Watch Over Me (4 page)

She closed the door behind her.

He found himself once again in Hopston’s field, wandering circles in the thirsty grass. The sheriff had tied a small knot of crime-scene tape in a clump of weeds by the creek—yellow tape, like the bag, marking where it had been found. Benjamin still saw some blood, brown and dusty, but it would rinse away with the approaching storm. It drizzled now, one plump drop on the back of his hand, one on his ear, his boot. The air already felt cooler.

Interstate 90 sliced the cattle farm in two. It cut through the entire state, from one side to the other. Whoever left the baby might have simply been passing by. Benjamin shook his head, let out a low groan only the birds heard. He would never know who did this, not unless someone came forward.

Before Afghanistan, before Stephen, he would have prayed. Now his prayers were like his words, atrophied at the back of his throat. And if they did come, if he forgot that he didn’t want them to come, they’d drop to the ground in brittle, incoherent half phrases and clanging cymbals. For the best, probably. He was afraid of what he might say.

Yesterday he canvassed seventy-three houses; today he hit thirty before noon. No one had seen anything suspicious, nor could they think of any women who might have been hiding a pregnancy. He thanked people and offered them his card should they remember something. Not many took them, saying his number was already stuck to their refrigerators, printed on car-shaped magnets given out by the sheriff ’s department each June.

At the office, Wesley leaned back in his chair, boots on the desk, eating a bowl of chili, napkin squeezed between his collar and bullish neck.

“How can you eat that stuff ? It’s ninety degrees outside,” Benjamin said.

“It’s eighty outside, only seventy in here. And I like it.” Wesley held the bowl above his mouth and scraped the last bit of tomato into it. “Any luck door knocking?”

Benjamin shook his head. “One hundred and three homes down, nearly fourteen hundred to go. I heard yesterday there was no luck at the school.”

“Nope. Two pregnant girls there this year. One had her baby in May. The other, not due for another month.”

“You sure?”

“Went to the house, saw her tummy myself.”

“Anything else?” Benjamin asked, scratching the side of his nose, pushing down until it hurt.

“Got five other girls to check out. Names the guidance counselor heard through the grapevine. She said it’s probably nothing, but she always keeps record of the pregnancy rumors, just in case.”

“Well, let me know what you come up with,” Benjamin said. “I’m going to Pierre.”

“Again?”

“So what?”

“You could just call to see how the baby is doing. Save the gas.”

“Then I wouldn’t get the mileage reimbursement,” Benjamin said, waving a form in the air before folding it in half and tucking it under his arm.

“Patil,” Wesley said, popping open a can of Sprite. “You’ll need to let this one go.”

“Not yet.”

He drove to the hospital in a rain so heavy it felt as if he were moving beneath the sea. Water sluiced around his tires, shimmying the car. He turned on his hazard lights, but didn’t pull off onto the shoulder like the other, smarter, drivers. Through the downpour, he saw figures he thought were children dancing in their yards; it could have been the vibrating rain playing tricks on him, or shrubs moving in the wind. Maybe it was all in his head.

The baby was still the only child in the nursery, but out of the isolette and in a bassinet, cocooned in a white blanket. She wore a pink-and-blue-striped hat and mewed, kitten-like, her face flushed with hunger. “She’s a fighter,” the nurse said, holding a bottle. “Even the doctor’s surprised she’s come ’round so fast.”

“She looks better,” Benjamin said.

“Want to feed her?” Before he could answer, the nurse eased the baby from the bed and into his arms. “You can sit in that rocker. There, behind you.”

The nurse poked the nipple between the infant’s lips, let the plastic bottle slide into Benjamin’s hand. He watched the baby smack and sigh, and couldn’t help but start the chair rocking gently.

“You’re a natural,” the nurse said. “I’ll be back in a few.”

After the baby finished the formula, he lifted her to his shoulder and patted her on the back. She seemed to be in discomfort, fussing and arching. He laid her in the bassinet and changed her into a clean diaper no bigger than his hand, making sure to fold the top down under the umbilical stub, a mottled golden raisin in her belly button. The insect bites had faded to strawberry-colored smudges.

