by Roy Freirich
Grief clogs Sam’s throat, the tightness of withheld tears crowds his chest when Kathy grabs the Boy, clinging hard, whispering fiercely, “Bye bye, you. Bye.”
The Boy blinks rapidly, confused, his eyes dark with fear.
Kathy just nods once at Sam, lets go and hurries back to the boat to pack while she still can, wiping at tears.
Sam feels a surge of optimism as sure as his despair moments ago. No worries; he will find his way back to her, of course—when the Boy is safe, when the world has slept, when they can find their footing and their careful, purposeful balance of joy in the moment again. Everything is temporary.
Sam takes the Boy’s hand with a wink. “Good to go, Admiral? See Paula?”
−−−
Through the damp of last night’s deluge, Sam walks his bike and the Boy along the bay front lane, this morning devoid of the usual joggers and cyclists. Approaching the long, rust-stained concrete quay of the island ferry terminus, Sam sees the hulking stern of the dead Sea Mist 1 still bobbing uselessly and wonders if they’ve expedited replacement. By the open air shed of the terminal, the first tourists have gathered, or the last, more accurately, of the block-long line already formed to wait for it—families and college kids and their gear, a confusion of color as they mill in murmuring groups. A hundred? Two? More, of course, since their numbers disappear around the far edge of the terminal.
Before they’re spotted and mobbed, Sam quickly, gently touches the Boy’s shoulder, steering them around the corner of a kitsch emporium and along a narrow access lane to the beachward boardwalk.
The boardwalk is empty too, but littered, trash-strewn, soaked and steaming in the intermittent baking sun, the eerie stillness like a held breath foul with the stink of low-tide mudflats, dead fish, rotting clams.
Up ahead, in the shimmer of damp heat rising from the planks, a pile of dark soaked clothes seems to stir. Foreboding stops him: what’s happened here? Everywhere?
Sam smiles grimly at the Boy. “Wait here?”
He rushes forward in jarring steps along the planks, sunlight flaring in the dim periphery.
The body twitches as Sam kneels beside it. A face turns to his, bleary, sagging, foul.
Sam rears back, gasping, but already another sound reaches him from yards away off the side of the boardwalk; in the dunes, another form is stirring, another pile of soaked clothes rises, a pale drawn face, a hand pointing at him: a tourist, laughing woozily: “Pills? A drop in the ocean, man, you have no idea!”
The two stare at each other, red-eyed, haggard.
In his pocket, Sam’s cell bursts into a buzz, its ring piercing like a klaxon. He yanks it out but then hesitates, afraid. Whose voice will it bring him this time? He winces as he brings it to his ear.
Paula’s voice crackles through, a quick single syllable: “Sam?” And then again as he stands there, his throat raw, words somehow lost to him: “Sam?”
3
When did the light in his windows go from gray to orange, the day descend? Bent beneath the side of his head, Chief’s arm stings with pins and needles and barely straightens. He flexes his toes to help his heart bring blood to where it doesn’t go much these days, and his arch begins to cramp, the tendons there pulled taut, hard as rebar. He stifles a gasp and sits upright, the sheet falling away, his gut trembling, and shuts his eyes to breathe through it.
No way now—to fool himself enough to lie back down and hope his eyes will close, or to even dream that they can, or even that they had at all during the last hours of last night.
Padding carefully into the living room, he sees her last somehow, a detail lost in the décor. She sits almost primly on the sofa, staring at nothing, sponges still taped to her knees.
The face she finally turns to his seems grayish with waxy translucence, and for a moment she regards him with the barely disguised disinterest of a stranger, until her gaze finds him anew, focusing, finally recognizing. How far has she wandered?
“You okay?” It’s not a question, both know, but tacit acknowledgment that neither are particularly, even approximately, okay.
“Oh.” She looks away and manages something like a shrug. “Tired, maybe, I guess.”
They’ve taught each other well, but today the shared habitual practice of stoic grace fails her and she asks, “Why? Why can’t we sleep?”
