Two Days of Silence

Theron

On Monday morning he did not go to the window.

He woke at five, as he always did, in the narrow bed in the middle room of number 14, and lay for some time with his eyes open, listening to the radiator and the early-morning mutter of Mrs. Ferreira's television coming up through the floor. He was aware that it was a quarter to six. He was aware that in nine minutes a kitchen light would come on, across the way, and a woman would appear at a window in an old gray robe with a cup of lemon water, and look out at the street. He was aware that he had stood at that glass every morning for seventy-one days.

He lay quite still and did not move.

You will go to the window, he told himself, and she will be there, and she will lift her hand. And you will lift yours. And you will smile like a fool. And at the end of it you will go and sit at your card table and do arithmetic, and you will know that you are standing at a window with a lie in your pocket the size of a house.

The radiator knocked.

Not the lie, he corrected, as he corrected everything. The omission. You have not said one false word.

That is the lie.

At 5:54, he heard, through the wall and the street and thirty feet of frozen air, a very faint click. A light switch. He knew it as he knew his own pulse. He lay with his hands clenched on the blanket and counted to sixty, and then to a hundred, and then to three hundred, and at the end of it he rose, and washed his face, and put on a suit, and left the building by the back stairs, like a burglar.

He did not look up as he crossed the yard.

…

"You are not well," said Ansel.

"I am perfectly well."

"You have a look."

"I always have a look."

"You have the particular look," said Ansel Pryor, "that you have worn on exactly three occasions in your life. At your father's funeral, when you were told the cancer had spread, and the afternoon you discovered that Isabelle had taken the Persian rug." He took off his spectacles and polished them on his tie. "I should like to know what has happened."

They sat in the old lawyer's office on South Main Street in the thin gray light of a Monday afternoon, the radiator banging, the tea cooling in its pot. Theron had taken the straight chair. He sat bolt upright, with his hands on his knees, and he had not touched the shortbread. On the desk between them lay a folder, newly tied, and a single sheet of paper, which he had read four times.

"I need to ask about the petition," he said.

"Ah."

"Hale's petition. What are the grounds?"

"I thought you would never ask." Ansel replaced his spectacles. "Kessler filed it on Friday. It is a 'Petition for Appointment of Guardian Ad Litem and for Declaratory Judgment as to the Validity of Article Four.' It alleges, in the most delicate language, that the testator was of diminished judgment at the time of execution, owing to his youth, his recent bereavement of his father's memory, and an unusual attachment to a sperm bank."

"An unusual attachment."

"I am quoting."

"And what does it request?"

"That the court appoint a neutral party to represent the interests of any unborn beneficiary. And that, pending a determination, the shares be held in escrow by a professional trustee." Ansel's mouth thinned. "Named, in a footnote, as the Hale Wexcombe Family Trust."

Theron closed his eyes.

"He is not being subtle."

"He is being very subtle, my dear boy. He is being so subtle that no judge in Providence would see it. He is asking, in the soft voice of a concerned relative, that the court protect a child from the burden of its inheritance by handing the inheritance to him." Ansel folded his hands. "It is quite brilliant. It is the oldest trick in the book."

"What are his chances?"

"Poor. Very poor. The will is witnessed and notarized, the testator was twenty-four and sober and a graduate of Brown, and there is not the least evidence of undue influence. Any competent judge will throw out the claim on the pleadings." He paused. "But a hearing is a hearing. It will be public. It will be reported. It will name the mother."

"It must not name her."

"It need not. The petition refers to her as 'Jane Doe.' But a motivated reporter, with a friend in the clinic—"

"Wade Pruitt."

"I should imagine."

Theron opened his eyes.

"When?"

"The hearing is set for the thirtieth of March. It will be a Tuesday, at ten, before Judge Marchetti. The petition must be served on the mother, as a party in interest, no later than fourteen days before." Ansel consulted the paper. "I am the executor. It falls to me, under the rules, to make that service. I can, with the court's leave, delay it. But not past the sixteenth of March."

"Sixteenth."

"At the very latest." The old lawyer's gaze was steady. "Theron. I am going to say this once, and then I shall be silent. I have kept your secret for twelve weeks. I have done so because you asked, and because I believed you meant to tell her. I have watched you take her to a clinic and a diner and a dock. I have heard you speak her name in a voice I have not heard in thirty years. I do not wish to see you hurt."

"I know."

"But on the sixteenth of March, a woman in a navy blazer will open her door to a man in a raincoat, and he will hand her a document of forty pages, and in it will be the words 'Article Four.' If she has not heard those words from you by that morning, I shall resign as executor. And I shall tell her, in person, why."

