The Stranger at Tidewater

Dess

At 8:41 on Saturday morning, Dess Rourke sat at the corner table of Tidewater Coffee with a pot of ginger tea, a legal pad, a mechanical pencil, and a kitchen timer shaped like a chicken, and tried to look like a woman who did this sort of thing every weekend.

"You brought a chicken," said Joelle.

"It's a timer."

"It's a chicken that happens to be a timer."

"It was the only one in my drawer. The other one's a tomato, and it's got a dent, and it runs eleven seconds slow." Dess set the chicken precisely in the center of the table and squared it to the edge. "I want him to see it. I want the first thing he sees to be a calibrated instrument of time."

"Honey, the first thing he's going to see is a woman with a legal pad and a poultry-themed appliance."

"Good. Let him wonder."

Joelle, who had come straight from a night shift and was wearing the oversized purple hoodie she kept in her locker for post-delivery emergencies, leaned back in her chair and regarded her best friend with enormous affection and no mercy whatsoever. "You've made notes."

"I've made notes."

"Can I see them?"

"No."

"Dess."

"They're preliminary."

Joelle reached across the table with the unhurried air of a nurse removing a thermometer and drew the pad toward her. Dess made a noise of protest, and then subsided, because it was no use. On the page, in her small neat hand, were five lines.

1. Who told him?

2. What does he want? (Be specific. "To see the baby" is not specific.)

3. What does he think he's entitled to?

4. Watch for: tone shifts, gestures, anything he repeats.

5. DO NOT LIKE HIM. (Likability is a technique.)

"Number five," said Joelle slowly, "is underlined three times."

"Likability is a technique."

"Is it?"

"I've sat across from a hundred claimants. The ones who make the best first impression are the ones you have to count your fingers after." Dess poured tea with a hand that was almost steady. "A man with that much money doesn't show up on your doorstep out of kindness. He shows up with a reason. And what I've learned in six years is that people hide their reasons behind their manners."

"What if his reason is that his brother died and he's sad?"

"Then he can be sad at twenty minutes. With a chicken."

"You're a cold woman."

"I'm a careful woman."

"You're a cold woman who's been awake since four a.m. and has had nothing for breakfast but a saltine and a spreadsheet." Joelle slid a plate across the table. On it sat a blueberry scone the size of a catcher's mitt, still warm, which she had apparently ordered while Dess wasn't looking. "Eat. If you're going to do battle, do it with a base layer."

Dess ate. It was, she was annoyed to find, a very good scone.

At 8:56, the bell over the door jingled.

She did not turn her head. She had resolved not to. She sat with her back very straight and her hands around her cup and her eyes fixed on the chicken, and she felt the cold air curl around her ankles and the door swing shut, and she listened.

Footsteps. Unhurried. Even. Heavy shoes on an old wooden floor.

They crossed the room and stopped.

"Ms. Rourke."

It was not at all the voice she had expected. She'd imagined something smooth, the kind of baritone that sells you a timeshare. Instead it was low and dry and slightly rough at the edges, like a good piece of linen that had been laundered too many times. It was very controlled. It was, she thought, the voice of a man who had practiced the sentence several times in a mirror, and had not been entirely pleased with it.

She looked up.

He was taller than she'd thought. That was the first thing. The second was that he was thinner, in the way of a man who forgets about lunch, with sharp cheekbones and a pale, tired, narrow face, and gray eyes ringed with the faint bruised shadows of someone who had not slept well in a month. He wore a charcoal overcoat, a gray tie, and a dark suit that fit him like a thing he'd been born in. His hair was dark and very short and going silver at the temples, far too early. In his right hand he carried a leather folder. His left he held at his side, a little stiffly.

He didn't smile.

"Mr. Wexcombe," said Dess.

"Thank you for seeing me."

"I haven't seen you yet. I'm still deciding." She nodded at the chair across from her. "Sit."

He looked at the chair. It was a small, spindly café chair with a woven seat, and it was drawn up to a very small round table, and for a moment he seemed to measure the distance between himself and it with the cool deliberation of a man estimating a bridge.

He did not sit.

"May I ask first," he said, "whether you're comfortable? If you'd prefer that I remain standing—"

"Mr. Wexcombe."

"Yes."

"I asked you to sit."

"I'm aware."

"Then sit."