His eyes blur. He shakes his head, helpless. He moves to her and brings his arms around her, pulling her in. She sways a little in his grasp. “Don’t know, sweetie. We’re trying to figure it out. I’ll see about some pills, meanwhile.”
She moves away, shaking her head. She bends to tear the duct tape from around her knees, asking, “Linda? Shouldn’t we check—?”
“It’s barely seven. She hates getting woken up.”
Quickly, almost gratefully: “Of course. Right.”
“I’ll call her in a while from the Jeep.”
He feels her head nod beneath his chin, the hard bone and thinning hair.
Suddenly, unbidden, too much comes to him: their arsenal of hurts, their signals of forgiveness, the unfailing secret rituals of their nights, rages and vanities, the children they remain to each other, adversaries and allies.
He swallows and loosens his grip, her question and the day pulling at him. Too many days have borne him surely away to the problems of too many others, for too many years. No strength to fight the current now, and there is still trust that the shallows and the shore will be gained again, as always, in a glance, a touch, a familiar rhythm of everyday motion.
Even now she silently moves to the sink to jam on the tap and fill the coffeepot, the pitch of the swirl and gush climbing as it tops. Clatter of silverware, plates, the click, click woosh of the stove burner.
−−−
The sand is still damp and cool with dew, the Jeep’s windshield streaked and smudged with it as Chief steers along the straight, flat beach between Pines Beach and Ocean View. The tires bounce through ruts of harder sand, the suspension squeaking with a trebly complaint that worries a spot just above his left temple. Fog has gathered close offshore, an intermittently dense bank edging in, the sun a white disk struggling through.
The first Sleepless sit each apart in the sand, cross-legged like yoga students, motionless, until their faces turn slowly—odd how slowly—to watch him pass with impassive eyes. High school girl, tear-streaked face. Middle-aged man, sharp knees splayed, rocking. An older lady in a tent-like caftan, glaring.
But what slows him, instead, is the detritus from an odd turn of tide—a woman’s floppy hat floating in the wash, a flip-flop with a broken strap sticking straight out of the sand, a bathing suit top, salt-stained, twisted in rotting kelp.
He pulls over, climbs out to pluck each from the wash to study. But for what? They could be anyone’s, after all—things forgotten and swept away by the edge of high tide, or torn by the surf from a struggling woman, or worse, from one gone gladly limp and floating downward with closed eyes, filling her lungs with seawater as she descends.
He turns to the middle-aged man now staring mutely, as if trying to comprehend or recall who Chief might possibly be. Chief wonders himself today, with his service pistol buried or washed away, or just as likely tucked under some homicidal schizoid’s waistband.
“Can you give us a hand this morning? We need to form a line, water to dunes, and move down this beach, even spaced. We’re looking for a woman. Okay?” He looks at the others. “Folks? Everyone?”
“Another one?” The man wants to know, all smirking incredulity, as if Chief has personally lost two adult human beings in as many days.
“The ferry line is two blocks long already, Chief, tomorrow’s sold out, too, they’re saying. You get my wife on it, I’ll help you search every damned foot, here to Pine Glade.”
“When it gets here, we’ll see who gets on it, okay? Meanwhile, we have all kinds o
f help on the way to deal with this.”
“Not soon enough.”
“Pills? It takes forever to see the doctor to get a scrip—”
“It’ll all get sorted today. Meanwhile, I need some eyes looking for a missing woman.”
The woman in the caftan stands, staggering a little, still glaring as she nods at Chief. Another, tall as a basketball pro, shivers and smirks in a sleeveless tee as he steps up beside her. A hollowness in his stomach, lightness in his knees, Chief swallows and turns away from the dumb slowness of these tourists, their blithe hostility, the rising edge of his own fear.
