Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  “I’m going to take a run,” she said. She changed to her running clothes and sneakers, tied back her hair, and left. The screen door hissed closed behind her.

  She liked to jog at twilight, when the details began blurring into the horizon. Tonight the sky was wan with harvest, a haze left in the air by combines cutting wheat and trucks hauling the grain to bin sites or local elevators throughout the county. She’d come to love the exercise. She didn’t run to lose weight now—she’d never be some little waif of a girl, never smaller than a size ten—but had in the beginning, eight years ago, the summer before college.

  Then she ran every day, pushing herself for three, four hours sometimes. She liked how she looked when the pounds spilled off, liked it too much, her mood dependent on the scale’s tattling. By the time classes began, she was always tired and irritable and half-starved, and no longer had the time or willpower to spend long hours in the gym.

  Now she spent maybe an hour on the roads, her quiet time, though if she went much longer than three days without it, she began to feel a bit antsy. A bit fat. And then the laxatives tempted her.

  She shook her head, prayed, her words timed to her stride, bouncing in her mind. Step. Step. Step. Step. Lord. Please. Hear. Me. Tonight they were for Benjamin.

  Abbi thought he was fine when he first came home, when the days were busy with reporters and photographers, with relatives and well-wishers, with various ceremonies and speaking engagements. A little more pensive, a little less young. But still fine, after what he’d been through. Things hadn’t been all that wonderful between them when he left—her fault, she could admit it now. But he had brought up none of that, and they worked at reconnecting. Going on dates and hanging out at old haunts in Vermillion, hiking the Badlands, making love. And then the phone stopped ringing, and friends stopped dropping by, and life returned to quiet normalcy. And Benjamin slipped between the cracks of the mundane.

  It didn’t happen all at once. More a gradual fading—like wallpaper too long in direct sunlight, and no one noticed until a picture was moved and hung somewhere else, leaving a big, vibrant square of color peering out from the center of the washed-out pattern, and people thought, So that’s what it used to look like.

  One night Benjamin didn’t finish the plate of his favorite biryani, didn’t laugh at his favorite movie, didn’t lie on the couch with his legs thrown over hers, and turned his back to her when she reached for him in bed. Abbi had curled in a ball on the other side of the mattress, listening to him listen to her, replaying the past months, and realized she’d been losing him for a long time.

  Then she had come home from the grocery to find him on the bathroom floor, toilet swimming with vomit, an empty bottle of Paxil—prescribed by the V.A. doctor—on the sink. He shouted at her to leave and stayed there all night, emerging in the morning showered and shaved, and went to work without discussion.

  Abbi hadn’t known he was taking antidepressants.

  She was good at doing nothing. Too good. But now something needed to be done for the baby’s sake. Abbi had grown up with two parents who spoke only of the price of gas and what color to paint the shutters, and retreated to private corners when the trivialities ended. She didn’t want that for Silvia.

  At home she showered and, in her pajamas, crept into the bedroom. Benjamin read, propped up on both pillows, his back to her. Silvia slept next to him, covered with a flannel receiving blanket, feet poking from the bottom. Abbi wiped her palms on her flannel shorts, licked her lips. “Why are you doing this to her?” she asked.

  He stiffened, turned the page of his book. “What?”

  “Us.”

  “There isn’t an us. Remember?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.” He snapped off the lamp, pushed one pillow to her side of the bed. His own he folded in half, burrowed both arms under it and hugged it to his head.

  “I’ll tell them about the pills.”

  He said nothing, but his left hand squeezed the pillow. His right snaked out, touched Silvia’s shoulder.

  “I’ll tell them all the things you left out. And they’ll take her away and give her to a happy family.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he said to the crib.

  Because I love you. “Because it’s time something was done.”

  “What would you suggest? Since you’re so full of suggestions tonight.”

  Abbi sat on the bed, at Benjamin’s feet, could see the outline of his toes through the thin cotton. One, two, three, four, five, six, she counted, and a half. “I don’t know. Talk to someone, maybe.”

  “Talk,” he said.

  “The V.A. could recommend someone. Or maybe Pastor Bob. You said you liked him.”

  He said nothing, so Abbi asked, “So?”

  “We’ll see.”

  We’ll see. Her mother used to say that to her all the time, when she meant, “No,” but had no interest in dealing with the repercussions of her answer. She took a breath, turned her head. The closet was open, all Benjamin’s belts hanging on it, vegan dreadlocks down the back of the door. What did he think about when he saw them each morning, if anything at all? “You’ll have to do better than that,” she said.

  “Fine,” he said, lifting Silvia over his body to the outside of the mattress and shimming her between his arm and rib cage, her head tucked in his armpit, not quite in her own sleeping space.

  “She can’t stay in the bed,” Abbi said, though they’d slept with her between them several nights, despite it being a foster care no-no.

  He ignored her again, and she got up to brush her teeth, lingered in the bathroom squeezing blackheads on her chin. Then she called Genelise. No one answered. Benjamin was still awake when she went back into the bedroom; his eyes were completely closed. When he slept, his lids opened halfway and his eyes rolled back into his head so only the whites could be seen. The first night they stayed together—in college, when she and Benjamin played chicken with temptation by just sleeping in the same bed—she woke up and thought he’d died.