"I—" He seemed to search for a suitable phrase. "I find I don't take a seat in a room unless I've been invited twice."

Joelle, at the next table over (she had moved there, very smoothly, and become engrossed in a copy of Rhode Island Monthly), made a tiny noise that might have been a cough.

Dess blinked at him.

"That's a very strange rule," she said.

"It's an old one. My mother taught it to me." A flicker of something crossed his face. "I'm told it's tiresome."

"It's a little tiresome."

"I can sit, if you prefer."

"I prefer that you sit, Mr. Wexcombe. I've been asking for ten seconds. I've got nineteen minutes and fifty seconds left." She tapped the timer. "Consider that your second invitation. Please sit down before I start charging by the minute."

He sat.

He did it slowly, and carefully, and with a curious stiffness, as a man might lower himself into a boat he suspected of leaking. He set the leather folder on the table, squared it to the edge, and folded his hands on top of it. The left hand trembled very slightly. He pressed it into the right.

Dess saw. She noted it. She didn't write it down.

She set the chicken ticking.

…

"I'd like to begin," said Theron Wexcombe, "by apologizing."

"For what?"

"For the card. For the car. For the fact that you came home from a medical appointment to find a stranger watching you from across the street. I had intended a more dignified introduction. I'm afraid dignity is a skill I seem to be losing in the process."

"It was very polite stalking."

"I didn't intend it as stalking."

"It had all the features." Dess ticked them off on her fingers. "A black SUV. A man in a beard. A cream card with a deckled edge. And you, in the back seat, with your hand on the window, like a ghost in a Victorian novel. I nearly called the police."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because the card was so nicely written. And because I'm a coward who wants to know the end of the story." She leaned forward. "Let's skip the preliminaries. You're Kit Wexcombe's brother."

He didn't flinch. He had, she noticed, a remarkable quality of stillness; not rigidity, but a kind of settledness, as if his body had learned long ago to give nothing away until it had decided what to give. Only his eyes changed. They dropped for an instant to the folder, then rose to hers.

"Yes," he said.

"And Kit Wexcombe was Donor 4417."

"Yes."

"And he's dead."

"Yes. Five weeks ago. A car accident on Ocean Drive." His voice did not shake, but it slowed, as if each word had to be lowered carefully to the floor. "He was twenty-four."

Dess felt something go out of her chest, a thing she hadn't known she was holding.

She had prepared for many things. For a threat, a pitch, a polite and elegant coercion. She had prepared a short speech about her rights under the Rhode Island parentage statute and a longer speech about her rights under common decency. What she had not prepared for was the plain, unadorned, terrible simplicity of the thing; the single yes, said without cushioning, by a man who had plainly said it too many times already.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Thank you."

"I mean that. I read about it. Before I knew. I saw his picture on my phone and I thought—" She stopped. She had been about to say he looked like someone who'd be late for dinner. She said instead, "He looked young."

"He was."

"Was he—" Dess hesitated. "I don't know what the right question is. I don't want to be ghoulish. But I've been thinking about him for two months, as a sort of idea. A line on a form. And now he's a person who's dead. And I don't know what I'm allowed to ask."

"You are allowed to ask anything."

"That's very generous."

"It isn't. It's the only thing I have to offer." He paused. "I came here with a speech, Ms. Rourke. A long one. It was a very good speech. I rehearsed it in the car for an hour, and Dell, my driver, who has never in his life paid me a compliment, said it was 'adequate.' It began with a statement of my intentions and ended with a list of reassurances. I've decided not to give it."

"Why?"

"Because it was a lie."

Dess's pencil stopped.

"Not in the facts," he said. "In the shape. It was arranged to make you comfortable. To make me appear what I'd like to be, which is a harmless man with a handkerchief. And I have a strong suspicion that you've spent your career being handled by people with good speeches, and that you'd see through this one by the second paragraph."

"By the first sentence."

"I'd have guessed the third."

"I'm having a very good morning."

The faintest movement touched the corner of his mouth.

"So instead," said Theron, "I'll tell you the plain version. In October, my brother died. In November, my mother and I found a letter in his things which told us that he had donated to a sperm bank at the age of twenty, and that one vial of his remained in storage as of last year. My mother is sixty-two and has lost her youngest son. She asked me to find out whether there was a child. I tried to do it properly. I went to the bank. The director refused to tell me anything, which was entirely right of her. And so I found you by another way." He paused. "I'm not proud of the other way."

