He Sits Down

Theron

"Sit," said Dess.

"I am quite comfortable standing."

"You've been standing in my living room for eleven minutes. You've admired the lighthouse twice. You've examined the spines of nineteen paperbacks. You have lifted a ceramic frog, looked underneath it, and put it back." She was propped on her sofa in a nest of quilts and pillows, in a pair of gray flannel pajamas and a cardigan that had been washed so often it had gone the color of porridge, with her bare feet in a hot-water bottle and a mug of ginger tea on the arm. "I've been ordered to rest by a man in a Santa hat. I've been on this couch for two days. If you do not sit down, I'm going to get up, and I will be punished by the medical establishment, and it will be your fault."

"That is blackmail."

"It's leverage."

"It is the same thing, with better manners."

"Sit, Theron."

He looked at the sofa.

It was a battered green corduroy thing, with sagging cushions and a pattern of old stains that suggested a long history of tea, and it stood against the wall beneath the window, under a shelf of paperbacks. The far end held Dess. The near end held a stack of folded laundry, a tabby cat of enormous girth asleep on a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting, and a small crocheted blanket in a shade of orange not found in nature.

There was no other seat in the room. He had counted.

"I have not," he said, "been invited twice."

"I invited you in the doorway. That's one."

"The doorway counts as one?"

"It's an established precedent. Come in, I said. And you did. Now I'm saying sit. That's two." She picked up the mug and regarded him over the rim. "Don't tell me you're going to make me say it a third time. I'm tired. I'm full of fluids. I'll cry."

"You would not."

"I would. I cry at car commercials."

"It is the twenty-seventh of December," said Theron, with great gravity, "and I have, in the last seventy-two hours, entered a blizzard, a hospital, and your apartment. I do not know that I can bear a fourth ordeal."

"Sit on the sofa."

"The cat is on it."

"That's Mr. Biscuit. He's Mrs. Ferreira's. He lives on whatever he likes." She waved a hand. "Move him."

"I am not at liberty to move a cat I have not been introduced to."

"He's a cat, not a duchess."

"He appears to me to be both."

She was laughing again, softly, into her tea. He watched it. He watched the way her shoulders shook, and her nose wrinkled, and a lock of dark hair slid out of its clip and across her cheek, and the thing in his chest that had been clenched for six weeks turned over once, quite slowly, in its sleep.

He picked up Mr. Biscuit.

The cat opened one yellow eye, evaluated the situation, and with an expression of immense and scornful patience allowed itself to be shifted six inches to the left. It resumed its slumber on the laundry. Theron sat down.

The sofa received him with a groan and a puff of dust.

For a moment, neither of them said a word.

It was a curious feeling. He had sat in the Bentley, in his father's chair at the head of the boardroom, in a hundred hospital waiting rooms and a thousand first-class seats. He had never sat in a place where the cushion gave beneath him exactly as much as it ought, where the arm fitted the elbow, where the springs had learned in a hundred evenings the precise weight and shape of a particular woman reading in the lamplight. He felt like a visitor in a foreign country who has walked, by mistake, into someone's house, and been given a cup of tea.

"There," said Dess.

"There."

"How is it?"

"Remarkably uncomfortable."

"It's the springs. The left one went in 2023." She shifted. "You get used to it."

"I do not believe I shall."

"You'll be surprised."

He set his hands on his knees. They were quite still. He noted it: the stillness, the strange rested quiet of them, like two animals that have stopped running. He did not look at her.

"Would you like tea?" she said.

"I should not like to trouble you."

"It's already made. It's on the stove. I made enough for two. In case you finally sat down."

"You made tea in case I sat."

"I'm an optimist."

"You are a woman of method."

"Same thing." She started to rise. "I'll get it."

"You will do nothing of the kind." He was on his feet before she had finished the sentence. "Doctor's orders. I shall fetch it. Where is it?"

"The blue pot. On the back burner. Cups are in the cupboard over the sink, the left side, not the right, the right's for the chipped ones."

"Understood."

"Careful with the pot. It drips."

"I shall treat it as a relic."

"It's not a relic."

"They are all relics," said Theron, "in the end."

He went to the kitchen. It was nine feet long. Everything in it was at the height of a person five inches shorter than himself. He found the blue pot, and the cupboard, and two mugs, one of them chipped, which he took, because it was clearly the one she'd have given herself. He carried them back, steaming, with the careful measured step of a man crossing a ballroom with a tray of champagne, and handed her the whole one.

