing.
“Hello?”
Nada. He shrugs and hangs up.
−−−
A half hour later, Sam and Kathy seem to move in a sort of fog, smiling vaguely at their guest. Kathy clears their breakfast of cold cereal and peanut butter and jelly on toast, and Sam thumbs dimly at his cell phone, readying the camera function.
“More coffee, honey?” she asks Sam, her subtle parody of a family breakfast.
He raises an eyebrow at her. She raises one back, a wry duet.
“What about you, sir? More milk?” She smiles gamely at the Boy, whose eyes dart away. She shrugs and pours him some anyway.
Sam lifts and aims the little cell. “If I thought you would, I’d ask you to smile.”
Across the dinette from him, the Boy goes still, expression blank. Cli-ick.
“Okay, one more for insurance, and we’ll get these out to the chief.”
But before Sam can aim the cell again, footsteps pound along the float past them, quick panicky impacts, a muffled shout, “This way, here!”
Sam stands, head tilted, listening.
From just outside now, another shout, from a sailor whose boat is just a few slips down, whose name escapes him: “Doc! Hey, you in there?”
Kathy and Sam trade looks of annoyance, then trepidation. He rushes up the companionway and out.
Sunlight stabs at his eyes as he leaps onto the float, met by two wide-eyed sailors.
“End slip, old couple? Went over to borrow some dish soap? Cabin open, TV on . . . I knocked, called out—Man, they look—on the berth in their cabin—I think they’re both—”
“Okay.” Sam starts off down the float, in a rush quickening to a run toward the big sleek 60-foot Erikson sloop in the outermost berth, a king’s ransom worth of yacht.
The two sailors keep pace, one yammering off point, “I guess I just thought I—well, sorry, but maybe you should—”
Sam gives a vague nod and quickly clambers aboard, swinging under the wire rail and hopping down onto the teak sole of the cockpit. The main cabin door is shut, but unlocked, and Sam twists the knob and takes the first step down into dimness.
The rest—galley, chart table, the good mahogany cabinetry, a laptop open—goes by too fast as he crosses the main cabin and blunders on into the small hall to the owner’s stateroom, where through the ajar door he sees two pairs of bluish bare feet at the end of a wide bunk, and then the couple themselves, so very still—dead, plainly, even from the doorway where Sam hesitates at first, stunned.
The bodies side by side, barely touching. The blue-white pallor unmistakable, the eyes open and already milky, fixed on nothing.
They were in their seventies, lank and handsome as any in a backlit Cialis commercial, and seasoned hands. They arrived on a windy morning, tacked close into an offshore breeze, smartly lowered the main, and luffed the jib. With a deft touch on throttle and helm, and the wife’s long, easy rope toss from bow to float, they eased in to barely nudge a fender.
Hail-fellow-well-met, they’d invited Sam and Kathy over for Pimm’s. After introductory chatter, they told tales of all-nighters on watch in the shipping lanes, or running full sails ahead of a nor’easter, sleeping with one eye open.
The man’s wife had clocked Sam quickly and asked, “A doctor, huh? No rest for the weary around here, I bet.” She seemed to study him a moment too long before the conversation veered onward and away.
By the book, Sam checks their vital signs anyway, and then turns and yanks open a sliding porthole and cracks the ceiling hatches for air. On a utility shelf across from the bed, a little TV is on, a morning talk show of women around a table, chattering and laughing. Sam snaps it off.
And then he sees it there beside the TV—a little amber plastic pill bottle, cap off. He edges closer, close enough to see it’s empty and make out the label, “Lotosil,” and a prescription date more than a year old.
One of the sailors, whichever one, has appeared in the stateroom doorway now, wide-eyed. “Jesus.”
Sam lifts the berth sheet, turns each body a few inches over and pulls up their Ts to check for lividity. He bends and studies the glisten of their open eyes. TOD, probably not earlier than last night.
So no one can say he didn’t, he gives the place a closer once-over for any sort of note, but it’s Chief’s wheelhouse, not his, and he’s more likely than not to compromise evidence, should there be a need for any.
