by Roy Freirich
“Right. Then . . . water ambulance, county police boat, whatever works.”
His last words become an idea. If actual sleeping pills are effective, then why not? Even safer, since an overdose will kill no one. He blurts it: “Placebos.”
Paula squints. “Sam?”
“Tell him to hand out placebos.”
He pauses, images of generic-looking pills flashing—Lovastatin, Dimetapp, Losartan—none right, all too recognizable, with too many possible side effects, interactions, contraindications. Wait, supplements? No, they’re capsules, too unlike sleeping meds. But maybe—
“Vitamins. Sure, Ds.” He lifts a hand, as if to offer a few. “The small round tabs, I know Howard stocks them at pharmacy. Say, three apiece.”
Paula hesitates too, at this threshold never crossed. The lie of it galls her, contrary to every instinct to provide honest treatment. Finally, she nods and crosses to the admitting desk to speed-dial the pharmacy on the landline.
Sam shuts his eyes a moment, but a sideways pull of vertigo opens them again. He turns in place, his hands twitching. What now?
The Boy, of course. With the ferry out, County will have to spare or charter a boat to send Child Services. It’ll be a day’s delay, easily, given the speed at which they typically fail to move.
He sighs and moves to the landline on the opposite counter, dials, and tries and fails again, this time at a dry, clinical tone as he fills Kathy in on the day.
“Sam, what does it all mean?” she finally wants to know.
“Mean? They send another ferry, not the first time, I heard. And the longer we go without, the sooner we sleep. A good night’s worth will fix everything.” His voice sounds squeezed, like someone about to laugh.
“The EPA? Or the other—?”
“—lumbering bureaucracy and last refuge of the inept? Our case has been kicked upstairs, where it’s being vetted and discussed internally.” His tone is too bitter, manic, and he shakes his head ruefully at himself.
Her silence unnerves him. He fills it with a rushed sign-off: “I’ll be back soon. Keep our young customer happy?”
“How will I know if I’m succeeding?”
“See you soon.” He clicks off before there’s even less to say.
#
Cold and flu seasons certainly create an influx of patients prescribed the same medications, and we pharmacists, especially those of us possessing more than the requisite pharmacology background, prepare with plenty of backstock and with each patient’s individual, updated medication lists ready to hand to check for and avoid risky interactions and contraindications. This surge in demand for sleeping medication, though, is quite unexpected, if not entirely unforeseen, and requires some improvisation, on the fly, which could easily and understandably create a somewhat stressful experience, for anybody, somewhat.
As in: too many fucking customers. Printer jammed, no time to fix it, so no bottle labels. Oh, fat guy in plaid shorts, is that why you forgot which pill is which, and how many to take at one time? So that’s why you’ve been vomiting and damaged the lining of your esophagus? Sorry. Old lady sadly dressed teen in a hoodie and leggings? Your sleepy meds didn’t play well with your Heparin? Whoops, oh gosh, stroke. Really, how in fuck-all do Sam and Paula expect me to be responsible for all these total bitch assholes from Hewlett or Great Neck or wherever? Oh, they’re tired. They’re exhausted. Who isn’t? I try to make sure no one will croak from a BP spike or turn purple from anaphylactic shock, because (I know I’m not a doctor, thanks, but) I didn’t go four years fast-track at Fordham Pharmacology Institute and take home a shit ton of debt and a sheepskin to be ordered by Sam Carlson’s piggy old nurse to fill scrips without complete, current medication lists for each patient.
But Carlson says it’s on him, fully answerable, totally responsible, no worries. So I guess whatever, okay. I guess.
Which doesn’t mean I’m not sorry to tell these late-to-the-party dimwits, confused or pissed off as they are, that I’m all out of the Ambesta, the Lotosil, the Sonosol. They argue, they pace in angry little circles, they swear, but what can they say when I shake the bulk bottles of nighty-night candy and turn them upside down over the counter—like a clown hobo turning his pockets inside out with a sad face—see? Or like a magician, more like, though unfortunately unable to make anything appear in place of the nothing that’s there.
