“I Was Worried”

Dess

There were, by Dess Rourke's count, three kinds of silence.

There was the silence of a man who was busy, which was loud and had a calendar. There was the silence of a man who was angry, which was cold and had edges. And there was the third kind, which she had met only twice in her life, once in her mother's years with Gary and once in the last week with Marcus Pell: the silence of a man who was standing very still on the far side of a door, holding it shut with his whole body, so that you would not see what was in the room.

At nine o'clock on Friday night she sat at her kitchen table in her gray robe, with the blue ledger open in front of her and a cup of ginger tea going cold at her elbow, and understood that she had been listening to the third kind for four days.

"You're doing the thing," said Joelle.

"I'm not doing a thing."

"You're doing the thing where you read the same line of the ledger and don't see it."

"It's an excellent line."

"What is it?"

Dess looked down. "'Sunday, Feb. 7. Dess gave: one dock, one kiss, one name. Dess received:'" She stopped. "I don't know what I received."

"Honey."

"I'm just saying it's blank."

Joelle's face, on the phone propped against the sugar bowl, was a small bright oval in a pink bonnet, with a hair-scrunchie round one wrist and a face mask drying on her cheeks. She had been on the call for forty minutes, in the back bedroom in Cranston, with the door closed against the baby monitor and Terrence's snoring. She had listened to the whole thing. The window. The mug. The cold little texts. The I regret the lapse. The earliest opportunity. She had listened with the focused, ferocious, unblinking attention of a woman who had once gotten a ticket reversed by sheer force of will.

"Okay," said Joelle. "I'm going to say some things. And you're going to let me say them all, and then you're going to tell me I'm wrong."

"Fine."

"One. He is a man who has told you, on a dock, in the dark, that he is going to tell you something. By the end of the month. He said it. You heard it."

"He said he'd explain a thing. He didn't say what."

"Two. Since then he has said nothing. He has gone from a man who texts you good-morning from forty feet away to a man who writes like a hostage."

"A hostage to his own syntax."

"Three. A man doesn't do that because he's bored. A man does that because he's done something. Or because he's about to." Joelle leaned in. The mask cracked at the edges. "Dess. I love you. I'll say it plain. I think there's a thing he hasn't told you. And I think it's big."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I've known since the Ledge Point dock." Dess pushed the tea away. "I told him I'd wait. I said, 'I decided to want it with my eyes open.' That's what I said. I meant it. I knew there was a closet and I didn't open it."

"And now?"

"And now it's been four days, and I'm standing in the hall outside the closet, and the door is breathing."

Joelle was quiet.

On the screen behind her a night-light glowed, a small blue cartoon moon. A floor-board squeaked. Somewhere in the Baptiste house a toilet flushed with the dull ancient gurgle of Cranston plumbing.

"What do you want to do?" said Joelle.

"I want to be the person who said she'd wait."

"And?"

"And I want to go over there and take him by the lapels."

"Which one wins?"

Dess opened her mouth.

And at that moment, in the dark of her belly, a small quick foot drove itself under her left rib like a man trying to open a stuck window. She gasped. The pen skidded across the ledger. She sat up, one hand on her side, and felt the second kick, and the third, a whole drumroll, a pugnacious, urgent, thumping knock.

"Whoa," said Joelle. "Was that him?"

"He's mad."

"At what?"

"At me," said Dess. "He's been quiet all week too. I think he knows."

"Knows what?"

"That the person who's supposed to be holding the door shut is me."

The foot kicked again. Dess laughed, a short helpless wet sound, and pressed her palm flat against it, and the thing under her palm pushed back, hard, as if to say: go.

"I'll call you tomorrow," she said.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to put on my shoes."

"Dess—"

"It's twenty degrees out and I'm twenty-two weeks pregnant. I'll put on two pairs of socks. Don't tell Terrence."

"I'm not telling Terrence!" cried Joelle. "I'm going to wait up!"

…

She had been to the door of number 14 exactly twice.

The first time, in the snow, with a sack of groceries and a lie about having seen a package. The second, a month ago, when she had left a dish of Mrs. Ferreira's pastéis on the mat with a note that said For the man who owns the window. She had never knocked. She had never gone in. It stood across the narrow yard from her own, the same sagging porch, the same worn green paint, the same iron number nailed up crooked above the bell. There was a single yellow light in the third-floor window.

She crossed the yard in her coat and her husband-sized galoshes, with the cold coming up through the soles, and the stars out over the harbor in a hard bright scatter, and stood on the porch with her fist raised.

You're doing this on a kick, she thought. That's not a plan.

