by Roy Freirich
Sam shifts in his chair, unhappy at still more of the same: darkly obsessive thoughts, the circling narratives, the blurry gazes. But does he feel any different?
“I can give you something to help you sleep. But . . . your parents? Maybe talk to them? Do they know how you’re feeling?”
The kid’s gaze lands on Sam for a long, strange moment before he simply bursts into laughter—a low, rising howl cut off by a series of ugly, derisive snorts. Sam watches silently—for what?—and then stands and slips out of the exam room, his face burning like a taunted boy’s.
−−−
“It’s the light, it doesn’t stop, or the sounds. They hurt now.” This patient is a middle-aged woman, sweet-faced, slender, redheaded, her voice abashed somehow, as if she’s embarrassed by her plight.
“‘The world is too much with us . . .’” A light touch and a prescription pad are all he has. He clicks his pen and pulls the pad onto his clipboard, but sees her curious look and explains, “Sorry. It’s Wordsworth, freshman English. Not really apropos, after all.”
“I should look it up. I don’t really remember. But I remember less and less.” She tries to smile, tries to shrug.
“You’ll be okay.” Won’t she? He scribbles a scrip for sleeping pills, one with the least side effects and contraindications, Ambesta, and tears the page from his pad to hand to her.
−−−
Moments seem to repeat themselves as Sam moves quickly from room to room, a rhythm developing: a minute or two for each patient, the Q & A now automatic:
“I can write you for four Ambesta. See your doctor for more when you get home.”
“Trouble falling asleep, or staying? Or both?”
“How many nights?”
“Any new sounds, odors, anything taste strange? The water?”
“Try these. Ambesta, a few nights’ worth.”
“Hammer thumb, in Two, Sam.”
“Take one before bed. Ambesta, should do the trick until you get back on track.”
“Stove burn, wrist, some third degree.”
Accident cases, too, are stacking up more quickly—a radius fracture from a bike spill, a glass splinter from a dropped bottle, dizziness from Indocin overdose. Most are not so unusual, but in the current context of events, they could well be caused by the impaired judgment and diminished motor control of sleep deficit.
A few are actually repeats, back for a few more sleeping pills. It’s a mixed message: the pills work, but they need more. Did the old sailor couple develop too much tolerance to their own prescription, and finally OD trying to achieve any result at all?
He hesitates in the hall, trying to add the patients. The numbers would peak, of course, before they fell, as with any communicable illness. Here, the turning point would depend on the physical need overruling the psychological, every hour more due.
From the entrance, a burst of noise and motion yanks him back. Two shirtless, lean, sweaty guys in toolbelts and shorts stagger into the waiting area with their hands joined in a two-man carry for a third, who lolls between them, arm in a tourniquet, blood leaking from a hugely bandaged hand. The others make way with dim disinterest, and even Andrew stares a beat too long before yanking out a wheelchair, helping them lower the bleeding man into it, and turning to shout toward them, “Paula?”
−−−
Without a hand-specialist surgeon and pricey real-time laparoscopy imaging and gear, there’s no way to reattach the severed finger, no matter how clean the cut; small blood vessels need to be grafted and rejoined, nerves reconnected and conduction results verified—it’s all well beyond Sam and the capabilities of Pines Beach Urgent Care.
When Sam has fully stopped the bleeding with a pressure compress and dosed the guy with enough fentanyl, he seems amiable enough about taking his fingertip to the mainland in the little med cooler Sam has packed for him, to have a specialist perform the procedure there.
“You’ve got a day or so to get back to shore and have surgery to reattach. The ferry tomorrow should be fine,” Sam tells him. “But keep it on ice. Don’t be taking it out to show your friends at the Clam Shack.”
From nowhere, Paula’s preternaturally calm but insistent voice reaches him. “Sam?”
