Watch Over Me (17 page)
St. John pushed on during the blackness, coming out the other side with a refined faith, an intimate knowledge of the Divine. He saw struggle as a blessing, and Benjamin had prayed for his own dark night, wanting the kind of spiritual awakening St. John had experienced.
Well, he had what he asked for. What a fool. He wondered if he’d make it out at all.
“Abbi. Abbi, where is your flour?”
Slinging Silvia, she found Sangita cooking in the kitchen, her hair knotted at the base of her neck, flashing gold and green as she moved around the kitchen in her
kurta
with gilt embroidery, her red
churidar
tightly gathered at her ankles. A matching crimson
dupatta
draped across her shoulders. Abbi had only seen her dressed traditionally, but usually in a more casual cotton
salwar kameez
.
Whatever she wore, it hadn’t been enough to keep her from feeling Benjamin’s bones through both their clothes. She’d seen Sangita wince as she hugged him earlier. The woman loved her son—maybe too much, if that was possible. Abbi didn’t know. Benjamin suffered from the opposite affliction she did. His parents heaped all their expectations on him; hers none at all.
Harish and Sangita had never been anything but kind to her, but Abbi hadn’t been able to find her place with them. She felt as if Benjamin’s mother was always looking at her, wishing she was Maharashtrian, or at least a Republican. Benjamin, of course, told her she was being ridiculous. Whether she was or not, she needed Sangita now, to help her figure out how to help Benjamin.
“You wanted flour?” Abbi said. “It’s right up here.”
“I see that flour. It is darker than I need. You have white?”
“I have spelt in the basement. It’s close in texture to all-purpose.”
She brought the glass jar up from her cellar pantry, and Sangita screwed off the lid, rubbed the flour between thumb and forefinger. “Is good.”
“Good. Is there something I can do?” Abbi asked.
Sangita kept her sleek head bent as she kneaded dough for
naan
. “You hold that baby too much.”
“Maybe chop something? I can’t mess that up.”
“Thank you to ask, but I not need help.”
“Ben does.”
The woman made a dry, barking sound, clearing only air from her throat.
“Sangita, please. I know you don’t like to talk about things, but you’re his mother. And I don’t know what to do for him.” Abbi sighed, shook her head. “I love him.”
The woman slapped the dough into a disc. “Benjamin go always his own way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He do what he do. That job. That army. You. He have his own mind.”
“Okay, fine. But what am I supposed to do?”
“You cook. You wash clothes. You pray.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“You are only a wife. You cannot make a husband do what they not think themselves of doing. That is how it is.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not watching him disappear a little more each day.”
Sangita turned, looked at Abbi. “Not easy,” she said, tapping three fingers just beneath her collarbone on the left side of her chest, her hand fanned out like a star. Her heart. “Not easy at all. I hear in his voice when he calls. My boy is in much pain. I know it.”
“I know it, too. That’s why there has to be something else,” Abbi said, petulant, like a child who finds only a package of underwear after tearing through the wrapping of her birthday present.
“If there is, I have not an idea.” Sangita poured a few scattered drops of oil into a bowl, swirled it to coat the sides. She dropped the ball of dough into it and covered it with a plain white dishcloth. “You hold that baby too much.”
Abbi sighed. Conversation over. “How long until dinner?”
“Always we eat at five.”
“I’m going to go take a walk, get Silvia out for some air. Do you want to come?”
“
Nako
.”
“That’s a no, right?”
Sangita nodded once, wiping her just-washed hands on her apron. She reached out, touched Abbi’s sleeve. “
Kanyaratna
, I know what it is like to be part of hard marriage. But Benjamin, he is not hard man. Have thanks for that.”
Abbi shook her head. “Ben always told me you and Harish—”
“Not Harish. My first marriages. They were to . . . hard men.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. These things make me what I am. Make me look not to men but to God. Is good, and is past.” She lifted the pot’s lid, stirred. “I make
amti bhaat bhaji
.”
Lentil dal, rice and vegetable. “My favorite,” Abbi said.
“I know it.”
She pondered Sangita’s words as she walked with Silvia, unhappy with the advice. She wasn’t a sit-and-do-nothing type person. Her initial instinct was always to act, then consider the consequences. Benjamin liked to talk first. She wished he’d open his mouth and tell her what happened in Afghanistan, but she figured she’d lost that privilege, to be in
that
part of his life.