But no, crazy, because how bad can it really get? Each night without means they’re all more due. It comes to him, even as one stands, and then another, to dust the sand off their legs and peer at him and one another with their mouths slackly open; he suddenly, unmistakably knows that this day, at least, will be his last without sleep.
4
“We’ll be fine. It’s okay.” At the first soft grip of the Boy’s hand in his, a knot tightens in Sam’s chest as they stop a block from the clinic to stare at the crude queue of Sleepless already formed.
The Boy nods solemnly up at him, and they start forward again, even as faces turn toward them and sudden silence descends, as though they have happened upon the sharing of a secret. In that pause, faintly, the sound of the surf a quarter mile across the island reaches them and fades.
Tiny burst capillaries vein the eyes that follow them, filled with light that shut lids no longer block; sallow skin shudders loosely as though days have been decades aging these bewildered tourists who have come here seeking respite and found only interminable brightness and sound and motion. No voice rises up to whine or insist or beg for solace; these are like the faces of doomed refugees who finally understand resistance will only hasten their end.
Inside the clinic, better than fifty of them fill the waiting area, standing in small clusters, twisting their hands, peering at each other peevishly, cramping each other. One steps back on another’s foot and shrugs at the other’s glare. Two women spot each other across the room and mime back and forth: one makes a prayer steeple of her hands and holds them against the side of her tilted head, the other laughs and shakes hers “no,” rolling her eyes.
The rest stand back and watch, as if respectfully, as Sam takes in their sheer number and guides the Boy quickly through and around the admittance counter to a seat in the back hallway. Still within earshot, they begin to murmur again among themselves:
“He’s really writing scrips?”
“What I heard, why I’m here.”
“Yeah, he is. Saw a guy passed out on the beach with a pill bottle in his hand. Before somebody else grabbed it.”
Sam pulls out his cell and dials from still too-recent memory. It’s been the number called too many nights—when he couldn’t turn off the ceaseless redundancy of his own condemnation, the replaying and second guessing, the merciless voices of verdict. The voices are back again today, gleeful whispers of perfidy. He blinks and sees Kathy’s face, and the Boy’s, wanting only to trust, watching him, waiting.
When he opens his eyes again, out in the waiting area the Sleepless are there—as if they have always been and will always be there, watching and wanting. How far is it to go to escape them all?
The message beep in his ear startles him, and he struggles to regroup for a blank panicky second, searching for the calm, resolute tone he fails, predictably, to find once more: “Professor, hey, Sam here. Said to call first thing. I am. Please get back, soon as you get this. I do definitely have a situation. CDC should be apprised. I’ve left word again. This is escalating, if anything.”
He clicks off and suddenly Paula is there. Has she been there, is she always? He takes in the faint puffiness around her eyes, the pallor of her lips, the weary rasp of her voice: “Howard called, it’s what we heard, the D vitamins are working. But he’s running out. People are lining up.”
“Okay. Tell him to hand out some other tablet, nothing too recognizable, nothing with any side effects or contraindications. Maybe . . . coated aspirin. Whatever off-brand he has most of. Sure, coated aspirin.”
The moment seems an echo of an earlier moment, or perhaps the earlier moment presaged this one. Or it’s a rewind and replay, stuck in a loop.
Paula gives him her wary look and nods and goes off to dial Howard again.
He blunders away to the counter to take a breath, but now Andrew is too near, hovering by the sample drawer. A flash of pink, Andrew’s hand slips into and back out of his lab coat pocket. Was there a glint of plastic?
It comes to Sam slowly; it’s no surprise, really, given Andrew’s aggrieved, prissy attitude around here; now he’s stealing meds.
“Put it back, Andrew. Those samples are all we have.”
Andrew backs up a step, all blinky faux-outrage, laughable. His face experiments with expressions—shock, fury, self-pity. “Jesus, Sam, one pill . . .”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“Well, what would you have said?”
Sam shakes his head, puts out his hand, as one might to a child.
“Turns out not everyone agrees with you and what you think.” Andrew lifts a smug eyebrow.