Again? He turns to see her pointing out into the waiting area, where Chief stands beside a darkly tanned teenaged girl in cutoffs and cowboy shirt over a bathing suit, barely distinguishable from her friends—but for her worried, skittish look.
Carol, is it? Cora? Sam shakes his head. She’s here, but the name is lost again, for the second time in the blur of this day. Or was it yesterday?
6
After so many months riding his bike to work and the beach and back, Sam’s uneasy with the close glass, unyielding seats, and jerky motion of the Jeep as Chief guns them out onto harder sand.
In the back, Cort seems nervous, but at her age it takes more than a sleepless night to dim her hair and eyes or fade her tan into pastiness.
Chief tries for a wry note and misses: “Cort here told her mom she was babysitting last year, too. Favorite alibi. For all-nighters in the Jensen boat shed with Tay Garner. They oughta put a padlock on that.” He steers them bouncing along West Beach, around groups of beachgoers who seem oddly sullen, quiet, blinking at them as they go by. One family’s eyes follow them with a kind of desperation, the look of the marooned.
The girl leans forward from the backseat, wiping at aggrieved tears: “My mom used to not want me to be happy, but this year she just doesn’t even care. It’s all vodka and TV. I’m really sorry, anyway, I just met the lady in the market, and I was going to and then, you know, I guess I . . . didn’t, right?” She focuses on Sam. “So how is he? Okay? Is he okay?”
Sam takes in her borderline manic affect, probably another acute insomnia symptom—plenty to go around, another that will abate when everyone finally sleeps, and not soon enough. “Well, he seems okay. Do you . . . remember him being quiet when you met? Silent?”
Cort blinks at this, as if trying to recall someone from long ago. “Opposite of, really. Talking to himself, playing. Said hi.”
Unhappily, it only confirms what by now is obvious—that some trauma has precipitated this Boy’s silence. No need, though, to make the point to Cort, who seems plenty thrown as it is.
Sam nods at her. “Okay. Thanks, Cort, for everything.” A closer look at her makes him ask: “What about you? You look tired.”
“It’s my friends, there’s like a contest? Who can stay awake the longest.”
Sam trades a fraught glance with the chief and looks back at the girl again. “How do you know if someone cheats?”
She stares out her window, shrugs. “Tweet every fifteen minutes.”
“How . . . long have you been up?”
“Not so long, two days, I guess.”
“Meaning . . . two nights without? It’s not really good for you.”
“Some friends longer. Nobody can remember who started it.”
“Parents must be thrilled.” They share a vague smirk, but Sam’s mind is already circling: is it a possible cause, somehow, or yet another symptom? The new meaning of “viral” is possibly more than apt, but would it change anything to know for sure?
Chief steers them over a dune to a fire access way beside a lane of peeling mid-century bungalows. He pulls them over and stops outside a shabby little studio rental, an ugly cinderblock box with aluminum sash windows and a fenced patio under a water-stained green umbrella.
Chief turns in his seat to regard the girl. “Cort, we’re gonna have to ask you to wait out here.” She nods again, wide-eyed, at once frightened and grateful to remain behind.
Chief’s woeful gaze slides to Sam’s and then to the rental’s door.
The three climb out and Sam and the chief approach the unit slowly, almost reluctantly. Sam’s mind is racing with too much,
too soon: the bloated faces of the elderly OD’d couple return to him, and a new image appearing, fleeting—a woman prone in tangled sheets, a pill bottle overturned on a rickety end table.
Finally, again, he imagines the sprawled blood-spattered legs of someone he can’t see yet as he approaches another doorway, this one down a dim hall he will always walk with dread as familiar as an old grief, since it is a memory and not some imagined thing at all.
A shard of sunlight from Chief’s watch stabs his eyes as Chief lifts his hand to knock and finds the front door ajar, creaking open a few inches at his touch.
They do not look at each other now, each of them steadying himself for what may lie inside the dim interior: a dead woman, most probably, and perhaps not alone. But what can prepare them, if not other deaths—crime scenes, accident sites, hospital rooms, patients, relatives at the end?