"Thank you."

"It is a very small kitchen."

"It's a good kitchen."

"It is the best I have ever been in."

"You've been in, what, three?"

"I have been in a great many. This is the first in which I was able to find the cups."

…

They talked for a long time.

It began with trifles. The snow, which had melted into slush; Mrs. Ferreira, who had sent a casserole; Gabe, who had sent a card with a drawing of a pregnant giraffe. Joelle's schedule. Colleen's insistence on a crib, which she had bought, on layaway, from a shop in Swansea, and which now stood assembled in her living room under a sheet like a piece of furniture in a haunted house. The thaw. The tea. The cat.

And then, somewhere around the middle of the second cup, with the lamp on and the radiator knocking and the long blue afternoon dimming at the window, Dess said, quite casually, looking down at her mug:

"Can I ask you something?"

"You may ask anything."

"It's a direct one."

He set down his own cup.

"Go on."

"Why did you say you could not have a child?"

He did not move.

It was perfectly quiet. The radiator ticked. A siren went by at the end of the street, small and thin and far, rising and falling and dying. In the corner, Mr. Biscuit stretched, and curled again, with a long sighing purr.

"I did not say it," he said at last.

"You didn't. Not in words."

"Then how—"

"Joelle." Her voice was gentle. "She didn't tell me. Don't be angry. She said only that she had a feeling. She said the way you looked at the screen, in the clinic, wasn't just grief. She said she's seen it on men in waiting rooms. A man who looks at a baby like it's a thing that was taken from him twice." She turned her mug in her hands. "And Mrs. Ferreira said you told her, the first day, that you'd come to be of use. She said you said it like a man who wasn't expecting to be anything else."

"They are both too perceptive."

"They're women."

"That is what I said."

"Theron."

"Yes."

"You don't have to answer."

"I know."

"I'm only— I'm asking because I want to know where you stand. In all of this. What you want. Not what you think you should want. I've been looking at you for six weeks, and I've been telling myself you're the uncle. And I think you are. But I think you're something else too, and I don't have the word, and I'd rather ask than guess."

He looked at his hands.

They lay on his knees, long and pale and quiet. He had looked at them, over the years, so many times, with so many different feelings: hatred, shame, a numb clinical regard. They were a good pair of hands. They had built boats. They had held a pen at a thousand desks. They had been, for a short time, and in a way he could not explain, the hands of a boy of twenty-four who had walked into a clinic with the door locked.

"I had cancer," he said.

"I know. Mrs. Aldrich told Mrs. Ferreira."

"They talk?"

"Every Tuesday. On the phone. They're in a coalition."

"God help me."

"Keep going."

He took a breath.

"I was twenty-four. It was the left side. A testicular tumor. A very aggressive one, the doctors said, and rare in a man of that age, and caught late, because I had not been to a physician in four years. I was working eighty hours a week at the yard. My father had left us in debt, I told you. I did not think there was time for anything so absurd as a body."

"That's not absurd."

"It is a small, ridiculous organ, and it very nearly killed me."

He heard his own voice, dry, precise, a little amused. It was the voice he used at board meetings to describe a failure of the Bristol drydock.

"They operated. They took it. The surgeon said it was clean, and the chemotherapy would be a precaution, three rounds, six weeks. And on the Friday before, a man in a bow tie said to me, kindly, in a corner of an office: Mr. Wexcombe, you should consider banking sperm before treatment begins. There's a window. We can arrange it today."

"And you didn't."

"I had a board meeting at four."

Dess made a very small sound.

"I told myself it would keep. I told myself that I was young. That I had another testicle, which was functioning perfectly, and a reasonable family history, and a lifetime in which to deal with it." He smiled. It was not a good smile. "I went to the meeting. I approved the Bristol expansion. I walked out at half past five and went to the clinic and found the door locked, and a sign in the window: Closed for the weekend."

"Oh, Theron."

"On Monday I began treatment. Three months later, a scan told me that the cisplatin had done its work. On both counts. The cancer was gone. And so was the rest of it."

"Everything?"

"Everything that mattered." He lifted one shoulder. "It is not very dramatic. Nobody ever told me I could not have children, in so many words. There was a number. A very low one, on a sheet of paper, in a drawer. A doctor looked at it, and said, I'm sorry, and shut the drawer. I have not opened it since."

She said nothing.

