Watch Over Me (2 page)
“I will,” Holbach said. “First thing.”
Benjamin wrote
School
and
A.H.
on one of the empty lines. The office phone kept ringing; they didn’t pick it up after hours, after the secretary went home. The answering machine kicked on, recording reporters or dial tones.
“That bag. The Food Mart uses them,” Raymond Wesley said.
“And probably a dozen other stores,” Holbach said.
“We can’t do anything about the others, but I’ll head over to the Food Mart, ask around. Maybe one of the clerks remembers someone coming through there pregnant.”
“And I’ll just start knocking on doors,” Benjamin said, adding Wesley’s and his initials to the diagram. “Covering the whole county is going to take a lot of time. Not much else to do, though, at least for now.”
“Not much else, sure as shooting,” Roubideau said. “Now go home. All of you.”
Benjamin didn’t. He drove around for twenty minutes, then let himself back into the station, into the holding cell. He took off his shoes and socks, his shirt, his belt, and crawled onto the bottom bunk, setting his watch alarm for four thirty. The sheriff didn’t come in until close to six.
She hadn’t trimmed her hair in six months. That was what Abbi was thinking when she saw the dull spasms of light beneath the haze. Heat lightning. She stopped, drank the air instead of breathing it. It tasted like rain, sort of mossy and gray. On either side of her, the hard red winter wheat stood unmoving, the humidity sponging up the wind. Harvest would begin in a month or so.
How her mind had wandered from prayer to hair, she couldn’t remember. But it happened that way when she ran, her feet penitent against the loose stone at the start, her petitions spilling into the open space with each breath. And then, twenty or so minutes later, she slowed for a quick drink and realized she’d been making mental lists of glazes she needed to reorder, or replaying her conversation with Genelise from late the night before.
She unzipped her hip pack and swallowed her last mouthfuls of water from a stainless-steel bottle. It was too hot to run, she knew. But Benjamin had asked her not to go. Or told her not to; she couldn’t tell the difference with him. He’d finished reading the front page article in the weekly
Beck County Register—
the one she read minutes before, about the rare humidity spell, the heat index over one hundred degrees, the three hundred dead cattle across the county—and said a couple jumbled sentences about the temperature and his concern, and how she could just skip a few days and jog when the swelter broke. She said, “Yeah, thanks,” and hid in her studio until well after he’d left for work.
Back out on the paved road, she untied the bandana from around her hair and shook it open, smoothed it over the top of her head like a veil. It helped cut the sun a little. She walked now, her toes burning in her jute sneakers. The asphalt stretched ahead of her, shimmering in places as if wet, an illusion of the heat. A tractor putted by, loose hay jouncing in a trailer hooked to the back. Abbi hopped in the bed—she doubted the farmer noticed—and rode until the turnoff to her house. She jogged the remaining distance, gravel shifting under her feet.
They didn’t live on a farm, but rather a misplaced street of ranch houses built in the ’50s, seven in a row with less than a quarter-acre each, more than most had in town. Theirs was second to last, peach-colored with faux stucco siding. The Vilhausers, a quiet elderly couple who kept chickens and a goat, lived on one side. The wife, Marie, sold eggs to Benjamin; she wouldn’t speak to Abbi, hadn’t so much as looked at her since that day when Abbi’s photo appeared in the newspaper, while Benjamin was gone, the one of her at the protest. The old woman had poked her skeletal finger into the ripple of bones beneath Abbi’s neck and called her a fascist.
On the other side, Silas and Janet McGee. Janet had moseyed over the first week Abbi and Benjamin moved in three years ago—Pepsi cake with broiled peanut butter frosting balanced on one hand, an “Are You Going to Heaven?” tract taped to the domed aluminum foil. She had a collection of tracts, Abbi soon found out, all colors and lengths and for every occasion. Janet often left the glossy booklets in the Patils’ screen door, mostly messages of praise or comfort, sometimes reminders of the power of prayer, and once a “Be a Missionary at Home” tract that encouraged the use of more tracts. Abbi had a good chuckle over that one, but she did admire Janet’s utter sincerity. She and her husband attended the same church as Ben and Abbi, and Abbi used to be able to call her a friend—sort of. Now, more often than not, she kept away from the windows when Janet came by, and didn’t return her phone calls.