“Hello? Ma’am?” Chief calls out, barely loud enough. The door creaks again, complaining, as he pushes it gingerly open to reveal the inside of this single room efficiency.
Light leaks from the edges of a single curtained window, slanting in shafts of dust motes. Slowly, their eyes adjust to take it all in: the unmade beds, clothes strewn, toys, flies buzzing around leftovers on a kitchenette counter. A single bird feather in the middle of the floor.
Sam lets in a small sniff of air, judging the thick, dank sickly-sweet smell of the place, but as they take another step inside, they can see no one through the ajar bathroom door, or tangled prone in the dingy bedsheets, or anywhere in the dim single room. Chief moves slowly to check the far side of the bed along the floor; Sam approaches a furry cheap-looking teddy bear perched on a high bookshelf, as if watching.
The idea makes him go still, and then he reaches up and pulls the thing down. It’s heavy for a stuffed animal, short stubby arms held out to hug, smelling of dust. When Sam turns it over, he sees what he suspected he would, half-hidden in the glossy nap: RCA-style outputs. Huh, a nanny cam. He flips it over again and studies the little button eyes, one of which now barely conceals the little lens beneath.
Sam brings it over to the TV, a boxy little Sylvania (nothing to put in the brochure), and leans over the back: sure enough, red, white and yellow RCA cords dangle obligingly from auxiliary inputs, just waiting to be connected to a source.
Sam glances over at Chief. “Nanny cam here, may be something.”
Chief looks over, mild surprise. “Yeah? Let me see . . .”
Sam ignores him, already bending to hook up the video cord and flick on the TV. He turns the teddy bear over and over, and finally finds the strip of plastic sewn into the fur with the directional symbols.
On the little TV, snow flickers, hissing bursts from its cheap little speaker, and then, from the side of the frame, suddenly looming, the face of a woman fills the screen.
−−−
So many visit Carratuck for the best reasons—the gleaming sunlight, the kindness of the sea cool on their skin, the sound of their children’s laughter. Some, though, come to escape to the last of the land, as Sam well knows. To face away from the past, out to the straight edge of the sky’s end, the line there as sharp as the one between before and after. She was another of these refugees, strange to him as any, though it seems now more kindred after all.
It was her, he remembers now, on a shaded bench. On one of these narrow lanes between houses from to bay to beach, she was a woman crying. How many passed, rolling coolers and long-handled wagons of groceries, carrying a toddler, a beach umbrella, glancing at and away? How many spoke to her, how many ignored her? Was it a week ago now? Sam had slowed his bike and finally stopped, lowering his creaking kickstand to climb off and unhappily approach, slowed by the previous night’s exertions and palliatives. What had he seen? Mid-thirties, limp salty hair, with a slack, worn face streaked with tears.
“You okay?”
She looked him over and laughed, derisive. “Me? You look like you had a long night.”
He shrugs. “Carratuck, summer. The island that never sleeps.”
“Just, please, go away?” she said. But before he showed his palms in defeat and turned away, her eyes seemed to take in the dark glint of his own, and his hers.
The ones we turn from haunt us most, merciless to the end.
−−−
On the screen now, she appears blurred and dim, with familiar bruise-colored skin beneath her eyes and her eyes preternaturally wide, blinking too rapidly as she stares into the lens, talking to herself: “It’s gonna be a brand-new girl, seems nice but we gotta be careful, who doesn’t? Just in case . . . right, baby?”
Her hands flash by and her wrists fill the foreground as she adjusts the teddy bear cam. The rattling profusion of bangle bracelets don’t really hide the long dark scars that run the length of her forearms, inside of elbow to wrist, and Sam tenses as the Boy appears in frame now, in the background, ignoring his mother while he plays listlessly with his same little electronic game. Doi-oing! Whoa-oh! Cartoon noises leak from it, tinny maddening music.