It's the only plan I've ever had.

She knocked.

Nothing happened for so long that she thought the building was empty. Then she heard the stairs, slow and heavy, three flights coming down by degrees, a hand on the rail, a pause on each landing as if the man were lowering himself through a series of locks. The chain rattled. A bolt shot back. The door opened four inches.

He stood in the gap.

She had seen him in a hundred conditions. In a morning suit and a dinner jacket, in a leather jacket at a diner. In the snow with his hair plastered to his forehead, in a bathrobe, at midnight, in a hospital corridor. She had never seen him like this.

He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was rumpled, the cuffs undone, the top two buttons gone. His hair stood up on one side. The skin under his eyes was a thin, smudged, brownish blue, like a bruise on a plum. A day's black stubble shadowed his jaw, and the gray streak at his temple seemed to have crept a quarter-inch farther back. In his left hand, held awkwardly against his thigh as if he'd forgotten it, was a yellow legal pad. He was trembling.

"Dess," he said.

It was barely a voice.

"Hi."

"You should not be out. It is ten degrees below—"

"It's twenty. I looked."

"There is ice on the steps—"

"I came across a yard, Theron. I didn't scale a glacier." She looked him up and down. "You look like something the tide left."

"I am— It has been a difficult week."

"I know."

"I should have written."

"You did write. 'I regret the lapse.'" She said it in his own cool Newport drawl, and saw it land. "It was the most beautiful piece of prose I've ever received. I'd frame it, but I think it's evidence."

"I beg your pardon."

"Don't. Don't beg. I didn't come for that." She put her hand flat on the door. "Can I come in?"

He looked at her hand. He looked at the dark of the stairwell behind him. He looked, for a split second, so naked with terror that she felt her own heart turn over.

"The flat is not fit—"

"I've lived in a triplex with a shared bathroom for eleven years. I have seen the inside of Ray Dufresne's truck. There is nothing you can show me."

"There is a great deal."

"Then show me. Or tell me no. But don't tell me it's not fit." Her voice cracked on the last word. She clamped her jaw. "Please."

It was the please that did it.

He stepped back. The door swung wide.

…

The flat was the least furnished place she had ever been in.

She stood on the threshold of the third-floor room, with the radiator hammering and the yellow bulb swinging on its cord, and took it in. A card table. One chair. A cot, military-neat, in the corner. A map of Narragansett Bay taped to the plaster. A shelf with eleven books, all spines aligned. A hotplate. A mug on the table, the white one with the blue stripe, and beside it— She saw it and her breath went out in a gasp.

A plastic chicken.

It sat in the middle of the card table with its painted eye turned to the door, bright yellow, ridiculous, a kitchen timer from the pine ages. Beside it lay a crumple of yellow pages, a pencil, and a card in a boy's neat capitals.

"That's mine," she said.

"Gabe left it."

"I lost that."

"He found it under the Herman Miller." Theron closed the door, softly, and turned the key. "He asked me to give it to you at a moment when you were angry with me. He said it might help to have a chicken."

She stared at him.

Then she began to laugh.

It came up out of her in a great helpless rush, bent her in half, and set her clutching the back of the one chair. She laughed until the baby kicked in protest. She laughed until her eyes ran. She laughed, she understood, the way you cry at a funeral: because the other thing was too big, and this was the only door that opened.

"He gave you—" she gasped. "He gave you my chicken. To use on me."

"He was very sincere."

"He was Gabe."

"He was a good man."

"I know he was!" She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "God. I'm sorry. It's not funny. It's— He drove all the way up here from his own party to hand you a kitchen timer and I'm— Oh, Theron."

"I am not offended."

"You should be. Look at you. You look like a ghost in a suit."

"I am told it suits me."

She laughed again, weaker, and then it went out of her all at once, and she stood in the middle of the bare room with her coat hanging open over her belly and her hand over her mouth. The radiator banged. The yellow bulb swayed.

He did not move.

He stood by the locked door with the legal pad in his hand and watched her with that terrible patient stillness, the still of a man at a bedside, and she saw the tremor in his left wrist, the whole forearm shivering, and realized that he was holding the pad so hard that the cardboard backing had buckled.

"Sit down," she said.

"I—"

"There's one chair. Take it."

"It is yours. I could not possibly—"

"Theron Cabot Wexcombe." She pointed. "You've been on your feet for four days. You look like you've been dragged behind your own boat. I'm twenty-two weeks pregnant and I've been standing in a stairwell and I'm going to sit on the cot, which looks like it was made by the Marines, and you are going to sit in that chair, and we are going to have a conversation like two people who work for a living."

