Maggie had come out onto the beach in the early morning because it was her vacation and she wasn’t going to let a little fog stop her from enjoying it. There were only a few other people near the shoreline that Maggie could see, like ghosts in a bottle, outlines in the fog that shifted because her brain could not triangulate between her good and her bad eye yet. Eventually the brain would slide into its new way of seeing, but for now it felt like she was always drunk without the benefit of not caring. She had allowed a doctor to “correct” her vision with lasers because contacts felt like sandpaper and she was too young to wear an old woman’s pair of glasses, or too old to start wearing them now. She wondered if it had been a mistake, if maybe her eyes would never triangulate on their own, if she had doomed herself to double-sight.

Maggie wore a floppy brown hat and cheap teal flip-flops, tan shorts over her one-piece, and she dragged a canvas bag marked with a Carter Hospital insignia, the name in an elaborate script font. She left markings like a snail trail behind her. The bag was heavy with lotion, lunch, blanket, books and magazines. Under her arm she carried a chair in a bag with a nylon draw string and a plastic ball fastener.

She laid her blanket out, set her chair up and sat in the fog. The breeze off the water was warm. She took her flip-flops off to run her toes through cool sand. She was about thirty feet from the beach and about twenty feet to the left of the posts of a dilapidated jetty. Near the posts a man with a hairy, square back was diving into the water, under the fog, resurfacing and waving to a small Asian boy who crouched on the sand staring at his bastketed hands. Maggie watched them from the corner of her right eye, where sometimes her double vision smoothed into an approximation of real sight.

She took a magazine from her bag and held it before her eyes, but she could make almost nothing out of it. It was like a nightmare, or a montage of an acid trip in a bad movie from the sixties. Swirling colors and tanned body parts. It was an entertainment magazine.

The square man had black hair that, Maggie thought, didn’t look any different wet than it did dry. He dove under a breaking wave. Maggie waited for him to resurface. The boy was building something with dry sand that kept losing shape and spreading around his toes. After a few minutes the man still hadn’t resurfaced, or else she’d missed him by turning to look at the boy for a second.

The fog lifted slowly and palpably as the sun rose somewhere on the other side of the ocean. The fog clung for as long as it could, but then it was gone and Maggie had to lower the brim of her hat to keep the sun from her eyes. Closing them was the best thing to do.

When she opened them again, the boy was still crouched where he’d been before and the man was nowhere to be seen. A family of blond people was setting up an umbrella and towels to her left. A toddler in an anachronistic sailor’s suit was tipping near the water.

* * *

By noon Maggie couldn’t tell if the nausea she felt came from her blurred eyesight or from sitting in the sun for several hours. Warmth buzzed beneath her skin. A humming had started in her head. The boy was still crouched exactly where he had been all morning. Now he had his head up and was staring at the waves as they came in one after the other. He turned toward her, she turned away. Umbrellas and blankets, small groups of young women with no asses in bikinis and young men with long trunks pulled down to expose faint trails of wispy hair littered the beach.

She left her blanket and full bag where it was to walk back to the hotel, her teal flip-flops slapping her bare feet red. The smells and colors of the hotel room reminded her of an old shower curtain liner. Her face was red. She sat on the edge of the bed and called Gil.

“Can’t come up today,” Gil said. “I gotta prep an emergency appendectomy here. After that I got three amputations.”

“Three amputations?” Maggie said.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I really wish—”

She hung up the phone and sat with it on her legs. It was an old black phone with a face of gray buttons where the dial should have been. She waited for it to ring, but it didn’t.

Gil was a resident in the OR, which meant he had to work unlimited hours for three months. Gil was seven years younger than Maggie. They’d met during a night cruise around Boston Harbor. Smooth jazz, a long black dress, fruit drinks. Gil had been with his parents, two people determined to age gracefully, in expensive clothes and styled gray hair.

When Maggie closed one eye she could see the one long window, the room flattened into a white plane. She closed the other eye.

She woke up with her lips caked together with saliva. In the bright white bathroom, she washed her face and drank three glasses of slightly sulfurous tap water. When she opened her door onto the second floor outdoor hall, the Asian boy was standing across from her, leaning back against the white railing, one bare foot up behind him. She paused, then headed down to the pool, where she sat on a white plastic lounger in the shade. The boy came up after a few minutes and sat cross-legged next to her on the concrete patio.

“You want something?” she said.

