Echoes of a Stranger: His Child

The Ocean II

Getting him up the path was the hardest thing she had done in recent memory. She managed to rouse him just enough patting his face firmly, calling to him in a low urgent voice until his eyes fluttered and some dim surviving instinct made his legs attempt to hold weight. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t focus. But his arm went across her shoulders when she pulled it there, and she wrapped both of hers around his torso and began the slow, exhausting climb back up the coastal path toward the Hargrove house, her left boot letting the cold in with every step.

He made a sound once. Low and rough. Like something trying to surface.

“Don’t talk,” she told him. “Just walk. I’ll do everything else.”

Mrs. Hargrove opened the door before Nadia could knock. She had been on her way to the kitchen and had seen them through the window the girl she thought of quietly as her daughter, half-carrying a large unconscious man through the front gate with the focused expression she always wore when she had decided something needed to be done.

“Nadia—”

“He was at the shoreline. He’s breathing. He needs to be warm.” Nadia didn’t stop moving. “Can you get Mr. Hargrove please?”

It took both of them and most of Nadia’s remaining strength to get him up the stairs and into the spare room. They laid him on the bed and Mrs. Hargrove immediately pressed her palm to his forehead, his cheek, his wrist, the way a woman does when she has spent a lifetime caring for people and her hands have learned to read what words cannot say.

“Lord,” she murmured. “Where did he come from?”

“I don’t know,” Nadia said. “There was nothing on him. No phone. Nothing.”

Mr. Hargrove stood in the doorway, a quiet and steady man who had seen enough of life not to be rattled easily. He looked at the stranger in his spare bed for a long moment. Then he looked at Nadia.

“You did right,” he said. That was all. But it settled something in her chest.

Mrs. Hargrove cleaned the wound above his brow with careful hands, tsking softly at the depth of it. She wrapped him in the heavy quilts from the chest at the foot of the bed. She brought warm water and cloth and worked quietly the way she always did, and Mr. Hargrove went to make the call to the town’s retired doctor, old Dr. Pell, who could be trusted to come without making it everyone’s business immediately.

Nadia sat in the chair beside the bed.

She didn’t plan to stay. She had things to do before eight o’clock. But she looked at his face pale now against the white pillow, the bruising darker in the warm light of the room and she didn’t move.

He woke just before noon.

It happened slowly. A tightening of his expression first, like something inside was pulling him upward from a very deep place. Then his fingers moved and Nadia noticed something. Even in unconsciousness, his right hand was closed. Tight. Like he was holding something. Like he had been holding something when the sea took him and some part of him had simply refused to let go, even after everything else was gone.

His hand was empty. But it wouldn’t open.

His eyes opened.

They were dark. Disoriented. They moved across the ceiling, the walls, the window, and then they found her.

He stared at her. She didn’t look away.

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. He looked at her the way a person looks at something they are not sure is real. Like she might disappear if he moved too quickly.

Then his mouth opened.

“Who—” His voice came out broken, scraped raw by salt water and silence. He stopped. Tried again. “Who are you?”

Nadia leaned forward slightly in the chair.

“My name is Nadia,” she said calmly. “You’re safe. You’re in a house in Cresthaven. I found you this morning at the seaside.” She paused. “What’s your name?”

He looked at her.

And the look on his face — the way it shifted from confusion to something deeper and more frightening than confusion — made her go very still.

He didn’t know.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. His jaw tightened and she could see him reaching, searching, turning inward to find something that should have been the simplest thing in the world his own name, and finding nothing.

His right hand pressed harder into the quilt, fingers still curled tight around nothing.

“I don’t—” he started.

He stopped.

His eyes, dark and lost and desperate, stayed on hers like she was the only solid thing in a room that had begun to tilt.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.