"What was it?"

"I'd prefer not to say."

"I'd prefer you did."

"I'm sure you would."

"Mr. Wexcombe." Dess laid the pencil across the legal pad. "Let me explain something about how I work. When a man comes to me with a claim, I ask three questions. What happened? What do you want? And how do you know? The third is the one people hate. It's the one that tells me whether the story holds."

"And if the third question is the one I can't answer?"

"Then I'd treat it as a claim without a source. And I'd put it at the bottom of the pile."

"That's reasonable."

"It's more than reasonable. It's the industry standard."

"Then I'll tell you what I can." He seemed to choose each word like a stone for a wall. "Someone was indiscreet. Someone who ought not to have been. I will not name him, because he did it out of a desperation I understand, and because I would be ashamed to ruin a man who has already been ruined enough. But I'll say this: it was not Dr. Teague. She did the right thing. She refused me flat. If you hold anyone responsible, hold me."

"Somebody sold you my name."

He said nothing.

"Somebody sold it," repeated Dess slowly. "That's what 'indiscreet' means. Nobody gives away a patient's name for free. There was money."

"Ms. Rourke—"

"I'm not asking you to deny it. I know what it sounds like when a person's trying not to lie." She sat back. "You didn't say no. You said you'd prefer not to say. That's a very different grammatical mood."

For a moment he looked at her, and she saw him recalculate. It was an extraordinary thing to watch: a mind that had been running at one level shifting, quietly, into a different gear. The gray eyes sharpened. The stillness deepened. He had, she realized, under the courtesy and the folder and the tired voice, the cold clear attention of a man who built things for a living and did not like it when something proved sturdier than he expected.

"I paid," he said.

She had not thought he would say it.

"I paid forty thousand dollars," he said, "for your name and address. I did it in a parking lot, to a man with a sister in need of surgery. I did it at eleven at night, from a private account. And I read your file, which I had no right to read, and I looked at your photograph, which I had no right to look at, and I was ashamed of both." His voice was flat and level. "That is how I know your name. I'm telling you because I think you would have worked it out in ten more minutes, and because I find, to my considerable irritation, that I would rather you hear it from me."

Dess sat motionless.

Behind the counter, the espresso machine hissed. Somewhere a spoon rang against a saucer. The chicken ticked on the table, gently, indifferently, like a small plastic heart.

Forty thousand, thought Dess. For a name.

It was more than she'd saved in two years.

"Wade," she said.

He went very still.

"The receptionist. With the cold. The one who told me to hang in there." She was not looking at Theron now, but through him, at a memory: a lanyard, a pink nose, a damp sniffly voice. My sister did it three times. "He said his sister did it three times. I thought he was being kind."

"I won't confirm—"

"You don't have to." She pressed her hand flat against her sternum. "He had a sister. And I—I signed my name on a form in front of him. He watched me do it. And he—" Her mouth twisted. "He was so nice."

"Ms. Rourke."

"Don't."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You paid." She said it quite quietly. "You understand, don't you, that you're sitting across from a woman whose privacy you bought like a used car? That's the foundation of this conversation. I'd like us both to remember it."

"I haven't forgotten for a moment."

"Good."

"I will not pretend it was anything other than what it was."

"Good. That's the first honest thing you've said."

"It's the second," said Theron. "The first was yes."

She looked at him. And, against every instinct, she found herself very nearly liking him; and she stamped on the feeling, hard, as one stamps on a cockroach, with a silent, vicious, internal no.

Likability is a technique, she reminded herself. Count your fingers.

…

At the eleven-minute mark, Joelle got up to refill her coffee, and passed behind Theron's chair, and gave Dess a tiny, deliberate shake of the head.

Stay.

Dess stayed.

"What do you want?" she said. "Specifically. Not 'to see the baby.' Not 'to be involved.' Those are shapes. Give me a number, a date, a deliverable."

"I want to know that the child is well."

"That's a feeling."

"I want to know that you are well."

"Also a feeling."

"I want—" He stopped. His left hand slid beneath the table, out of sight. "I want to be told, once a month, by a means of your choosing, that both of you are alive. I don't require to be told anything else. No photographs. No updates. A single line. Alive. I would prefer it by email, but a postcard would do."

