Echoes of a Stranger: His Child

Mr Hero II

He sat in the chair beside the bed he had managed to move from the bed to the chair, which felt like a significant achievement even if nobody was there to witness it.

He looked at his right hand.

He had been trying all morning to understand the grip. It wasn’t conscious he didn’t decide to hold his hand closed. It just was, the way a habit is, or a reflex. Something had been in this hand.

Something he had been holding with everything he had. He could feel the ghost of it — the shape of something, smooth on one side, slightly ridged on the other, small enough to close his fingers around completely.

He didn’t know what it was.

He pressed his fist gently against his knee and stared at the window.

The sea was visible from here a strip of grey-green between the rooftops. He looked at it and felt something move in the deep inaccessible part of himself.

He was still looking at it when he heard the gate open. Adrian went very still.

Two of them came around the side of the house they were inside.

Adrian stood up from the chair. His ribs screamed. He ignored them completely.

He moved to the bedroom door and positioned himself behind it, his back flat against the wall, and something extraordinary happened — his body, stripped of every conscious memory, fell into a stance that his muscles clearly remembered without any help from his mind.

The footsteps came up the stairs.

The first man pushed the spare room door open and stepped in looking toward the bed, expecting, presumably, a bedridden invalid. What he found instead was nothing, a rumpled empty bed then a half-second later he found Adrian’s elbow connecting with the side of his head.

He went down fast.

The second man was quicker and came through the door already reaching, grabbing for Adrian’s injured side with the instinct of someone who had been briefed on the weakness. Adrian turned into it rather than away, taking the impact against his forearm instead of his ribs, and used the man’s own forward momentum to redirect him a clean pivot, a controlled application of force, and the second man met the wall with enough conviction to lose both his breath and his footing simultaneously.

He slid down it slowly.

Adrian stood in the middle of the room breathing carefully around his ribs. Both men were on the floor. Neither was unconscious but neither was interested in getting up immediately. He looked at them for a moment and then he went and sat back down on the bed.

By the time he heard the commotion from the street neighbours, voices, someone who had apparently witnessed the men enter and had done what small towns do, which is gather

Adrian was lying down with the quilt pulled up, his eyes half closed, the picture of a man too injured to have done anything more strenuous than breathe.

Nadia heard it at the market.

She had packed the table and was moving before she had fully processed the words, her feet finding the fastest route home through the market crowd with the knowledge of someone who has spent years navigating Cresthaven at speed.

She came through the front gate to find two men being held at the arms by Bernard Cole and two others, looking considerably worse than men who had merely been discovered trespassing ought to look. One had a split above his ear. The other was holding his shoulder at an angle that suggested things were not right inside it.

She took the stairs two at a time.

Adrian was lying in the bed. He turned his head slowly toward her when she came in — slowly, with great apparent effort — and his expression was the concentrated picture of pained helplessness.

Nadia looked at him.

She looked at the room. The door had a fresh scuff on its frame. There was a disturbed patch of rug near the entrance.

She looked back at Adrian.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I think so,” he said weakly. “Some men came in. I — I tried to call out but I couldn’t—” He paused, winced with considerable commitment. “I’m not sure what happened. They seemed to — fall.”

“They fell,” Nadia said.

“Yes.”

“Both of them.”

“It was very sudden,” Adrian said gravely.

Nadia looked at him for a long moment. His face was arranged in an expression of complete innocent fragility. Not a single muscle betrayed him.

She pressed her lips together. “I see,” she said. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

“Thank you,” he said humbly. “It was very frightening.”

She nodded seriously and went back downstairs.

By early evening the two men had been taken in by the community watch — outsiders, it turned out, with no legitimate business in Cresthaven and no good explanation for why they had entered a private residence uninvited. The town was buzzing with it. Vera Hutchins had already developed three separate theories, none of which involved Nadia for once, which was its own small miracle.

Nadia sat on the edge of Adrian’s bed with the medical kit Mrs. Hargrove kept in the bathroom cabinet. His ribs needed fresh wrapping — the activity of the afternoon had done them no favours and she worked quietly, her hands careful and practiced.

“You can drop it now,” she said, without looking up from the bandage. “There’s nobody else here.”

A pause.

“Drop what?” Adrian said.

“The helpless injured man.” She glanced up briefly. “You fought two people with bruised ribs and a head wound and then lay down and pretended it never happened. I’m not going to report you.”

The silence stretched for three seconds.

Then Adrian’s face did something she hadn’t seen it do before it broke open, just slightly, and a laugh came out. A real one, low and involuntary, the kind that arrives before a person can decide whether to allow it. He stopped immediately because of his ribs and made a sharp pained sound instead which somehow made it funnier.

Nadia bit the inside of her cheek.

“They fell,” she said gravely.

“Very suddenly,” he confirmed, his voice strained between pain and laughter.

“Both of them.”

“The floor in this house is quite treacherous.”

She laughed then. She couldn’t help it it came out before she could pull it back, a real laugh, the kind she didn’t produce very often. It lasted only a moment and then she composed herself and returned to the bandage with professional focus, but the warmth of it stayed in the room like the warmth of the kitchen downstairs — the kind that soaks into walls and remains.

“Your ribs are going to hate you tomorrow,” she said.

“They already hate me,” Adrian said.

“Good. They should.” She tied off the bandage and sat back. “Whoever you are — you know how to fight. Properly. Not street fighting. Something trained.”

He looked at his hand. The closed one. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It seems I do.”