For the first three days of his sojourn (euphemism) on Block Island he ventured out rarely, and when he did, it didn’t go well. He tried a trip downtown. Just as he was parking, his mother called. She proceeded to describe her most recent afternoon with Max in such detail that Anthony’s heart pulsed and throbbed, and if that weren’t painful enough he was publicly chastised for blocking an angry woman’s parking space. The woman gave him the finger, and after he reparked he laid his head on the steering wheel and allowed the tears to overtake him.

That was his last trip to the center of town.

The next day, he went again to the island grocery store. Eight dollars for toothpaste! Seven-fifty for butter! That was dismaying, but even more dismaying was the display of mass-market paperbacks near the checkout. He waited in line facing several copies of Downtown Train and Child’s Play, both by Leonard Puckett.

At the cottage he kept the curtains drawn because the relentless sun was an insult, the worst kind of affront. In a place where everyone around him was happy and suntanned he was positive he was contracting rickets. He stared at the decanter of mysterious golden liquid on the sideboard and imagined pouring it down his throat, erasing all of his pain. He tried Unisom—first a single dose, then a double—but the medicine made him restless at night and foggy in the morning. It made his legs quiver and shake like an unseen hand had hold of his ankle.

If he were still a writer, he might have described his plight thusly: Anthony was thirty seconds from the beach and yet he grew paler. He seemed to be drying out, in danger of blowing away, like an old husk.

There was no momentum in this story, nobody to root for. He stopped.

And so, on the fourth day, he made his way through a bit of underbrush to reach a sandy path bordered by proudly waving beach grasses and some sort of yellow flower he supposed to be indigenous but didn’t know enough to identify. He had never been much of a flower guy—he knew only that his mother’s favorites were delphiniums, although his parents maintained (with expensive professional help) a substantial rose garden.

The Caribbean of the East! Anthony had seen this phrase plastered on Block Island tourist materials at the Chamber of Commerce the day he’d first arrived. And he’d thought, Yeah, right, because from the ferry the water had looked like every other stretch of New England coastline he’d known in his life—somewhat gray, a little bit foreboding, Yankee-proud. But in fact, when the sandy path gave way to the wider stretch of beach, he thought the marketing wasn’t too far off. The water here was a pale turquoise, with just a few whitecaps off in the distance. The sand was soft and unsullied by seaweed or other ocean debris, and it caressed his feet in a way Anthony, who so rarely found comfort these days, could only describe as comforting.