She cried earnestly now, mouth wide, legs bent into her stomach. Her hat slipped off; he left it, picked her up again, bouncing and walking the room, talking, telling her the story of how he found her, like Moses in the reeds. “The Lord’s hand was on you,” he said, and then stopped, thinking even saying the name of God might be too close to a prayer. His nose rested against the top of her head, his lips in her eyelashes. He felt a warm wetness run down his neck, into his shirt, and pulled her away. Curds of regurgitated formula hung on her chin. He wiped up the mess on her, on him, but could still smell the milky rancidness.

The nurse came back in and laughed. “She got you good.”

“I think she feels better now.”

The woman took the baby; today her clogs were blue, yesterday, coral. “I bet she does. Try club soda on that stain when you get home.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that.”

“So, will we see you tomorrow, Deputy?”

“Maybe,” he said. The baby’s slate blue eyes were on him, drawing him in. Connecting him. He hadn’t felt attached to something, someone, in a long time. “Yeah.”

Chapter FIVE

They went to church on Sunday, and it didn’t feel like a holy day. Abbi’s hair was still wet from the shower and soaking the shoulders of her linen blouse as she leaned back in the passenger’s seat beside Benjamin. He had buttoned his shirt crooked, left collar peak jutting into his chin and two buttons vying for one lonely hole. She tried to tell him, opened her mouth with the words
Ben, your shirt is buttoned wrong
, but somehow it came out as, “Slow down. My teeth are rattling.”

“We’re late,” he said.

Ben, your shirt is buttoned wrong
. “I was ready at ten to.”

He steered onto the side of the road, between the bright orange cones, and jammed the shifter to park. She scrambled out of the car before him, wanting her slam to come first, and it did, echoing in the golden farmland around them. He untangled himself from the seat belt slowly, deliberately; he wouldn’t look at her.

Ben, your shirt is buttoned wrong.
How difficult was it to say? But she let him walk across the street without trying again, knowing everyone inside would notice but be too polite to mention it. That was what her marriage had become—unspoken fashion advice taped together by barbs, and vows she wasn’t sure she should have ever said.

Their church was a sturdy Presbyterian congregation of about sixty meeting inside a metal building, the outside walls rippled and yellowish. The potato-chip church, she called it when they first moved to Temple three years ago. She’d liked the Catholic church better, a musty-smelling white chapel with a festive nun-organist, who wore Nikes and nylons beneath her habit, and Father Brendan, an Irish priest planted in the wheat fields. Every sermon, she said to Benjamin, was delightful in brogue. He wanted to go to Second Baptist because the worship team reminded him of the one in Vermillion, and when she asked him what was wrong with First Baptist, and why a town of five hundred needed two of the same church, he told her not to be so darn difficult.

This church had been their compromise.

They weren’t late. The preparatory music hadn’t started yet, and people mingled in the narthex and sanctuary; the casual scent of coffee and cookies swirled through the cloud of noxious glue fumes still loitering from the new carpet that had been installed during the week. Abbi’s sinuses constricted, pressure building between her eyes, in her cheeks. She didn’t know what was wrong with the old carpet; yes it had been Raggedy Ann red and twenty years old, but so what? Now she was Judas, complaining about using the perfume instead of selling it for the poor. Judas, of course, was a thief. She was just as self-righteous. She knew it.

She took a bulletin and sat in the last row, next to Benjamin, and saw the Communion table draped in a bulging white cloth. The second Sunday. She had forgotten, and ate breakfast. Usually, Abbi fasted on Communion days, or tried to, a conscious effort to remember those in poverty who went without. Some Sundays she made it through, pushing aside the thoughts of the two or three pounds she’d lose, like a woman spreading the clothes hanging in the closet to get the rarely worn coat in the back—the prayers for the hungry that should come with every growl and pang. Other Sundays she hated herself for considering the fast’s effect on her weight and stuffed food in her mouth until she hated herself more.

By the time Communion began, she was concentrating more on keeping Benjamin out of her thoughts than keeping the words of institution in them. He hadn’t partaken in six months. She leaned across him to pluck a cracker from the tray, her fingers hovering over the broken pieces before selecting the smallest she could find without seeming too obvious she was actually searching. Benjamin pinned his hands between his knees. Seven months.

The kids ran around after the benediction, collecting the little plastic cups from each seat, stacking them until their disposable towers swayed as they paraded to the trash can.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Benjamin said. He’d stay there until the building cleared.