The boy didn’t answer, just stared at his legs. After a while he started making movements with his hands, as if he was passing sand through his fingers. Once in a while he looked up to watch people jump into the pool and swim back and forth. It was impossible to tell how old he was. He could have been five or eleven, no younger and no older than that. Old enough to be able to talk.

“Your father come back?” she said. He acted as if he didn’t hear. She closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. She heard the boy breathing right next to her.

* * *

There was no mini-bar in the hotel room, but at least there was a mini-refrigerator, which Maggie had stocked with cheap white wine and beer, on the possibility that Gil would show up. She lay back flat on the bed and drank the wine, warming a mouthful before swallowing fast so she didn’t choke. The door to the hall was open. The boy stood outside, looking in.

Once in a while an old person in a wide-brimmed white hat and white pants passed, all striated arms. Some wore square brown sunglasses. They looked at the boy, then looked in at Maggie laying on the bed before passing.

Maggie picked up the phone and placed it against her wobbly abdomen. She would have to start doing crunches soon.

Then she put the phone back onto the end table and stood up, too fast, the room rocking one way, then the other.

“Well,” she said when she passed the boy, “let’s go find him then.”

The boy followed at her side.

* * *

The boardwalk was a jumble of bodies. Any of them could have been the boy’s father, the man who had been with the boy before. They walked up and down, past frozen custard stands, miniature golf courses, and bathroom kiosks. Maggie could not steer a clear path and brushed against people. Fog was a distant memory. The heat was humid and constant.

Whenever she stopped, the boy stopped too. Close up she could not see his face properly. His features blurred together.

Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of the side pocket of her khaki shorts.

“It’s Gil,” Gil said. “Tomorrow. I swear.”

She ended the call and sat looking toward where the ocean was. It was a big swelling green thing in the distance. The people were impressionistic smears of bright colors and taupe against the light sand.

She bought them pizza and onion rings at an open-air restaurant with Slavic waitresses. The boy held a drooping clump of onion rings up in his hand and dropped them into his mouth. He made almost no sound as he ate.

* * *

When Gil showed up the next day the boy was building a model airplane on the laminated carpet of the hotel room. Gil walked in with his bag slung over his shoulder, looked at the kid and said, “whoa.” Maggie had not seen Gil out of blue hospital scrubs in months, and he was in them now. His bag had the Carter Hospital insignia on it. He had a beeper clipped to one side of his scrubs, a cell phone to the other. He was sweating.

“We’re finding his father,” Maggie said.

Gil shrugged, took a shower, came out in clean blue scrubs, opened a beer and drank it.

“God this weather,” he said.

* * *

The boy couldn’t have been too old because he reached out for both of their hands on the boardwalk and they walked along like that—a string or a chain. He wore a new tourist t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops Maggie had bought for him the day before, for far more than they were worth. It seemed that her vision was a little better today, that her brain was on the road to triangulation.

In a little overpriced amusement park, the boy rode the kiddie rides but he wasn’t happy and kept steering them over to the Moon Launcher, a round shuttle attached to two enormous bungee cords. The frame of the ride rose up fifty feet, and when the shuttle went up, the bungee cords carried it an additional fifty feet.

Maggie got on with him. When they went up the boy had no reaction, but to Maggie it felt like they were leaving the earth, like her eyeballs had disconnected from her optical cords. A sound rose up in her throat and at the crest of the ride she let it out. It didn’t make any sense to her.

The kid shrugged.

Afterwards, he ducked his face into a big green mound of cotton candy on a cardboard cone. Gil held Maggie’s hand. The sun was big and closing in on the horizon, but it was easy to believe that it would never set.

“Cute kid,” Gil said.

* * *

Maggie wore her old thick plaid pajamas and she sweated under a single sheet, even with the AC cranking. Gil reached out for her, sliding both hands under the thick material to cup her ass cheeks. He poked against the back of her legs.

“Come on,” he said, his idea of sweettalk. He smelled like sand and beer and his skin radiated sun warmth.

“No,” she whispered. “Not with, you know.”

“Kids are sound sleepers.”

“Still,” she said.

Once in a while someone passing on the walkway outside blotted the light around the window shade and Maggie wondered who they were and where they were all going so late at night. During the day she saw only old people.

Gil rolled away from her, breathing loud from his nose.

In the darkness it was okay that she couldn’t see, that her brain couldn’t triangulate. It stopped trying. Her headache eased.

* * *

In the middle of the night she heard the boy get up from his spot on the floor. The white bathroom light threw everything into stark confusion. She could see nothing for a while. Just an unstirring shape next to her that had to be Gil. Another shape broke away from the light in the bathroom, and that was the boy. Then she heard the loud liquid gurgle of the boy throwing up.

