Watch Over Me (22 page)
She knew guilt, couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel guilty about something—her weight, her binge eating, the ninth grade boys groping her in the band room. Deceiving Benjamin about the state of her uterus. That only intensified her desire to hide, and her self-loathing.
Her year of laxative abstinence ended, and she set her alarm for three in the morning, taking the pills then so she wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom until Benjamin left for work. She snapped at him more, found all sorts of silly reasons to be angry. And he, feeling her slipping away, squeezed tighter, trying harder to please her, suffocating her. When news came his National Guard unit would be mobilizing, Abbi had been relieved. The two months Benjamin spent at Fort Dix, where she figured nothing bad could happen to him—it was only training, right?—were the best months of her time in Temple. Only after he shipped out to Afghanistan did the shame come crashing down, and hard. What kind of woman wanted her husband in a war zone?
More guilt. More bingeing. More purging and exercise and withdrawing from everyone around her.
She was sick; she knew it. The twisted truth of it all was that she needed to be in control, of her weight, her bowels. Her husband. And when he came home and began treating her the way she’d been treating him, giving her what she had once wanted—space, silence, inattention—she couldn’t handle it.
How dare he pull away? He’s supposed to love me. He’s supposed to look
at me like I’m the only person in the world who matters to him.
She wanted to be left alone on her terms.
She wanted to be loved on her terms.
I want, I want, I want.
“You’re right,” she told Lauren.
“I know I’m right.”
“You don’t have to be so smug about it.”
“What are friends for,” Lauren said.
Silvia, on the kitchen table in her basket, began to cry. Abbi picked her up, and Lauren said, “Oh, let me hold her.”
“Go right ahead. You’re the baby person.”
Lauren cuddled her, cooing and kissing and making faces. “What did you name her again?”
“Silvia.”
“I bet Ben regrets ever making you read
The Bell Jar
.”
“Not
that
Sylvia. The one from Shakespeare. Spelled with two I’s.”
“She’s beautiful,” Lauren said. “I miss this. I want ten more.”
“One will be the death of me.” Abbi gave her friend a warm bottle. “Do you really think you’ll have more?”
“If I get my way. Don’t know what God’s plan is, but I can’t say I have any intentions of becoming a nun anytime soon.”
Abbi leaned back cross-legged on the couch, watching Lauren acting motherly, and asked, “Are you doing okay?”
“I am. Really. Sometimes I miss him. At night, mostly. But I have so much to be thankful for.”
“That didn’t just come out of your mouth,” Abbi said with a snort.
Lauren kicked her, laughed. “I know, I know. It sounds trite. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
They visited awhile longer, until Lauren needed to get home to her children. Abbi hugged her again, not wanting to let go. Lauren shined. The first day they met, in the dorm, Abbi had seen that glow about her, and it convinced her to go to that first Campus Crusade meeting. And after everything, Lauren still had that shimmer. Abbi silently admitted her envy. She wanted that kind of faith.
He wasn’t in homeroom with Ellie. The forty-three seniors, divided in half, alphabetically, the H’s and S’s split. Matthew found his desk, class schedule waiting for him, and saw calculus in the first-period slot. Glanced at the clock above the door. Seven minutes until the bell.
Lord, I’m so nervous. Am I allowed to feel this way about a girl?
He hadn’t seen Ellie since that night at the movies. She never did show up at the apartment, not that he honestly expected her to. He hoped, yes, but with a kind of futile hope more like tossing pennies in the fountain at the shopping mall. He’d loved doing that as a little boy. And when he didn’t have pennies—which was almost always—he would grab a handful of gravel and stick it in his pocket, and wish on the pebbles he threw in the water. Wishes for his mother to get clean, for his hearing to come back, to find the Godzilla Rampage game under the Christmas tree.
He didn’t need wishes now. He could pray. But he wouldn’t pray for silly, inconsequential things, and making some girl like him fell decidedly into that category.
