Bonus One: Kit's Last Voicemail

Theron

Ledge Point, Newport. Sunday, the seventeenth of October.

The phone had been charged every night for a year.

He had not decided to do it. It had simply happened, in the way that certain disciplines happen to a man in grief: without announcement, by degrees, until one morning he found that the thing was done and that he could no longer remember a time when it was not. The phone was an old one, a scuffed black Samsung in a gray rubber case, with a crack across one corner. It lived in the drawer of the nightstand in his bedroom at Ledge Point, plugged into a cord that ran out through a hole Mrs. Aldrich had drilled in the back panel. It had not been turned on since the nineteenth of October of the previous year.

It was turned on now.

It lay on the kitchen table in the gray light of a Sunday afternoon, face up, on a folded dish towel, between a pot of tea and a plate of toast that no one had touched. The screen glowed. It showed, in white sans-serif on a field of sea-blue, the time (3:41), the date (Sunday, October 17), and a small red badge at the corner of a green icon, with a number inside it.

1.

"It's been there the whole time," said Theron.

"I know."

"Since the night. One new message. Received 8:12 p.m. I have looked at that badge every day for a year, and have not touched it." He heard his own voice, level and precise, and wondered at it. "I find that I am extremely calm."

"You're sitting on your hands."

"I am merely seated."

"Theron." Dess, on the opposite side of the table, with Cal on her lap and a spoon in her fist, did not look up from the baby. "I can see your knuckles. They're the color of the tablecloth."

He unclenched them.

There was a silence. In the next room, and the room beyond that, and the long hall to the front of the house, forty-one clocks ticked in forty-one slightly different rhythms, a vast, dry, whispering, overlapping murmur like rain on a roof, or the breath of a sleeping animal. They had been wound that morning. He had done it with Dess at his elbow and a baby in a sling, going from room to room in the stillness of a Sunday, key after key, turn after turn, and his left hand had been, on every clock, quite steady. It was Kit's job. It had been Kit's job since he was nine. He had wound the clocks every Sunday of his life, grumbling, with a mouthful of toast; and for a year after he died Theron had wound them in a state of cold fury at himself, at the clocks, at the whole absurd apparatus of the dead, and had got them wrong every time.

He had got them right today.

"You don't have to," said Dess.

"I do."

"You really don't. It's not a rule."

"I know it is not a rule." He looked at the phone. "That is rather why I must."

…

The fight had been about varnish.

That was the thing he could not forgive. It had not been about the company, or the will, or Isabelle, or the Halvorsen offer; it had not been about their father's long shadow, or the cancer, or the silent load-bearing wall of the thing he had never told. It had been about varnish. On the evening of the nineteenth of October, a Monday, he had driven down to the boathouse at half-past seven to find his brother on his knees in the cockpit of the Kittiwake, in paint-stained jeans and a Red Sox cap, laying a third coat on the coamings, humming.

"You'll never finish her," Theron had said.

He remembered the exact words. He had said them from the door. He had had a bad day, a day of covenants and calls, and Hale's voice in his ear at four o'clock saying you are your father's son, Theron, you can't see the wood for the trees, and he had come down the gravel path in the dusk with his collar open and his briefcase in his hand, wanting, with a sudden mean hunger, to find someone who was more tired than he.

"Hm?" Kit had looked up. His nose was sunburned. He had a streak of amber on his chin.

"The boat. You have been at her for three years. You'll never finish. You'll start another thing, in the spring, and she will rot on her cradle, and I shall pay Dell to have her hauled to the dump."

"Whoa."

"I am only saying it as a matter of arithmetic."

"Theron."

"You have no head for it. You never did. You have charm and talent and a very beautiful hand with a plane, and you have absolutely no interest in the thing that matters, which is completion." It was horribly easy. It poured out of him like a poison. "Father said the same of you. Do you know what he said? He said Christopher will never finish anything he can't be seen starting."

Kit had put down the brush.

He had done it carefully, balancing it across the can. He had sat back on his heels in the cockpit and looked up at his brother, at the tall gray figure in the doorway, with that wide-open, unguarded, startled look he had had since he was four, a look that said I am not accustomed to being hit. And then he had smiled. It was a small, lopsided, forgiving smile, the smile of a boy who has been struck by someone he loves and is already working out how to make it all right.

"Okay," Kit had said. "Okay, big brother. Noted."

"Kit—"

"No, it's fine. It's fair. I'll think about it." He picked up the brush again. His hand, Theron saw, was perfectly steady. "Hey. I've got something I wanted to tell you. About Saturday."