"A postcard."

"A postcard is entirely adequate."

"You want a postcard."

"I want to know that I haven't lost him twice."

The words came out of him rough and low and quick, and then he shut his mouth hard on them, as if he'd bitten something. A flush rose along his cheekbones. He looked away, at the window, where the early sun lay in long thin bars across the wet pavement of Wickenden Street, and a woman in a puffy coat was walking a dachshund in a sweater.

Dess did not say anything for a while.

"That's not what you said in the car," she said finally.

"What did I say in the car?"

"You didn't say anything in the car. I mean, in your head. You must have said something." She gestured vaguely. "I'm assuming that when a man buys a woman's name for forty thousand dollars, he's not going to settle for a postcard."

"I might surprise you."

"I doubt it."

"You're very sure."

"I'm very sure that you're not telling me everything."

"No," said Theron. "I'm not."

She stared at him.

"I'm not telling you everything," he said, "because there are things I don't yet know how to say. And I think that if I said them now, in the wrong order, you'd get up and leave, and you'd be right to. I'm trying to be—" He seemed to search for the word. "Sequential. I'm trying to do this in an order that doesn't hurt you."

"That's the most suspicious thing you've said yet."

"Yes. I realize."

"That's not an answer."

"It's not meant to be. It's a warning." He met her eyes. "I would rather warn you that there are things I haven't said than let you think there aren't. You'd find out in time. And you would not forgive me for pretending."

She had absolutely no idea what to do with this.

In six years at Narragansett Mutual, she had interviewed three hundred and fourteen claimants. She had met the liars and the exaggerators and the sad, decent, bewildered people who didn't know what they were entitled to. She had never met anyone who looked her in the eye and said, I am lying to you by omission, and I am telling you so as a courtesy.

It was either the cleverest con she'd ever seen, or a man with a terrible and unusual conscience.

She could not tell which. That alone was infuriating.

"I want to set some rules," she said.

"Please."

"I'm not asking. I'm informing."

"Understood."

"Rule one. You do not come to my building. You do not park outside it. You do not send a driver, a car, a courier, a card, or a basket of fruit."

"Agreed."

"Rule two. No money. None. If a single dollar of yours enters my account, I will return it and report it. I've been paid for my silence before by better men than you."

"I will not offer."

"Rule three. You do not contact my mother, my friends, my employer, or the receptionist at the clinic. You don't ask anyone about me. If I find out you've had me followed, I'll make a claim against you."

"For what?"

"I'll think of something. I'm very creative."

"I believe you."

"Rule four." She paused. This one she hadn't planned. It arrived on its own, out of the place where she kept the things she didn't say to anyone. "You don't get to be sad at me. I know that sounds terrible. But I have a lot to carry right now, and I cannot carry your grief too. If you need to be sad, be sad somewhere else, with your mother. I'll be sorry about it from a distance."

"That's fair."

"It isn't fair."

"No," he agreed. "But it's necessary."

She wrote 4 on the pad, and then crossed it out, because the pencil lead had snapped.

"Rule five," she said. "You tell me the truth when I ask a direct question."

"I will."

"Even if it's inconvenient."

"Especially then."

"Even if you've decided it's for my own good."

For the first time that morning, he hesitated.

It was a fraction of a second. A hitch, a catch in the clockwork. But she saw it, and she saw him see her see it, and in the silence that followed, the chicken ticked, and the espresso machine hissed, and somewhere at the back of the shop a baby began to cry in a stroller, a thin furious wail that rose and fell like a siren.

"I'll tell you the truth when you ask a direct question," said Theron slowly. "I can't promise to volunteer it."

"That's a loophole."

"It's an honest one."

"It's a loophole with a clean collar." Dess narrowed her eyes. "Fine. You've given me an out, and I've noticed. I'll just have to ask very good questions."

"I have no doubt of it."

The timer rang.

It was a loud, brassy, ridiculous sound, a tinny ding like a diner bell, and it rose out of the plastic chicken and filled the little café. Every head turned. The baby stopped crying in surprise. Joelle, at the counter, put a hand over her mouth.

Theron looked at the chicken.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"Twenty minutes."

