Deprivation

#day_two

#

Innocently, they come in August to Carratuck Island and the end of sleep. From ferries out of Long Island’s North Fork, or from the south ports of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the sojourners disembark in chattering, impatient lines at the old Bay Haven dock to trudge—with roll-ons and duffels and backpacks, a toddler crying, a dog barking—to their weekly rentals, share houses, motels. On to the broad shining ocean, along gray planks of boardwalk and over the dunes from the sandy lanes, a pilgrimage, a peregrination, they cross the narrow island. In flip-flops, struggling with coolers and umbrellas and mesh bags bearing floppy hats and tubes of sweet-smelling sunblock, they come—the tourists and weekenders, the clusters of couples and friends and families reunited yearly for these last fleeting days of summer.

From the beachfront Cape Cod or cedar-sided architectural second homes, the ad and publishing executives come, the bond traders and middle-aged trust-fund children, with a folding chaise and towel and a Kindle or tablet, for even just an hour to inhabit a perfect moment of sea, air and light, to cling to, as in a lingering farewell, a moment somehow so lazy, insouciant, redolent of youth.

A Frisbee seems weightless, coasting slowly and improbably straight through the sodden air, until giving in to gravity to skid into a wet footstep near the tide line. Kids grapple over it, pushing, giggling lazily, all knees and elbows, jams yanked, and taunts muttered like endearments, almost sweetly: aaassswiiipe, biyatch, bite me.

Women frown down at their shoulder straps, melted ice sloshes in coolers as their lids creak open, and there’s the snap and hiss of a pop-top, the smells of baloney sandwiches gone warm, yellow cheese cubes in baggies, peeled oranges.

Teenagers thumb cells, texting each other from yards away. Laughter erupts, dies. Tinny music leaks from earbuds, chunky thrash guitars, sibilance of cymbals, angry indecipherable vocals.

A young mother lies on a spread towel; she stares up at nothing, her eyes wide, unblinking, the tender skin beneath darkly bruised. Her fingers absently clutch and release the hot terrycloth, holding on, letting go, holding on.

Nearby, her little boy sits cross-legged in the sand. His hair is tufted to a point on one side by dried salt, his trunks are crooked and the skin on one hip is pink and etched by the damp waistband; his eyes are bluer than the ocean, fixed on the bright little flashing square in his hand—his GameBox—and the funny, tiny figure there leaping and dodging glowing balls, fleeing, or to the rescue. Points! Sparkles! A bouncy song of bleeps!

A gull floats nearby, hovering in the scantest breeze, wingtips trembling.

On his screen, the little hero leaps a platform, a cloud.

A wave hesitates, and spills lazily ashore.

#day_four

1

Carratuck Island’s local surfers like to call themselves the Dawn Patrol; when they find the Boy standing mute and staring seaward, day has barely begun on their pale stretch of beach, or across the lanes of share houses, or at the Bay Haven Marina where Sam lies aching in the bunk of his forward cabin, watching the deck hatch brighten above him.

The sheets cling, damp with humidity, a hint of mildew under the tang of bleach. It’s already too hot, too airless. Weighing the throb in his head against last night’s excesses, he’s lucky to feel no worse.

Was it three or four plastic cupfuls of Chateauneuf-du-Pape? After the half-joint of indica, the hour of easy chatter and laughs and another of enthusiastic sex, he had lain back and waited, and waited, for the usual dependable sounds—the idle slosh of current on keel, the creak of dock lines in cleats—to lull him into unconsciousness and a few blessed hours of forgetting.

He would turn over to face the close mahogany wall along his bunk, just to trade the pressure on one hip and shoulder for the other, but he might wake Kathy there beside him, her sleep deep and trusting, beautiful to see. His own eludes him too often of late, but from triple shifts at med school to the wakeful nights of these past months, he’s learned to hope; a kind of purposeful drifting can sometimes almost work, and end the endlessness, if only for a while.

