Bonus Two: Donor 4417

Kit

Lumen Family Cryobank, Providence. The last Tuesday of April, eighteen months before the deer.

Kit Wexcombe had brought a crab.

It was a small one, a green shore crab about the size of a half-dollar, dead and dry and perfectly intact, and he had carried it all the way from Newport in a jam jar with a perforated lid, on the passenger seat of the Jeep, with the seat belt fastened across it. He had named it Gerald. He did not know why. It had simply looked like a Gerald, lying belly-up on the rocks below Brenton Point at six that morning with its pale legs folded, and he had stood over it for some time in the cold gray light with his hands in his pockets and felt, quite unreasonably, that it deserved a better send-off than the tide.

Now Gerald sat on his knee in the waiting room, and the receptionist was staring at him.

"Is that—" said the receptionist.

"It's a crab."

"Is it alive?"

"It's extremely not."

"Sir, we have a policy on—"

"It's a present." Kit smiled at him. The receptionist was a sniffling pink-nosed young man in a lanyard, with a laminated badge that read WADE and a mug of what appeared to be tea with honey in it. He looked about twenty-six and tired in an interesting way, as if he had been given a great deal of news lately and was struggling to file it. "For Dr. Teague. She likes things. She's got a plant."

"The ficus?"

"It's a fig. She told me. It's from her mother's garden in Pawtucket." Kit shifted the jar. "I figured she might like a crab. You know. For the, uh. The ecosystem."

Wade opened his mouth. He closed it. He sneezed, enormously, into a tissue, and when he emerged he said, rather faintly: "I'll ask."

"Thanks, man."

"Don't—" He sniffed. "Don't open it."

"I wasn't going to."

"People always say that," said Wade, and went away down the corridor.

…

The waiting room at Lumen was a pleasant, low-lit, hushed place that had been designed, Kit thought, by someone who had once read a book about calm. The walls were pale gray. One of them, the long one behind the sofa, was faced with smooth river stones in a dozen shades of slate, set in mortar so cunningly that it looked as if the stream had simply stopped. There was a low table with magazines nobody read, and a bowl of smooth glass pebbles, and a fountain, no larger than a salad plate, which trickled with a faint insistent sound like a person trying not to cry. In the corner stood the fig. It was a fine, glossy, broad-leaved, rather smug fig, in a copper pot, and it had put out that spring, Kit noted, two small hard green fruits.

He had been coming here for four years.

He had come first at twenty, on a rainy Thursday in the winter of his sophomore year, with a gym bag and a nervous smile and a false address, because he had not been ready for his mother to find out. He had come again in April, and again the following spring. He had sat in this room, on this exact sofa, under this exact ceiling light, in the hush of the fig and the fountain, while a woman in lavender scrubs said, "Mr. Rivers, we're ready for you now," and he had stood, and said, "That's me," and walked down the corridor to the little room with the door that locked.

It had never occurred to him to be embarrassed.

That was what the others couldn't understand. He had tried to explain it, once, to a girl he was seeing in Boston, over a bottle of cheap red on a fire escape in the August heat. She had put down her glass. "You're a donor?" she had said. "Like, you sell your—" And he had said, "I don't sell it. They give me forty bucks for the bus." And she had said, "But why?" and he had opened his mouth, and found, to his surprise, that he did not have a sentence.

He had one now.

He had spent eighteen months looking for it, in the hold of the Kittiwake, on his back with a paintbrush, and on the long gray road from Newport to Providence on the last Tuesday of every April, and in the nights; and he thought, at last, that he had it. It was a small sentence. It was not poetry. But it was true, and it would hold.

…

"Mr. Rivers?"

"That's me."

"Dr. Teague would like a moment first."

"Oh." Kit stood. "Oh, sure. Is it the crab?"

"She'd like a moment first," said the nurse. She was a calm, broad, brown-faced woman in lavender scrubs, with silver studs in her ears and the wide level gaze of someone who has long since stopped being astonished. He knew her. Her name was Philippa. She had been the one who took his blood the first time, on that rainy Thursday, and told him, kindly, that he was shaking, and given him a juice box.

"Is it bad?"

"No."

"Did I fail something?"

"No, honey," said Philippa. "She just wants to talk."

He followed her down the corridor with the crab.

