Watch Over Me (20 page)
“Fine. Hurry,” Benjamin said, and Abbi took a tote bag from near the front door and left. They followed her, Benjamin strapping himself into the front of the truck, Matthew behind him. Abbi returned and slipped into the back seat, as well.
“Can I do anything?” she asked.
He shook his head.
It’s not as bad as you think.
“I don’t believe you.”
Matthew leaned his head back and closed his eyes. They’d remove the clot. That was nothing—a nick in the skin, a balloon catheter, a couple hours of day surgery. He needed to hope there wouldn’t be continued clotting. A failed access meant an operation to create another fistula in his other arm. He shouldn’t complain; people spent years in dialysis. For him, it’d been, what? Fourteen months?
He felt a flutter against his wristbone, then another, saw Abbi’s fingers tapping him. “Can I pray, at least?”
He nodded, and she took his hand and squeezed. Her prayer fell into her lap as she bowed her head, so he could only agree with her moving lips. She didn’t look up until Benjamin pulled into the hospital parking lot.
They walked on either side of him, sentinels, Abbi holding on to his upper arm, the deputy close enough so their shoulders kept bumping. He thought of that song, the one Ellie had sung the solo part for at the spring concert. “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Or, two someones. His first someones, really.
Mother.
He couldn’t say she’d never looked out for him; she’d had moments of lucidity, periods of days, weeks sometimes, when her blood and brain weren’t boiling with drugs. In those times she tried to be a parent, making his favorite grilled cheese sandwiches with tater tots and reminding him to wash his face before bed. But mostly he remembered her strung out, passed out, or out of luck. He had to believe she would have been a better mom if she hadn’t been full up with poison. Had to.
He didn’t remember his father at all.
And he didn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been going deaf, though he didn’t know it. How would he have? He couldn’t hear through ears other than his own, and those ears heard bubbly, dim, underwater sounds. He learned to talk that way, from the television, listening to words through cotton, and by the time he turned five it had been clear there was a problem. If his mother hadn’t been a junkie, she would have known he spoke differently than other kids his age.
Instead, he went to kindergarten, and when his teacher realized he had speech delays, she arranged for a hearing test. The school nurse squashed his head between a pair of heavy, padded headphones, telling him to raise his hand when he heard the beep. By then, he’d lost nearly fifty percent of his hearing in one ear, close to ninety percent in the other.
The doctor didn’t find the kidney damage until later, at eleven, when Matt stopped peeing and fell asleep each day in class, couldn’t walk from one end of the soccer field to the other without gasping for air. The genetic testing showed he had Alport Syndrome, a rare disorder passed down maternally. Had his mother taken him to be examined when he was three and had blood in his urine, early intervention may have prolonged the life of his kidneys.
He had to believe she wanted to be a better mother, but couldn’t.
The sidewalks leading to the emergency room were dusty gray and still ridged with newness. There were prints in the cement, leaf fossils, oblong and pointed at the ends. They must have fallen from the trees lining the path onto the still-wet concrete. Not many, one or two per rectangular slab, but Matthew noticed them because he was looking down rather than ahead. He felt the sting of loneliness. If something should happen to him, who would feel it?
Lacie, of course, for a while. But her attachment to him was like a child’s to a pet gerbil, passionate while the thing lived, weeping during the shoebox funeral in the backyard, then rapidly fading as something new—a guinea pig, a first crush—came along. None of his other cousins, nor his aunt. Not his mother. He was only a blip, a point on an infinite plane. No one would miss him. He knew it but kept putting one foot in front of the other, moving through each day, clutching at his numbers and his Lord, telling himself he needed nothing else.
Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven
nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two
seven five zero . . .
Inside the hospital, Benjamin explained the situation to the woman at the reception desk. He talked with his hand, gesturing, raking his fingernails over the top of his head. “Do you have your insurance card?” he asked Matthew.
My wallet is home.
The receptionist entered Matthew’s information into the computer from the page he wrote it on, and told them to sit and wait. “He would have gotten in quicker if he’d gone by ambulance,” he said to Abbi, perhaps forgetting Matthew would see his words.