"I do not wish to hear it."

"It's good. It's really good. I think you'd—"

"I said I do not wish to hear it."

And he had walked away.

He had walked up the gravel path in the dusk with his briefcase in his hand. He had got into the Bentley, and told Dell to drive, and sat in the back seat with his jaw clenched and his eyes shut, and gone home. It was, in the sum of a life, a very small thing. He had said it a hundred times: a sharp word, a closed door. It had been the sort of thing that men said to their brothers in every century, and was forgiven by Sunday.

At 8:05, Kit had left the boathouse in his Jeep.

At 8:12, driving, he had made a call; and a message had arrived on a phone that Theron, in a dark study at Ledge Point, had turned face-down on the desk and refused to look at. He had never turned it face-up again.

At 8:20, on Ocean Drive, in the dark, near Brenton Point, a deer had stepped out of the hedge.

When they came to tell him, at ten, he was still sitting there. Afterward he had put the phone in the drawer, and kept it charged, and not touched it.

…

"I'll sit here," said Dess.

"Thank you."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I know that."

"I'll hold the baby, and I won't say anything, and if you want me to leave, you say, 'Please go,' and I'll go. And if you want me to stay, you don't have to say anything." She shifted Cal on her knee. He had fallen asleep, his cheek on her collarbone. "That's the whole arrangement. Okay?"

"It is an excellent arrangement."

"I thought so."

He reached for the phone.

His hand was steady. It was a marvel to him still. He had stopped, somewhere in the course of that year, thinking of the tremor as a thing that happened to him. It was a weather. It came with fear and went with comfort, and it had gone, he realized, in the last six months, nearly altogether; he had signed a hundred papers with it still. He touched the green icon. A box opened. A small gray bar appeared, with a triangle at its end, and a number: 0:42.

He looked at it.

Forty-two seconds.

For a year he had imagined it a speech. He had imagined four minutes, six; a whole rolling valedictory in the ringing baritone of a man who knows. Theron. If you're hearing this. He had imagined an accusation. He had imagined, on the worst nights, the sound of a car, and a scream. But it was only forty-two seconds. It was less than the time it took to boil an egg.

He pressed the triangle.

…

"Hey. It's me."

The voice came into the kitchen like a draft from an open window.

It was a young voice, warm, hoarse, a little breathless, with the wind in it. He could hear the engine, a low steady Jeep rumble, and under it a faint rushing sound, the sea. He could hear the click of a turn signal. He could hear, absurdly, the radio, playing something old and bluesy at a low volume, and Kit humming along a half-step flat.

"Okay, so. Don't be mad. I know you're mad. You're gonna be mad for like a week and then you'll be fine, because that's how you work. I love that about you. It's very reliable."

A pause. A snort of laughter.

"Anyway. I'm driving. It's illegal to leave voicemails while driving, I think, so if I die in a ditch, you can say you were right about that too."

Theron did not breathe.

"Hey. For the record. You were right about the varnish. I'm never going to finish her. That's not the point. I've been thinking about it, and the point isn't that she gets done. The point is I get to do the next coat." The wind roared, and dropped. "You wouldn't get that. You like things done. It's fine. Somebody has to. That's why I'm glad it's you."

"I'm saying: you said a thing back there and it was kind of a jerk thing, and I want you to know that I forgive you. All the way. No strings. Okay? I forgive you for all of it. I don't even know what 'all of it' is yet. I'm pre-forgiving. It's a service I offer."

Dess, across the table, had put her hand to her mouth.

"So here's the thing I wanted to tell you. I did something. Back in the spring, a while ago, a couple of years actually, and I never said. I kept meaning to. It's good, I swear. It's the best thing I ever did. It's got nothing to do with the company or the will or anything. You'll see. I'll tell you on Saturday, on the boat. Wear a jacket."

"And—"

A long breath.

"And hey. Theron. You need to quit winding the clocks like they're gonna go off. You're so tense about it. They're just clocks. They're just time. It's okay if they're a few minutes off. It's always okay to be late for dinner if the water's good."

The Jeep's engine murmured. Out of the little speaker came the faint, bright, careless, living tick of a turn signal; and over it, close and low and quite clearly, the voice of a young man who had no idea:

"Love you, big brother. See you Saturday."

A click.

"End of message."

…

The kitchen was very quiet.

