Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  “No.”

  Jaylyn rolled her eyes. “He found a baby. Some wacko dumped a newborn baby girl on Pete Hopston’s land, and Deputy Patil found her. Probably left by an Indian. Maybe a drunk one.”

  Abbi pressed a button on her register. The drawer clanked open, and she dropped her money tray in. “Isn’t your sister part Native American?”

  “Sienna, yeah. Her daddy’s half of one. That’s the half that made him split, so my mother said.”

  Abbi bit the inside of her cheek, said nothing. She keyed in merchandise codes and slid the food to the end of the ramp, watching Jaylyn’s back, her seventeen-year-old legs long and smooth in her cutoff shorts. The girl dropped bananas and two-liter bottles of soda on loaves of bread, flirting as customers passed by. The old men played along, the young men snuck glances at her body, and Abbi stood there like the Pharisee in the temple. God, I thank you that I am not like these sad people. And she despised herself for it.

  Women wandered through Abbi’s checkout line, heaping compliments on Benjamin. She said, “Thank you” and “I’ll tell him” and “I know I’m lucky.” But she just wanted to go home, and when her shift ended at six, she hurried to sweep and punch out, wadding her smock into a ball and tossing it on the shelf.

  The house was still empty. On the answering machine, a red digital number one pulsed on, off, on. She pressed the Play button and heard static, then a dial tone.

  She wasn’t hungry, not really. But there was too much space around her, inside her. She filled it with a sprouted-grain bagel and homemade hummus, two handfuls of raw almonds, a soy yogurt, and a chewy, double carob chip cookie. Before changing into her pajamas, she drank three glasses of prune juice, quickly, one after another, plugging her soft palate with her tongue to dim the taste. Then she snapped on the living-room lamp and made a sandwich for Benjamin—roast beef and Swiss; her stomach lurched as she picked the meat up between her thumb and forefinger, dropped it on the bread—in case he wanted something to eat when he came home.

  In case he came home.

  Chapter THREE

  Other people woke to alarm clocks or crying babies or shouts from the apartments next door. But Matthew Savoie woke in silence, and in the minutes before he opened his eyes, he hid alone within his head, without distraction.

  He thought in words, watched them scroll across the backs of his eyelids, ordering him to get up, get going. But the heat ground against him, wet and heavy, a mildewed blanket over his face, provoking his sleepiness.

  The sheet stuck to his chest as he managed to turn over; he felt it peel away from his skin like a Band-Aid. Last night, he had taken the three cushions off the couch and lined them up on the floor. A narrow bed, yes, but his body was well accustomed to the width. He’d slept on the sofa here in his aunt’s living room for the past five years. And the floor—where his feet flopped off the end of the cushions, and he could spread his arms for air—was cooler than if he folded his body to fit between the padded gold arms, his skin pressed into the hot velour fabric.

  A little cooler, he tried to convince himself.

  He felt the floor shake. Someone slammed the bathroom door. He opened his eyes and saw two of his cousins, Jaylyn and Skye. Irish twins, his grandmother called them, born eleven months apart in the same year. Two different fathers.

  “Ma said you better get your lazy self up or you’re gonna be late,” Jaylyn said.

  Matthew turned onto his stomach again, swept his arm over the carpet and caught his T-shirt on his pinky. He put it on, not wanting the girls to see his bare chest, pale as the moon and puckered with ribs. Too thin for a sixteen-year-old. Too thin for a boy, really. He stood, shrugged.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  He found his notepads in the denim shorts he’d worn yesterday, a sad pair of jeans Heather brought home from the Salvation Army, cut and hemmed by hand one night when she’d been feeling maternal. He flipped open the red one, spiral-bound on top like a reporter’s, and wrote, What do you care?

  “Retard. Come on, Skye,” Jaylyn said, and twirled away, her smooth blond hair fanning around her shoulders.