  She crept over to the very edge of her side, used to balancing there, but tonight the fall seemed so far. So she rolled back toward Benjamin and, keeping her body on her half of the mattress, lay on his pillow. Her nose close to the nape of his neck, she smelled sweat and scalp and the bitterness of dried saliva—inhaled deeply, trying to pull the thoughts from his head with her breath.

  He didn’t lean back into her but also didn’t move away. She slid her hand between her nose and the drool, and prayed he wouldn’t give her the opportunity to prove she’d follow through with her ultimatum. She didn’t know if she could.

  Chapter TWELVE

  Matthew poured Hi-C into the Dixie cups lined up on the plastic tray. On another tray, he counted out two vanilla crème cookies for each child. He stacked the juice tray on the cookie tray and carried them both balanced on his left arm, grabbing a bag of napkins before taking the snacks to the fellowship room, where the children sat on matted carpet squares, waiting to eat.

  It was his fourth year helping with Vacation Bible School at Temple Methodist, the church he called his own. He’d come as a participant the first summer he’d moved in with his aunt, when he was eleven. Lacie was a few weeks old and crying all night, and when Heather saw the hand-painted banner announcing the free VBS for kids four to twelve, she dumped him and the other girls off there so she could have three hours of extra sleep.

  He’d been to church on occasion, with his mother, in those few times she tried to go sober, when she attended meetings and lit candles and tried to be all spiritual. But he never learned the story of Jesus— acted out before him in mangy felt shapes—until that week, and when his teacher asked if he wanted Jesus to live in his heart, he raised his hand, along with the rest of the children.

  He could still hear some then, with his hearing aids, and the pianist taught them all to sing “No, Not One” for the end-of-week parents’ day and barbeque. He sang as loudly as he could, not
caring that the others stared at him, snickering and poking each other, and holding their ears. It wasn’t for them. His song was for Jesus, who heard him perfectly, the way he would sound when he was in heaven—or so Mrs. Merry had told him.

  There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus.

  No, not one. No, not one.

  None else could heal all our soul’s diseases.

  No, not one. No, not one.

  Jesus knows all about our struggles.

  He will guide ’til the day is done.

  There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus.

  No, not one. No, not one.

  They gave all the children a golden cross on a fluorescent cord, thin and rubbery like licorice. He chose the green-corded one, and wore the necklace every day under his shirt, until all the gold flaked away and the hanging loop broke off, and no amount of Gorilla Glue would fix it. And he attended church nearly every Sunday after that, Temple Methodist being only a third of a mile from his aunt’s apartment. He rode his bike or walked in the winter. Sometimes someone from the church would pick him up if the weather turned sour. Matthew tried to get Jaylyn and Skye to go with him—after all, they had prayed the prayer, too.

  Jesus is in your heart now, he’d told them.

  “Give me a break,” Jaylyn had said. “We just wanted the free ice cream coupons.”

  He passed out the cookies and juice to the children. The younger ones—the four-, five-, and six-year-olds—touching fingertips to their lips, then flapping their hand forward as if blowing a kiss. Thank you. He’d taught them earlier in the week.

  With the food finished, the children were led back to their classrooms duckling-style, one behind the other in a line, and Matthew collected the crumpled cups and napkins most left on the floor. He piled the mats one on another and took them outside, shook the crumbs onto the back lawn. He swept the floor in the fellowship room, washed the serving trays. Then he sat reading the Bible, waiting for the day to end so he could walk Sienna and Lacie home.

  The VBS committee didn’t have anything else for him to do. Maybe the women would have been happier if he didn’t volunteer to help. Each year they gave him snack and clean-up duty, and he didn’t mind. But the distance remained between him and the church members, a Sunday assortment of fifty or so senior citizens—farmers born and raised, staid in the old ways—and a handful of young families looking for a back-to-basics style of worship, without guitars and drums, and streamers. Matthew didn’t doubt they cared about him with proper Christian love, and the pastor had begun adding sermon notes to the bulletin, for him. But beyond that, it was a handshake and a smile, maybe a “How’s school?” if someone felt particularly chatty. He couldn’t blame any of them for not knowing what to do with a sick, deaf kid who used to show up to services with mismatched shoes and gum in his hair.

  At noon, he walked Lacie and Sienna back to the apartment. Heather was home, and when he wrote he was going out for a while, she said, “Don’t forget I work at three.” He rode his bike down to the school. The library, Phil’s Steak n’ Bake, or the school ball field—they were where his peers hung out.

  There was nowhere else.

  Matthew hoped to see Ellie at the field, and she was there with a couple girl friends, watching the boys play baseball—just a pickup game, six against five, the dust swirling over their feet as they danced into position, then set, punching their gloves and bending low to the ground. The inning ended with a high fly ball to shallow left, the shortstop backpedaling onto the singed grass to catch it. He ran in and waved at Ellie. She waved back.

  Why am I doing this to myself?

