Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  The letters came from everywhere—donations, offers of adoption, little prayer cards and notes of encouragement. Nothing captivated like the suffering of children. People were more likely to open their checkbooks for little, bald chemo heads and distended African bellies than—

  What’s wrong with me?

  He’d never been a cynic, and he hated feeling the undertow at his feet all the time, battling to pull him down. So far, he had been able to keep his head from sinking beneath the crashing surf—barely sometimes—but each day he found himself struggling more. If he wasn’t such a coward, he’d give up.

  He scooped the letter into a manila envelope and took the stairs by twos and threes to the second floor, the family services office. Cheyenne Donaldson typed at her desk, twinkling in the fluorescent lights, cheap rhinestone rings layered on each finger. Thumbs, too. She wore her lavender blouse ’80s-style, collar starched up, gold-tone fairy necklaces jangling against strands of pastel pearls.

  “More mail,” Benjamin said, spilling the letters onto a table next to her.

  She sifted through them, picked one up, and tapped one end on brown laminate. When the letter settled, she tore off the other side, squeezed both edges of the envelope, and shook. A folded sheet of paper slipped out, and a check. Cheyenne skimmed the letter, stuffed it back in the envelope, and opened another. “Want to help? Mail in one pile, money in another. We opened an account for all the donations coming in.”

  Benjamin dug under the loose end of an envelope flap and yanked, and then stuck his index finger into the hole, sawing the paper open. He found four five-dollar bills in a glittery pink Welcome, Baby card and added the cash to the pile.

  “No luck finding the parents yet,” Cheyenne said, more statement than question, more defeat than hope.

  “I doubt we will.”

  “She’s leaving the hospital in a few days, Monday or Tuesday.

  Into foster care. You know.” She paused, her plastic bangles clattering as she plowed through the envelopes again. “We have three licensed families in the county. You’re one of them.”

  He sliced through another envelope, more quickly this time. “Abbi can’t have children.”

  “Do you want to take her?”

  Now he stopped. “Cheyenne, I don’t think . . . There must be someone better.”

  “This isn’t coming out of nowhere. You’ve been at the hospital, what? Every day? More than anyone else, she knows you.”

  “She’s only ten days old.”

  “She knows you.”

  He couldn’t. What did he know about babies, especially ones who’d been abandoned by their mothers? He and Abbi thought they’d be adopting an older child, if at all. The way things were between them now . . . If Cheyenne knew, she’d not be making this offer.

  He could hardly keep himself from coming apart.

  But new fathers knew nothing of babies, either. They learned and stumbled through. They made mistakes, and their sons and daughters turned out fine. And he’d found her. He went to the hospital every day because he still felt responsible for her. He was her protector. She was his redemption.

  Some part of him wanted this.

  “I’ll need to talk to Abbi,” he said.

  “Think about it a couple days, and let me know.”

  He walked the unpaved quartzite of Lippman, the town east of Temple and smaller still. Benjamin had loved the sound of gravel roads as a child, closing his eyes and imagining great dragons gnashing the bones of their prey as the stones scraped and popped under car tires, or his feet. Of course he was the dragon slayer. The brave hero. Some boys grew out of this phase; that was what he heard his parents whisper to each other as he attacked giants in the tree trunks with twiggy swords and slept with his golden junior officer badge—his name engraved on it, a Christmas gift from Stephen’s family one year—pinned to his pajamas. Things would have been a lot easier if he’d gone on to middle school and left the cops-and-robbers games in his fifth grade cubby with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunch box his parents made him buy with his own money. A lot different.

  A lot better.

  He bounced as he walked, partly from his naturally loose gait, partly because his hip twisted as he pushed off with the ball of his right foot instead of his toes. Each step jostled his desire to bring the infant home, settling it deeper. It had been there since the beginning, though he had refused to admit it until now. He still needed to ask Abbi, and he had no right to ask anything of her.

  Lippman’s thirty or so houses clustered on less than six acres in the southeast corner of town, trying not to waste too much valuable field space. Benjamin started with the first house on the first street; many knocks went unanswered. He looked at his watch, the hour hand barely scraping two. Folks at work, kids at daycare. He left a preprinted note asking people to call if they knew anything. Those he did find home said they couldn’t help him. No one seemed to be lying.

  Some children laughed and bounced on a corroded trampoline in one front yard. They saw Benjamin and ran to him, pleading for him to show them his gun. He unholstered it and let them run their dirty fingers over the metal. They poked at it and jumped away, as if worrying it might come alive and bite them.

  He walked away from the last house and decided not to bother with the farms today. No more procrastinating. The gravel shifted as his Durango rolled over it. Chomp, chomp, chomp. The only dragons left to slay were his own.

  “I wasn’t expecting you home,” Abbi said when he entered the kitchen. “I didn’t cook anything for you.”