Sam just keeps the stare on, his best chance, since words seem to fail lately.
Finally, Andrew sighs theatrically, digs back into his pocket, and tosses down the sample pack. “You got more of these somewhere, too, I know it. You’re just holding out. You know what all this is?”
He nods at the Boy, who sits in his hallway chair, watching all, his little game a blinking rectangle in his lap. “It’s because of that kid. From the day he showed up, it started. Walking him around, marina and boardwalk and back. I’m not the only one who thinks so. He’s a doctor, too.”
Andrew points through the plateglass window at a silver-haired man just outside, looking in.
Wearing sterile gloves and a surgical mask.
5
Sometime during the night, Cort’s mother’s face has become a map, all dead ends and detours, miles of bad road marked in fine red lines, branching off to smaller and smaller roads that lead everywhere and nowhere. Her eyes have yellowed; the light they give back is dull, reluctant, but her voice unnerves Cort most: thick with a wet rattling edge deeper and uglier than her usual smoker’s rasp.
“You okay, Mom?” Cort stands in her bedroom doorway staring at her mother, who has suddenly become the one she hates most to imagine a decade or more from now, helpless and cruel, shrunken and squinting. The planes of her face have sharpened even while the skin seems looser, sagging. A crease crosses one cheek like a sheet mark. Her hair has thinned to clumps of strands, limp, unwashed.
What’s happened? Mom isn’t sleeping either, for sure, but now it’s aging her, unless it’s making Cort see things like she did in the dark last night, lying there for so long the shadows made shapes.
She’s torn: stay here with Mom, or go find Madison, who last night frightened her so badly with her weird hysteria?
Her mother steps toward her, glaring for some reason, and Cort backs up; an edgy, thin scent of dried sweat over something heavier—wrong, malevolent—hits her.
She pinches off a breath, eyes darting, and offers, “Mom, I know! Let’s take showers and go out for a bacon fix. Want to?”
Mom backs up a step now: “Whoa no. Not for me. This is your world now. I’m in here, I’m in here. You go on.”
Mom is sick with something, has been sick, it must be, because it explains everything. “Mom, are you—”
A hiss, her face shuddering with unaccountable fury: “Go!”
The room seems to tilt and turn a little as Cort turns back into her bedroom to slam the door and dress, trembling with her own anger. She rubs at a spot on her forehead where a sharp pain has begun to pulse. Her throat feels tight, her stomach sour. Why does Mom have
to be such a bitch, always, and even more now? Every mom knows her girl goes out with boys and lives with it as normal, which it is, anyway. But Mom needs her to lie and then is furious at the lying when she finds out; it’s twisted.
In the tragically tiny bathroom with the gross gray mildew in the ceiling’s corner, she peels off her boxers and tee and steps into the shower, blasting it hot to cry, fingertips hard on her scalp to scrub with shampoo. Peppermint soap from the bottle, quick with a washcloth, rinse and out.
When did she step out, dry herself? She turns from the mirror where she must be the girl looking back at herself, but it hurts to think so, wet hair plastered to a flat cheek, thin pale lips.
The room seems to slowly turn in place as Cort checks her cell—no need, anymore, for the timer and the tweet every fifteen minutes—but when she brings up Messaging to try Madison again, she sees the old cascading green thought-balloonish back and forth texts with Tay, and new incoming from Evi:
cant sleep anymore cant stay awake what’s left god god
This, from best frenemy Sioux:
I know you hate me but is evi okay I got weird text have u heard from her
Scary, from Madison, who is never not the cool one, queen of smug disdain:
nowhere to run nowhere to hide
A chill lifts the tiny hairs on Cort’s arms, and she quickly yanks on a clean suit, the tankini with straps that don’t hurt or need pulling every five minutes. Cutoffs, thin boyfriend work shirt, and out to the front room where she slows to see Mom standing in the middle of the front room flooded with sunlight like a statue that would crumble if touched, tears running down the side of her face.