He sat.

He sat as he did everything, with a kind of formal, absolute obedience, as if to some ancient code, and laid the pad on his knees, and put both hands over it. She crossed to the cot and lowered herself onto it. The springs groaned. The blanket was gray wool, folded with hospital corners, and smelled faintly of cedar and soap.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

"I was worried," said Dess.

…

It wasn't what she had planned to say.

She had planned a great many things in the cold on the way across. She had planned how dare you. She had planned you made a promise. She had a short, elegant speech in her pocket about the nature of trust and the difference between privacy and evasion. She had an itemized list. She had spent, by her own estimate, forty-one hours on it.

What came out, sitting on a Marine's cot in a drafty room above a cold street, was three words in a smaller voice than she had used since she was nine years old.

"I was worried," she said again. "Not mad. I mean, I'm a little mad. But mostly I just— I stood at the window on Monday and you weren't there. And I told myself, he's busy. He's a CEO. Men like that have days. And then Tuesday. And I thought, okay, maybe he's got a thing. And then you sent me that text. 'Detained by business.' And I looked at it for a long time. And I thought: I know what that is."

"What is it?"

"It's what my mother's boyfriends sent when they were with someone else."

He flinched.

It was a small, involuntary, physical thing, like a man hit in the stomach. His hands tightened on the pad.

"It is not that," he said. "I swear to you. There is no one. There has been no one since— There has been no one in my life but you since the first morning I saw you at that window, and there never will be again. I would put my hand in the fire."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I know it's not that." She pulled her coat closed. "That's the thing. It's not that, and I know it's not that, and somehow it's worse. Because if it were another woman I'd know what to do. I'd throw a plate. I'd cry on Joelle. I'd write the whole thing down in the ledger and draw a line under it and go on being miserable like a normal person." She shook her head. "But it isn't that. It's something I can't see. And I've been looking at the shape of it for four days, and every time I get close it changes."

"Dess—"

"I'm not asking you to tell me now."

He stopped.

"I mean it. I'm not." She held his gaze, steady and plain, with the yellow bulb swaying over them. "I came across the yard to say two things. Number one. Whatever it is, I decided to want you with my eyes open. I told you that on the dock and I'm not taking it back because you got scared."

"I am not—"

"You're terrified. You've been terrified since the fire escape. It's all right. You're allowed. I'm terrified too. I've been terrified since the second blue line." Her voice shook. "But number two. Number two, Theron. You don't get to go dark."

He closed his eyes.

"I will not ask you what's in the room," she said. "I'll wait for you to open the door. But you can't leave me standing in the hall. Not like that. Not with a text like a legal notice. If you can't talk, you say chicken. If you need a day, you say I need a day. If you need to go sit in a boat in the middle of the bay and not think, you tell me, and I'll bring you soup. But you don't just— vanish. Because I've had vanishing. I've had it from every man in my life since I was six years old. And I won't have it from the father of my son."

The last words came out rough.

The father of my son.

She hadn't meant to say it.

It hung between them in the warm, stale, lamplit air. It was not true, not strictly. It was true in no biological, legal, or strictly honest way. And she saw it strike him, saw him go perfectly white and perfectly still, with the shock of a man handed a live coal.

"I am not—" he said hoarsely.

"I know what you're not."

"I am not his—"

"I know." She spoke very gently. "Theron. I know. I was there when they filled out the form. You're the neighbor, you're the uncle, you're the man with the umbrella. I'm not rewriting anything." She took a breath. "I'm saying that when he's born, and he looks around, and he finds a man who's been coming up the stairs every day with soup and a strange toy and a very long vocabulary, that man's going to be something to him. And I'd like him to be something that doesn't disappear."

His eyes were open now, and wet, and fixed on her.

"I am so sorry," he said.

"I know."

"I should have— I have behaved—"

"You've behaved like a man who's afraid." She slid off the cot and knelt, awkwardly, in front of his chair, one hand on the arm to keep her balance. "I'm not scared of you. I'm scared for you. There's a difference."

"Dess. Do not kneel. You will hurt the child—"

"I'm not kneeling. I'm crouching. It's different. My doctor said so." She took the legal pad out of his hands. "Give me that."

"No. That is—"

She glanced down.

The top page was a clean sheet of yellow paper, ruled in blue. Across the top, in his small upright hand, were two lines, the second crossed out.

Dess—

I must tell you something, and I would ask that you hear the whole of it before

She stopped. Her eyes went to the crumple of discarded pages on the table, nine, ten, a drift of them, each one begun in that same cramped hand.