He stood at once. He did it in a single, smooth movement, no hesitation, no fumbling; he picked up his folder, buttoned his overcoat, and stepped back from the table. He had not touched the coffee she'd ordered him, which sat steaming beside the sugar bowl. She hadn't even noticed it arrive.

"Thank you for your time," he said. "I'll respect your rules. I'll go now."

"You're going?"

"You said twenty minutes."

"I did."

"Then it's twenty minutes."

She stared at him.

She'd expected him to bargain. To linger. To say just one more thing in the doorway, with a hand on the frame and a crooked, rueful look, the way every man she'd ever met had done when he wanted something and was too polite to ask. She'd planned for it. She had a whole script, an entire arsenal of firm and gentle refusals.

He simply stood there, tall and thin and tired, in the weak light, with his coat buttoned to the chin, and waited for her to release him.

"Mr. Wexcombe."

"Yes."

"Why didn't you sit down until I asked you twice?"

He looked puzzled. "I told you. It's a rule."

"But why?"

"Because—" He seemed to be hunting through a drawer of old answers. "Because when I was a boy, my father used to sit down in other people's houses. In the chairs they hadn't offered. He'd sprawl. He'd put his feet up. He thought it showed power. And my mother said to me, when I was seven, in the car: Never take what hasn't been offered, Theron. Not a chair, not a glass of water, not an opinion. Wait to be asked." A faint, rueful, humorless twitch of the lips. "My father, as it happened, had a great deal of trouble with creditors."

Dess felt her face do something unplanned.

"That's a good rule," she said.

"It has its uses."

"It's a lousy rule for a businessman."

"I've found it quite effective." He inclined his head. "Good morning, Ms. Rourke. I'll hope for the postcard."

He went out.

The bell jingled. The door swung shut. Through the window, she watched him cross the pavement to a black SUV at the curb, where a broad gray-bearded man was holding the back door open with the solemn air of a verger at a funeral. The tall figure paused, once, with one hand on the roof, as if listening for something. Then he got in.

The car pulled away.

For a long time Dess didn't move.

"Well," said Joelle, sliding back into her chair. She picked up her cup, took a long, ruminative sip, and set it down. "That was annoying."

"Yes."

"I wanted to hate him. I was ready. I had a whole tirade. I'd been practicing in the shower." Joelle shook her head slowly. "And then he went and stood up when the chicken rang."

"I know."

"Who does that?"

"I don't know."

"A man doesn't do that who's playing a game. A man who's playing a game takes the extra five minutes and calls it a gift."

"Joelle."

"I'm only saying."

"Don't only say." Dess pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "He bought my name. For forty thousand dollars. From a boy who had a sick sister. He sat across from me, with that terrible voice, and told me so calmly, like he was reading a weather report. And I wanted to throw the teapot at him, and I also wanted to—" She stopped.

"To what?"

"To make him eat something."

Joelle burst out laughing.

"I'm serious! He's thin! He didn't touch his coffee! His hand shakes! There's a man whose brother just died, and he's walking around town in a suit, and nobody's put a sandwich in his hand since October." Dess dropped her head onto the table. "I am a terrible person. I'm a woman of principle and a spreadsheet, and I just developed a maternal feeling about a man who stalked me. Kill me."

"You're not a terrible person."

"I'm a deeply compromised one."

"You're pregnant." Joelle patted her back. "You've got hormones. You'd feel maternal about a traffic cone."

"That's an excuse."

"It's a scientific excuse."

Dess lifted her head. On the table, the chicken stared at her with its stupid painted eye.

"He said he'd leave," she said slowly. "He said he'd respect the rules."

"He did."

"And you believe him?"

Joelle considered. She turned her cup a quarter turn in its saucer, the way she did when she was thinking.

"I believe," she said, "that he believes it. Which isn't the same thing. And I believe that something's coming that he hasn't told you." She met Dess's eyes. "I believe that man is carrying a very heavy bag, and he's chosen to put it down very politely, right outside your door. And I think that sooner or later, honey, you're going to have to decide whether you want to be the person who opens it."

Dess looked at the empty chair across from her, and at the untouched cup beside the sugar bowl, still faintly steaming in the cold bright air.

Then she picked up the pencil, found it broken, took out another, and wrote at the bottom of the legal pad, below DO NOT LIKE HIM, in letters that were very small and very neat:

He stood up when the timer rang.

She underlined it once.

Then, after a moment, a second time.