The words fell into the room like a weight into a well.

"That gives me," said Theron slowly, "five weeks."

"It gives you thirty-four days."

"Thirty-four."

"I counted." Ansel's face softened. "Use them."

…

He walked back to the car by the long way.

It was a bright, cold, windy afternoon, and the harbor lay beyond the end of the street like a plate of hammered tin. Gulls wheeled. A tugboat hooted. He went along the waterfront with his hands in his pockets and his head down, past the old brick warehouses with their iron shutters and the boarded-up chandleries and the shuttered fish stalls, with the wind pulling at his coat and the stink of tar and diesel in his nose. It was the world he had been born in. It was the smell of money and salt and long accumulating decay. He had loved it, once, with the helpless blind love of a boy.

Thirty-four days.

He did the arithmetic as he walked.

Thirty-four days was the time from now until the sixteenth of March. It was the time it would take a ship to cross the Atlantic. It was the time it took a fever to run its course. And in thirty-four days he had to find a way to say to a woman, who had put her hand over his mouth in a kitchen and said I'm waiving it, who had said I trust you, who had kissed him on a dock and said I decided to want it with my eyes open: that he had, since the first day, been holding a document that would put her child in the center of a legal war.

No, he thought. Not that. Say it plainly. You have been holding a document that, had she known, she might not have let you near the child at all.

You did not tell her because you were afraid.

You told yourself it was to protect her. It was to protect you.

It was a very simple sentence. He had known it for weeks. He had gone round and round it like a man circling a hole in the ice. And now, on a windy pier in February, with the gulls crying and a tugboat hooting, he stopped, and looked at it directly, and it looked back.

You are a coward, said the voice, in his father's cadence.

Yes, he said.

You are a man who sat in a boardroom while his brother waited on a dock.

Yes.

And you are going to do it again.

He leaned on the rail of the pier.

The water was dark and heaving. A plastic bag floated by. In the middle of the bay a ferry crawled toward Jamestown with a white plume at its stack, and the sun struck its windows and made them blaze.

I could tell her tonight, he thought. I could walk up the stairs and knock. I could say: Dess. Sit down. I have to tell you a thing.

And she would listen. She would listen to the end. And she would be very calm. And then she would stand up, and put on her coat, and say: Thank you for telling me. And she'd walk out the door.

And not come back.

And the boy would be born in a hospital with only Joelle in the room.

He bent his head over the rail and gripped it with both hands.

The tremor had come back. He felt it, a fine thin vibration in his left wrist that had been absent for twelve days, and he looked at it with a sort of tired recognition. It was the old tenant. It had only gone away on a visit.

Not yet, he thought. Not this week.

She is happy.

Let her be happy a little.

I will tell her on the fourteenth. After her checkup. In a calm room, with Joelle waiting in the car. I will have the words ready. I will have the documents. I will explain, with perfect clarity, that I was wrong, and I will take whatever she gives me.

He knew, even as he thought it, that it was the same lie in a different coat.

He walked on.

…

He did not come to the window on Tuesday, either.

He told himself it was a matter of schedule. There was a meeting at the Bristol yard at seven, and a call with the bank at ten, and an interminable lunch with Halvorsen's emissaries, who had flown in from Oslo to look at the drydock and who spoke in the careful, glacial, perfect English of men who had never in their lives been late. He stood on the apron of the yard in a hard hat, in the cold, with the wind whipping the flag, and listened to Hale, in a camel overcoat, give a smooth warm speech about the history of the family firm.

"Of course, we are always open to the right partner," said Hale, laying a hand on a Norwegian shoulder. "My late father used to say that a shipyard is a living thing. It needs fresh blood. It needs vision. We would be delighted to explore, in the fullness of time, what a closer relationship might look like."

"Of course," said the Norwegian.

"Naturally, there are family considerations. A transition. The loss of my nephew was a blow to us all. But we are resilient. And I think, Theron, would you not agree, that the shareholders would see the wisdom—"

"I am afraid I must differ," said Theron.

Hale smiled at him.

It was an extraordinary smile. It contained nothing but warmth. It was the smile of a loving uncle watching a nephew say something endearing and a little foolish at a family dinner.

"Of course you must, my boy," he said. "We shall discuss it at the board."

The Norwegians looked from one to the other.

Theron stood on the concrete, in the cold, with a clipboard in his hand and a hard hat on his head, and felt it settle on him: the whole weight of the old, bright, intricate structure of lies in which he had been raised. It was not a thing with a face. It was an atmosphere. It was the air of a house in which everyone was kind, and everyone was lying, and no one had ever once said anything that could be held against them.