Unbidden, randomly, the faces of the summer’s patients come back to him, the tourists gathered at Carratuck’s day clinic in jams and tees and faux-batik beach wraps, with an ear infection, or the heaves from a bad steamer clam, or alcohol poisoning. Most present with a sheepish sense of their maladies as minor or self-inflicted: the Hannah or Heather with itching mosquito bites, Frank from Rhode Island with an angry sunburn, tipsy college kid Max with a foot cut on a horseshoe crab’s broken shell. More than the usual absent regard, though, lately a few seem to offer a commiserating look, as if for a kindred weary soul. Or maybe worse: almost a kind of recognition, in glances met and slid away. And what about that other girl? The plain-faced teenager, Cindy or Cynthia, in for a headache, whose pupils when he checked seemed to darken and dilate, as if some faintest shadow had passed between them? Stoned, likely, and who wouldn’t want to be at her age, trapped in an Airbnb with her parents bored or bickering?

Faint chiming begins. His cell? He climbs quickly, silently, out of bed. Kathy barely stirs behind him, one ankle nudging her other’s tattooed bracelet of thorns, as he pads naked through the cabin and its clutter of last night’s detritus.

Where is it? He spots and plucks the little cell from where he has forgotten it on the companionway shelf, and answers with a finger swipe. From its tiny speaker, as it sometimes has over the last few days, a wave of static surges and disappears. A word becomes audible, like something surfacing, a question: Sam? It’s Paula, his clinic nurse, voice harsh, too loud and too soon on this day to bring good news.

I admit it. He does a half-turn, aiming his lowered voice out the cabin door so Kathy can sleep in, her luxury since quitting her waitress job at the local Coffee Spot.

Sorry to rush you this morning.—the line is clear now, her voice sharp—but we got a little boy here, surfers found on the beach, alone. He won’t talk, or can’t.

An image floating up: silhouettes against the gleam of the ocean, leading a smaller one away. The lost child, found. Not news in a summer resort town like Pines Beach, but a boy with a disability, or purposely silent, suggests more amiss. Huh. His parents—?

Nothing, Sam. Who he belongs to, where he’s staying, nothing. He bolted a Cup o’ Noodles and a bag of chips, but shied at a washcloth.

He makes his eyes wide, rubs the bridge of his nose. On my way.

Say hi to Kathy.

He clicks off, and behind him she appears—a glimpse of nude hip by the stateroom door, her wry sleepy eyes and teasing smile. Whatcha got? Bee sting? Sunburn?

He hesitates, torn, but grabs her sweatshirt from the dinette and flings it across to her. Hi to Kathy.

−−−

Sam rushes his routine, skipping the shave and finding a tee and cargo shorts. Unimpressive, but clean enough for work.

Kathy’s already set for her morning—iced coffee in one hand, eReader with Destination: Tuscany cued up in the other, the little galley TV tuned to The View—when Sam bends to brush her lips with his own, and a small hint of lingering.

I realized, we’ve got it all wrong, she says. I’m supposed to pine away on shore for you, while you take to the deep blue sea.

They trade their crooked smiles and he heads up the cockpit steps to work the tarnished latch and open up on gray-white daylight, blinking as his eyes adjust. The world sharpens into verticals and horizontals—stays and masts and blue canvas-covered furled mainsails, down the long multi-fingered float of Bay Haven Marina—fifty-odd slips filled this time of year by weekenders from Greenport, Nantucket, Hyannis.

He steps into the day, from the cockpit onto the deck to leap a bit jarringly down to the float. He climbs onto his rusting five speed Rudge and pedals up the ramp for the dock, sun warm on his back.

Through the open gate, he glides onto the quay where tourists are slowed as usual in idle groups before Carratuck’s kitschy clip joints, ogling the same stacked tee shirts and coffee mugs, the laminated faux-nautical charts, the cheap bikinis and Chinese Ray-Ban knockoffs. There’s enough belly fat for twice as many people here, on what looks like a whole bowling team, outer borough or Jersey commuters with Bluetooth headsets and big showy laughs, taking their summer ease from middle-class city jobs—police, transit, fire.

