Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

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.

  The lights blinked on and off, the ten-minute warning. He slipped on his backpack, passed Skye hunched in a desk cubby, her thick hair veiling her face. He watched as she picked the metal security strip from a magazine, stuck it under the desk. He tugged her sleeve and she jumped.

  “Matty, don’t do that. You scared the stink out of me.”

  Sorry, he wrote. You hiding out?

  “Yeah. You?”

  He nodded. What are you reading?

  “N
othing. The newspaper.” She shuffled the gray pages over the latest issue of Seventeen.

  Want to get some ice cream? My treat.

  “I’m kinda . . . not really eating ice cream right now.”

  You rather go home?

  “Okay, well, maybe a pop. Let me just put this back.”

  She kept the magazine hidden beneath the newspaper and disappeared into the stacks for a minute. When she emerged, he saw the outline of a rectangle beneath her thin yellow T-shirt, the silhouette of a woman, the word Maybelline. He stood too close to her as they left, his stomach nearly against her back, so the librarian wouldn’t see it, too.

  They walked to Phil’s Steak n’ Bake, Skye scuffing her heels through the gravel.

  New shoes? Matthew asked. She wasn’t wearing her usual canvas tennis shoes, the black ones covered in pink hearts and top-hatted skulls. These were light blue with pointed toes and fat white soles.

  “I found them in the back of Ma’s closet. I’m going for the granny look. You like?”

  Crazy.

  “That’s me.”

  The small restaurant, decked out in Old West style, was fairly busy for a Tuesday. Some locals, some travelers who pulled off the highway for food or toilet, and some families from the KOA down the road. They sat, and Skye pulled the magazine from her back. He flipped the page in his pad, but she snatched his pen. “Don’t start.”

  He ordered a sundae, she a Sprite with two scoops of chocolate ice cream floating in it. She drank from three straws and paged through Seventeen. They didn’t talk, weren’t there for talking. Skye tore several uneven circles from the magazine and sucked up the foam at the bottom of her mug. He paid at the register, and someone bumped him.

  “Hey, Matt. Long time no see,” Jared Whalen said.

  Matthew took a pen from beside the credit card machine and scribbled on the napkin, Busy, busy.

  “I hear you,” Jared said, stuck his finger through a hole at the hem of his dingy T-shirt. “Well, I don’t hear you. But I, you know, get you. It. What you said. I mean, wrote.”

  Relax. It’s all good.

  “I know, Matt. Sorry. I think I must be fried from the sun.” He’d rolled the bottom of his shirt into a fat sausage of fabric while he spoke, eyes flickering toward Skye, and then back to his nervous fingers. “Mr. Hoogendoorn hired me on for harvest.”

  You leave for college soon, right?

  “End of August.” The women behind the counter gave Jared two styrofoam containers. “Wouldn’t have made it without you. You know that.”

  Nah. I’m not the only nerd around.

  Matthew had tutored Jared in occupational math and chemistry last year, a favor for Skye. When she’d asked him, he protested a bit, wondering if her boyfriend might do better with a tutor who could actually explain concepts to him verbally. Skye batted away his worries. “He asked if you would do it,” she said. “He likes you.”

  I like pie. That doesn’t mean it should help me with my math homework.

  “Like you’d ever need help. Seriously. You know how shy he is. Come on. Just do it for me.”

  That had been early October. By December, Skye had broken up with Jared. Matthew knew none of the details, except that Jared was clearly heartbroken, and Skye hadn’t seemed too happy about it, either. He asked Jared if he’d feel more comfortable with another tutor. “Only if you would,” he said.

  So Matthew had spent every Tuesday and Saturday afternoon writing out equations and diagrams, and word problems asking for the width of a river if the length of line segment AC and angle ACB are known. Jared muddled through with C-pluses and made it into college—first in his family—for his mother.

  “She’s convinced the land killed my pops,” Jared had said. “I think I’ll find my way back to a farm, though. I’m not the desk-sitting type.” Matthew had agreed; winter wheat filled Jared’s veins, and that wouldn’t disappear after a couple of years of lecture halls and frat houses.

  Jared now picked up his food and tried one last time to make eye contact with Skye. She buried her head deeper into the magazine. “Well,” he said, “I’ll see you around. Tell your cousin I said hey.”

  Matthew returned to the table. Skye was leafing through his notebook. He held out his hand.

  “Nope. Not until you tell me about this.” She tapped the heart he’d doodled on the inside front cover, the one with the E inside it. “Who is she?”

  Matthew flared his nostrils, snapped, pointed to the pad. She tore out a page, gave it to him.

  I could just buy a new one.

  “Yeah, but you want to tell me.”

  He grinned at her, wrote, Ellie Holt.

  “Are you serious? She’s a brain.”