Dr. Rosalind Teague's office was a small, orderly, sunny room at the end of the hall, with a glass-topped desk, a pair of leather chairs, and a window that looked down onto a brick courtyard where somebody had planted tulips. She sat behind the desk in a charcoal blazer, with her silver bob and her half-moon glasses and a stack of files at her elbow. She was fifty-eight. She had a long, austere, humorous, narrow-nosed face, and a way of listening, with her chin on her fist, that made even the dullest sentence sound like a thing worth hearing. She rose when he came in.

"Mr. Rivers."

"Dr. Teague."

"Rosalind, please. We've known each other long enough." She extended a hand. "I understand you've brought me a gift."

"Oh. Yeah." He held out the jar. "It's a crab."

"So I'm told."

"His name is Gerald."

She took it. She held it up to the window, turning it slowly, so that the light came through the glass and lit the small dry carapace like a coin. She looked at it for a considerable time. Her face was perfectly grave. Then she set it, with great care, on the exact center of the desk blotter, beside a paperweight in the shape of a sleeping cat.

"Thank you," said Dr. Teague. "It's the loveliest thing that anyone has given me in this room."

"Really?"

"Really. Last week it was a fruit basket from a man who didn't want me to tell his wife." She smiled. "Sit down, Kit."

He sat.

It was the first time she had called him that.

…

"I've something to ask," she said. "And I'd like you to feel entirely free not to answer."

"Okay."

"You know that you have made a number of deposits here. Six, over four years. The last, in April of last year, brought the total to six vials." She folded her hands. "Five of them have gone out. They've gone to five families. Three have succeeded. One remains."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"You told me." He shifted in the chair. "You said, in the, uh. The annual letter. 'Three live births.' It's very official."

"And how did that make you feel?"

"Weird." He laughed. "Good-weird. Like, it's three kids, right? Somewhere. Eating cereal. Falling off bikes. And they've got my, I don't know, my chin or whatever. And I'm never gonna meet them."

"No."

"And that's fine."

"Is it?"

"It's—" He stopped.

She waited. She was very good at it. She sat with her chin on her fist and her pale gray eyes on his face, and said nothing at all, and the silence grew in the room like a plant. A bee bumped at the window. Down in the courtyard somebody was whistling.

"It's not fine," said Kit slowly. "I thought it would be. I told myself it was. But I think, lately, I've been—" He rubbed his jaw. "Can I tell you something? It's gonna sound stupid."

"I doubt that."

"I think about them. The kids. Like, constantly. I'll be sanding a plank, or I'll be in a meeting with my brother where they're all talking about the quarter, and I'll think: is one of them in a meeting right now? Is one of them bored? And I'll want—" He spread his hands. "I want to tell them something. I don't know what. I just want to say hi."

"That's very natural."

"Is it?"

"It's one of the most natural things in the world. It's the reason, in my experience, that men who donate often stop." Her voice was kind. "They find that they can't be anonymous about it. They find that they're curious. And then they must either withdraw or accept that they will always be, in some small way, waiting."

"So what do I do?"

"I can't tell you that."

"What would you do?"

"I'd write a letter," said Dr. Teague.

…

He had known she would say it.

He didn't know how. It was simply a thing he had been circling for a year, in the way that one circles a door in the dark; and when she said it, he felt the whole of his body go still, as a bird goes still when a hand is held out. He stared at her. He heard the bee. He heard the trickle of the tiny fountain down the hall, and the click of a keyboard from the room next door, and Wade, somewhere, sneezing.

"A letter."

"We keep them on file. It's quite common. A donor writes a letter, to be given, at the recipient's request, to a child who comes looking. Or, if the donor wishes, to the recipient herself, upon his death." She said the last words quite plainly, without drama. "Many of them are very short. Many are very strange. I have one from a man who wrote only: Sorry about the nose. I have a poem. I have a recipe for lasagna."

"A recipe?"

"It was an excellent lasagna."

Kit laughed.

He put his hands over his face and laughed, helplessly, for what felt like a long time. When he took them away his eyes were wet. "God," he said. "God. I can't believe I'm doing this. I came in here to drop off a crab."

"Many things begin with a crab."

"Name one."

"Evolution," said Dr. Teague. "Bouillabaisse."

"That's two."

"I never promised to stop at one." She slid a sheet of paper across the glass: heavy, cream, unlined, with the Lumen device embossed at the corner. "Take your time. I'll be in the corridor. If you wish to write more than one page, there's more paper in the drawer. If you wish to write nothing, you may leave the page here and I shall keep it, as a kind of promissory note."

