Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  Madison, Sioux, the others, do they already know she got felt up and then freaked and ran like a prude all while she pretended to babysit for a woman who maybe killed herself?

  But that’s just ugly, when it’s Madison to worry about now, her scary tweet and now nothing, as if she’s simply disappeared.

  She punches up FaceTime. She’s turned down her volume so the hollow bbrrr, brrr old-school ring won’t wake Mom, who seems as sleep-deprived as everyone else lately, anyway. It sounds twice, and then Madison, it must be Madison, the streaky flash of a face swinging out of frame and then a shaky-cam close-up of a mouth twisted into a shriek of laughter and a shout:

  “—outta here!”

  “Madis—?”

  Dead, hung up, or dropped, the image blinks into blackness. Cort stabs the redial, but Madison lets it ring and ring, a dull lazy sound, more annoying than urgent. Nothing, no one. Cort quits.

  Is it everybody? The lady leaving her kid, Madison gone to crazytown.

  She looks up. The thin strip of light beneath her door has darkened, a board creaks with the weight of her mother’s footstep.

  16

  Sam waits in his cabin, listening to the rain drumming on the deck above, faster as squall lines rake the marina. Each thought leads only to the missed signs, the late response, the blind stumble past the hands that reached for him and the voices that called, until there’s no thought to follow but back to the desperate longing for fatigue to finally set him, everyone, adrift in sweet luxurious sleep.

  Kathy slips quietly inside, leaving the door ajar. Sam looks up and she nods, her hard-edged beauty harder, the lines of her face sharper somehow, even as her eyes seem duller with fatigue.

  “He’s out, finally,” she murmurs. She turns away to undress and slips quickly into a robe. She sits on the edge of the bed, perched, and adds, “He picked hot dogs over cereal. It’s something.”

  He doesn’t smile. “Well, it’s progress.”

  “Nothing for you?”

  “What do you mean? We all had—we—”

  “Mac n’ cheese? Salad? That was last night.”

  “Well, sure. I had something at the clinic, though.” He looks away with a vague shrug. Has he not eaten anything but the two or three Power Bars chased with Evian, out in the hall between patients? Hunger just another hollowness, one more forgotten thing.

  She studies him, and he bears it, stonewalling. It’s nothing to do with dinner; she doesn’t want to understand, of course, why he isn’t in the main cabin, encouraging the Boy to recall everything about the thing that stole his words away.

  He dodges, dropping his voice to a whisper: “I brought these.” He brings out a sample pack of Ambesta—two doses, bubble wrapped, innocuous beautiful pink oblongs.

  She worries: “What if he wakes up?”

  “I’ll be up.” It’s reassurance, hopefully.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be. Maybe you should take one. Or part of one.”

  He looks at the meds, part of him wanting only to give in, to end the endlessness of this day. He understands the urge too well, and barely battles back the impulse to tell her everything—the red-haired woman and her family, the chief’s fugue state, the island’s quickening descent into so much fear and confusion. But what solace can he offer? He shakes his head. “Too much going on. Something happens, I get a call, I don’t want to be out of it. But you go ahead.”

  She doesn’t look comforted. She cuts her eyes to the door. “But if you do get a call? I’ll be out of it.” A final hesitation, and then she decides: “I’ll pass for now.”

  She slides in beside him in the dimness, murmuring, “Sam, he was staring into the water today. Like . . . waiting?”

  Throbbing behind his eyes, in his throat: the bitter needless waste, the cost of it.

  “Do you think she took him to the beach?” she presses.

  “I don’t know, Kath. Even if he was talking, he might not be ready to remember.”

  “And if he is ready, and needs to?”

  Woodenly, fighting his own anger: “You tell me. Shall I go and slowly, carefully, win his trust and begin to open the wound—that’s just what it is, Kathy—and then hand him off tomorrow, bleeding, to someone he’s never met, so they can start all over again?”