He’d considered sacrificing his hair for Ellie, biking over to the one-chair salon her mother had in their garage for a trim, but he didn’t have the guts; it would have killed him to show up and have Ellie treat him like just some geek in her calculus class. If she’d wanted to see him, she would have.
In homeroom no one talked to him.
The bell rang; he knew because everyone suddenly jumped from their seats and scrambled out of the room. Matthew waited a minute more before venturing out to the hallway. Ellie stood near the door, dressed in a pink blouse and pleated plaid skirt. White tights. Black buckle shoes. And those braids. “I thought I’d walk with you,” she said.
He smiled a little, not wanting to hope, and wishing he’d bought a new shirt for the first day of school, or at least worn one without dark grease splotches staining the front, Lacie’s buttery handprints from her hug that morning.
They slipped into the mathematics room. Ellie took a seat front row center, spilling her books and folders onto the desk before smoothing her skirt under and sitting. Matthew hesitated, and she said to him, “You’re not going to stand there all day, are you?”
So he sat next to her and dropped his books, exposing his forearms. The gauze seemed so much whiter with Ellie staring at it; he’d hardly noticed it this morning.
“Are you okay? Your arm . . .”
Touching the bandage, he shrugged off her concern, a quick jerk of the shoulder, a wrinkle of the nose.
“Matt, really.”
It’s nothing.
“Would you tell me if it was?”
Mr. Brandt entered and handed out syllabi and classroom policies to the three students in the class, and gave Matthew several more pages. Notes for the week. All the teachers provided notes for him. While he lectured, Mr. Brandt occasionally remembered to speak toward the class, but mostly he talked into the blackboard, whirling every few minutes to say, “Oh, Matt, sorry. Did you get that?”
Matthew gave a thumbs-up.
They had time at the end of class to work on their homework assignment. Ellie leaned over and tapped his arm. “When do you have lunch?”
5th period.
“Darn. I have it sixth. But I have English next,” Ellie said. “How about you?”
Same.
“I’ll walk with you. I just have to stop at my locker first.”
I don’t need a babysitter.
Ellie tugged on one of her braids, wove it through her fingers. Over, under, over. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
You’re a smart girl.
She shook her head. “Fine,” she said, and swished out of the room.
In English, she sat between her friends—who wasn’t her friend?— and didn’t look at him. He couldn’t concentrate at all, scribbled in the margins of his notebook. In fourth-period history, she ignored him again.
At lunchtime, Matthew picked a plate of goulash from the cafeteria line and took his tray outside. He straddled the low wall, in front of the gymnasium, and poked at his canned peaches. His stomach burned.
Someone touched his shoulder.
“Hey,” Ellie said.
You said you had lunch next period.
“I’m skipping Spanish.” She sat beside him, crossed her legs, tucking her skirt between her thighs so it wouldn’t blow up. “I thought you might, you know, stop by.”
I thought you might.
“I couldn’t. My grandmother got sick and my folks went out to see her. I had to take care of my little sister. I asked Jaylyn to tell you.”
When?
“When I called.”
When was that?
“The day after we went to the movies.”
He wanted to strangle Jaylyn.
She didn’t tell me.
“Really? Oh, that’s good. Well, I mean, it isn’t good, but it’s better than what I figured.”
Which is?
Her ears turned pink; she pulled on one, twisting her lobe, stretching it like Silly Putty. He thought she was blushing, but couldn’t be certain beneath all those freckles. “That you don’t like me.”
You’re crazy.
“It’s a simple categorical syllogism. People don’t come over when they don’t like you. You didn’t come over. Hence . . . Well, you’re a smart boy.”
That doesn’t work. Your middle is undistributed.
“Now you’re just showing off.”
Yeah. I am.
They sat without talking, and he watched the wisps of hair shivering around her face, the ones that had escaped from her braids.
I thought you were seeing Teddy Derboven.
“Seriously? Come on. He flunked Algebra One. And Two.”
All the girls drool over him.
“I’m not all the girls,” she said, and she wriggled a black-and-white-marbled composition notebook from the bottom of her pile. “This is for you.”