  Skye stood there looking dark and tired. She reached her hand across her chubby stomach and grabbed a knot of skin near her hip and, through her cutoff sweatpants, kneaded it. She seemed more distracted lately, quieter than usual. Matthew doubted anyone else had noticed, a symptom of living packed close together, eyes turned toward the ceiling or floor—at first to give each other a bit more privacy, then to have more privacy of one’s own, until finally all anyone did was look up and inward and away.

  Are you okay? he wrote.

  “Yeah,” she said, head dripping into her shoulder, her mouth still moving.

  Unable to read her lips now, he scribbled, What? and held the pad in front of her face.

  She looked at him. “Nothing. Sorry,” she said, and followed Jaylyn outside.

  He hated that. The nothings and never minds. As if it took too much effort to repeat the words, and he wasn’t worth a minute more of conversation, another lungful of air. But he was used to it, too.

  He couldn’t go without breakfast, so he took the three steps to the kitchen and filled a bowl with cornflakes. Opening the refrigerator, he stood inside it while he poured milk on his cereal, indulging in the rush of cold around him, a few guilty seconds of luxury. He slid the near-empty jug back onto the top shelf and elbowed the door closed.

  The cereal, a store brand that came in a huge plastic bag, lost its crunch before Matthew sucked the first bite off the spoon. Still, he finished it, the soggy flakes filling the pits in his molars. He dug the mush out with his tongue, a silvery pain shooting through his jaw as he brushed the cavity he needed to have filled. Then he drank the warm, gritty milk left in the bottom of the bowl and opened the cabinet again to get his pillbox, hidden on the second shelf behind a stack of dishes so Lacie wouldn’t be tempted to play with it. Once he forgot and left it on the counter, and later found his youngest cousin twirling around the kitchen, shaking the blue plastic case like a maraca and singing.

  With his thumbnail, he popped open the square labeled Thursday Morning and dumped the pills into his palm. Orange footballs, white capsules, and pastel wafers that look like Easter candies. Blood thinners and stool softeners, vitamin supplements and phosphate binders—he could take all eight in one gulp, and did, feeling as if he swallowed a handful of gravel and drinking a full glass of water to wash them all the way to his stomach. If not, he would belch up bitterness until lunch.

  His noontime pills and between-meals pills he rolled in a paper napkin, to take with him for later.

  He looked at the clock—already close to eight. In the bathroom he saw a speck of silver glittering at the bottom of the toilet and flushed. When the bowl refilled, the speck was still there, so he reached in and washed it and his hands with soap. Skye’s earring, a skull-and-crossbones stud. Her favorite. He left it on her pillow.

  Rushing now, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and stuffed his notebooks and medication into the pockets, then lifted the top off the Rubbermaid tote in the corner of the living room. All his clothes fit in there, and he shuffled through to find his collared shirt, a yellow polo style with a bundle of green, black, and white stripes banded around his chest. He put it on, stared for a moment at his good chinos folded at the top of the pile, then snapped the lid closed. His mother wasn’t worth pants in near 100-degree heat. She wasn’t worth a collared shirt, either, not worth a single drop of the sweat that would sprout at the nape of his neck and slide down his back beneath the heavy piqué fabric. But Matthew remembered the fifth commandment. “Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.”

  He flipped the lid off the tote again and took out a clean pair of shorts to wear.

  He needed all the days he could get.

  There wasn’t a single
taxicab company in Beck County. Not one in Castle, either. Matthew pedaled to the main roadway, stashed his bicycle in the tall grasses near the on-ramp, and waited. A car rattled by, then another, ignoring his outstretched thumb. Already his head and mouth felt fuzzy. He couldn’t stay in the sun much longer.

  Finally a pickup steered onto the shoulder. The driver rolled down his window.

  “Where you going, son?”

  Matthew opened his pad. He’d already written Hollings.

  “You got a tongue in that mouth of yours?”

  He flipped his pad over, showing the driver the words already printed on the back cover. I’M DEAF. I READ LIPS.

  “Deaf, eh?”

  Matthew nodded.

  “Foolish thing, hitchhiking. ’Specially when you can’t hear nothing.” The man took off his Twins cap, wiped his hairline with his cuff. “Get in.”