  He sees the flicker of surprised pain in her look and softens his voice. “Child Services will be here tomorrow. It’s what they do.”

  “Well, not a day too soon.”

  He shakes off the sting, wondering if he should take her hand, look her in the eyes; it’s what she wants, of course: sincerity, even about uncertainty. If only he knew how to begin. “I know. Thank you, by the way. Not what you had in mind this week, I’m sure. But when this is all over, we’ll take some days . . . just us . . .” It’s a start, weak but well meant, and more honest than the Sam of a few days ago, with his blithe reassurances.

  But before he can go on, she gently disengages her hand with a thin smile. “Yeah? Hurricanes and karaoke at the Pier View? That what you’re thinking? Some boogie boarding?”

  His smile is shaky, best he’s got right now. “Sure, all of the above.” So much more waits to be said, but once asked, doesn’t it always ring hollow, too little, too late?

  He needs to become an honest man, a kind man. He needs a drink, a hit off a J. He needs to turn away the thought of the others he failed—too workaholic, too slow to commit, too skittish when pushed—the tearful, shouted endings and the quieter, woeful partings. He needs a night of true velvet darkness to close his eyes in, a darkness beyond all thought or memory.

  But there’s still the incessant rain and the ding ding of wind in the rigging as she slides into bed, barely mussing the covers beside him, and turns out her small lamp. Her eyes don’t close, even for a second.

  Another squall line passes, drumming on the deck above, a crescendo of pattering, then a diminuendo, like a million fleeing tiny footsteps.

  She springs up again, suddenly, and grabs a tissue from a box on her night table. Jaw set, she rips it into pieces, as if a page of unwelcome news, and then twists the larger bits and jams them in her ears. She lies back down.

  He lies carefully motionless, just staring out the porthole at the deluge.

  −−−

  Later, how much later he can’t guess, Sam slips silently and carefully from their bunk to pad to the main cabin doorway.

  Flicking sideways away from the small light of his little game—impassive, incurious, cold—the Boy’s gaze finds his.

  Sam steps back, before he even realizes it, into the shadow of his cabin, retreating as quickly and soundlessly as if he were never there.

  #day_seven

  1

  Snow had fallen heavily over the campus the day hollow-eyed, reticent Gabriel returned. Shrugging out of his huge parka, he sat silently, snow in his hair melting in the steamy heat of the little office.

  The peeling radiator hissing and murmuring. His pale hands worrying each other.

  Sam waited with a quizzical smile and finally leaned forward. “Well, suppose we start this way: why do you feel like you’re here today?”

  “I’m here for everybody.” No hesitation, just a simple certainty, unequivocal, from deep within some elaborate private construct.

  “How so?”

  A shrug, a glance away. The planes of his face sharpened, eroded.

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “What? Right now, you mean?”

  “No. In general, lately.”

  “Not so much. I’m afraid, I guess.” Pure Brisbane: “afraid” pronounced “afride.” “Guess” like “gis.”

  “Of what, do you think?”

  The radiator sighing, the little digital clock rearranging its numerals.

  Was it impatience? The stifling heat of the tiny office, the late hour with darkness fallen hours ago? “Do
you feel threatened . . . or . . . do you feel . . . responsible for something? Like something is your fault?”

  Another glance away, his dark eyes veiled. “Not yet. But ideas can spread. Maybe believing that even makes it so. And it’s how they come true. Maybe . . . some shouldn’t be talked about.”

  “Which ideas are those?”

  Gabriel’s hands had gone still as cold statuary, his eyes widening and his mouth opening a little. He shook his head, mute, as if a thing named was a thing more frightening.

  “Gabriel?”

  When did he stand? His face twitching like some aged broken man’s as he backs away.

  “Gabriel, wait—”

  How we flee. How Gabriel had fled—out the door and down the empty, ringing hall into the dark quad, one sleeve of his clutched parka dangling behind like a dead man’s farewell.