Next up, though, is one I feel worst for: a sleek enough redhead but with an office tan and her eyes red from crying and her hair stuck to her neck with sweat and with rain since it just started to pour—air so wet it finally just gave in, like it does around here. This one somehow believes that the meds I do not have to give anyone I will give to her because she has the same scrawled white page off of Sam Carlson’s scrip pad that everybody has. And it’s sad to see her hope against hope, a kind of denial that falls apart finally, turning into the stunned look of someone realizing some huge betrayal, like all their money is worthless, counterfeit.
So it’s rain or tears on her face, which is contorted with fear now, and if her scrip was for anything I had or had even a substitute for, she’d have it and be halfway home already. Which she is nearly is, rushing with a panicky sob for the door clutching her useless prescription while I answer the phone, which I realize has been ringing nonstop.
Speaking of Paula, it’s her again and I listen and ask again, for avoidance of doubt and all, because now I really don’t want to be responsible if it all goes sideways, as if it could any more than it already has.
So I say okay and hang up, reach for the back shelf, and find the vitamin stock and pull down bottles of D vitamins. And then I think to call out to the redhead lady to fill her scrip with these, but she’s gone, a last glimpse of her out the door, and more are forming up anyway for their three apiece of Hail-Mary hope, good luck, fingers crossed. I’d try some myself if I didn’t know better, but I do, and tonight no one on god’s green earth is gonna stop me from taking an Ambesta from my own hard-earned personal inventory.
−−−
Outside now the rain quickens, hissing and spattering as dusk falls and down the other nearby lanes soaked, sagging shapes, solider darknesses amid the darkness, emerge to watch with covetous eyes and follow the lucky ones leaving the pharmacy with their little paper bags.
One man with a little bag can wait no longer; he rips it open to shake a double dose from his pill bottle and chews and swallows down the rough fragments. He turns his face to the maelstrom and trudges on.
After a while, the light ahead is a single lamppost; the rain is a tunnel of lighted stinging drops; his feet feel nothing beneath them. Even the chill of the water running in rivers on his skin is gone as his knees find the wet wood of the boardwalk, and then his side and his back as he lies smiling up, closing his eyes on everything, finally.
Behind him a dim form appears, out of the din and gloom, to find him there like a pile of wet rags, a hand protruding from a black soaked sleeve, still clutching the prescription pill bottle. This man bends and pries the bottle from the sleeper’s hand and trudges on himself, shaking out pills, chewing them also, to hasten their effect.
Behind him, still another dim form appears, keeping pace.
9
Now the sky and sea are plunging gray and white and Cort’s feet pound the hard tide line, jarring her spine as her heels hit, spattering drops lost in the downpour, the hiss and roar in her ears like the sound of the white noise on that little television in that little room where she was supposed to have watched and played with and cared for that little boy, but never did.
Tears sting her eyes and she lifts the back of a hand to wipe uselessly at them, and she stumbles on a greasy pile of rotting kelp and goes down, a sob torn from her throat. Her face is sideways hard against the wet sand that disappears beneath white foam as the wash rushes up and soaks her fully.
She spits and gasps and climbs swa
ying to her feet off the clinging sand and continues down the beach, but she needs to lie down, really, if only there were any warm, dry sand where the sunlight could sink into her skin again and leave floating orange blotches burned on the black inside of her eyelids, even just for a little while so she could stop thinking of names of people that will never think of hers anymore: her dad who never did anyway, so what?
Janey, Cami, no way. There are no girlfriends to really call, not since Sioux accused her of trying to poach her boyfriend and the others took sides, as if she could move in on any boy who got everything he wanted from Sioux in her eyeliner and micro jean skirt and white tee over black bra, even out in the parking lot during lunch, or behind the handball court on weekend nights where low bushes hide the picnic-table area.