Once inside, she dumped her exercise clothes in the washing machine and took a cool shower. After drying, she began her getting-dressed ritual. Underpants. Bra. The stack of jeans came out of her nightstand. She pulled on the size-fourteens first, stood in front of the mirror attached to the top of her dresser. She gathered the extra material, first at the front, holding it in her fist at her navel, then at the back, and then let go and rolled her stomach like a belly dancer; the pants slid down her legs.
Twelves next. She buttoned them and tugged the waistband up as high as it could go, then released it and watched the denim settle low on her hips. She did this four, five, six times before stripping off the jeans and shaking out the folded size-tens. This pair fit perfectly—a little give in the seat, some room in the thighs, not too tight across the belly.
Abbi folded the jeans, put them away, and dressed in an elasticwaist skirt she’d made from a vintage tablecloth—all her homemade bottoms had elastic; she was a crafter with a short attention span, not a seamstress—and an ocean blue T-shirt. She draped a raku-fired pendant around her neck, a copper and turquoise leaf print on a black cord, and then changed her nose ring from the hoop she preferred to the little diamond speck most folks didn’t notice. Before leaving, she gathered her hair into a loose ponytail knotted with an orange silk scarf. She didn’t know why she bothered trying to look nice; she’d be wearing a yellow polyester smock the rest of the day.
The small grocery store buzzed with people, more people than Abbi usually saw during a Wednesday shift. They weren’t shopping so much as congregating, standing with cans of Green Giant peas in their hands, talking in quick, gossipy bursts. She punched her timecard and tied on her Food Mart apron.
“So, your hubby’s a hero,” the other cashier, Jaylyn Grant, said.
Abbi shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you watch the news?”
“No.”
Jaylyn rolled her eyes. “He found a baby. Some wacko dumped a newborn baby girl on Pete Hopston’s land, and Deputy Patil found her. Probably left by an Indian. Maybe a drunk one.”
Abbi pressed a button on her register. The drawer clanked open, and she dropped her money tray in. “Isn’t your sister part Native American?”
“Sienna, yeah. Her daddy’s half of one. That’s the half that made him split, so my mother said.”
Abbi bit the inside of her cheek, said nothing. She keyed in merchandise codes and slid the food to the end of the ramp, watching Jaylyn’s back, her seventeen-year-old legs long and smooth in her cutoff shorts. The girl dropped bananas and two-liter bottles of soda on loaves of bread, flirting as customers passed by. The old men played along, the young men snuck glances at her body, and Abbi stood there like the Pharisee in the temple.
God, I thank you that I am not like these
sad people.
And she despised herself for it.
Women wandered through Abbi’s checkout line, heaping compliments on Benjamin. She said, “Thank you” and “I’ll tell him” and “I know I’m lucky.” But she just wanted to go home, and when her shift ended at six, she hurried to sweep and punch out, wadding her smock into a ball and tossing it on the shelf.
The house was still empty. On the answering machine, a red digital number one pulsed on, off, on. She pressed the Play button and heard static, then a dial tone.
She wasn’t hungry, not really. But there was too much space around her, inside her. She filled it with a sprouted-grain bagel and homemade hummus, two handfuls of raw almonds, a soy yogurt, and a chewy, double carob chip cookie. Before changing into her pajamas, she drank three glasses of prune juice, quickly, one after another, plugging her soft palate with her tongue to dim the taste. Then she snapped on the living-room lamp and made a sandwich for Benjamin—roast beef and Swiss; her stomach lurched as she picked the meat up between her thumb and forefinger, dropped it on the bread—in case he wanted something to eat when he came home.
In case he came home.
Other people woke to alarm clocks or crying babies or shouts from the apartments next door. But Matthew Savoie woke in silence, and in the minutes before he opened his eyes, he hid alone within his head, without distraction.
He thought in words, watched them scroll across the backs of his eyelids, ordering him to get up, get going. But the heat ground against him, wet and heavy, a mildewed blanket over his face, provoking his sleepiness.
The sheet stuck to his chest as he managed to turn over; he felt it peel away from his skin like a Band-Aid. Last night, he had taken the three cushions off the couch and lined them up on the floor. A narrow bed, yes, but his body was well accustomed to the width. He’d slept on the sofa here in his aunt’s living room for the past five years. And the floor—where his feet flopped off the end of the cushions, and he could spread his arms for air—was cooler than if he folded his body to fit between the padded gold arms, his skin pressed into the hot velour fabric.