I am my uncle, he thought, with a surge of vertigo. I am my father. I am standing in a yard on a cold day, with a smile, concealing a document.

The difference is only one of degree.

His phone buzzed.

He took it out. He knew, before he looked, whose it was.

Dess: You weren't at the window yesterday or this morning. Are you okay?

He stood and looked at it.

The wind snapped at the flagstaff. Somewhere behind him, Hale was laughing at a Norwegian joke. A forklift reversed with a shrill electronic beep. The words on the screen were small and clear and black, and above them, in a little round circle, was a photograph he had never before been able to look at without a pang: a woman in a green sweater, squinting into the sun, with a smear of lemon meringue on her chin.

Are you okay?

He typed: I am well. Detained by business. I regret the lapse.

He read it.

It was the coldest thing he had ever written. It was the voice of the card, the cream deckled card on a welcome mat. It was the voice he used to the bank. He saw it for what it was, and stood with his thumb above the screen, and heard his own heart go very quiet and very flat.

Delete it, said the voice in his head. Write: I am ashamed. I am frightened. I cannot lift the mug.

He sent it.

For a long minute there was nothing. Then the dots appeared, and vanished, and appeared again. The wind blew grit into his eyes.

Dess: Okay.

That was all.

Okay.

He had never in his life been so afraid of a word.

…

Gabe came on Wednesday.

He came in the evening, at a quarter past six, up the three flights of number 14, and knocked on the door of the flat with a small, shy, apologetic rap. Theron was at the card table. He had been there for four hours, with a legal pad, composing a speech and tearing it up. He had a pile of crumpled yellow sheets at his elbow. He had shaved twice.

He opened the door.

The man on the landing was tall and shaggy and sandy, in a rumpled gray suit, with a cardboard box in his arms and an expression of such awkward, honest, cheerful embarrassment that Theron, for a moment, did not recognize him.

"Mr. Wexcombe," said Gabe.

"Mr. Lindqvist."

"I'm sorry to bother you. I know it's late. I can come back." He shifted the box. "I just wanted— It's been a strange week. I've had a lot of goodbyes. And I thought, if I didn't say this to you, I'd regret it."

"Goodbyes?"

"I'm going to Hartford."

Theron stared at him.

"Peg got me a transfer," said Gabe. "To the regional office. Senior adjuster. It's a real promotion. It's— A pay raise and an office with a door." He gave a small, rueful, crooked grin. "I start on Monday. I told her I couldn't, I said I had commitments here. She said, 'Lindqvist, you are twenty-eight years old, you have never had a commitment longer than a lease, and you're going to Hartford.'"

"I— I am sorry. For you. For her. I mean— That is excellent news."

"It's both." Gabe laughed shortly. "Can I come in?"

Theron stepped back.

He saw the younger man look round the bare room: the card table, the single chair, the map of Narragansett Bay taped to the plaster, the heap of crumpled papers. He saw him take it in, with the quick, shrewd, uncomplaining glance of an adjuster entering a flooded basement. Then Gabe put the box on the floor, and straightened, and held out his hand.

"I came to say," he said, "that I'm glad it's you."

Theron took the hand.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The neighbor. The one in the window." Gabe's grip was firm and warm. "I didn't like it at first. I'll admit it. I thought, who is this guy? He's stalking her. He's rich. He's got a car with a driver. I thought, he's going to hurt her. And I looked at it as an adjuster, you know, and I thought, I'm going to find the discrepancy."

"And?"

"And there wasn't one." The sandy brows drew together. "You were exactly what you said. Which was nothing. A neighbor. A man who stood in the rain. A man who never asked for anything." He let go. "I watched you for two months. I'm good at watching. And I want you to know that I have never in my life been so sure of anything as I am that you're not going to hurt her."

The words fell on Theron like a hand on an open wound.

"Mr. Lindqvist—"

"Gabe."

"Gabe. I must tell you—"

"No, let me finish. I've been practicing." Gabe drew a breath. "She's the best person I know. I'm not in love with her anymore, and I'm not going to be weird about it. I was. It was real. But it's over, and it was never going to work, and I'm glad. I'm glad because it means I can say this without wanting anything." He looked Theron straight in the eye. "Take care of her. That's all. Whatever you are to her, or aren't. Take care of her and the kid. And if you ever, ever don't—"

"You'll drive down from Hartford."

"I'll drive down from Hartford," said Gabe, "in a very small car, and I'll be extremely irritating about it."

Theron laughed.

It broke out of him, unplanned, a short, startled, gasping sound, and he put his hand over his mouth. Gabe grinned.

"There it is," he said. "I wondered if you did that."

"I am told it is rare."