Others wondered, when they first married, how a soldier and a pacifist could live beneath the same roof of their tiny loft apartment. But Benjamin wasn’t really a soldier then, and she a pacifist in name only. He went off to shoot at things one weekend a month, coming home afterward to shower away the smell of mock combat, wash and roll his fatigues into a bag he kept in the trunk of his car until the next training exercise. And she spouted the flaws of the just-war theory and “blessed are the peacemakers” from a comfy armchair at the coffee shop two blocks from the college. Neither thought they’d be forced to become who they said they were.
And then the war started.
For two years they waited for Benjamin’s deployment, knowing it would happen. After he left, Abbi drove three hours every Tuesday to Vermillion to stand on the corner of Cherry and Pine with a smattering of college kids and retired professionals, carrying a red tagboard sign reading
What Would Jesus Bomb?
on one side and
Peace Takes
Brains
on the other.
When the local newspaper learned she was a soldier’s wife, they asked to profile her, and she agreed, not taking a moment to consider Benjamin’s feelings. Or anyone else’s.
She didn’t tell Lauren about the story, and when her friend saw it, glaring above the front-page fold of Sunday’s thick edition, she met Abbi in the church parking lot and dumped the newsprint pages on her feet. Sale circulars cartwheeled across the gravel, glossy full-color tumbleweeds.
“This isn’t helping them,” Lauren shouted, and then hugged her fiercely, fingers digging into her upper arms. “You’re not the only one who wants them home.”
Abbi knew she wasn’t. One weekend she traveled to a protest in Washington, D.C., stood shoulder to shoulder with wives and girlfriends and sisters. Mothers. Daughters. So close she smelled their angry breath—some coffee-coated, some fruity, some tinged with nicotine or alcohol—as they shouted their pain to anyone who would listen. They used blame as their balm of Gilead, their way to keep from going mad, to make sense of the empty pillow next to them, the unused car keys hanging beside the front door. It helped—some.
People were supportive of her, for the most part. A few—like the neighborhood egg lady, Marie Vilhauser—believed Abbi’s pacifism betrayed not only Benjamin and the other soldiers, but America, and Jesus himself, but the rest came alongside her and, despite their disagreeing beliefs, worked hard to see her as
Abbi
and not as
that
left-wing commie liberal
.
She, however, was less than charitable toward them, becoming distant and snappish. She hated that they carried on with their farming, and shopping, and whatever else they did, maybe offering up a prayer on Thursdays and Sundays for Benjamin’s safety, but otherwise totally unaffected by the happenings on the other side of the globe. They turned off their televisions, but it was in her living room, her bedroom, her heart every single moment of every single day.
By the time Benjamin returned home, she had wedged the war between her and everyone else. And now, as she tried to retrace her steps, to mend the holes she had poked through her relationships, a tired embarrassment kept her from fully reconciling. She just was too ashamed of her behavior. Self-loathing, she was good at. Apologizing, not so much.
Silvia’s cries pierced Abbi’s thoughts, and she jogged home, the bouncing calming the cranky baby. Benjamin sat on the front steps, waiting for her. “You okay?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You spent the afternoon with my mother. Alone.”
“She’s hungry,” Abbi said.
He took the baby. “I’ll go feed her.”
“Ben, wait,” she said. “What does
kanyaratna
mean?”
“Daughter. But in an endearing way, like saying “she’s a gem.” Mom called you that?”
“Yeah.”
“You must have done something right, then.”
“That’s a change.” She smoothed Silvia’s hair. “Are you okay?”
They stood close, only the baby separating them. Benjamin touched Silvia’s head, too, but avoided Abbi’s fingers. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said. “I’ll see you inside.”
She was exhausted from the short weekend visit, mentally more than physically, and Sunday night she flopped back on the bed with a sigh, her feet still on the floor. She listened to Benjamin rattling through the refrigerator, the cabinets. His parents had left after church, a small blessing that they decided not to stay for lunch. Abbi had spent the afternoon and evening in her studio, coming in only when the dim light gave her a headache.
The phone rang.
“Abbi, you getting that?” Benjamin called, but she ignored him. The answering machine kicked on, and she heard a voice through the walls, then Benjamin said, “Hello. Wait, hold on. You there?” He carried the cordless receiver into the bedroom, held it out to her. “It’s for you.”