Where is there a voice now? The kind concern of anybody’s words to say what she needs to know and believe somehow: that this lady’s tragedy is not because of her, that this lady’s desperation would have driven her into whatever she did, sooner or later, someday anyway.
But the same thought comes back again and again, a sharp twinge that makes her whole body clench as if she’s flinching. By putting her worst, most selfish self first, hasn’t she, sorry or not but forever, been a part of this death?
But no mother’s craziness is her fault, how could it be? These single moms with their clown makeup and push-up bras and blatant gold-digger hair-flipping and giggling. Or the others with their pills and cigarettes, stringy wrinkled bitches who hate everybody and fuck disgusting men and cry about it with their scrawny shoulders shaking and their skin ugly and blotchy and flabby, skinny as they are anyway, skinny ugly. They sneer and smirk and roll their eyes and exhale cigarette smoke and sigh like actresses in old movies, but they’re no one but dangers to themselves and their own children who are so alone in the world with nowhere to turn, but worse, because if you are not loved then the ones who don’t love you will come for you, always.
Running is right, in her jean cutoffs over her suit, wind through her thin shirt and tangled hair, running until it’s all a blur she’s moving by, with air burning in her lungs and a cramp like a wound in her side, running until the stab of pain bends her gasping, hands on knees, the edge of the sky tilting downward and the cell in her pocket buzzing, buzzing like some poisonous flying thing trying to escape.
She yanks it from her pocket and shields it from the rain as she stares down at Sarah Rubaker’s tweet, and the others now sliding into being from the top edge of her page, one after another, judging, ridiculing, shunning.
UR OWT!
loser
!!! :( !!!
wakey wakey
10
From the last gawkers at the marina, Chief has recruited a few of the same preening, fratty guys he’s seen all week, blinking like bulls, all pumped arms, goopy hair, and surfer-meets-rapper chatter—“yo dude” and “biyatch ho”—as if any of it, from their clothes to their bad imitations of macho bravado, reflects even the slightest reality of their lives. Raised in Long Island tracts of mid-century split-levels, these sons of mid-management insurance or stock account execs are headed straight for more of the same, and the fewer bumps in the road, the better. Now they shuffle dumbly along the beach, reluctantly, holding soaked cardboard over their heads, in makeshift ponchos of plastic bags, trying against all hope to stay dry.
A few of their posse are late-comers from town, stumbling down the dunes to join in, murmuring and jostling, and Chief thinks he clocks flashes of hands trading cash for . . . pills? One even gulps back a few.
“Hold up.” Chief stops the group. “What is that?” He points to a fist one spiky-haired poser tries to jam in a pocket.
The kid’s lip quivers, like a defensive child’s. “It’s prescription. For sleeping.”
“Yours? Let’s see.”
The kid pretends to shrug and hands over the little amber pill bottle he tried to hide. “They’re not printing labels now. It’s only six.”
Chief squints down at the unidentifiable bottle. What the fuck is Sam doing? New disasters loom: a criminal economy of sales or outright theft of anybody’s pills, overdoses from stockpiled meds. Sam will have to answer for it all, when the world rights itself again.
Chief hands the bottle back. “Do not be selling, or trading. It’s controlled substance, got it?” As if he could tell whose was whose. He wants to laugh at himself.
They nod slowly, as if trying to figure it out themselves.
“Let’s keep moving.” He points them forward.
It makes sense to start the search at East Beach; if the tide was incoming, the current would have taken her sideways, easterly somewhere along the flatter sections of the barrier island, floating beneath the surface until expanding body gasses brought her back up. He almost sees her, her hair moving slowly, her hands hovering, dim light streaming from above.
Not a good way to go. No matter how inevitable it seems and how resigned we think are, the body fights at the end, clawing at nothing, trying to scream, and the face Chief finally sees—if it’s not too much later—is always nothing short of terrified.
Sand shifts fast, and sooner or later the gleam of a bracelet or a ring will likely make somebody see a hand, and they’ll discover her a few inches under wet sand, with it caked in her mouth and nose and ears, wet grains stuck to her eyes still open on the last thing they saw—just the blurry pall, and maybe her own hand reaching into it, as if for another to pull her out.