"I told my mother," he said. "I told no one else. Not for a long time. Not Kit. Kit was eleven, and then he was sixteen, and then he was twenty, and every year the moment seemed to have passed. It would have been like announcing, at dinner, that I had always been a tall man." A breath. "Then there was a woman. Isabelle. We were together two years. She was— She was very kind. She was a painter. She had a studio on Wickenden Street, not a half mile from here, and she wore paint on her jeans and she laughed at my ties. I told her on the fourth month. And she said, Oh, darling. It doesn't matter."

"Did it?"

"It mattered to her more than to me. I did not know that at first." The tremor in his left hand came back, a thin faint flutter; he covered it with the right. "For two years she was kind. She was patient. She was understanding. And I watched her being patient, and understanding, and kind, every day, in the same voice, like a woman holding a heavy tray. And then one morning she said: I'm thirty-one, Theron. I want to be a mother. I don't want to adopt. I want to feel it kick. And I said: Of course. And she said: You aren't going to argue? And I said: I have no argument."

"What did she say?"

"That I was the loneliest man she'd ever met." He met Dess's eyes. "She was right. She left on a Tuesday. With a coat and a bag. She did not slam the door. I was proud of that. I stood in the hall and I thought, She is behaving beautifully. I should do the same. And I went back to the study and answered email."

The lamp hummed. The window had gone dark.

Dess had set down her tea. She sat very still, with her hands in her lap, and her eyes on his face, and her expression was one he had not seen on her before. It was not pity. He would have flinched from pity. It was something harder and more attentive, a sort of enormous, patient gravity, as though she were taking a very careful reading of a gauge.

"And Kit's child," she said.

"Yes."

"When you found out. When you read the letter." Her voice was low. "What did you feel?"

He did not answer for a long time.

The truth was a thing he had not spoken aloud. He had not spoken it to Ansel, or Dell, or his mother, or to the quiet, unlistening dark of his own bedroom at three in the morning. It lay at the bottom of him, under the grief and the guilt and the cold clean determination, like a stone under a stream.

"I felt," said Theron, "that I had been given something back."

Dess closed her eyes.

"That is a terrible thing to feel. I know that. It was my brother's death that gave it to me. I stood in a workshop with a letter in my hand and I thought, There is still a piece of him. And in the next breath, with a kind of horror, I thought: There is still a piece of me. Of us. Of the family. Of a house that had been going quiet for twenty years." He pressed his lips together. "It was not noble. It was not even decent. It was a hunger. It was the oldest hunger in the world."

"Theron."

"I wanted it for myself."

"I know."

"I wanted to find that child and bring it home and sit beside its crib and tell it who it was." His voice shook. "I wanted to give it everything. I wanted to give it the boat and the house and the workshop and the spoons. I wanted to be what Kit was supposed to be, if he had lived, and I wanted to be it better. I wanted to be there. Every afternoon. For every board meeting I had ever missed." He drew a ragged breath. "And then I met you."

She opened her eyes.

"And I understood that it was not mine to want."

…

The room was very still.

It was an extraordinary thing, he thought, to say what he had just said, in a stranger's flat, to a woman who had every reason to throw him out. He felt emptied. Scraped clean. He sat on the green sofa with his hands on his knees and the cat purring on the laundry and the dark pressing against the window, and waited, with a curious calm, for whatever she would do.

She did not throw him out.

She did not say anything for a long time. She sat gathering her breath, and at last she leaned forward, with one hand on her stomach, and said, very clearly, in a voice that was not quite steady:

"It isn't a replacement."

He looked up.

"The baby. It isn't Kit. It isn't a second chance. It isn't something that was taken from you and returned." Her eyes were bright. "I need you to understand that. Because I understand you. I do. I understand every word of it. But if you look at this child and see your brother, then one day it's going to look back at you and see that, and it'll carry it all its life. It'll wonder what it's supposed to be."

"I know."

"It's going to be a person. It's going to have its own chin, and its own opinions, and its own stupid habit of picking its nose. It's going to hate peas. It's going to want a motorcycle." She laughed, shakily. "It's not going to build wooden boats. It might be terrible at boats. It might get seasick."

"It might."

"And you're going to love it anyway."

"Yes."

"Not as a substitute. As itself."

"Yes."

"That's the only way I can let you in."

"I understand."

"Do you?"

"I have thought of little else for six weeks." He looked at her. "I do not want to replace anything. I want only to be in the room."