The thought occurs, probably unkind, that in the biggest picture their fate is perhaps not an overly-tragic one; after seventy, there are worse ways to go than falling asleep on a million-dollar yacht with your wife beside you—before the routine checkup turns something up, or the name of a day of the week slips away, or you almost make it to the men’s room at a rest area off the Mass Turnpike. How much brighter could their future be?
If it’s any solace to wonder, it’s cold comfort twenty minutes later—when the sheet falls away from the woman’s face as she’s borne on a stretcher by two auxiliary firemen up the ramp from the float to the dock. Her cheeks shudder with their steps, as if alive; the shocked crowd of weekenders murmurs and gapes. The chief shouts with a pained look of dismay, “Sheet, Tommy! Come on!”
A hardened Staten Island FD transplant since 9/11, Tommy looks white himself as he quickly reaches down to readjust and cover her again.
Chief tilts himself back on his heels with his hands in his pockets, shaking his head at the day looming ahead, of paperwork and badgering calls to the mainland for the coroner he’s failed to persuade Carratuck’s supervisory board to provide. And of course, Deputy Police Chief Ken Ballard’s father had to pick this week to die, way out in California, and Chief had to grant family leave; flaky as Ken is, he’s better than none, and way better than the auxiliary guys, who need managing and aren’t worth the trouble.
Chief calls out a last admonition, “Okay, everybody, nothing here to see!” before turning confidentially back to Sam. There are dark circles under his eyes today, a blurred look to his gaze. “Sleeping pills, huh?” He lets out a small, exasperated sigh.
“We’d all rather say accidental overdose, I’m sure. But both of them?”
Chief nods. “That sucks. Now I definitely gotta call mainland to sign off on forensics.”
Sam looks away, more than the sentiment is worth.
Chief shakes his head woefully, watching the bodies being loaded into the back of his Jeep.
“Man, that’s hard to see. We had a guy OD on something a few years back. Found him too many days later. I gotta get these two to the Fire Station, on ice.” He sighs theatrically. “And call next of kin. Every year I put a coroner in the budget.”
Sam nods back, commiserating. Waiting.
Chief remembers. “How’s the boy?”
“Still not a word. I just took his picture, before all this, was just about to email it. Maybe show it around, one last Hail Mary before you call CPS?”
“Good. I’ll get copies circulating.” Chief seems edgy, distracted. His shave is bad, his hair sweat-darke
ned. He seems to nod as he lifts a hand to the other side of his head. “Yeah, no. Slow down, please. Methamphetamine? Why do you think so?”
Meth—? It takes Sam a small second to realize Chief has clicked his Bluetooth earbud and is already elsewhere, in urgent conversation with someone else. Is everyone somewhere else?
Sam waits, unhappy, as Chief paces a little circle, listening, and then pitches his voice low, holding up a one-sec finger at Sam. “Ma’am, hang on now, have you seen your son actually take any, or found any? Can you put him on the phone? He—what’s the address?” He gives Sam a helpless look.
Sam gives a vague wave, later, and turns back to his boat. Kathy’s there, waiting in the cockpit, a hand lifted to shield her eyes from the glare.
Sam slows, seeing just what he hoped he wouldn’t: a pale shape hesitating by his main cabin’s porthole—the Boy’s face, just turning away.
2
“Higher,” she says now, or wants to say, or has already said. It’s the blue smoke she loves, floating upward in the windless lee of their dune, curling from the thin jay Tay has rolled for them. It’s strong bud, and the air on her skin feels tingly, pressure against a dizzy lightness pressing outward from inside. She has an idea to speak again, if she has at all, but the words that occur to her might be dumb, but she hasn’t said them anyway, she’s pretty sure, so okay.
Tay has a foot lifted backwards behind him and reaches back to hold it higher, bending forward at the waist and lifting his other hand before him in a showy flourish. It’s almost the Standing Bow yoga pose she has shown him, but not so much, really.
She blinks at him. An idea from nowhere fills the hollowness of lost sleep, suddenly, urgently important: “The Rig Vedas are a Hindu book. Which is how yoga started, I heard. It’s a way of life, even sleep. It says to live in your dreams, or your dreams will live in your life. I read that.” Why has she said this?