“Genelise?” Abbi asked. No one else called her.
“My mother.”
“Why are you giving me the phone?”
“She wants to talk to you.”
Abbi sat up, took the phone. “Um, hello?”
Benjamin stared at her.
“We need to pray. Now, for Benjamin. We pray every day together,”
Sangita said.
“Okay, I guess.”
Benjamin still hadn’t left the room. He changed out of his clothes, slowly, listening.
“He there. You listen. Tomorrow I call in the morning.”
“That would be better.”
“Now, you listen.” Sangita prayed for her son in a Marathi-English hybrid. Abbi had difficulty understanding the words, but her spirit knew. She closed her eyes until her mother-in-law said, “Amen. Okay, I call tomorrow. Good night.”
“Bye.” Abbi pressed the Off button. “Here.” She tossed Benjamin the phone and fell back onto the mattress again.
“You didn’t say much,” he said.
“You know your mother.”
“What did she want?”
“To pray,” she said, and then added, “for you.”
Benjamin got an odd, crumbly look on his face; he blinked rapidly and then shut his eyes, took a stilted breath. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m your wife. That’s my job.”
“Job,” he mumbled. “Yeah.”
“That’s not how I—”
“It’s okay, really. Trust me, I know I’m lucky to have that much.” He climbed into bed, removed his socks beneath the sheet, balling them and leaving them on the nightstand for the morning. “You coming to bed?”
She nodded. “After I change Silvia.”
“Good night,” Benjamin said, and turned out the light.
He’d knocked on every door in Beck County. No one knew where Silvia had come from. Benjamin didn’t know if he should be relieved or not, didn’t want to think about it. Today was one of the hard days, like the ones he had before Silvia, when he had to hide from people so they wouldn’t see him struggling. He straddled the ravine between a civilian’s life and a soldier’s, curling the toes he had left into the earth on either side to keep his balance. But the banks of the ravine kept moving, wide at some points, narrow at others. On the easy days there was hardly a crack between the banks. Today the ravine was so wide, his legs wouldn’t stretch any farther. The doctor said the new medication would help—she wrote him a prescription the day Abbi went to that mothers’ meeting—and it had, until he’d gone into Dunkin’ Donuts this morning for a coffee and bear claw, and the television mounted in the corner showed scenes from Afghanistan.
He’d swallowed the war whole, and then came home and started regurgitating up pieces. He moved his desk into the corner so his back wouldn’t be exposed, and found himself always positioned by doors, just in case. He swerved around trash on the side of the road. He replayed combat scenarios in his head over and over, searching for alternative outcomes. But no matter how many times he watched and rewound, the end stayed the same. Stephen dead; him looking on, helpless. If he’d acted with honor, he’d be dead, too.
I should be.
Benjamin checked into the office. Roubideau looked him over. “We tracked down the McClure girl,” the sheriff said. “With a friend or a friend’s cousin over in Aberdeen. Holbach’s on his way to pick her up.”
“And?”
“She’s not the one who left the kid, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But she ran.”
“Seems the Grant girl was tellin’ the truth, or some bit of it. Rebecka McClure did find herself pregnant back earlier this year. But she terminated. Left town ’cause she got scared about her parents finding out.”
“They must know now.”
“If they do, it wasn’t from us.”
“Rebecka McClure is just sixteen,” Benjamin said.
“Don’t I know it.” Roubideau squinted at him again. “Take the rest of the day off. You look like you need it. That kid still keeping you up nights?”
Benjamin nodded.
“Better you than me.”
“That’s why you never had children.”
The sheriff chuckled. “Or a wife, for that matter. Or a goldfish. Too much trouble for me. I got all I need with this job.”
Instead of going home, Benjamin went to the library, and the books welcomed him. He hadn’t been born a reader. As a child, his parents assumed he would follow his father into the sciences, and he thought the same because they did. But they didn’t know such things—titrations and quadratics and dissections—didn’t come easy for him. He excelled because he worked harder than anyone else, the pages in his loose-leaf binder constantly reinforced with white donuts of gummed paper and smudged with graphite marks. And his father patted his hair and brought home back issues of
Biomacromolecules
and
Organometallics
, which Benjamin faithfully slogged through, dizzy with jargon by the time he finished. He never allowed himself to consider he hadn’t an interest in any of it.