"Then be in the room."

"Dess—"

"No. Listen." She sat forward, wincing, and grabbed his sleeve. "You're not the uncle because you're Kit's brother. You're the uncle because you stood in the rain. Because you learned to iron. Because you hold a mug at a window and don't wave. Because you came." Her fingers tightened. "You think I let people in because of their blood? I've had a lifetime of people with the right blood. I let you in because you answered a direct question and went pale."

He could not speak.

"That's all it takes," said Dess. "With me. It's a very low bar. Nobody ever clears it."

"I— I do not know what to say."

"Then say nothing. Sit there. Be a person in a room."

"I can do that."

"I know you can." She let go of his sleeve. She fell back against the cushions, exhausted, breathing hard, and turned her face to the lamp. "Oh, God. I'm tired."

"You should sleep."

"I'm not tired like that."

"You are tired exactly like that."

"I'm tired like a woman who's been told she's allowed to have a thing."

He was silent.

"Don't go," she said.

"I shall not."

"I mean tonight. It's late. It's snowing again." She waved a hand toward the window, where fat white flakes had begun to drift in the streetlight. "Stay till I sleep. I get scared when it's quiet. You can stay on the sofa. I'll take the bed. You can go home when it's light."

"Dess, I—"

"I'm asking."

He stared at her.

"I'm asking first," she said. "Because that's the rule. Will you stay, Theron? Not for the baby. Not for the rent. Because I'd like it."

The radiator knocked. A single flake touched the glass, melted, and ran.

"Yes," said Theron.

…

She did not take the bed.

She tried. She got as far as the bedroom door, in her flannel pajamas, with the hot-water bottle clutched to her chest, and stood there swaying with exhaustion, and said, "I'm going to lie down for ten minutes and then I'll come back." But she did not come back. When he went to look, at half past ten, with a blanket over his arm, she was asleep sideways across the foot of the sofa, curled around a pillow, with her feet tucked under the orange blanket and her head on the armrest.

She'd come out after all. She'd lain down where she could see him.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment.

Then, very carefully, so as not to wake her, he lifted her feet, and settled himself on the far end of the cushion, and placed her feet in his lap. He pulled the blanket up. She stirred, murmured something that sounded like Gerald, and was still.

He did not move.

He sat there in the lamplight with a sleeping woman's feet in his lap, and the cat on the laundry, and a siren drifting by and fading, and the snow coming down outside the window in soft slow whirls. He thought: This is a thing I do not deserve. He thought: I have a will in a drawer. He thought: I will tell her.

He thought of nothing at all.

Hours later, he woke.

He did not remember falling asleep. The lamp had burned low. The radiator was silent. A thin gray light was creeping through the curtain, the color of dishwater and pearl, and he lay half-slumped against the sofa arm with a crick in his neck and his left hand curled around something warm.

It was her ankle.

He lay absolutely still.

She was awake. He could tell by her breathing. She lay on her side, facing him, with her eyes open in the early light, and she was looking at him with an expression so tender, and so unguarded, and so entirely without alarm that his heart gave one large, slow, painful turn.

"Hi," she said, in a sleep-rough whisper.

"Hello."

"You stayed."

"You asked."

"You didn't leave."

"I was not invited to."

She smiled. It was the sleepiest, slowest, most private smile in the world.

"Your hand," she said.

"What of it?"

"It's still."

He looked down. His fingers lay curled around her ankle, light as a bird's feet. He lifted them an inch and watched them, in the dim gray light. They did not shake. They did not so much as tremble.

"It appears to be a side effect of you," said Theron.

She laughed, soundlessly, her eyes closing.

"Go back to sleep," he said. "It is not yet seven."

"Don't move."

"I will not."

"Not till I say."

"I shall wait."

"For how long?"

"As long as it takes." He settled his head against the sofa arm, and shut his eyes. "I am extremely good at it."

She did not answer. Her breathing slowed. After a little while, he felt her toes, which were cold, curl gently against his palm.

Outside, the snow went on falling. Down on the first floor, a canary trilled. Somewhere over the rooftops of Fox Point, a ship's horn sounded, long and low, across the dark water of the harbor, and was answered.

They slept.

In the corner, on a stack of folded laundry, Mr. Biscuit opened one yellow eye, regarded the two of them for a long, judicial moment, and closed it again, with an air of having seen everything and found it entirely unsurprising.