Abbi didn’t move. Women passed her, some smiled and nodded and said, “Hi, how are you?” but didn’t wait for an answer. Others acted busy with their bulletins or hurried by without eye contact. Then Janet McGee stopped, knelt one floral-skirted knee on the chair next to her. “We missed you at Bible study Thursday night.”

“I had to work,” Abbi said, though they both knew the Food Mart closed at six, and Bible study didn’t begin until seven, though it was more like seven fifteen once all the ladies got there and stopped talking.

“Think you can make it next week? It’s not the same without your— What did Gail call it?”

“My unique perspective.” And they both chuckled a little at the memory; seventy-nine-year-old Gail Galpin’s shock when Abbi wondered aloud if perhaps the Sabbath should still be celebrated on Saturday, and then went on about anti-Semitism during the early Roman church. Abbi’s brand of shaded belief baffled those with a more black-and-white Christianity; she knew that from college, but at least then she also knew many others who thought more like her. Here, not so much. That included Janet. But rather than retreating into her fixed faith, she and Abbi had often batted around ideas, doctrine, differences. Not that either of their minds changed.

“You certainly liven up the discussions,” Janet said.

“I don’t find out my hours until tomorrow.”

“Well, I hope you can come,” Janet said.

Ask me. Ask me why I stopped.

But she didn’t.

They had done this each time they spoke lately, the dance of niceties, sidestepping with polite questions and non-answers, and then waltzing back center to go again. But Janet wasn’t alone. If not her, then Claudia Martin; if not Claudia, then Rachelle Yates. Or others. The concern was there, but no one asked her straight out why she didn’t attend the study and prayer meeting anymore, stayed away from the monthly ladies’ tea, and avoided even impromptu fellowship. She couldn’t say whether she’d tell them if they did. Abbi wasn’t deliberately keeping secrets, but she didn’t know how to outrun them anymore, and they gobbled her up into their silent belly.

She didn’t feel right living as her husband rotted away, and more so because of the difficulty she had stepping back into things she’d withdrawn from. She didn’t belong with these women anymore, having spent months underground, no longer engaged in their lives, not learning until weeks after the fact that Minnie’s daughter had filed for divorce or Tabitha’s father had succumbed to his Alzheimer’s fog. The connection had been broken, and Abbi was too exhausted, too alone, to try to find her way inside again.

Janet switched knees and rearranged the pens in the front pocket of her Bible cover. She punched her knuckles against her hipbone, cracking them. “You seem . . . quiet today.”

“I’m fine.”

“How’s Ben doing?”

“He’s fine.”
Left, right, together. Left, right, together.
“Just busy with this baby thing.”

“Oh, tell me about it. It’s horrible. Silas can’t believe it, either.”

“Yeah.”

“We haven’t really had a chance to chat lately. Anything going on with you?”

“No, I’m good.”

Left, right, together. Left, right, together.

Two seats to her right, Benjamin’s thin fingers slid onto the back of the green padded chair. Abbi didn’t turn around, but Janet said, “Ben, I was just telling Abbi how Silas and I are still reeling over that baby. We can’t believe it. No one can. It’s really a miracle you were there to find her.”

“You should be thanking the Wayne kid,” Ben said. “And God, who apparently even works through a teenaged boy trying to get into his girlfriend’s pants.”

“And who thwarted both unhappy endings.” Janet laughed. “Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?”

“Simon Wayne, for one. He’s grounded for the next two months.”

Janet laughed more, too much, shifting knees again, popping knuckles again. “I feel like we haven’t seen the two of you in ages. Are you sure you won’t come for lunch today? We have plenty.”

“We can’t—” Abbi and Benjamin said together, then stopped. His fingers tightened on the chair.

“I’m heading up to see a friend,” Abbi said.

“Oh. Soon then. Maybe next week.”

“We’ll let you know,” Benjamin said.

“Well, I’ll stop going on now and let you get out of here. Have a nice visit with your friend, Abbi.”

Abbi nodded and left the building with Benjamin, his buttons properly aligned now. They got into the Durango. She didn’t understand. Anyone with one working eye could see her husband withering away to a skeleton, the man who came back from Afghanistan wearing Benjamin’s clothes and face and voice wasn’t the one who went over. She needed someone to say it first, to give her permission to cry out, “Yes, yes, you see it, too. I’m not crazy.”