She turns away and moves to him. “Can we stop for a minute, baby? Here, I found this, for you.” She pulls a feather from her beach bag and bends to hand it to him. Smiling too wide, too desperately. “Will you keep it?”
He glances up, slack-jawed, bleary-eyed, to grasp the proffered gift, barely regarding it before setting it down and returning to his game.
Now his mom’s cell rings, stock marimba ring tone, and she snaps it up, anxious, stepping back, forgetting the nanny cam altogether as she turns away from her son, her voice bright, eager: “Hello? What? You’re . . . not coming? Before I go crazy, for god’s sake, please. Oh, sorry, I must sound like forgot my Zoloft. Wait, I did! I need to go to sleep, or something, or take a swim, to wake up. But . . . it’s Cortney, right? Cort, okay . . . Look, I’m desperate . . . please . . . oh, but . . . well, ill? Oh. I see. Okay . . . no worries, all good, right, okay, but . . . sorry, okay, sweetie.”
She hangs up and spins slowly in place, looking around as if for escape. She begins to cry, in soft choking sobs, and her hands flutter to her hair and begin to pull at it, on either side of her head. Her face twists into a quivering grimace like a hideous smile as she steps past her boy, leaving him in the foreground as she paces.
The tinny maddening music from the Boy’s game seems to grow louder, sharper, tempo increasing.
In the background now, fully visible in her sweatpants and a wrinkled tee, his mother lies down on the unmade bed, closes her eyes, and goes still there, as if in a pageant or play. Her eyes snap open again and she turns over onto her other side now, facing away from the camera. Suddenly, she leaps up, does a half-turn, muttering unintelligibly, and then lies down again with a theatrical sigh. Improbably, she leaps up yet again and rushes across the room to the efficiency kitchenette, where she digs frantically through the drawer.
She’s cartoon-style frantic, tossing items behind her as soon as she finds them; they flash by—a corkscrew, a potholder, pliers, a spatula. Her boy doesn’t even look up, entranced by his little electronic game again, staring down as he thumbs at it.
His mother stops, finally, and turns from the drawer, a box of Saran Wrap in her hands. She smiles down at it, as if at some novel labor-saving device, but then she kneels and yanks open a lower cabinet and starts all over again. She slides out pots and pans and cookie tins with a clatter, until it seems she has found what she needs: a roll of gray duct tape.
She stands breathless with it, collects the Saran Wrap, and crosses the room to an open closet, where she knocks aside wire hangers to kneel against the back wall.
The Boy turns his head to look at her and she smiles tearfully at him, her voice tight: “You play now, sweetie, okay? Play your game now.”
He bends dutifully back to the chirping little screen in his lap.
She rips a length of duct tape from the roll, tears it off with her teeth
, and now opens the box of Saran Wrap to tear off a yard or so of it against the box lid’s serrated edge. No hesitation, thoughtlessly, she wraps the clear plastic around her face, blinking rapidly, and duct-tapes off the top around her hairline and the bottom edge around her neck with a quick overhead circle of her arm. She tightens it with a last twist at her throat.
She goes still, waiting.
The plastic tightens around her mouth, loosens, tightens, her eyes no longer blinking but wide and terrified, darting as if desperate for something to look at last.
A hand flutters now, restless, rising, hesitating, rising again, struggling against itself as its fingers begin to twitch. It jerks downward against her side, her arm locking hard at the elbow and beginning to tremble, as the other lifts and falls back again.
The Boy glances back at her, a quick, furtive glimpse, and then he focuses downward again on his game, the feather unnoticed there beside him as he thumbs the little buttons, faster and faster with new desperation.
Behind him, she goes still suddenly. Dead, holding her breath?
Her hand flashes upward to rip at the plastic, once, twice, until her fingers grasp a twist and it tears in a ragged patch from her face as she gasps in air, her chest heaving, tears streaming.