Dess—

Dess, there is a matter I have—

Dess. Please sit down.

Dess, I love you, and I

She looked up.

He sat motionless. His face had gone grey with something she took, at that moment, for shame.

"They're letters," she said.

"They are— attempts."

"At what?"

"At saying a thing." He swallowed. "I find I cannot."

"You've been writing me love letters."

"I—"

"You've been sitting up here for four days trying to write me a love letter, and you can't get past the second line."

"That is—" He shut his mouth. His throat worked. "That is not entirely inaccurate."

She stared at him.

And she thought: It isn't. It isn't entirely inaccurate. There's more. There's a thing under it. She saw it. She saw it quite clearly, as she'd seen the altered date on a claim form in a hundred files: the small bright neat stroke where a different pen had been. He's telling me the truth. He's just not telling me all of it.

And I can let it go.

She had sat in the gray rooms of her own mind for a long time, adding up columns. She knew exactly how much she was giving away. She knew what a conservative adjuster would say. Request supplemental documentation. Flag for further review.

But this is not a claim, said another voice, a quieter one. This is a man on a chair in a cold room, shaking, who put his whole life on a card table to write you one honest line and couldn't. This is the best he can do tonight.

And it is, you know, quite a lot.

She set the pad on the floor, face down.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I'm not going to read them. They're yours. When you can say it, you'll say it. In your own words. Out loud." She laid her hand on his knee. "I'd rather have one sentence from your mouth than ten pages from a pencil."

He put his hand over hers.

It was shaking so badly that for a moment she thought he'd lose his grip. Then, slowly, as she watched, it steadied. The long fingers closed round hers and the tremor in the wrist ran down, like a motor winding off, until the hand was warm and heavy and perfectly still.

"There," she said softly.

"I do not know why that happens."

"I do."

"Tell me."

"You're not holding it alone." She turned her palm up under his. "That's all. You've been holding the whole building up on your own, and it turns out if somebody else puts a hand under it, it doesn't shake."

He bowed his head. His forehead came down against the back of her hand.

They stayed like that for a long time.

…

"I would like to ask you something," he said at last.

His voice was muffled against her knuckles. The radiator had stopped banging, and the room was quiet.

"Okay."

"It is a great liberty."

"Ask."

"I would like—" He lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted, and extraordinarily clear. "I would like very much to ask if you would stay."

"Stay."

"Tonight."

"In the cot?"

"I would sleep on the floor."

"You would not."

"I have slept on worse."

"You've slept on a boat, I know, you told me. I'm not putting a man with a bad shoulder on a floor in February." She raised her eyebrows. "Is that what you're asking? Or is it a different question?"

He went slowly, deeply, helplessly red.

It started at his collar and rose to the roots of his hair, and she watched it with a kind of wondering tenderness. He was thirty-six years old. He had run a company through a recession. He had once stared down a Norwegian shipping magnate across a table. And he was a boy, at that moment, a boy at a dance, sitting on the edge of a folding chair with his hands in hers.

"I said," he began, and stopped. "I said I would ask first."

"You did."

"It is the principal—"

"I remember."

"It is, I believe, term four of the—"

"Theron."

"Yes."

"Ask."

He drew a long breath.

"Dess Rourke," he said, formally, with his hand over hers and his eyes steady on her face, "may I take you to bed?"

She looked at him.

It was, she thought, the most absurd sentence ever spoken in the English language. It had the cadence of a proposal in a Regency novel. It was spoken in a bare room with a kitchen timer for a witness. It came from a man who had been, ten minutes earlier, on the edge of tears. And every nerve in her body, from her scalp to her toes, went warm and quiet and certain.

"Yes," she said.

He did not move.

"Yes?"

"Yes." She laughed softly. "That's the whole word. You can have it."

"I wish to be certain you are—"

"I'm certain."

"You are twenty-two weeks—"

"Pregnant. I'm aware." She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly, on the corner of the mouth. "It's not contagious. And Dr. Pratt said, and I quote, 'as long as nothing hurts and nobody is doing anything acrobatic, it's fine.' I wrote it down. It's in the ledger."

"You asked Dr. Pratt."

"I ask Dr. Pratt everything. She thinks I'm a hypochondriac. I'm just thorough."

"I adore you," he said, in a kind of helpless wonder, "beyond all reason."

"Then take me to bed, Mr. Wexcombe," said Dess, "before I think better of it."

…

She would remember afterward that it was not what she'd expected.