“This is better,” Abbi replied, touching Matthew’s knee.
He looked at her and a smile twitched at one corner of his mouth.
Abbi plucked the pad and pen from his hand.
You can have the money for your trip. We’ll give it to you.
Matthew mouthed,
No
, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Abbi said. “I’m not saying you can’t come back and work. But if you can’t . . . If the doctor says you can’t, I mean, then Ben and I will give it to you. We want to. No one should miss their senior trip. It’s your only one, you know.”
He shrugged and nodded a little, and she said, “Good, it’s settled.” And she reached one arm around his shoulder, pressed her other hand against the side of his head and pulled him into her, kissing him on his hair, above his ear. Then she stood and took the deputy’s phone from his belt. “I’m calling Janet. How long do you think we’ll be here?”
Matthew tapped her shoulder.
I can wait by myself.
“No, no. I’m just worried she might need more diapers or something. Ben, did you leave the front door open?”
“Sorry. I locked it. Habit.”
“There’s still a key in the shed, though. Right?”
“On the beam to the left of the door.”
She dialed, wandering around the corner. When she came back, she again sat next to Matthew. This time, he touched her hand. She squeezed back, and didn’t let go.
After showering and dressing, Benjamin kissed Silvia on the top of the head and said good-bye to Abbi. “Maybe we can go out to dinner after work.”
“A date?” Abbi asked.
“Nah,” Benjamin said. “I’m just tired of tofu.”
He drove to the county building, and before he managed to get inside, Wesley came out. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“The school. Something to do with your case. I’ll drive.”
Inside a classroom adjacent to the front entrance, a teacher was hanging a glittery
Welcome Students
banner on a pocked bulletin board. A preschool staff day. Benjamin touched the brim of his hat; the woman nodded back.
The principal was waiting for them. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Benjamin asked.
“In the technology lab,” she said, walking briskly down the hall. The deputies followed her into a room with fifteen computers. “One of the students was looking for a Web site she visited a few weeks ago and found something, well, disturbing in the browser’s history.”
“Which was?” Wesley asked.
“I should show you.” She clicked on a window and it opened. “Three weeks ago. Someone was in here looking at this.”
Benjamin scanned the page, a newspaper article dated two years ago, about a teenaged mother who left her newborn in a Nevada McDonald’s restroom. “There must be more, if you called us.”
“Six sites, all about girls abandoning their babies, five of them having to do with sentencing. Plus sites with Baby Moses law information, state law sites.” The principal sighed. “It’s one of our girls.”
“The computers are password protected?” Benjamin asked.
“Well, yes. But I’m sure the student who found this wasn’t pregnant. Kids tell each other their log-in information, write it in the covers of their notebooks. You know. They’re kids.”
“We’ll need a list of everyone who’s used the computers recently,” Wesley said.
She handed him two sheets of paper. “Already done. There’s a list with those who have logged in during the past month, and also a list of those who have signed in at the door saying they’re here to use the lab. But there’s no guarantee she’s on here. Students let their friends in at other entrances. People are in and out. Doors are unlocked all day. It’s summer. Things just aren’t monitored as closely.”
“You checked out all the pregnancy rumors,” Benjamin said to Wesley. “There wasn’t anything on any of them?”
“It had to be someone who hid it,” Wesley said, his monster shoulders heaving up and down.
“Karen, were there any girls who suddenly started wearing baggy clothes, or seemed to gain weight quickly?”
The principal shook her head. “Not that I noticed. I can check again with Pam. And Tina. As guidance counselor and nurse, they’d hear more of it than anyone.”
“I was hoping . . .” Benjamin rubbed the back of his head.
Velcro
, he thought. He needed a haircut. “I really thought it was someone not from around here.”
“Keep your ear to the ground,” Wesley said to Karen. “Teachers, too. Can’t imagine a secret like this staying bottled up for too long. Especially with school starting in a couple of days.”
“I’ll call if I hear anything,” she said.
Without speaking, the two men walked down the hallway, Benjamin running his hand over the shiny metal handles protruding from the blue lockers—empty now, but on Wednesday they’d be filled with books, decorated with photos and stickers, a multitude of teenaged angst padlocked away. Wesley waved at the main office secretary on the way out the door, and as he climbed into the Durango, said, “This will get around. Someone will talk.”