"It's good. It suits you." He bent and picked up the box. "Here. I almost forgot. I brought you something."

"Gabe, I cannot—"

"It's not a gift. It's a loan." He held it out. "Open it."

Theron lifted the lid.

Inside, nested in newspaper, lay a plastic chicken.

It was a kitchen timer, bright yellow, with a painted black eye and an orange beak, exactly the size and shape of the one on the table at Tidewater Coffee. Under it lay a handwritten card, in a boy's careful capitals.

She uses this to time her meetings. It's her good-luck charm. She'll want it back. She can't remember which drawer she lost it in. I found it in the supply closet on three, under the Herman Miller. —G.

P.S. Her safe word is "chicken." I'm not supposed to know. Joelle told me, in confidence, at the party. I'm telling you because I think someone ought to be able to use it.

Theron stood motionless, with the card in his hand.

"It was the only thing I could think of," said Gabe, very low. "That's a stupid present. I know. But I thought you could give it back. Maybe at a time when she's, you know. Mad at you. People get mad. It might help to have a chicken."

"Gabe—"

"I've got to go. I've got a bus." He clapped Theron on the shoulder, awkwardly, and was gone down the stairs in three long strides, and the street door slammed.

Theron stood alone in the doorway.

He was holding a plastic chicken in one hand and a card in the other. The radiator knocked. The canary sang. The tears, which he had not known were coming, slid down the sides of his nose, and he stood quite still and let them, and felt, unmistakably, two things at once.

The first was relief.

It was enormous. It was warm and cheap and cowardly. It rose in him like a drug. He is gone, said a small voice at the bottom of his mind. He is going to Hartford. He is out of the way. There is no one now who could take her; there is no one in the office who will bring her coffee; there is no one in the world who stands between you and the next hundred days.

The second was disgust.

It came a half second after. It was colder, and cleaner, and far more accurate. It said: You are standing in a doorway, with a gift from a good man, and the thing you are feeling is thankfulness that he has been removed.

That is exactly what Hale would feel.

He put the chicken on the card table. He set it carefully, between the legal pad and the mug, facing the door. It looked at him with its small black painted eye.

"I am sorry," said Theron, aloud, to the chicken.

It said nothing.

…

"Have you told Miss Rourke?" said Dell.

It was Thursday morning, a quarter to nine, and the Bentley was idling in the lee of the Bristol yard, with its windows fogged, and Theron was sitting in the back with a cup of Dell's gas-station coffee growing cold in his hand. He had been there for twenty minutes. He had not got out. In the front seat, Dell sat motionless behind the wheel, large and gray and implacable, staring through the windshield at the rows of shrink-wrapped hulls.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've been in here since a quarter past. You haven't spoken. You haven't gone in to the meeting." Dell did not turn. "I've got four opinions left for the year. I thought I'd use one."

"Do."

"Have you told her?"

"After."

"After what?"

"After her appointment. After the fourteenth. After—" Theron stopped. "After."

"That's a long way from before."

"I am aware."

"You said, before the kick."

"She waived it."

"You said, on the dock, by the end of the month."

"I— Yes."

"You said, Christmas." Dell's voice was a low, flat, expressionless rumble, like a sea in a cave. "You said, after the New Year. You said, after the blizzard. You said, when she's stronger. When you are." A pause. "I've been driving you eleven years, Mr. Wexcombe. I know what 'after' is. It's a place a man goes when he doesn't want to be somewhere."

Theron did not answer.

He stared at the back of Dell's gray head. The collar of the overcoat was frayed. A single thread stood out, white, at the nape of the neck.

"You think me a coward," he said.

"No, sir."

"You think me my father."

"I think," said Dell, "that you're the best man I've ever driven. And I think you're about to do the worst thing you've ever done." He turned, at last, in his seat. His broad weathered face, in the fogged gray light, was deeply, painfully sorrowful. "I'm not a brave man myself. I've never said it. I drove for your father, and I stood by while he did a lot of things, and I told myself it wasn't my business. I've been sorry about it for twenty years. I wouldn't wish that on you."

Theron's throat closed.

"What would you have me do?" he said hoarsely.

"Go up the stairs."

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

"Because I am afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of the moment after." He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. "Of the half second after she has understood. Of her face. I have seen a great many faces, Dell. I have seen a surgeon's, and a banker's, and my mother's at a graveside. I have never seen hers close. And I find I cannot bear to be the thing that closes it."

Dell was silent.

Outside, a gust rocked the car. The flag at the yard cracked like a pistol shot, and settled.

"Then do it somewhere," said Dell slowly, "where you'll be holding her hand."

"I do not understand."