A clutch of teenagers whispers urgent business, probably trading pot for Ritalin or mom’s Flexeril, or just gossip: who’s back this year, who’s hooking up, who’s a total bitch or, forever unforgivable, just lame. A few clients back in Boston were teens suffering the slings and arrows of high school, anointed or exiled on a dime, self-medicating with anything handy, or hiding in their cluttered bedrooms, tweaking their online profiles, counting their friends and followers, lost in the data cloud.

Among these, the girls of summer stand giggling, fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds with salty, tangled hair, mahogany tans, fleeing childhood in the uniform of the day—cutoffs and unbuttoned, baggy sheer shirt over a two-piece, flip-flops, rawhide bracelets, pale lip gloss. He recognizes one he treated weeks ago—Cody, or Cortney? Was it food poisoning? Smirking and aggrieved, redolent of menthol cigarettes, her mother had dragged in the mortified girl, whose eyes now find his again in a fleeting glance. Her hand tips vaguely upward, before she’s nudged by a girlfriend and they all bend closer to a cell phone one holds, exclaiming, Oh my God, could I just die, please? and Oh my God, I have so gone longer! Whatever it means, they crowd in, twitching with the eager joys of bragging rights or schadenfreude.

Up ahead, there’s already a line at the Coffee Spot window, with its peeling redwood sills and red-eyed, hungover barista trying to keep up. It’s the only restaurant with a service window on the boardwalk, and no doubt the owner lobbied one alderman or another with the usual inducements for the honor—a cut of the till, a campaign contribution—more than free coffee, it’s a safe bet.

As Sam passes, a tourist in pricey Gore-Tex walking gear—everything but the goofy ski-poles, it seems—chides the barista in stagey, confiding tones: Hey, I know it isn’t Starbucks, but that latte yesterday wasn’t decaf. My fiancée was up all night. Just a heads-up, between us, right? Sam’s heard a thousand iterations of it—the uneasy tolerance between sulky islanders trapped in service jobs and finicky, demanding tourists who have planned and saved for a few days of having their way, right now and just so.

No time for the usual iced grande today, Sam presses on.

Doctor Sam, hey, a voice floats out, mild and lilting, and Sam lifts a hand in a casual wave to Carlo slouched in his beach chair, under his striped umbrella, beside his cooler-cart of bottled water and ices.

Now he coasts by a pair of local fishermen, Dwayne and Hank, both too leathery-looking before their time, sunblasted as boys on their dad’s charter boat, chumming off the stern without a shirt or hat in the halcyon days before anyone connected sun and melanoma.

Yo, doc, Hank offers.

Gentlemen. Sam indulges them with customary, dry subtext; these two will never qualify as such and take full pride in it. Dwayne will tell anyone how he coldcocked a Soho performance artist at the bar at Claude’s for whining about all the Guns n’ Roses on the jukebox. Today he has a bucket in one hand and his surf rig in the other, a ball cap low on his forehead, eyes shadowy, downcast.

A flash turns Sam to see sun glinting off the chrome of Chief’s patrol Jeep, slowly cruising the town’s last straightaway of boardwalk. Should he stop and tell him about the foundling at the clinic? Better a quick nod and keep on; chances are the parents have already shown up to claim the child, and he and Chief are glad to keep things need-to-know, both wary of false alarms and wasted time.

After a last hundred yards of sandy lane, past stands of dusty bayberry and mildewed bungalows, Sam pulls up outside the clinic with its peeling sign, PINES BEACH URGENT CARE. He leans his bike against the rough-hewn cedar siding, and through the plate-glass storefront window (the place was another kitschy gift shop before the township eminent-domained it), he can already see med tech Andrew laughing into the phone behind the check-in counter, and nurse Paula nowhere in sight—probably in an exam room debriefing the foundling’s embarrassed, contrite parents.