"I'll write it."

"Good."

"I'm not good at it."

"Nobody is," said Dr. Teague, rising. "That's why it matters." At the door she paused, with her hand on the frame. "Kit. May I ask a question as a woman who has been doing this for thirty-one years?"

"Sure."

"What is it you want them to know?"

He looked at the page. It was very white. It lay on the glass between a sleeping cat and a dead crab, and the afternoon sun came in through the window and laid a bar of gold across one corner of it.

"That it was a good one," said Kit. "I don't mean me. I mean the, the whole thing. The world. That they got a good one."

…

She went out and closed the door.

He sat for a while with the pen. It was a cheap blue ballpoint with the name of a drug company on it, and the barrel had been chewed, and the cap was missing. He turned it over in his fingers. He thought about his mother, in the garden at Halcyon, in a straw hat, deadheading roses, saying Kit, darling, don't squint, you'll get lines. He thought about his father, who was dead, and his brother, who was not.

He thought about Theron.

He had known for four years. He had found it by accident, at nineteen, in a drawer in the study: a thin brown folder from a hospital in New York, with his brother's name on the tab, and in it, among the biopsies and the billing codes, a letter from a Dr. Mehta of Sloan Kettering that used the phrase irreversible loss of fertility. It had been dated eight years before. His brother had been twenty-four. And Kit, sitting there on the floor of the study with the folder on his knees and the clocks ticking all around him, had felt something heavy and cold and ancient turn over in his chest, as if a stone had been lifted from the bottom of a well.

He never said.

He never said a word. He's been carrying that for eight years, and he's never said.

He had not told. He had put the folder back. He had gone to the boathouse and sat in the cockpit of the Kittiwake for six hours, until dark, and then he had gone to the library and applied for a thing he had read about once in a magazine. He had told himself it was for the money. He had told himself it was a lark. But in the bottom of his heart, he knew, he had known, even then: somebody in this family ought to be able to.

If it can't be him, then it'll be me.

And if it's me, then it's him, too. Because we've got the same ears.

He had never said it to anyone. He did not know how. It was not the sort of thing that a man said to a girl on a fire escape, or his mother at a dinner table, or a brother with a clenched jaw and a briefcase and no idea that he was loved. But he could say it here. He could say it on paper, to a stranger. And so, with a chewed blue ballpoint in his fist and a dead crab at his elbow, in a sunny office with the tulips bobbing below, he bent his head, and wrote.

…

Dear Whoever,

I don't know who you are. I figure that's the point.

My name isn't Rivers. It's Christopher. Everybody calls me Kit. I'm twenty-three. I build boats, sort of. I'm bad at finishing them, but I'm good at starting, which my brother says is the same as being bad at everything, and which I say is the same as being optimistic.

Here is what I know about wooden boats. A wooden boat is just a tree that learned to float. That's all it is. It was standing in a forest minding its business and somebody said, "Hey. Want to see the sea?" and it said, "Sure." It doesn't get scared. It doesn't ask what's out there. It doesn't read the reviews. It just floats.

So that's my advice. Be a tree. Float.

If you're reading this, one of two things has happened. Either you went looking for me, or I'm dead. If you went looking, hi. I hope I was a nice surprise. If I'm dead—

He stopped.

He put the pen down. He looked at the window. He saw himself reflected in the glass, faint and tall and sunburned, with the tulips growing out of his shoulders; and for the first time in his life he saw the face of a man who might not, after all, live very long.

It was only a thought. It passed. It went the way a cloud goes over a field.

He picked up the pen.

—if I'm dead, I want you to know that I wasn't sad about it. I was pretty happy, actually. I had a good family. I had a good dog. I had a lot of sun. I made some things with my hands and a few of them floated. And I had a brother, who is the best person I know, and who doesn't know it, and who is going to be very grumpy about this letter. If you meet him, tell him he's allowed to stop winding the clocks like they're about to explode.

Also tell him I'm not mad about anything. I've been pre-forgiving him since 2009.

I don't know your name. I hope it's something good. If you're a boy, I hope you get my ears. If you're a girl, I hope you get my ears anyway. They're a Wexcombe thing and nobody can do anything about them.

Be kind. Be late. Don't let anyone tell you the water's not good.

Your friend,

Kit

(Donor 4417)

He read it through twice.