She would remember the cot, which was narrow and creaked, and the absurd logistical comedy of two adults and one nearly-six-month belly negotiating a bed built for a soldier. She would remember him stopping, every half minute, with that grave and anxious courtesy: Is this all right? Is this? Tell me if it hurts. She would remember laughing against his collarbone and saying, If you ask me one more time I'm going to say chicken, and the silence, and then his shoulders beginning to shake.

She would remember the light, one yellow bulb on a cord, and his hands.

She had thought she knew those hands. She had watched them for four months, pour tea, fold a handkerchief, sign a napkin. She had thought of them as exact, as formal. They weren't. They were slow, and they shook, and they were so careful with her that she nearly wept. Every touch was a question, and every question had an answer, and the answer was always the same.

Yes. Yes. There. Yes.

She would remember that at some point, in the middle of it, the tremor stopped altogether. She felt it go, like a motor shutting off, and his hand lay broad and warm and perfectly steady across the curve of her belly, and over it, a heartbeat later, she felt a small quick thump from the inside.

"He kicked," she whispered.

"I felt it."

"He's saying hi."

"He is saying—" His voice broke. "He is saying get on with it."

She laughed so hard she cried.

And she would remember, last of all, afterward, lying in the crook of his arm under a wool blanket that smelled of cedar, with the radiator ticking and the cold stars in the window, that he had said her name once, very low, as if he were setting it down on something fragile, and that she had understood for the first time, with perfect clarity, what it was she had been afraid of.

It wasn't that he would leave.

It was that she would let him stay, and love him, and it would be real.

…

She woke at three.

She did not know what woke her. The baby had gone quiet. The radiator had gone quiet. The light was off, and only the window glowed, a square of dim blue with the harbor lights scattered across it like spilled salt. She lay on her side with her back against his chest and his arm over her, and his breath moved her hair, slow and even.

He was asleep.

She'd never seen him asleep. She turned her head, very carefully, so as not to wake him, and looked.

In sleep his face was younger. The guarded line of his mouth had slackened, and the long furrow between the brows was gone. His lashes were absurdly long. There was a thin white scar at his collarbone, from the surgeries, and she touched it lightly with one fingertip.

Thirty-six, she thought. Cancer at twenty-four. A brother who died on a dock. A father with a study. And he asked me if he could take me to bed.

She lay for a long time, looking at him.

Then, because she was Dess Rourke and could never let a night go unrecorded, she slid carefully out of his arm and found his dress shirt on the floor and put it on, and crossed the cold boards to the card table. The chicken was there, bright and mad in the dark. She patted its head. She found the pencil. And on a clean corner of a crumpled yellow page, in the faint light from the window, she wrote, very small:

Fri. Feb 12.

Dess gave: a stairwell. A chicken. One "please." A promise not to read.

Dess received:

She stopped.

Her eyes went to the pages. She could see, even in the dark, the beginnings of a dozen letters. Dess— and Dess, I must— and Dess, please. She kept her hands in her lap. She had promised. She would keep it.

But her eyes, being her eyes, went one inch farther, to the pile's edge, where a heavy cream envelope lay half-hidden beneath the legal pad, and on its flap, embossed in a dark and elegant script, was a small name she did not know.

Pryor & Pryor, Attorneys at Law.

She looked at it for a second.

It's his lawyer, she told herself. He has a lawyer. Everyone has a lawyer. It's a Rhode Island family. They have lawyers like other people have cousins.

It's none of your business.

She turned her face away, deliberately, and looked at the window instead. At the harbor lights and the black bulk of the water. At the long, bright, trembling road the moon made, from the horizon to the shore.

Then she wrote the last line, small and firm, under the first two:

Dess received: everything he had. I think. For now.

She stood a moment longer, with the pencil in her hand and the cold floor under her bare feet.

Behind her, in the dark, the cot creaked. A hand reached out, found the empty place where she'd been, and fell still.

"Dess?" said a thick voice.

"Here."

"You are cold."

"I'm wearing your shirt."

"Come back."

"Is that an order?"

"It is a— request," said the voice, drowsy, and she heard in it the faintest sleepy smile. "Pursuant to term— four. Subsection— I forget."

She went back.

She slid under the blanket, and his arm came over her, and his chin settled in her hair, and the tremor was gone. She lay with her eyes open for a little while, watching the moon on the water. She was not afraid. She was something near it, and more like it than she liked.

Whatever it is, she thought, I'll know soon.

I can wait.

I'm very good at waiting.

And in the dark of her body, small and fierce, the boy kicked once more, as if to say that he, for one, was not.