  Sam had gone after him, of course. To the edge of the lamp-lit icy sidewalk in front of Eton Hall, calling, the echo of his name fading even as he faded into the swirling darkness.

  −−−

  Daylight, like a sledgehammer, lands again and again with each throb of blood in Sam’s forehead. Vertigo begins as time gaps and repeats so that the spinning of this close cabin stops and starts again. Air also touches the exposed surfaces of his open eyes and blinking does not relieve the smaller, steadier ache continuing there, as irrefutably as fact.

  He turns, and blurs sharpen into Kathy’s lean shoulder, her face and her red-rimmed eyes returning nothing, frightening to see; her focus is hard elsewhere, on a memory or a waking dream so vivid that this world has fled. Sam reaches to touch her hand gently, to bring her back.

  Her pupils focus slowly, barely moving and shrinking to take him in. She doesn’t smile, so he does, though one lip seems pasted to his teeth. Voice thick with phlegm, pinched from the soreness in his throat, he whispers, “Hey.”

  Recognition dawns in her eyes, but dimly, joylessly. She nods, barest acknowledgment, as if meant to discourage conversation from a stranger. It’s worse than that, he knows. In the haze of exhaustion, she has let the undying doubts of mid-life turn him into a cad who’s toying with her affections, with no honest intentions for the future.

  “You okay?” A poor start, by any measure.

  “I’ll check on him.” Her flat whisper sidesteps his question and accuses all at once.

  She climbs out of bed; unaccountably abashed, Sam looks away from the lean body with its smooth upturned bottom and sinewy back that once stirred him, that once he found any excuse to see—a voyeur in his own cabin, or in the shower, or at night, tugging the sheet ever so slightly lower while she slept. He hears the whispery sounds of her quickly dressing and waits until her footsteps fade.

  He slips out of bed and into a pair of sweats.

  In the dank little bathroom, his watch reads 7:10. When did he put it on? It looks slightly fogged, as if condensation has formed behind the glass, or maybe on the surface of his own eyes, which in the mirror now regard themselves grimly; are they vibrating ever so slightly, a telltale nystagmus, or a vestige of REM sleep? The idea becomes a sort of Mobius strip: do they appear that way because they are? Suddenly, he yawns convulsively, his jaws stretching around a mouthful of tepid air, the pressure in his ears like a basso rumble even as another sound reaches him: knocking, faintly.

  The top of the companionway looms suddenly, the dark small mahogany door, the tarnished brightwork latches, the tap tap, tap tap, of someone there. Sam swings open the door to see a little girl, Sandy Winter from a few boats down, blinking up with seemingly lashless eyes, darker tender skin beneath. “Sleeping pills? My dad wants to know if you have?”

  A balance fails in Sam; his heart lurches and his head pounds to imagine a child’s bewilderment at so much exhaustion, the pure innocent fear and confusion at still being awake after the stories and the tucking-in, the warm milk and the murmured endearments. Another kind of nightmare, more terrifying than any dream.

  “Tell him to come over, honey. I might have, but I’ll need to talk to him. Can you go get him?”

  The little girl’s hands ball into tiny fists, and her eyes glint dully with malice. She turns and moves slowly and wordlessly away, climbing down to the float with the stiff care of an osteoporotic. In the dimness of the cockpit of her family’s yacht down the float, Sam sees a vague form stirring, a shadow—her dad, of course.

  Sam waves and doesn’t wait for the man to wave back before he ducks back below.

  In the close dank dimness of the head again, the moment stutters and his eyes look back at him, or seem to, and his watch seems cloudy as if condensation has formed on the inside of the glass as he checks the time: 7:10.

  No, because wasn’t he just above decks, talking with a little—

  BLLIII-IIING! His cell seems to blare, shrill. He reaches out the head door to snap it up off the hallway utility shelf.

  “Yeah?”

  He doesn’t want to recall the voice of the kid leaking over the line, barely older than a teenager’s, because the voice is from another time and place left carefully and completely behind, but apparently not after all, because now it asks, “Hey, hear this?”