Matthew looked at her, shook his head slightly. Ellie opened the cover, and turquoise words twirled across the first page, and the second and third, each
i
dotted with a daisy, each
t
crossed with an ocean ripple. “I thought we could write to each other. Like, instead of a phone call, if you think of something you want to tell me, you can write it down. I have one, too. We can switch them every day.”
He wanted to kiss her.
It was more than a crush, though. More than a pretty girl paying attention to him. For the first time in five long years, someone wanted to climb into his head and know him, peer into all the not-so-silent corners. Nothing was quiet about him, not when she was around.
He pinched the corner of the surgical tape holding the gauze pad over part of his access, pulled it up slowly, his skin releasing from the stickiness, exposing a small incision, scabbed over and greasy with Neosporin. His fistula bulged, like a garden hose snaked beneath his skin. Ellie reached down to touch it, traced the bulge with her soft fingers, inner elbow to wrist, then slipped her hand into his.
He went to Abbi as she folded laundry on the couch, diapers and boxer shorts and panties. It embarrassed him a little, watching her untwist bras from socks and then sling them around her shoulders; the cups dangled at her chest or bulged from the sides of her neck. At home he’d fold Sienna’s and Lacie’s underclothes, but not the older girls’, and certainly not his aunt’s silky thongs and lingerie. He didn’t even like taking them from the dryer, but he would if he had to.
He looked at his feet, but at Abbi’s tap on his knee, he looked up.
“Hey, what’s up? You feeling okay?”
He nodded. She always asked if he felt okay now, and he almost hated to admit he liked it, her concern. He didn’t get it much from anywhere else.
Since the day of his clot, his relationship with the Patils had shifted. He wasn’t
that kid who mows the lawn
anymore, but, honestly, he wasn’t quite sure what he had become. He knew, however, he trusted Abbi and the deputy—something else he’d never had.
I need a favor.
“As long as it’s legal.”
Do you have a credit card?
“Yes, I do.” She dropped her bras on the top of the laundry pile, a nest of straps and hooks.
I want to buy something on-line.
“I said legal, remember.”
A bracelet.
“A bracelet?”
Yeah. There’s this girl.
“A girl?”
Are you going to repeat everything I write?
“Sorry,” she said, grinning. “I just . . . Sure. Absolutely. I can order it for you.”
He followed her to the computer, set on a board across stacked milk crates. She typed in the address he gave her, and he pointed to the center photo, a polished sterling bangle with an awkward bend in it.
“This one?”
Matthew nodded.
“Are you sure? It looks mangled.”
It’s a Möbius strip.
“What’s that?”
He took a sheet of paper from the printer, folded the long edge of the page, scoring the crease with his nail, then ripped the strip over the edge of the tabletop. He gave the paper a half twist and, snagging a piece of transparent tape from the dispenser next to the keyboard, joined the ends together.
Watch
, he wrote, and then drew a star in the center of the tape. He placed her finger on the ink spot, guided it along the surface of the paper until she reached the seam again, but on the side without the star.
“I’m on the opposite side.”
There’s only one side. Keep going.
And she did, dragging her fingertip along the smooth paper until it returned to the star. “That’s kinda cool.”
Of course it’s cool. It’s math.
“Math, huh? How romantic.”
I think so.
“Does she?”
We’ll see.
“Whatever happened to flowers and chocolate? And poetry?”
I don’t think it works if she has to read it to herself.
“You do have a point.” And she left it there—no apology. “Does this girl have a name?”
Ellie.
“So, when are you and Ellie coming for dinner?”
He shook his head.
“You have to. Ben and I need to check her out. How about Friday?”
Dialysis.
“Shoot. Right. Saturday, then. Or Tuesday, or Thursday.”
Saturday.
She clicked on the bracelet, typed in the payment information. “I’ll send it to your address.”
He touched her shoulder, shook his head again. Here,
please.
Someone at the apartment would open it.