The Lifeguards(21)

Mack didn’t eat his dinner. He gazed dopily at the TV, his expression like a blasé summer girl’s. His breathing was shallow and seemed to take a lot of work. When he exhaled, he made a groaning sound. Once in a while, he started crying and clutching his head or neck.

We didn’t have a thermometer, but I could tell Mack was too hot. When he fell asleep, I ran through the trailer park in the dark to Mrs. Deacon’s house. Mrs. Deacon was an elderly woman who seemed nice. She opened the door after I had knocked for a while. She wore a nightgown, smelled of beer, and seemed annoyed. I apologized and told her Mack was very sick. She let me in, and from her wall phone I dialed my mom’s prepaid cellphone. She couldn’t always afford minutes, but I closed my eyes and prayed it was on.

I guess I had believed in God, because I did pray that night. I remember putting my palm on the wall beside Mrs. Deacon’s phone, the rough wallpaper. I asked God for help. I asked God to save my brother.

By morning, I knew God was a lie.

There was no answer on my mom’s phone. The Clam Shack had been closed for hours but I called there anyway. The phone rang and rang. I tried my mom again. Hatred for her shot through me—what kind of a mother forgot about her children?

Finally, I asked Mrs. Deacon if she had a thermometer. “Honestly, honey,” said Mrs. Deacon, “I have no idea where it is. Can we talk about this in the morning?”

I went home. Mack was breathing, but in a scary way. He was absolutely burning up, his eyes like hooks catching mine. “Help,” he managed. “It hurts so much, Weezie. It hurts so much.”

“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “I promise, Mackie. You’re going to be OK. Sip the Crystal Light.” I held the drink up, but when I tried to angle his head to the glass, he cried out in pain. “My neck!” he said.

After a while, I went back to Mrs. Deacon’s. I don’t remember all the details. I had been told never, never to call 911, as it was asking for trouble. Our next-door neighbor had called an ambulance once and the cost of the ride had ruined her. She’d eventually lost her trailer, because of calling 911. My father had gone to jail after a bar fight during which a stranger called 911. “You hear me?” my mom had said, after one of these stories. There were so many of these stories, brought out on lazy nights for my mom and her friends to rehash, to reexamine, almost as if they could find another ending if they told the stories often enough. “Don’t ever, ever, call the police. We handle things on our own in Bluebird Acres.”

My mom was a bad mother—I allowed myself to acknowledge this. From Mrs. Deacon’s, I called 911.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Mack was already dead of bacterial meningitis.

It was a tragedy, everyone said.

Mack would be thirty years old if he had lived. He loved microwave pizza, and dogs, and his bike. He would have been the best uncle, Uncle Mack, stopping by my Barton Hills house with a bike helmet on, and even those ridiculous biker shorts, saying, “Charles, my man, you up for a ride?”

When Mack had been dead a week, I stopped at a crosswalk on my way to work at the Woods Hole Beach Club. I watched a small white van pull into one of the mansions along Woods Hole Drive. On the side of the van was a red cross, but the vehicle was not an ambulance. Under the cross, I read the words CAPE COD CONCIERGE MEDICINE—KEEPING YOU SAFE. I watched the van park, and a young woman in a white doctor coat climbed out. She went to the front door of the mansion and rang the bell.

The door opened, and I heard a voice ring out. “Dr. Wilson! Thank goodness you’re here.”

Later that night, after work, I went to the Falmouth Library and typed “Cape Cod Concierge Medicine” into a web browser. I saw that rich people had their own doctors, who came right away when you called them.

It was clear: if you were wealthy, you were safe. I’d seen how the summer kids seemed braver than me, reckless, and now I knew why. They could dive off anything, because underneath them was an invisible net of parents, doctors, coaches, teachers, money. If they fell, they had Cape Cod Concierge. If we had been rich, Mack would be alive.



* * *



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A TEXT FROM WHITNEY brought me back from the past: NOT FROG ISLAND. MEET AT PACKERS’ POOL.

This was interesting. The Packers had put their enormous Cliffside mansion on the market over a year ago with Sotheby’s. They must have moved it over to Whitney if she wanted to meet there. I’d never been to the Packers’, just gazed at it towering above the greenbelt.

I was excited to see the inside of the Packers’ compound at last. This would be our most glamorous “dog walk” yet.

None of us had a dog.





-13-


    Salvatore


SALVATORE PARKED AT THE Gus Fruh entrance to the greenbelt. As soon as he opened his car door, a familiar smell washed over him and he was sixteen again, escaping from school, meeting his friends with a hammock and two pilfered beers—or three! The afternoon cracked open with possibility and sunshine…his high school girlfriend not exactly promising she’d show up, but a maybe just as thrilling…her nineties orange hair, bangs stiff with Aqua Net…smooth stomach and a high-cut Billabong bikini…

Salvatore’s stomach cramped, making him crouch and almost vomit. How had he ended up middle-aged and alone? What could he have done differently? He bent forward, puked a watery stream of coffee-colored bile.