Watch Over Me (7 page)

Abbi read the card taped to the bassinet.
Baby Doe
. But the
Baby
had been crossed out and above it
Angel
had been written in red marker. “Is that her name?”

“That’s what the nurses have been calling her,” Cheyenne said. “I think it’s cute.”

Benjamin strapped the infant into the car seat he had purchased before coming to the hospital, at Wal-Mart, along with a crib and clothes. Abbi had waited in the car. He looked at her. “If you can think of something better . . .”

“You want me to name her?”

Benjamin rubbed his palm over the top of his head, over the whirl where men went bald, though Abbi didn’t know if he was losing his hair or not. He’d always kept it short, nearly shaven. It couldn’t be described as fuzz. More like five o’clock shadow on his skull. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something . . . nice. Don’t take too long to decide, okay?”

The nurse returned carrying a mint green diaper bag dotted with Peter Rabbits. She filled it with the disposable diapers from the drawer beneath the bassinet.

“We won’t need those,” Abbi said.

“You’ll go through lots of them,” the nurse said. “Any extra will help.”

“We’re using cloth.”

“Mmm.” The nurse stuffed the remaining diapers into the bag and zipped it. Benjamin signed the necessary release forms, and the nurse embraced him quickly. “I’m glad it’s you, Deputy.”

He nodded.

“I’ll be over tomorrow,” Cheyenne said. “Around eleven. Just to make sure everything’s in order.”

“We’ll be there,” Benjamin said, and carried the baby to the car. Abbi followed; she drove home while he sat in the back seat with the infant. He spoke to her in hushed tones, coos, and sang in Marathi. She couldn’t understand him, but, still, there was an openness in his voice that she hadn’t heard in a long time.

He’d always wanted to be a father.

She’d ruined that for him.

They had been on the bed in their apartment in Vermillion—she studying for her art history final, he pretending to read, but more accurately trying to annoy her into stopping. He kept standing up and stretching, only to flop back down on the mattress, sending pencil and index cards bouncing onto the floor. He ran his foot up her calf, tickling her with his toenails, and reached across her to grab highlighters or sticky notes off her nightstand, brushing against her breast or blowing in her ear on the way back to his side.

She repeatedly slapped him and finally, biting the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t giggle, said, “Stop it.”

“Sorry,” he said, and would stare at her over the pages of his
Law
Officer
magazine until she couldn’t take his eyes boring into her. She looked at him, and he hid behind the glossy photos of motorcycle cops before peeking out like a child, sticking his tongue out at her and darting back behind the magazine.

“Fine, I give up,” she had said, closing her notebook in the fat history text and dropping it on the floor. “But if I fail and have to spend another semester here because you’re acting like a three-year-old who wants his mommy’s attention, don’t come crying to me.”

“Oh, you’re done studying?” he said, batting his eyelashes. “Let me just finish reading this.”

“You jerk.” She laughed, grabbed the magazine from him and tossed it over her shoulder. Then she straddled his legs, facing him. “I hope you have something better planned for tonight.”

He stretched the neck of her T-shirt to kiss her collarbone. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Though—” he kissed her neck—“we could—” he kissed her chin—“start working on that family we want.”

“What?” She pulled back.

“I got offered a deputy’s job today, in Beck County. It’s about three hours from here, but only twenty minutes from Lauren’s parents’ farm. You’ll be close to her when she and Stephen move out there, and we’ll be in the little town we both want. It’s perfect.”

“You haven’t even asked me,” she said, and his eyes, bright seconds before, clouded over. She climbed off him, stood, but he grabbed her hand and tugged her back down. Laced his fingers through hers.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that.”

“What do you think is wrong? I’m your wife, but, oh no, you’re going along, making plans without me.”

“They’re our plans, Abbi. We’ve been talking about them forever.”

“Well, maybe things have changed. Maybe I don’t want to pull up my skirt and start squeezing out kids for you.”

“Fine,” Benjamin said, shaking his hand free of hers. He went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. She lay on her back on her side of the bed, her vision swimming in the pools atop her eyeballs. She scrunched her lids closed, and the tears rolled outward, into her ears. She heard the door open, and then felt Benjamin’s hip against hers as he sat. He touched the corners of her eyes with his thumbs and traced the wet path to her hair. “Tell me,” he said.