A little cooler, he tried to convince himself.
He felt the floor shake. Someone slammed the bathroom door. He opened his eyes and saw two of his cousins, Jaylyn and Skye. Irish twins, his grandmother called them, born eleven months apart in the same year. Two different fathers.
“Ma said you better get your lazy self up or you’re gonna be late,” Jaylyn said.
Matthew turned onto his stomach again, swept his arm over the carpet and caught his T-shirt on his pinky. He put it on, not wanting the girls to see his bare chest, pale as the moon and puckered with ribs. Too thin for a sixteen-year-old. Too thin for a boy, really. He stood, shrugged.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He found his notepads in the denim shorts he’d worn yesterday, a sad pair of jeans Heather brought home from the Salvation Army, cut and hemmed by hand one night when she’d been feeling maternal. He flipped open the red one, spiral-bound on top like a reporter’s, and wrote,
What do you care?
“Retard. Come on, Skye,” Jaylyn said, and twirled away, her smooth blond hair fanning around her shoulders.
Skye stood there looking dark and tired. She reached her hand across her chubby stomach and grabbed a knot of skin near her hip and, through her cutoff sweatpants, kneaded it. She seemed more distracted lately, quieter than usual. Matthew doubted anyone else had noticed, a symptom of living packed close together, eyes turned toward the ceiling or floor—at first to give each other a bit more privacy, then to have more privacy of one’s own, until finally all anyone did was look up and inward and away.
Are you okay?
he wrote.
“Yeah,” she said, head dripping into her shoulder, her mouth still moving.
Unable to read her lips now, he scribbled, What? and held the pad in front of her face.
She looked at him. “Nothing. Sorry,” she said, and followed Jaylyn outside.
He hated that. The
nothing
s and
never mind
s. As if it took too much effort to repeat the words, and he wasn’t worth a minute more of conversation, another lungful of air. But he was used to it, too.
He couldn’t go without breakfast, so he took the three steps to the kitchen and filled a bowl with cornflakes. Opening the refrigerator, he stood inside it while he poured milk on his cereal, indulging in the rush of cold around him, a few guilty seconds of luxury. He slid the near-empty jug back onto the top shelf and elbowed the door closed.
The cereal, a store brand that came in a huge plastic bag, lost its crunch before Matthew sucked the first bite off the spoon. Still, he finished it, the soggy flakes filling the pits in his molars. He dug the mush out with his tongue, a silvery pain shooting through his jaw as he brushed the cavity he needed to have filled. Then he drank the warm, gritty milk left in the bottom of the bowl and opened the cabinet again to get his pillbox, hidden on the second shelf behind a stack of dishes so Lacie wouldn’t be tempted to play with it. Once he forgot and left it on the counter, and later found his youngest cousin twirling around the kitchen, shaking the blue plastic case like a maraca and singing.
With his thumbnail, he popped open the square labeled
Thursday Morning
and dumped the pills into his palm. Orange footballs, white capsules, and pastel wafers that look like Easter candies. Blood thinners and stool softeners, vitamin supplements and phosphate binders—he could take all eight in one gulp, and did, feeling as if he swallowed a handful of gravel and drinking a full glass of water to wash them all the way to his stomach. If not, he would belch up bitterness until lunch.
His noontime pills and between-meals pills he rolled in a paper napkin, to take with him for later.
He looked at the clock—already close to eight. In the bathroom he saw a speck of silver glittering at the bottom of the toilet and flushed. When the bowl refilled, the speck was still there, so he reached in and washed it and his hands with soap. Skye’s earring, a skull-and-crossbones stud. Her favorite. He left it on her pillow.
Rushing now, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and stuffed his notebooks and medication into the pockets, then lifted the top off the Rubbermaid tote in the corner of the living room. All his clothes fit in there, and he shuffled through to find his collared shirt, a yellow polo style with a bundle of green, black, and white stripes banded around his chest. He put it on, stared for a moment at his good chinos folded at the top of the pile, then snapped the lid closed. His mother wasn’t worth pants in near 100-degree heat. She wasn’t worth a collared shirt, either, not worth a single drop of the sweat that would sprout at the nape of his neck and slide down his back beneath the heavy piqué fabric. But Matthew remembered the fifth commandment. “
Honor
your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you,
that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you in the
land which the Lord your God gives you.”