  Benjamin said nothing, and she didn’t turn around but kept chopping the cucumber into smaller and smaller pieces. He made her nervous, her knees locking forward, elbows drawn in against her sides. She brushed the cucumber into a bowl and from a green carton dumped tiny oblong tomatoes onto the cutting board. They collapsed as she tried to slice them, spitting watery juice and seeds over the counter. She mumbled under her breath, flinging the smooth-bladed knife into the sink before pulling a serrated one from the block.

  “Abbi.”

  She exhaled, tilting her neck backward until it crackled. “What.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “So, ask.”

  “It’s important. Turn around.”

  Knife still in her fist, she shifted, only half facing him. But that was Abbi—tell her to do something and she’d find a way not to.

  “Cheyenne Donaldson wants to know if we would take the baby,” he said. “The one I . . . you know.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Forever, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s all up in the air, Abbi. She’ll need permanent placement. If we don’t find relatives, someone has to raise her.”

  “Someone, you.”

  “No. Someone, us.”

  She rinsed the knife under the faucet and dropped it, blade down, into the dish rack. Swiped her hands on the back of her shorts. “There isn’t an us.”

  It was the first time either of them had said it aloud, and the words stirred no emotion in Benjamin, no surprise. They were two halves now, no longer one flesh, put asunder not by man or circumstance, but by each other.

  Abbi’s hands trembled as she swept her vegetables into the bowl of couscous on the counter. She took a bite, shook on some salt, pepper, and took another bite. Her back still toward him, he read its twitches. Should he press her or not? He rubbed his thumbs over his sweaty fingertips. “Abbi.”

  “What, Ben? What? If you have something else to say, just say it. If not—” She shoved her bowl away. “I’m just . . . going to the studio.”

  “Wait,” he said, jumping in front of her, and she flinched, a residual instinct from that day. Both their eyes found the uneven mango-sized spot in the living room wall. He had patched the hole with spackle and repainted it, but it still wasn’t as smooth as the surrounding Sheetrock, the white paint brighter. “I found her.”

  “Oh, I get it. It�
�s, like, finders keepers?” Abbi snorted. “You’ve lost your mind. She’s not a quarter you picked up from the sidewalk. This is a life.”

  “I saved her life,” he shouted. He didn’t mean to, but it bubbled out. This time Abbi didn’t back away; her gazed dropped to his waist. Hesitantly, she reached out and traced the silver buckle on the creased brown-leather belt he’d worn since before they met. It had become a joke between them. Every Christmas and birthday Abbi bought him a vegan belt to replace it, wrapped in the same-sized box so he knew what it was. After the first two times he’d figured out her routine, and he would shake the gift and make outlandish guesses—“Is it a bowling ball? Keys to a new Corvette?”—before untying the ribbon and acting surprised. He’d strap the belt around his forehead, or around his neck like a tie, and dance about the room, and they’d laugh together and end up in bed.

  All those belts hung on the inside of the closet door—faux suede, jacquard nylon, canvas and hemp and vegetan—jingling each time someone opened it. He never wore any of them, each day sliding the battered leather through the loops on his pants. And now he watched her finger hop from one hole to the next; he was buckled to the seventh. The third hole was fat, a gaping wound from years of use. The next three were only slightly stretched. She lingered on the eighth and final hole. “And who’s going to take care of her while you’re at work?” she asked.

  “I figured you could quit the grocery. And not go back to subbing in the fall.”

  “You’re trying to bribe me.”

  He smiled a little, shrugged. “Yeah.”

  She dropped her hand, her face falling with it. “I guess we go see Cheyenne tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t,” she said, and went to her studio.

  Chapter EIGHT

  The smell of birth assaulted Abbi as she stepped through the doors of the maternity ward—a thick, sweet coat of lotions and latex gloves, and that pink toilet cleaner in the gallon bottles. She lagged behind Benjamin, passed by a glowing couple walking hand in hand, the proud papa lugging a blue-socked baby in a car seat, the wife still waddling with postpartum weight.

  That’s how babies should go home.

  Benjamin didn’t wait for her. He waved to the nurse through the window and slipped into the nursery. The woman came out, holding the door for Abbi. “Go on in,” she said. Abbi waited, the door against her hip, and as the nurse swished down the hallway, Cheyenne clattered around the corner. “I’m here, I’m here,” she said. She crowded Abbi into the room. Benjamin hoisted the baby on his shoulder, one of his brown hands cupped under her diapered bottom, the other eclipsing her back. Her thin, purple legs wriggled like night crawlers against his shirt, and Abbi winced at her shrill bleating. He draped her over his forearm, her head in the crook of his elbow. She calmed as he rhythmically pounded her back.

  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 th
ought 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.