She hadn’t meant to deceive him. They talked about having a family while they dated, and after, and she meant what she said. She thought they would try for a few years to get pregnant, and when nothing happened, they’d go to a specialist and get the bad news together, and she would act as surprised as he. That was
her
plan. But now she couldn’t lie. She looked at Benjamin. “I can’t have children.”

If he was trying not to react, he did a good job. Only the lower half of his face betrayed him, lips and jaw trembling for a moment, until he unclenched them, then got up from the bed. Abbi thought he would leave, but he shut off the light and slid next to her, folding her against him as she wept into his neck.

They talked about it, of course, days and weeks later, in the light, when big things seemed somewhat smaller, more known and manageable. He mentioned adoption and she agreed; not because she wanted to—she believed her condition to be a sort of penance for her youthful indiscretions and thought she should bear her barrenness as a cross—but because she felt obligated. So they completed their paper work to foster-adopt and had waited.

And now this nameless infant slept in the back seat of the car. Abbi didn’t want her, either. But Benjamin did, and he deserved to get something he wanted after all he’d been through. If it meant he would come out of . . . whatever it was he was in. She’d do anything to keep him from wasting away to that eighth and final hole on his belt. Or past it.

She owed him.

They lay in bed, sheets kicked at their feet, the baby between them. She sucked her lower lip, eyes shut. Benjamin had set up the crib in their bedroom, but the infant wanted none of it, screeching until he cuddled and swayed her to sleep. He promised to buy a bassinet tomorrow, in the hopes the smaller space would help settle her. Now he slept too, fatigue whistling in his nose.

Abbi couldn’t find her way into dreamland, the springs of their shoddy mattress grinding against her hip. They bought it used at a bedding outlet when they first married, one of those hauled-away-for-free-when-you-buy-a-new-one mattresses, strips of duct tape stuck over each stain. She propped her head on her elbow, ear squished against her skull, and gently touched the top of the baby’s head, tracing the soft, triangular divot beneath her downy black hair.
Who are you?
Abbi thought. And she remembered a vague snatch of Shakespeare. “
Who is Silvia? What is she . . . ?”
She had no idea of the rest. That was Benjamin’s realm.

She flattened her palm against Benjamin’s ribs, shook him. “Silvia,” she said.

“Mmm. What?” he asked, opening one eye. He rubbed the other with the back of his hand. Yawned.

“Her name. Silvia. It’s what I want to call her.”

“You’re kidding, right? Is she going to stick her head in the oven?”

“Not that Sylvia,” Abbi said. “The one from Shakespeare. You know.”

“Silvia. With two I’s,” he said, rolling to his elbow to look down on the baby. “ ‘Who is Silvia? What is she, that all our swains commend her? Holy, fair, and wise is she; the heaven such grace did lend her, that she might admired be.’ ”

“Yeah, that one.”

He flopped back down on the pillow. “Okay.”

“That’s it? No argument?”

“I don’t win arguments with you.”

They didn’t sleep more than a few unsettled minutes between the crying.

Both of them had practice with worry-induced insomnia. Forced sleeplessness was a different beast, the body and the mind craving rest and being refused. Benjamin walked the hallway beyond the closed bedroom door, but Abbi heard each peep and moan beneath her pillow. She began to doze when the noise stopped, and then it started again, jerking her from her half sleep. She looked at the clock. Seven minutes.

“Why won’t you make her stop?” she said, stomping toward him.

“Right. I’m enjoying this at three in the morning.” He moved between the kitchen table and the front door, baby across both arms, jostling her up and down. He wore his pants, belt open and jingling.

And socks. He didn’t wear them to bed, or in the shower, but the socks went on before anything else, and off last.

“This was your brilliant idea.”

“If you’re not going to help, go back to bed.”

“Like that’s a possibility.”

He took a bottle from his back pocket and pushed it into the baby’s wailing mouth. She continued to cry around the nipple. “She doesn’t want it.”