  In the truck, Matthew dropped his backpack on the floor and unzipped it, took out a bottle of water. He drank all of it, and half of another. Too much. He was allowed only four cups of liquid a day.

  Goosebumps sprouted on his arms, his sweaty skin reacting to the air-conditioning like a vinegar and baking soda experiment. He flipped the vent toward the driver, who glanced at him and said something; Matthew couldn’t read his sideways mouth but nodded anyway. The man slid the air control to low.

  Matthew looked out the passenger window. He counted hay bales, four hundred and ninety-seven during the twenty-minute ride, his eyes flickering over the fields, grouping, estimating, the numbers adding themselves. In Hollings, he walked a couple of miles to the bus station and bought a ticket to Pierre.

  Aunt Heather might have driven him to visit his mother on Saturday, if he’d asked, or she might have made her boyfriend do it. But he didn’t want anyone to know. He’d been planning to go alone for nearly a year, and wasn’t quite sure why he chose today to do so. He only knew that he had fallen asleep last night ready, finally, to take his trip. His aunt thought he was sitting in the high school computer lab, completing on-line classwork.

  The bus crossed the bridge into Pierre, a gray city on a gray day, the street lined with gas stations and hotels and fast-food restaurants. Matthew got off at the station, walked to his mother’s apartment building—three floors high, with the bottom floor half underground, the bluish siding a patchwork of dark and light stripes, newly replaced boards between the old. He prayed as he approached the main door. An elderly man with a cane stood just behind the glass, trying to push outside while dragging his wheeled shopping basket. Matthew rushed over, held the door open for him.

  “Thank you much, young man,” he said.

  Matthew smiled and slipped through, trudged up the hot stairway and banged on his mother’s apartment. The peephole darkened; Melissa Savoie opened the door, smirk on her face.

  “This isn’t my kid. He doesn’t ever come see me,” she said. “He’s too good for me, that boy.”

  Matthew’s hands shook as he fumbled to find a blank sheet in his notepad. Can I come in?

  “By all means. This don’t happen every day, you know. Is Heather with you?”

  I came alone.

  “You drive now?”

  Bus.

  He wiped his feet on the plastic runner, took off his sneakers and his backpack. The apartment had new carpeting since his last visit. Dark blue, almost purple, and plush. He sunk into it as he crossed the room to the small kitchen table.

  “You want a drink?”

  He shook his head.

  “I have root beer. Well, diet. It used to be your favorite. You used to sneak it, and pour it over your cereal when you were little. That kind you liked.”

  Cocoa Krispies.

  “Yeah, that. So, you want some?”

  He had used root beer on his cereal because it was often the only beverage his mother had in the house. And she’d been too strung out to get up and make him breakfast.

  He shook his head again.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, sitting across from him.

  I’m sick, he wrote, turning the words to his mother.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  It’s worse than before.

  Her mouth pulled in, the lines around her lips giving her a toothy appearance, as if she wore her jawbone on the outside. “Heather told me.”

  I need a kidney.

  “You think I’m gonna give you mine?”

  He wouldn’t ask if she would, fearing the answer. He knew she had loved him once; he remembered that, remembered her lifting him onto the handlebars of her rusty three-speed bicycle and pedaling seven miles to the T-ball field so he could play. They had no car then. They barely had food. But she tried, fighting for sobriety during those few summer months. She pedaled him to the school field after her double shifts at the catheter factory, sat smoking under the basketball net, watching the ball roll through his legs. Then Griese showed up, and any trying his mother used to do disappeared up her nose in a cloud of white powder.

  I can’t use yours.

  She dropped her eyes to her lap, tugged at the collar of her gray T-shirt. “So, what are you doing here?” She whispered this; Matthew could tell by the way her face remained still while her mouth moved.

  Where’s my father?

  “That dirtbag’s not gonna help you.”

  I just want to ask.

  “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

  Does he have family? Someone who might be in touch?

  “Forget about him.”

  You won’t tell me?

  “I don’t know.”

  Fine, he wrote, standing and stuffing his notebook in his back pocket.