  The ballplayers packed up their bats and trotted to their cars, shoving each other and spitting sunflower seeds into the grass. The girls jumped up to follow. Matthew bent down, pretending to fix his bicycle chain, hoping not to be seen behind the bleachers. But he saw feet in flip-flops with pink-painted toenails.

  He looked up.

  “Matt, hey. How are you? I haven’t seen you all summer,” Ellie said.

  I’ve been busy. You know. With stuff.

  “We’re all going to Phil’s for a soda. Want to come with?”

  Yes, he wanted to go, wanted to pack all his spare minutes together and spend them with her. He’d been crazy about her since that day last November when she’d come to his church with her family for her cousin’s baptism. Before then, Matthew had seen her around the hallways at school; he knew she was smart, and always smiled, at him, at everyone. But he’d never had a reason to speak to her.

  That day, however, at the reception, between the cake and punch and all the conversation he couldn’t understand, she’d found him sitting in the corner, alone, and asked, “Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?”

  He blinked. Then he felt a little grin on his lips, and he pulled out his pad and wrote, To get to the same side.

  “You got it,” she said, smiling, her braces ringed with blue and orange bands, the school’s colors. “I heard you are a math geek.”

  You know what a geek is, right?

  “Yeah, of course.”

  What?

  “A nerd.”

  No, before that. It’s real meaning.

  She shook her head.

  Someone who bites the heads off live chickens.

  “Oh, that’s gross. You’re not serious.”

  Really.

  “I’m going to go home and look that up.”

  Go right ahead.

  “I will.”

  The next day at school, he had found a folded sheet of paper in the vent of his locker. When he opened it, a widemouthed man peered out at him, and a cartoon rooster head stared down the man’s throat. Above the chicken’s head, a thought bubble had been drawn, and it read, Help! I’d rather be crossing a Möbius strip!

  He turned to her now, shook his head.

  “You sure? There’s room in the back of Teddy’s truck for your bike.”

  The shortstop. Teddy Derboven.

  No thanks.

  My aunt’s going to work soon, and I have to watch my cousins.

  “Well, okay. I’ll see you, then.”

  She turned away, to her friends, and all three girls walked to the parking lot, Ellie’s floral skirt swishing just below her knees. And Matthew biked home, knowing the math geek never got the girl, especially with a shortstop flexing and waving at her.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Benjamin heard the telephone ringing, though in his sleep he saw the sound coming from a machine gun. After four rings he opened his eyes, stretched backward to grab the receiver.

  “Yeah.”

  “Patil, we got a fire.” Wesley.

  “Where?”

  “At the Hoogendoorn place. East side.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Abbi had left the bed already, her pillow in her place. The baby slept in the bassinet with her fists near her ears, arms bent out from her shoulders in little L’s. He tucked his pillow next to Abbi’s and, after shimmying into his socks and pants, went into the basement to find Abbi at her sewing machine.

  “There’s a field fire I have to go to,” he said, standing behind her. She wore a tank top, and in another time he would have kissed the knob of bone at the base of her neck, the one that protruded from her back when she hunched over.

  “Okay.” The needle continued up and down. She didn’t turn.

  “What are you making?”

  “Something for the baby.”

  She couldn’t even tell him something as small as what. He breathed a deep, disjointed breath. “Don’t stay down here too long. You won’t hear her if she wakes up.”

  She switched off the machine light. “I’ll finish later. Do you want something for breakfast?”

  “No time,” he said.

  Thirty-foot flames burned in a field of wheat stubble, backed up against a grassed waterway. The lone Temple fire truck hammered the inferno with water, men in rubber coats guiding the hose. The flames shrunk, bowed to the firefig
hters in submission, until the hose went limp and dry, and then they were up again, big, orange marionettes of fire dancing and jerking their way over the green and across another harvested field.

  Benjamin crossed to Wesley, who stood with the fire chief.

  “Out of water,” Wesley said.

  “We’ve called in the Lippman and Hensley trucks. They’re on their way,” the chief said.

  Benjamin shielded his eyes, looked toward the fire, beyond it where two neighboring farmers sat on their tractors, disc implements hooked to the back, slicing grooves in the earth. “Looks like folks are trying to dig a fire line down there. I’ll head over, keep an eye out.”

  Wesley nodded.

  Benjamin started his car, the smoke dense and black enough to obscure his sight. Like the sandstorms in Afghanistan. Those were red, though, and loud, a freight train plowing through the desert. He honked, hoping anyone in his way would hear and move, crept down the road, past the fire, and eased the steering wheel to the left. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a reddish glare and two round lights.

  The fire truck slammed into his car, Benjamin’s head cracking against the driver’s-side window. Smoke seeped around him, filling the Durango. He pawed at the door handle, his fingers sliding off it once, twice, before his arm dropped to his thigh. He turned his head, watched the black air curl into the passenger seat, thickening, stretching until it looked like a man. And then it was a man. Stephen, sitting right there, made of smoke and sorrow. Benjamin managed to flip his arm up, palm flapping against his face, and rubbed his eyes.

  You sure got your bell rung, the smoke-man said.

  You’re dead, Benjamin thought. He heard shouting from far, far away.