“You just fed her half an hour ago.” She went back into the bedroom to escape the penetrating noise, tried to ignore it for another few minutes, but couldn’t. It wasn’t maternal instinct but sheer exhaustion that moved her to take an old T-shirt from her drawer, cut it beneath the armpits, and stretch the fabric tube over her body like a sash. “Give her to me,” she said, plucking the baby from Benjamin’s arms. Abbi wrapped the shirt around her, hanging the infant in the hammock of sorts across her torso, and walked. The baby bounced naturally with each step Abbi took; she whimpered and hiccupped, but the screaming stopped.

“Finally,” Abbi said.

Benjamin came close to her, close enough that the space between them was occupied only by the baby. He smoothed Silvia’s tiny eyebrows. “Thank you,” he said.

Abbi nodded. “I might as well keep her until she starts up again.” She lowered herself into the couch, imagining this was how a pregnant woman moved, off-balance with the weight in her abdomen, flexing her knees and holding the couch’s arm, and falling back on the cushions without folding at the waist. She lifted her feet up, bending her knees so Benjamin could sit on the other end. He closed his eyes, and Abbi hesitated only a minute before stretching her legs, resting her heels on his thighs. Benjamin lightly stroked her shin before dozing off, his hand suddenly heavy against her skin.

Benjamin went to work wearing fatherhood under his eyes and on his shoulder. After he left, Abbi dozed when Silvia dozed, and kept moving while the infant was awake—doing laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing the tub with the lemon rinds she saved during the week—because if she sat, she’d fall asleep. She carried Silvia with her to the mailbox, the sun giving her a bit of an energy boost, and pulled out an envelope of coupons and a phone bill. Closed the box with her elbow.

Marie Vilhauser dug in the flower bed along the split-rail fence separating their yards. She didn’t look up as Abbi passed, but said, “First coupla weeks are hardest. But it stops, eventually, the crying does.”

Abbi nodded. “Thanks.”

Chapter NINE

The computer listed seven Savoies in the Buffalo area. Two lived on the same street. No James. No Jimmy. Two J’s. Matthew copied them into his notebook, twice checking each letter, each number to be certain he’d not made a mistake. Then he figured the cost. Forty-one hours on a bus for eighty dollars—each way. By train, nearly a day and one hundred forty dollars, after he managed to get to the station in Minnesota. He jabbed his ballpoint into his pad, cutting the paper with deep, black lines. Threw the pen onto the table; it skidded off the end. He shouldn’t be frustrated. He’d known it would be expensive.

But money meant time.

He tore the scored pages from his pad, rolled them between his palms, like a child forming a Play-Doh snake. The librarian scowled, tapped her watch. He relinquished the computer and found a desk in the back corner of the three-room public library.

He’d have to go by train. The bus took too long. He shouldn’t miss a treatment, but could, had twice before. Once because of a snowstorm, and once when Lacie tripped and split her forehead open on the coffee table, and she wouldn’t go to the hospital without him.

With taxi fares, he’d probably need at least four hundred dollars for the trip, if he spent the night in the train station and not a motel. He could do odd jobs—painting, maybe, shoveling in the winter—and collect bottles and cans for the refund. Another year of long, tedious evenings and bus rides and needle sticks.

He was being stupid. Bullheaded. His aunt could pick up the phone and, in ten minutes, find out if Matthew was kin to any of the names on his list. But it seemed rude to have Heather calling paper names, asking if they had a son they’d forgotten. And he wouldn’t have some random relay operator do it—him sitting in the apartment typing out his life story while a stranger read it off a screen to another stranger in Buffalo, who may or may not care to know him.

Besides, he didn’t just want a kidney; he wanted a father. That was something that needed to be done face-to-face, man-to-man.

The library closed at five in the summer, and it was close to that. Matthew thought of things he could do instead of going home. There weren’t many. Too bad it wasn’t a dialysis day.

He envied Jaylyn sometimes—she always had a place to go, had people who wanted her—until he considered the price she paid for those perks. She gave herself away to anyone who showed a bit of interest. Not worth it.

Dirk was cheating on his aunt, again; that was what the crisis had been this morning. Matthew had cooked eggs and toast for his two younger cousins and ate with them until Heather came storming from the back of the apartment, hurling her boyfriend’s clothes out the front door. Dirk followed, grabbing her wild arms. She whacked him across the face with his sneaker; blood spurted from his nose, and Matthew had pulled the girls to a neighbor’s apartment before biking to school to use the computer lab.