  “Hey” like “hi.”

  On the line now, there’s a heavy sssssshhhhht-click—a weapon locked and loaded.

  He can never be quick enough to yank the cell away from his ear in time, to not be deafened by the gunshot, a sound so sudden and so impossibly loud that it seems to echo forever, if only for him to hear.

  He yanks the cell away, gasping, too stunned for fear—until it begins anyway, a prickly sweat of dread that now slowly turns him to see the Boy and Kathy standing there, side by side, just outside the open head door, staring at him.

  He blinks, dazed.

  Her voice seems to rise out of static: “—talk?” She nods topside.

  2

  Above, the marina is all dampness and glare and noise—water lapping nonstop as if the day weren’t windless and oddly still, halyards clang clanging against boom and mast as if somebody’s bungee has come loose and there’s a gale blowing. Steam rises off the wet decks and dock in the sun that hammers his head like a fist.

  To the south, Sam glimpses whiteness rising and shifting into the sky, a bank of sunlit fog obscuring the tips of masts and spars, rolling in from the channel to finally turn the sun itself into a throbbing circle.

  He and Kathy sit across from each other on the cockpit benches like a couple out for a daysail, both blinking at the brightness.

  In the dimness below, the Boy waits; Sam can see him at the dinette again, so sweetly, sadly patient that he can understand how Kathy can’t understand it: how Sam could leave the talk this boy has needed for days to others, to strangers, after they have shared these close quarters and lived the length of so many hours together.

  “Try again, Sam. You can reach him. Something’s wrong. Before something goes wrong.”

  Sam shakes his head, searching for focus, but he notices too much: the white sky closing on masts and stays, sun alternately dimming and glinting off channel water, Kathy’s gaze which seems vague and resolute at once, as if she is reading her lines from cue cards or has memorized them and needs a beat to recall.

  “It’s just a few hours. Child Services . . .”

  She studies him, shaking her head. Deciding, apparently. “Okay, then. Take him with. I’ll be packing my things.”

  “You’re . . . what?” It adds up, finally. His reticence about the Boy fits too perfectly with what she believes is his reticence about her; it’s wrong and unfair, but even now the Boy is watching from below, and every argument feels like equivocation, too scattered and haphazard to firmly, quickly grasp and offer.

  What was he about to say? His mind is worried about itself; hers worried about his, probably, too, and vice versa.

  What’s needed is bended knee and ring, too far
beyond them both on this torpid, punishing morning. After the accumulated ceaseless hours have weakened and numbed and confused, doubt comes too easily, trust and faith too hard.

  How can he even begin to know? What part of the urge to cling to her, to promise her everything, is fear—of nights looming without another voice to hear but his, or worse, none but those remembered? Or is it another fear, that she will see perfectly the blind man he has been?

  The last distance between us, always the longest.

  She sighs. “It’s time. I always thought you were half here. Now I know it. You lost a patient, so you’re hiding until you get your nerve back. Until then, I’m pretty much just . . . a party gal. Fisherman’s daughter, coffee shop waitress thought she won the lottery. Lazy and stupid. Maybe they’ll take me back. When things get back to normal.”

  Does every failure guarantee another? The world tilting, he’s sliding backward, reaching out too late. “Kath, you’re just tired, we all are . . .” He makes a move toward her, already knowing better.

  She steps back, shaking her head. “I know you believe your own lies—but don’t try to talk me into them again. I’m just someone who doesn’t threaten you. This is all a vacation, and that’s not good enough for me anymore.” She turns her gaze from his first. “You go on ahead with him.”

  “Kath—”

  She flinches, her eyes quick and furtive. “Don’t, okay?”

  −−−

  The Boy ascends into the light, his eyes calm and unblinking as he looks from Kathy to Sam, and they wordlessly climb down to the float and head up the dock ramp to the gate together.