The clocks went on ticking. Somewhere in the front of the house, a long-case clock in the hall gathered itself, whirred, and struck four, in a deep and mellow note that rolled down the corridors and died away among the rooms. The tea had gone cold. A fly hummed against the window glass. And Theron sat quite motionless at the table, with the phone in his hand and the screen gone dark, and the sound of his brother's voice still hanging in the air around him like the ring of a struck bell.

Wear a jacket.

He heard the words as if for the first time. He heard them under the other words. He heard what they were: not an accusation. Not a farewell. They were an invitation. A plain, loving, unremarkable, enormous invitation to a Saturday that would never come, from a boy who had forgiven him in advance, and had been, to the end, in the best of tempers.

He had been forgiven.

He had been forgiven for a year, by a dead man's voicemail, in a drawer; and had gone about the whole of that dreadful twelvemonth in the belief that he was damned.

"Theron," said Dess.

He did not answer.

"Theron. Look at me."

He looked.

She was crying. She had not made a sound. Tears ran down her face and dropped onto the baby's head, and she did not wipe them away; she sat there with her arms round the sleeping child and looked at him across the table with a face so wide open, so naked, so full of a fierce unguarded tenderness, that he thought: I have never been looked at like this by anyone. I have been looked at as a threat and as a prize and as a problem. But never like this. Never as a thing that was simply allowed to be sad.

"He forgave you," she said.

"Yes."

"Before you even said sorry."

"Yes."

"That's the thing about him." Her voice was thick. "That's the thing I know about him, from the profile, from the boat. He didn't keep a ledger."

"No."

"He just—" She laughed, through tears. "He gave. And forgot. And gave again. He was the opposite of me."

"He was the opposite of both of us."

"And he said—" She wiped her cheek on her shoulder. "He said it's okay to be late."

"He did."

"So you were never too late."

The sentence sat in the air.

He had not heard it in that form. He had heard you were wrong, and you are cruel, and you did not tell him. He had heard it from Hale, in the library, a hundred times, in the long courteous murmur of the elder statesman. He had heard it in the voice of his own mind. But he had never heard what she said. He had never heard that a person might be late, and still be loved; that a man might say a cruel thing to his brother at 7:40 and be forgiven at 8:12; that the clocks might be a few minutes off, and the water good.

And it came to him that the voicemail had a last sentence.

See you Saturday.

"I think," said Theron, very slowly, "that I should like to go to the boathouse."

"Now?"

"Now. And I should like to take the boy."

"He's asleep."

"I should like to take him anyway." He rose. His voice had gone unsteady. "I should like to show him the Kittiwake. And I should like to tell him a thing, which I know he will not understand, and which I shall tell him again when he is five, and again when he is fifteen. I should like to tell him that his father was the most generous man I have ever known. And that on the last night of his life, he forgave me for a thing I had not yet finished doing."

"Okay," said Dess.

"I should like you to come."

"I'm coming."

"I should like to—" He stopped. "It is rather a lot of things I should like."

"It's a day for it." She stood, with the baby on her shoulder, and put her free hand in his. "Come on. Wear a jacket."

…

They walked down together in the late October light.

The path ran from the back of the house across the lawn and down through a long slope of scrub oak and bayberry to the water, where the boathouse stood on its gray pilings in the slanting gold. A south wind came off the bay, smelling of seaweed and woodsmoke and the last of summer. The grass was damp. A sparrow went up out of the hedge like a thrown handful of seed. And behind them, in the great house on the hill, forty-one clocks ticked on, in their rooms, a few minutes off from one another, and all of them right.

Theron stopped at the door of the boathouse.

He put his hand on the latch. The wood was cool and dry and silvered, and under his palm he felt, faintly, through the grain, the rocking of the tide against the piles. He stood there for a long moment. Then he drew the little iron key on its blue twine from his pocket, and held it up, in the sun, in front of his son's face.

Cal opened his eyes.

He looked at the key. He looked at the man. He took the key out of his hand with a small damp competent fist and put it at once, with great ceremony, into his mouth.

"No," said Dess, "no, no, not that—"

"Let him," said Theron.

"It's iron."

"It has been in the family for sixty years." He was laughing, brokenly, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. "It has been in worse places. Let him have a taste of it. He should know what it is he comes from."

"What's it taste like?"

"I believe," said Theron, "it tastes like a Saturday."

He took the key back, gently, with a kiss on the damp fist. He fitted it to the lock. And he pushed open the door on the long gold bright room full of water and light, where a honey-colored boat lay on her cradle under a gray fur of dust, and a coffee mug stood on the bench, and a brush lay across a can with its bristles stiff, and its handle pointing, like a finger, at the sea.