It was not a good letter. He knew that. It rambled, it jested, it wept in the wrong places. A professional would have cut the bit about the ears. But he read it a third time, and found that his hand had stopped trembling, and that the pale fierce knot in his chest had loosened by a degree, like a line eased round a cleat, and he thought: no. It's all right. It's me.

He folded it in thirds and slid it into an envelope. He sealed it. He wrote on the flap, in block capitals, DON'T PANIC, and underneath, after a moment, in smaller letters: (IT'S A GOOD ONE.)

…

Dr. Teague was waiting in the corridor.

She was standing by the window at the end, with a clipboard, looking down into the courtyard, where a groundskeeper was watering the tulips. She turned when he opened the door. She did not ask. She held out her hand for the envelope, and when she had it she weighed it for a moment on her palm, as if it were a thing with a physical mass, and said, "Thank you."

"It's not very good."

"They never are."

"Will anyone read it?"

"I can't promise that. I can promise it will be kept." She slid the envelope into the clipboard. "It will be placed in your file. It will be retained for as long as this institution exists, and in the event that we cease to exist, it will pass to a successor. I can tell you that in thirty-one years I have never lost one."

"Okay."

"Kit."

"Yeah."

"May I ask the last question?"

"It's a day for them."

"Why did you do it?" She looked at him, steadily, over the half-moons. "Not now. Not the letter. Four years ago. The first time. You came in here on a Thursday with a false address and a gym bag, and you were shaking like a leaf. I have wondered ever since."

He opened his mouth to tell her.

He had a whole speech. It was ready. It was about a brother and a brown folder and a family that ran in the ears, and the strange fierce urgency of a boy who has found that his people are going to end. But when he looked at the dry, kind, intelligent face, at the silver hair and the tulips and the tiny dead crab visible through the open office door, he found that he didn't want to give her the speech. He found that he wanted to give her the sentence.

"Somebody has to say yes," said Kit. "To the next one."

She did not speak.

"That's all. That's the whole thing. There's always going to be somebody who's scared. Who doesn't want to start. Who's got a good reason. And somebody's got to just say, 'Sure. Why not. Want to see the sea?'" He shrugged, and the smile came back, crooked, warm and unguarded. "I figured it might as well be me. I'm good at yes. It's practically my only skill."

"That's a good skill."

"It's pretty useless in a meeting."

"I imagine it is." She smiled, and her face broke up into a hundred fine lines. "Go on. Go to dinner. You'll be late."

"I'm always late."

"I've heard."

"It's okay if the water's good."

"Is it?"

"It is today," said Kit.

…

He whistled in the elevator.

He whistled all the way down to the lobby, and out through the glass doors into the bright wet spring afternoon, where the sun was coming out between the clouds and the gutters ran with rain, and the whole city of Providence lay gleaming, as though it had been dipped in water and hung up to dry. He stood on the steps. He took a deep breath. The air smelled of rain and diesel and blossom and the river. A bus went by with an advertisement for a dentist. A woman in a yellow raincoat laughed at something on her phone.

He walked to the Jeep.

It was parked half on a curb, as usual, with a ticket tucked under the wiper. He pulled it out and read it and put it in his pocket with eleven others. He got in. He turned the key. The engine caught, with a cough and a roar, and the radio came on in the middle of an old blues song, something about a river and a train; and Kit Wexcombe, who was twenty-three years old and had eighteen months to live, put the car in gear and pulled out into the traffic with the window down.

He was going to be late for dinner.

His mother would say so. She would stand in the hall at Ledge Point, in her pearls, with her arms folded, and say, Christopher, it is a quarter to nine. And he would say I know. And she would say We held the fish. And he would kiss her, on the cheek, on the dry cool powdery skin, and say I love you, Mother, which always disarmed her, and she would say Oh, don't be ridiculous, and go pink.

He had a plank to buy on the way.

There was a yard in Warren that sold cypress, old stock, air-dried, with a smell like a church. He had been meaning to go for a month. He would get a short piece, he thought; a foot or so. Something to carve on a winter night, in the boathouse, with the stove going and the radio on. He had an idea. It was only a small idea. It was about a boat the size of a loaf of bread, and it had a name carved in the stern, and someone, someday, with a little luck, would put it in a bathtub.

Whoever you are, thought Kit, as the Jeep turned onto the bridge, and the whole wide bay opened under him, blue and bright and spangled with sails. Wherever you are.

Hi.

I hope it's a good one.

He turned the radio up, and drove into the light.