  I know.

  “She’s not that pretty.”

  Yes she is.

  “She’s not. She has a mustache.”

  He rolled his eyes, blew a long puff of air through his lips, felt them vibrate with sound.

  “She does. All the kids call her Stache.”

  You’re worse than Jaylyn.

  “How can you even say that?” She slung the pad at him. “You are a retard.”

  He shouldn’t have, did it only to be hurtful because she made fun of Ellie. He knew she hated being compared to her sister and, really, they couldn’t have been less alike.

  Jaylyn was tall and beautiful and thin with youth, though Matthew could imagine her looking like her mother in another decade, with an extra twenty pounds of life clinging to her hips. But now, today, that didn’t matter. Jaylyn strutted through the dusty streets of Beck County, expecting all eyes on her, and they were.

  In another place, a place where not everyone lived paycheck to paycheck or harvest to harvest, Jaylyn might not have been considered much more than pretty white trash. But there was no preppy, rich in-crowd in Beck County, not like in those teen movies Sienna begged Jaylyn to bring home from the grocery; everyone smelled like sweat and farm, wore clothes from JCPenney or Wal-Mart, or hand-me-downs. So popularity depended less on money and more on beauty. And Jaylyn had that in abundance.

  Skye could never keep up. She was her father’s daughter, heavy all over, from hands to hair to gait. She could have been pretty, but she worked to be the anti-Jaylyn, letting her hair obscure her face and her dark, oversized clothes hide the rest of her.

  Sorry, he wrote.

  “Whatever.”

  Really.

  “Well, I shouldn’t have insulted your girlfriend.”

  She’s not my girlfriend. He dragged the cap of his pen through a blob of hot fudge he had spilled on the table, swirling the dark goo. You see Jared come in?

  “Hard to miss.”

  He liked you. Still does.

  “Old news. I’m so over it.”

  You won’t tell me what happened with you guys?

  “Nothing happened. I was just done. Learned from the best, right?”

  He looked at the clock on the wall, the second hand jerking up a second, then twitching back a half, up and back, up and back. It’s nearly seven. We should go. Walk or hitch?

  “Hitch, definitely.” She touched his arm. “I won’t tell anyone about Ellie.”

  I know.

  “No you don’t. But I promise anyway.”

  The apartment glowed with one hidden light—the hallway light, oozing into the living room—and the television. The blinds were closed. Lacie and Sienna hugged their knees on the couch, skin blue in the cartoon glow, dark eyes dancing with yellow Sponge Bob irises. Heather sat in the dining area on a plastic lawn chair, feet propped on another, cigarette twined in her fingers.

  “Nice of you to grace us with your presence,” she said, took a long draw; the ash burned orange, then died. “Not like we needed anything from you tonight.”

  “We were at the library,” Skye said.

  Heather snuffed out the butt on her dinner plate, lit another. “I don’t need this garbage from you, too, Skye.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  He
ather turned to look at Matthew. He nodded.

  “Dirk’s gone.” Smoke leaked from Heather’s nose, between her teeth.

  “For how long this time?” Skye asked.

  Heather ignored her. “I’m going to bed. Get over here and kiss me good-night.”

  Lacie skipped into the dining area, knocking the ashtray off the plastic chair while throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. Heather pulled the girl off by the strap of her tank top, said something; Lacie’s head flopped forward.

  “I mean it. I better not find this mess in the morning,” Heather said. She looked at Sienna. “You can’t get your lazy self off the couch to say good-night?”

  “ ’Night,” Sienna said.

  “See how I jump for you when you want something.” Heather turned down the narrow hallway, and Skye followed. Matthew felt two doors slam through his feet.

  He found the spray cleaner from beneath the sink and gave a handful of paper towels to Lacie. He squirted the floor and she wiped, then he took her into the bathroom for a shower, her limbs dingy with the day’s play. She dug around the laundry basket, finding a mismatched pajama top and bottom, put them on. He combed her waist-length hair, and she danced and stomped as he wiggled the plastic teeth through the snarls. She finally turned and said, “Matty, you’re hurting me.”

  He tried to reply, “Sorry,” but didn’t know how it came out. Lacie seemed satisfied with whatever sound he’d made, and let him finish untangling her wet knots.

  “Can I sleep out with you tonight?” she asked.

  Matthew caught himself before he sighed, and nodded instead. She didn’t ask often, but when she did, it meant the floor for him. Tonight wasn’t exactly a night he wanted to give up the couch. He went into the living room and pressed the Off button for the television.

  “Hey,” Sienna said.

  He pointed down the hall.

  “Ma didn’t say I had to go to bed yet.”

  He bent his arm and whipped his index finger toward the hallway again. “Fine,” she said, and shoved Lacie into the wall on the way by.