“Whoever she is, she’s feeling remorse,” Benjamin said. “If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be looking at all that.”
“Unless she thinks she’s about to get caught,” Wesley said. “And it could be the father checking things out, not the mother.”
“I hate this. Now every time I see a kid, I’ll wonder, Did she do it? Did he?” Benjamin counted the names on the lists. “I’ll divvy these up between the three of us. Holbach will take some. There are no addresses, though. We’ll have to get those from Karen.”
“You hungry?”
“It’s barely noon.”
“I didn’t have breakfast,” Wesley said. “Like salmon stew?”
“No.”
“I do,” Wesley said, and he turned left, then right, then right again and pulled into his driveway. “Renée makes it twice a week.”
Inside, Wesley filled two bright turquoise dishes with the leftovers, stuck them in the microwave one at a time. He dropped a bargainsized bottle of ketchup on the table along with a jumble of flatware and napkins. “Water okay?”
“Whatever.”
“Ignore the blue plates. Reenie read some article says blue plates make you eat less. Ugly as dirt, but she had to have ’em. Says she lost ten pounds since she got ’em. I don’t see a difference.” Wesley stripped off his uniform shirt, hung it on the back of his chair. He sat in front of his meal in his undershirt. “I’m a slob when I eat. I know it. Can’t keep food off myself to save my life.”
Wesley paused—giving thanks, maybe—before stabbing a hunk of fish and chewing it. He shook on salt, garlic powder, and stirred. Then he squeezed ketchup over the plate, threads of red zigzagging across the potatoes and celery. Like blood. He whipped it all together. “Eat, eat,” he said.
Benjamin tried a carrot, not chewing but mashing it with his tongue against the roof of his mouth before swallowing. He sprinkled on some salt, too.
“I know,” Wesley said. “I love her, but my wife loves her stuff bland as bread. Still great, though.”
“Wes, did you . . . kill anyone?”
Wesley wiped his mouth. “Not exactly mealtime conversation.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Wesley’s stew, the ketchup mixed with the gravy, all muddied and brown. Like Stephen’s blood in the sand. “Me, too.”
“That’s war.”
“How can you be so cavalier?”
“I choose not to think about it.”
“Because you don’t, or because you don’t want to?”
“Ain’t no difference.”
“It’s a lot different, Wes. Either it just doesn’t come to mind, or you fight to keep it out of your head.”
“You’re trying too hard to figure it all out. Leave it be. Whoever is dead, is dead. Whoever’s living . . . Well, you got it. That’s just the way it is.”
Benjamin poked at his stew, fork scraping against the dish. “How many?”
“Don’t know,” Wesley said, his broad shoulders moving up and down.
“Honest.”
“As the day is long. Not like I counted. I got off thousands of rounds and watched dozens of men fall. My bullet, someone else’s. Don’t matter.”
“I know who I killed.”
“You know their names? Birthdays? Favorite colors?” Wesley wiped his mouth. “You don’t know a darn thing.”
“I know his face,” Benjamin said. “The first one. We were in the street in Kabul, and he looked at me, and he was terrified of dying. I saw it, clear as daylight. He looked at me like, ‘What am I doing here?’ and I thought the same exact thing. ‘What am I doing here, with my gun pointed at some stupid kid?’ He was a kid—just had this fuzz on his lip, couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Then he reached for his weapon and I shot him.”
His finger twitched with the memory, and he grabbed one hand in the other, squeezed.
Just a little pressure and bam. That’s all, folks. He
was there in a bright red puddle with half his skull imbedded in the wall
behind him, and I’m feeling like the big man. Oh yeah. All righty
.
Until later, when the adrenaline had sweat out, and it grew quiet and dark, and the springs of his cot squawked beneath the weight of his guilt each time he moved. And he did too much moving that night, and the nights after, flopping from back to stomach, knowing some mother would be waiting forever for her boy to come home. He hadn’t realized it would be so hard, when ideologies turned to people, and people bled.