Inside, the waiting room’s empty. Magazines are scattered, the place could use a dusting, and the TV silently displays a commercial for nothing short of happiness, apparently: a mom and dad and child in their kitchen high-fiving, laughing. The image freezes and scattered, solid-colored squares flicker, and then the picture recovers and becomes a talk show. After just a few months on the island, Sam already knows: a gull has built its nest in the island’s cable TV head-end again, probably, or someone needs to check the TV inputs for corrosion, not the first time. Andrew, as usual, ducks his head and whispers last words into the phone with a sideways nod.

Sam pauses to wash up, and then steps around the doorway of Exam One to see Paula and the Boy there. In baby-blue shapeless scrubs and her glasses-on-a-chain, she’s a trim, Black, no-nonsense sixty-one from Medford, ever on alert, always appraising.

The Boy’s skin is smudged with grime, his hair dark and matted with sweat, but his eyes stop Sam with a look Sam knows—haunted, from someplace well past grief.

Well, we’ve made friends, I guess. Paula peers over her glasses at Sam. But he doesn’t want to tell us who he is or write it down. Do you? She smiles winningly back at the Boy, whose gaze has never left Sam’s, and now holds a glint of something deeper, unsettling, almost accusing.

Sam’s shoulders tense, an odd reflex he shakes off, trying a smile of his own. That so? Can’t get you to write anything down?

The Boy’s silence is filled, it seems, with other sounds: the phone gently ringing out at the admittance counter, the murmur of voices there, the distant sighing of the ocean a few sandy lanes away, broad and deep but barely audible.

Sam eyes the comma of grime crossing the Boy’s cheek, the smudge on the side of his neck, and turns to yank on the exam room sink tap and adjust the temperature. Maybe we’ll just clean you up a little, for now. How’s that sound—?

Sam . . . Paula’s warning voice spins him back: the Boy cringes there, wide-eyed and gasping at the gush of water bursting from the faucet. Sam flashes a hand out to slam it off. He smiles, too fast, too big. Or not—later works, too!

He and Paula trade a glance that at once suggests and agrees on the likely but vague initial diagnosis: trauma, and what it first requires—slow, careful going.

As if in agreement, the Boy has reached into his shorts pocket and pulled out his black little rectangle of a handheld electronic game. He grips it like something ready to fly off, and the gaze he turns to Sam now beseeches.

It’s a relief, for the moment, at least. Any semblance of normalcy is welcome for any sense of calm it might restore. Sam nods, and pitches his voice soothingly. Hmmm. One of those, sure. Sam looks closer at the inert thing. Looks like the batteries are— He checks himself. Let’s see if we can find you some new ones.

2

Heat seems to descend all at once this morning, baking the damp planks of the boardwalk in a torpid haze. Chief slows his patrol Jeep by the seaward rail near a group of teenagers eyeing him sideways, a few of them girls in a giggling huddle. He gives them his wry wave as he rolls by. Square, loser, is no doubt what they all think, but ten years from now, they’ll be getting jobs and knocked up and less hip by the minute.

Near the end of the broadest section of boardwalk, Chief steers for an access ramp to the beach and trades a nod out his open window with Sam Carlson just biking by, on his way to the Pines Beach clinic, somehow on time today, go figure.

Down on the sand, Chief slows again along the kelp-strewn high-tide line, near folks spread out in groups of gaudy towels or folding beach chairs, with their noses in those sleek eReaders, or their ears plugged with iPod or -pad or -phone buds, wires dangling. Why show up at all, just to tune everything out?

Not that anybody misses it, but there used to be plenty more drama: benders turning into bar fights, bachelorette parties ending ugly with blotchy shouting faces streaked with mascara, frat guys breaking limbs on dares. Of course, the place invites it. With no cars but beach taxis, it’s always been a DUI-free-zone, where a .12 blood-alcohol level is anyone’s hangover to have. The Pier View, the Pelican, Claude’s Clam Shack—for years, none of them cut anybody off until they couldn’t stand, and customers did get plenty clumsy sooner than later, with cheap well drinks at Happy Hour prices all night long, or tall-highball themed concoctions of sugary crème de menthe and rum, The Haymaker, or the standby Sex on the Beach, featuring peach schnapps and vodka.