The bathroom smelled like half-digested cotton candy and bile. The vomit was florescent with flecks of red in it, from the pizza they’d had before the amusement park. The boy looked up at her without any expression on his face. She pressed her hand against his forehead and collected him against her chest.

She cleaned him, running a warm washcloth over the mouth, giving him her toothbrush (she’d buy a new one in the morning), and getting him into a pair of Gil’s blue scrubs and under the comforter that Gil had thrown onto the floor for him. Maggie lay down next to the boy. He fit in the crook between her thigh and her chin. She felt his ribcage rising and falling with each breath.

* * *

Gil put a cold washcloth onto the boy’s head, lifted his eyelids and looked inside, then got out an otoscope and shined it into his pupils and ears.

“I don’t know, Maggie,” he said. “Something’s not right.”

“I could have told you that.”

“He’ll be all right.”

“Are you sure?”

Gil shrugged and sat on the bed staring at the wall. The room smelled like Lysol. They would have to get out soon, for the maid.

“We could drop him by the emergency room. That would take care of all your problems. They’d find the kid’s parents, fix him up, you could move on with life.”

“Right,” Maggie said. The boy’s arms were about half as long and half as thin as hers. When she picked up the forearm it hovered in the air for a split second before falling again. Her brain was still not triangulating, but she knew that that wasn’t why Gil looked ragged this morning. Unkempt. His middle-aged face to come had spread like a rash across his young man’s face. Puffy around the eyes. Did she want to wake up to that every morning?

She curled next to the boy’s body, hot like a stone in the sun.

“Just leave us here,” she said.

Gil shrugged and left.

A few hours later he returned with a sunburn and a foam lizard on a stick that looked like it was walking in front of him, a kite, a Julio Iglesias CD, two cups of once-frozen custard.

“He up and about?” Gil said.

Maggie looked up at Gil from the floor. He was framed in light. He looked like Patch Adams, or like Robin Williams as Patch Adams, come to entertain the sick kids. The boy had been sleeping the whole time, but now his eyelids separated and he looked around, confused at first, then not confused.

“What if he dies like that,” Gil said. “You have to take him somewhere.”

He stuck a thermometer into the kid’s ear, and waited for the beep.

“101,” he said. “That’s not too bad.”

The kid got up and slumped into the uncomfortable chair near the door, grabbing a cup of custard. He got some on his mouth and chin that Maggie wanted to wipe off but didn’t.

“See?” Gil said. “Better already.”

* * *

They spent the rest of the day on the beach, looking at the water, under a huge green umbrella that Gil rented.

* * *

That night Maggie dreamed that she was on the beach in the early morning fog. There was the man, there was the boy, there were the posts of the jetty. Her eyes were bugging the shit out of her. She dragged a bag crammed full of stuff behind him. She emptied out rocks the size of skulls and when she turned again the man was gone, and just the boy was there. She waded into the water, which soaked into her flannel pajamas and dragged her down. She was submerged in green water. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see anymore. There was swirling foam and pressure all around her. Undertow. Then she saw the man with the square, hairy back. He was floating, being dragged deeper by a current. He reached his hand toward her, but she couldn’t tell if he wanted help or if he wanted to drag her in with him. They were both drowning.

When she opened her eyes it was morning. Gil’s morning breath brushed against the ends of her hair. The boy was staring at the window from the floor. He turned to her and smiled. Her brain was suddenly triangulating. It was like getting rid of the hiccups. She felt like a part of her was gone now. The boy was cute.

* * *

After the boy had fallen back asleep, Maggie drew on her bathing suit and shorts and walked across the street to a donut place that had plastic chairs and tables set up on the sidewalk under a dark blue awning, where she could see the door to her hotel room. Everything was bright with the slanted light of morning. She put on her sunglasses, ordered a large coffee and sat dunking plain donuts.

After about an hour the door to her room opened. Gil stepped out, his blue scrubs bright in the sun. He had his pager in his hand and was checking it, looking up and down the street without seeing her. After him came the boy, in scrubs bunched up around his ankles and wrists. He wore one of Maggie’s belts strapped twice around his waist.

Maggie watched them walk across the walkway, then down to the pool area, then out to the sidewalk and the parking lot, where they both got into Gil’s Nissan pick-up truck. She could see the Clark Hospital parking permit perfectly on the back windshield as the truck turned onto the street out of town.