"Don't tell her at a table. Don't tell her in a window. Tell her in the one place where you can't run." He nodded toward the road. "Wait till she's got a hand on yours. And then say it fast. Like pulling a tooth. And don't stop to explain. Just say it, and hold on, and let her hit you if she wants."

"That is terrible advice."

"It's the only kind I've got."

Theron almost laughed.

"I shall consider it," he said.

"That's all I ask."

"And Dell."

"Sir?"

"If I do not— If I fail— You will see to it that she and the child are provided for? Whatever occurs?"

"No, sir."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'll do no such thing." Dell turned back to the windshield. "She's not a charity. You told me that yourself. She'd throw it in your face." A pause. "I'll see to it that you're provided for. That's different."

Theron looked at the back of the gray head.

For a long moment he could not think of a single thing to say.

…

The next morning he bought the building.

He did it at ten, in Ansel's office, through a Delaware company called Ives Holdings LLC, with a cashier's check drawn on a private account, and it took seventeen minutes. The seller was a Mr. Pardo, who lived in Naples, Florida, and had never seen the property. The price was eight hundred and forty thousand dollars, which was, Ansel observed in a tone of arid wonder, nearly double what the place was worth. There was a closing. There were signatures. There was a small ceremonial transfer of keys.

"Why?" said Ansel.

"For safety."

"Whose?"

"Hers." Theron signed. "There is a man in a gray sedan. He has been outside for three nights. I have not yet traced his employer, but I have a strong suspicion. I do not wish her landlord to be subjected to persuasion."

"You have bought the entire house."

"I have bought the building."

"You have purchased your lover's home, in secret, through a shell company, so that your uncle cannot bribe her landlord." Ansel closed his eyes. "My dear boy. Do you hear yourself?"

"I hear myself."

"It is not safety. It is possession."

"It is both."

"It is a thing that she will never forgive."

"She will not know."

"She will always know," said Ansel. "That is the whole nature of the thing. She is the most thorough woman I have ever met. She will turn over the deed, the way she turns over a claim. And in the last line of the title she will find your name."

Theron laid down the pen.

He sat looking at the document. At the legal description, the neat black type, the seal. At the words Lot 13, Ives Street, Providence, together with all buildings thereon. It seemed to him a very small thing. A heap of wood and brick and plaster. A porch. A green door.

She lives there, he thought. She sleeps there. Her lamp is there. Her ledger is there. The shape of her is in the floors.

I have bought the floor she stands on.

He felt, as he thought it, something pass through him. It was not pride, or possessiveness, or even fear. It was a long dark shiver, like a hand passing across his grave. He knew exactly what it was. He had felt it once before, at fifteen, at the door of his father's study, when the old man looked up from a desk covered in other people's property and smiled.

You are doing what he did, said the voice.

I am doing what he did to protect something he loved.

That is what he said too.

He put the keys in his pocket.

They lay there against his thigh, cold and heavy, all three of them, a Yale and a Schlage and a small brass skeleton for the cellar. He walked out of Ansel's office with them, and down the stairs, and into the bright, hard, windy morning, and stood on the pavement of South Main Street with his face lifted to the sun.

He thought: I will tell her tonight.

He thought: I will give her the deed with my own hand.

He thought: I will say: here. I bought your floor. I am sorry.

He thought: She will laugh. She will say it is the stupidest thing she has ever heard.

His phone buzzed.

Dess: Forty-one hours.

He stopped.

Dess: That's how long since you lifted the mug.

Dess: I'm not asking you to explain. I'm not demanding anything. I'm just telling you the number, because I count things, and this is a number I don't like.

Dess: Something's wrong.

Dess: If it's me, say so. If it's you, say so. If it's something else, say "chicken" and I'll know you can't say more.

Dess: But don't say "busy."

He read it standing on the sidewalk with the keys in his pocket and his heart going like a hammer. People passed him on both sides. A woman with a stroller. A man with a briefcase. A boy on a skateboard. He stood in the midst of them, gripping the phone, and understood that he was about to make a choice, and that it was the last one of its kind.

Chicken, he thought. Say it. She would not need more. She would hear it, and she'd know.

She would come. She would sit down on the floor. She would say: Tell me.

And I would tell her.

His thumb hovered over the glass.

He typed:

T.W.: It is nothing to do with you. It is a matter of the family. I have been unworthy of your patience. I shall explain at the earliest opportunity.

He stared at it.

At the earliest opportunity.

It was the voice of a solicitor. It was the voice of a man who had never in his life said an honest thing on a Friday. He knew it. He felt it settle into the screen like a stone into a pond.

He sent it.

For the first time in four months, there was no answer at all.