Last few years, lawsuits have made bar owners wary; doormen check IDs, and pourers prefer their customers ambulatory. Kids who used to get wild seem busy with their own gadgetry now, and at their worst, content to just appear menacing—it’s a fashion statement these days.

Just ahead, four college guys try to look like players who mean business, but their sleeveless college tees showing off pumped guns, their surf jams, rapper shades and gleaming spiky hair are just more MTV beach party. They share the same goofy white-boy, pimp-roll gait, pausing to laugh with a hand hovering over their crotches, bending stiffly forward and back at the waist. Bozos, out from the local schools, SUNY at Brookhaven, or Hofstra, probably.

Chief looks away as he rolls by and heads down an emptier stretch of beach, where somebody’s bonfire last night has left telltale gray cinders and a charred log, ready for any sun-dazed tourist to blunder into and maybe get burned. He pulls up and climbs out, not so fast since sciatica has been nagging him and sending a funny-bone-like tingling down one leg. He squats to check the log: dead cold. But a yard away a flash of red catches his eye, brightness almost buried in the beige sand. He digs out a bikini top: C-cups, gotta be, and he imagines, or rather remembers, tits this size, with the unique heft that always stirred him, from bar girls in Subic, or some in high school, not a long list but a few; is there anything else on earth that matches the warm, luxurious consistency, tenderly weighed in his hand?

A few yards on, he checks the rickety wooden boat shed, all peeling one-bys and rusty nails. He pushes open the door, scraping the bottom edge through loose sand, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dimness to take in the tarp-covered little sailboat, the jerry cans and coiled lines, and at his feet, a tiny papery stub—a nice fat roach, charred at one end, but a quarter-inch worth with enough bud inside for a buzz, not that he’s interested. It fogged him up too much the last time he and Jan took a few hits, and she had chuckled at his spaciness, which got him compensating with a bit more alertness, which of course she took for paranoia and found even more hilarious. He bends for the roach and steps back out into the glare to tear it up, wondering what else the kids might be into this year. PCP, maybe some other rave club or date rape drug? He hasn’t kept up, and there’s no need, since Long Island Iced Tea is the poison of choice around here, and trouble enough for most.

Except, of course, for the group of locals idling by now, stringy-haired surfers in unzipped wet suits, faces greasy from sunblock, carrying shortboards and trailing their leashes.

Hey, fascist oppressor, one greets him.

Chief barely glances his way, knowing the voice from every season of his decade on Carratuck. Up yours, sharkbait.

One of these stoners lets out a goofy chuckle, and they plod on toward the bright Atlantic, today barely rippling between slow sets of glassy two-footers, hardly a reason to get wet.

For all their piercings and tats, Chief knows they’re really just puppy dogs who want to catch a wave, pop a Red Stripe, smoke a jay and get laid, end of story. They talk a line about locals-only on this stretch, but Chief has heard them whine and bicker and fail to appoint one of their own to tell some clueless city kid to find another spot to get drilled.

As Chief scrapes the shed door shut again, his earbud bleeps and he clicks the call through. Chief Mays.

Chief, good. It’s Sam. Listen . . .

Chief feels the slow, careless morning already slipping away as he climbs back into the Jeep, still cool from the AC. He tilts his head back and a glint of sun off the surf wash makes him blink; his eyes feel tender from a poor night’s sleep. He sighs as he weighs the concern in Sam’s voice, and runs him through the short list of probabilities that put them where they are, apparently—with a little kid wandering alone, found dirty, hungry and silent. Well, it’s a single mom or dad, some kind of misunderstanding. They left the kid with a neighbor or someone, waiting on a babysitter that never showed. Happens every other year. You know, or one parent thought the other had the boy, like that . . .

Chief hears Sam’s silence as skepticism, but it’s early yet and more than likely that a sheepish, hungover parent will show at the substation or clinic to claim the kid—not the first time, sad to say. Carlson is just too new to know it.

—just concerned that something’s happened, since he seems frightened. He won’t talk, he won’t write his name or his parents’. It’s something you see in people who’ve witnessed something upsetting . . .