  Melissa grabbed his arm and said, “Buffalo. New York. He was there, last I heard.”

  Matthew pressed his lips together and nodded.

  Melissa let go of him. “You should have called. I don’t got time for this today. I’m working now. Got to get there in forty-five minutes.”

  He nodded again, strapped on his knapsack and left, walking back to the bus station, to the ticket window. The bus to Hollings wouldn’t leave for another three hours. He waited in the air-conditioning, buying two packages of Chips Ahoy from the vending machine and shaking the crumbly, stale cookies into his mouth straight from the bags. He read, worked a Sudoku puzzle in the newspaper someone left behind. After an hour, he wandered out to one of the cabbies lining the station curb and asked how much it would cost for a ride back to Temple. When the driver said two hundred dollars, he went back to the hard plastic seat to wait some more. He’d take the bus, even though it meant he’d be stuck on the side of the road when he got off in Hollings, praying for someone to stop and bring him home.

  Chapter FOUR

  Sitting at the kitchen table, his third cup of coffee empty, Benjamin stared at the Bible. He didn’t remember the last time he opened it, had to blow the dust off it when he found it under his bed, having stuffed it under there when he couldn’t stand it looking at him from the nightstand, accusing him of neglect. But he had dug it out today, opened to a random page somewhere in the middle, hoping for—he couldn’t say what. He hadn’t read more than a sentence, the blurry words drifting off the page, disappearing each time he rubbed his eyes to clear his vision.

  He heard Abbi come out of the bedroom, the swollen door opening with a sticky pop. Everything swelled in the heat. Problems. Fears. Sins. All puffed with humidity and ready to rain out with the slightest change in air pressure.

  As she passed, his arm moved on its own, reached out and cupped her loosely around her waist. She let him, and he tried to think back to the last time their touches weren’t accidental bumps against one another while scurrying around the small bathroom in the morning, or brushed hips when passing too close in the kitchen. For months, they had each slept on their own side of the bed, backs to each other, their bodies two parentheses curving away from one another, refusing to close. When he came to bed. He hadn’t last night. Or the night before.

 
; “I didn’t know you were home,” she said.

  “Came in late.”

  “You’re sweating. Turn the air on.”

  “It’s too loud. I can’t hear myself think.”

  She spun away from him, opened the dishwasher. “You emptied it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s the juicer?”

  He pointed up, at the middle cabinet. “Where it always is.”

  She stood on tiptoe and stretched to reach it on the top shelf. Her arm uncurled above her head like a butterfly’s proboscis.

  She’s beautiful, he thought, had thought hundreds of times. But not in a long time.

  “What are you doing today?” he asked.

  “Working. You?”

  “Working. Probably late again.”

  She took two oranges and a lemon from the refrigerator, balanced them on the flat of her bare arm. “Want some?”

  Benjamin shook his head, watched her slice through the fruit right on the counter, without a cutting board. Citrus filled the air as she pressed each half against the glass juicer, twisting and grinding the guts out. She rinsed her hands, wiped them on the back of her— his—boxer shorts, and drank right out of the collection cup.

  He couldn’t find words for her anymore. They used to talk— bicker—about anything, everything. Politics, religion, the price of corn on the cob at the roadside farm stand. But now it was fights with jagged words, or polite trivialities, or nothing. Mostly nothing, a wounded silence snapping at their heels.

  Abbi rinsed the juicer, without soap or sponge, rubbing the pulp away with her fingers. She only used detergent on oils and baked-on crud. “It’s the water that does the cleaning. The soap only helps it along, and a little elbow grease will do the same,” she’d tell him if he complained. It drove him crazy. To him, plates weren’t clean unless the sink mounded with bubbles. He got that from his mother. Commercial cleaners, difficult to get in India, at least where she had lived, were almost an addiction for her, and after coming to the States, his mother had filled her kitchen pantry with pastes and gels and sprays. Chemical fumes meant loving care; they comforted Benjamin almost as much as the simmering black-eyed peas and garam masala in his mother’s chavli amti.