A name would help; he could track down next of kin and maybe find her sleeping it off at her sister’s in Bayshore or Far Rockaway, or at her own walk-up in Williamsburg. But Chief has left messages for the realtor who rented the unit to her and heard nothing back yet.
He points the group eastward, and they move forward at a ragged pace, finally spreading out, becoming vague in the whiteout swirl and shift of the pall that has descended on Carratuck. His feet throb, one angrily at the ankle joint, and his eyes feel dry and tender, as if tears would be a relief. The sound of the surf has shifted into a pulsing, fuzzy headache. Out beyond the break, the dark water’s surface is mottled with raindrops, fleeting ripples lost in the windblown chop.
A shout sounds suddenly, from off to his left, out to sea, improbably.
What now, what else—somebody else drowning? Why not? Chief spins seaward, and by the time it truly dawns, he’s yanked off his gun belt and flung down his cell phone and is knee-deep in the uprush to struggle through and finally fling himself forward for a few fast strokes of crawl. He ducks under a looming breaker and emerges gasping, treading water and turning and searching.
The drowning man’s not far, really, the bobbing dark roundness of his head, his flashing hand. Just a few more strokes, a hard kick to edge behind him to grab him around the chest, to keep him on his back and his face clear.
“Okay, easy. Got you. No problem.”
The man spits and gasps but luckily doesn’t panic or try to climb out of the water by climbing onto Chief’s shoulders and sinking them both; Chief’s seen it back in the Navy; the only hope left is a chokehold hard enough to knock somebody out but not kill them, and from there drag them in—bad odds all the way around.
Chief barely gets a look at the guy, just quick glimpses of a fleshy, sunburned nose and red eyes, and now just thin hair plastered to a balding head. He’s bigger than average, and in shape, from the firm girth of chest and bicep under Chief’s arm.
There’s no rip here, so how far east has this one drifted? Chief’s still got his hiking shoes on, filled with water, and his own clothes fight him like deadweight around his body, trying to pull him sideways and under. A choppy, stinging splash fills his nose and he coughs and then sucks in air too soon, choking.
His feet reach for purchase, find none, one arm flailing when the ocean suddenly bulges up and shoreward, and they nearly tumble in the rush of whiteness. Chief loses his grip around the man’s chest,
but his foot touches down and he shoots out a hand to close around the man’s slick forearm and yank him into standing depth, toward the paler width of beach.
They stagger out, stumbling in the backwash, to lie gasping in the soaked sand. Chief’s lungs burn, head pounding as he lies still, waiting for strength enough to speak or stand. He turns his head to the sideways world down the beach, where his search volunteers have continued into the gloom of rain and dusk, no look back, as if soon to be lost themselves. He rolls onto his side to kneel, facing the swimmer whose life he has just saved.
“You’ll be . . . okay. You . . . shouldn’t swim alone.”
The swimmer regains his breath, finally, looking at him, smirking. “I’m on vacation. I’m supposed to be swimming.”
Chief squints at the man, at the red knot of burst blood vessels in one eye, his unfocused look, his mouth slack like a drunk’s.
The man plucks up a seashell, holding it to his ear, grinning. “Hear it? The siren song of the sea? The she-devil in Davey Jones’s locker! Singing mermaids!”
He staggers away, laughing. Dripping, still gasping, Chief stares after him.
When he looks down to retrieve his gun belt, the leather holster is half-filled with damp sand, his revolver gone—stolen by some unseen thief while he struggled in the surf. He turns in place, mouth open, a sob of fury and dismay half-stifled.
The rain, the beach, houses, more beach, surf. Turning.
No one.
11
Soaked, Sam’s tee and shorts cling, heavy on his skin. Through the dark, the rain comes at him almost sideways, windblown, stinging. The wet sand deepens and tugs at his bike tires, but he presses on slowly to Bramble Lane.
