Echoes of a Stranger: His Child

The Man From the Ocean II

“Clara!” Mr. Hargrove raised his voice just slightly toward the kitchen. “Did we see anyone suspicious this morning?”

Mrs. Hargrove appeared at the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a cloth, “Not a soul,” she said pleasantly. “Just the usual morning. Would you like to come in for tea, Vera? You look cold.”

Vera Hutchins looked like she very much did not want tea.

“We’ll keep moving,” Bernard said, after a moment. He tipped his head at Mr. Hargrove. “You see anything unusual, you let us know.”

“Of course,” Mr. Hargrove said. He closed the door.

Upstairs, behind the spare room door, Nadia had moved the moment she heard the knock.

She had taken the stairs two at a time without making a sound a skill built from years of not wanting to wake Lily during bad nights and slipped into the spare room where Adrian lay. He was awake, barely, his dark eyes tracking her as she came in and crossed quickly to the bed.

“There are people downstairs,” she whispered. “You need to be quiet. Completely quiet. Can you do that?”

He looked at her. Something in his expression sharpened. He nodded once.

She looked around the room quickly. He was lying down, covered by the quilts. The room looked like a guest room in use, nothing more. She positioned herself in the chair beside the bed, picked up the book from the side table Mrs. Hargrove’s reading book, left there from a previous evening, and opened it to a random page.

If anyone came up, she was sitting with a resting family guest. Nothing more.

When she finally heard the front door close and Mr. Hargrove’s steady footsteps returning to the kitchen, she let out a breath she had been holding so long it made her ribs ache.

Adrian was watching her.

“They were looking for someone,” he said. His voice was still rough but stronger than it had been at noon.

“They were looking for you,” she said honestly. “Or someone who sounded a lot like you.”

Something moved across his face. Not quite fear. More like the particular discomfort of a man who has just discovered that the danger he cannot remember is apparently still very much real.

“Am I—” He stopped. Started again. “Do you think I’m dangerous?”

Nadia considered him for a moment. The man in the bed with no name and no past, with bruised ribs and a bandaged brow and a right hand that still hadn’t fully opened.

“I think if you were dangerous,” she said carefully, “you’ve had three chances today to prove it and you haven’t.” She closed the book. “That’s enough for me right now.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the ceiling.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “For not leaving me on the beach.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “Thank me when we figure out who you are.”

The afternoon came in slowly, grey softening toward something almost golden by the time Lily finished her homework at the kitchen table. She was eight years old small for her age, with Nadia’s same dark eyes dim. She had known about the man upstairs since lunchtime. Mrs. Hargrove had explained it simply: a man who was hurt and needed rest. Lily had nodded very seriously and asked no more questions.

But by three o’clock the not-asking had visibly exhausted her.

She appeared at the spare room door so quietly that Nadia, dozing lightly in the chair, didn’t hear her until she was already inside. Adrian was awake, propped slightly against the pillows, staring at the window. He turned at the small sound of her footsteps.

Lily stopped. She looked at him with the frank and total appraisal that only small children are still honest enough to give.

“You’re very handsome,” she said.

Adrian blinked.

Nadia jolted awake in the chair and found her sister standing three feet from the bed with her hands clasped behind her back like a small dignitary.

“Lily—”

“I’m just saying what’s true,” Lily said, without turning around. She took one step closer to the bed and tilted her head. “What’s your name?”

Adrian looked at the small girl in front of him. Something in his face shifted the guarded careful expression he had worn all day loosened at its edges, just slightly.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

Lily considered this with great seriousness. “That must be very strange,” she said. “Not knowing your own name.”

“It is,” he agreed.

She nodded slowly. Then she climbed up onto the chair beside his bed — Nadia’s chair, where Nadia was no longer sitting because Nadia had stood up in alarm — and settled herself with complete comfort, pulling her knees up and wrapping her arms around them.

“I’ll call you something,” Lily announced. “Until you remember. You need something to be called.” She studied him. “You look like an Echo. Like something that was somewhere else first.”

Nadia went very still.

Adrian looked at the small girl. Then, slowly, something happened to his face that hadn’t happened all day the corners of his mouth moved.

“Echo,” he said quietly.

“Echo,” Lily confirmed.