No one likes being talked down to, and Chief has had to draw the line before with these clinic guys slumming from the city, who think no one will ever know as much. Understood, Sam, overwhelming experience, post-trauma stress disorder, sure. Upsetting things upset people, especially kids.

Well, there’s just a little more concern here, since we do have a few more question marks.

There’s a hiss and snap on the line; a kite snagged in the cell tower, probably, or pigeons, but it clears just as suddenly, and Chief tries not to sound impatient as he pushes back: Sure, but we get CPS here today and then he’s in the system, ferry to the mainland, ward of the court, in a foster house. It’s a judge’s order to get him out. Sound better than giving it a few hours?

A few hours. Meanwhile . . .

Chief puts the Jeep in gear, steering around another group of families setting up for the day. Coloring book? Puzzle? he offers.

Another gap of silence, until Chief finally does them both a favor: Keep me posted, Sam. He clicks off.

3

This morning Cort has been following a new hashtag, #sleepless43, with silent alerts, and now the tweets are coming faster, buzzing her cell as four of her high school classmates in a quick row join the game—Jenn and Cami in the Hamptons, Deena stuck in Bayshore the whole break, Evi on the far, tony end of Carratuck, from her music exec dad’s mansion on a gated dead end. The whole thing is crazy stupid, but harmless enough, so why not? She checks the time in her screen’s corner and quickly thumbs, here—all that’s required, every fifteen minutes on the quarter hour, to stay in the game.

Hands on a Hardbody—that was the old documentary movie everybody downloaded to laugh at how pitiful those rednecks were, standing in some shopping mall with their hands on a Ram Runner or Doredo, or whatever monster truck, to see who would let go last and win the gross, gas-guzzling, planet-killing thing. This contest isn’t so different, a virtual version, more like, with nothing but bragging rights to whoever tweets on schedule the longest to prove it. A prize, in fact, would probably ruin everything, since somebody would get the bright idea to team up and tweet from each other’s accounts in shifts so they could split up whatever they won, or else figure some automated workaround with a client app, which someone probably has already.

Cinder, a Junior and a year ahead but dumb enough to get left back, started the whole dumb thing and is a famous complainer and kind of a hypochondriac. Her dad is mean, she has a stomachache, or she barely cut her foot on a pop-top or a shell and the doctor at the Urgent Care made her wait. Her eyes are dry, or her ears hurt from her earbuds. Cort can’t remember if the 43 is supposed to mean forty-three hours straight, as a goal, or what—but who has time to scroll back?

She double taps her home button and brings up messages; pathetic, because it shouldn’t be all about whether or not Tay is here yet—for god’s sake, get a life, right?—but she checks texts for the tenth time in as many minutes and twitches her sunburned shoulder beneath her shirt and scratchy bikini strap. Probably she has gone with the wrong suit—this tiny retro madras with little boy-short bottoms—since it does nothing for her broad, too-flat chest, which Tay seemed more distracted by last year than not, glancing and glancing away, as if she didn’t see. The boy-shorts ride up plenty, though, and she has caught some looks and had to adjust to avoid the complete wedgie disaster when she steps out of the surf, before she even wipes the salt from her eyes or twists the water out of her hair.

Last year, she met Tay at a full-on run from halfway down the boardwalk, across the dunes from the marina to the bottom of the main beach stairs, so lame, even though his smile seemed really glad before he downshifted back into his cooler, blissed-out surfer self. This year, she knows better, to go with a vague shy wave as she glides up, distracted, with maybe an eye on her cell or, even better, someone else to wave to on her way to him.

For Mom, who hates all boys, Cort has the perfect alibi this year: the chattery, kind of tweaky lady with the crooked lipstick and her big-eyed eight-year-old boy at Roscoe’s Market looking for a babysitter, staying in a weekly bungalow on Spinnaker just a few lanes over. The little boy was so cute, with eyelashes a mile long, holding a little GameBox, smiling and saying, Hilo, like a combination of hi and hello. Cute, but maybe a handful; the woman