Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  They strapped on their packs and climbed, first over a few packed footpaths, then up sheerer faces, jamming their boots into the soft rock and testing each handhold, having learned early on that even the firmest-looking ledges could crumble under the weight of a man. Benjamin hadn’t done such climbing since he lost his toes and found his footing a bit hesitant, a bit unsure. He favored his left leg, going behind his father, debris spilling down into his face as Harish scaled the peak above him.

  His father stopped, sat, and Benjamin caught up; they drank water and ate cashews, staring over the majestic formations. “ ‘Lead me to the rock that is higher than I,’ ” Harish said. “ ‘For You have been a refuge for me, a tower of strength against the enemy.’ ”

  Benjamin tossed handfuls of stones down into the gaping crevice; they scrambled and bounced over the craggy outcroppings, and then fell silent. His father capped his canteen. “You did the same when you were a child.”

  “I like how it sounds.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Like dragon scales.”

  On the way home, Harish wanted to stop for a meal, and inside the diner he picked up all the free publications near the counter— real estate magazines, weekly newspapers, tourist guides. They sat and ordered, Benjamin asking for a large coffee. The air-conditioning had dried the sweat on his skin, chilling him. “You’re not going to say anything?” he finally said.

  “If you want to talk, I will listen. You know that. But I do not think you want to. If you did, you would have said it to me by now.”

  “Maybe I want you to pry it out of me.”

  Harish paged through the Beck County Register. “Do you?”

  “Don’t read that,” Benjamin said, sipping his coffee. More gossip column than journalism, the thin newspaper reported who went to whose birthday party, who had houseguests over the long holiday weekend, and the dates of the United Methodist Church’s next ice cream socials. And included the sheriff ’s log.

  “You are mentioned in here.”

  “Come on, Baba, you can’t seriously look at this stuff and think . . .” He grabbed the paper from his father. “You want to hear how I’m in here? ‘July twenty-ninth. Deputy Patil responded to a report of three cows and eleven calves in the middle of I-90, about four miles south of Temple. The owner’s neighbor assisted the deputy in putting the cattle back in the pasture.’ ”

  “Benjamin—”

  “Wait. There’s more. ‘August first. Deputy Patil responded to a church in Lippmann for an out-of-state subject needing ministerial aid.’ Another incident on August first. ‘Deputy Patil responded to a motorist assist at the westbound rest area east of Temple. A wrecker was called for assistance, and Deputy Patil transported four people to a motel in Hensley.’ ”

  “Tell me, what is the matter?”

  “You have to ask? It’s this—” Benjamin folded the paper and shook it. “All of this. Livestock and lost travelers. This is how I spend my days.”

  “And I fiddle with test tube, and lecture freshman who take my chemistry class because they know my teaching assistants will grade them lightly.” Harish took off his silver-rimmed glasses and bent one bow before repositioning them on his nose. “We can trivialize all what we do. It does not change whether we do it well. You saved a life, nannubala. Do you not think the Lord put you in your job, in that field, for that reason?”

  “Okay, fine. I saved one unwanted child. But how many lives have I taken?”

  “You are angry.”

  “What was your first clue?”

  The waitress brought their food; she slid the plates from her brown plastic tray to the table without making eye contact and hurried away.

  Harish cut his baked potato down the center, and Benjamin watched his ritual. Butter pressed onto the back of the fork, painted over the entire white surface. Three shakes of salt over each half, then cut into fifteenths—four slices widthwise, two lengthwise. That was his father. Deliberate. Steady. Unmoving. No, unmoved. “Tell me, at whom are you so angry?”

  Everyone.

  Abbi, of course. Stephen, for getting himself killed and leaving Benjamin alone to deal with it all. Everyone who looked at him and thought he was fine. Everyone who looked at him and pitied him.

  And he was so, so angry with himself. He had no idea where that list began, or ended.

  Benjamin stabbed his overcooked carrots. “I don’t know.”

  “You have been in prayer, yes?”

  “No.”

  They ate, their eyes not traveling past the other’s chin. Harish diced his steak into polite bites. Benjamin hacked at the tough poultry, gnawing on chunks, working his jaw as he did as a teenager with braces, when he snuck Bubbalicious in the bathroom and chewed three or four pieces at a time. A thread of chicken lodged between his molars, and he tried to work it out with his tongue. It didn’t come loose. He dropped his knife and fork on the table and cupped his forehead in his hands, palms pressing into his eyes until he saw violet and blue and green blobs swirling behind his lids, and flashes of crackly white lightning.

  “This is your dark night of the soul,” his father said.

  Benjamin looked up, blinked until his vision cleared. “What did you say?”

  “ ‘Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved.’ ”

  “How do you—?”

  “Benjamin, Benjamin. Do you think honestly I would know nothing of what my son holds closest to him?” Harish slid his napkin under the lip of his dish. “You were seventeen, I believe, and you carried that book with you all the places you went. Always it was curled in your back pocket. What kind of father would I be if I failed to notice?”

  “You read it.”

  “The librarian laughed when I checked it out. In all my years at USD, I did not ever take anything from the library unrelated to the sciences. And not since.”

  “You read it,” Benjamin said again. He’d never doubted either of his parents would have worked their fingers to bloody nubs for him, even though the words “I love you” weren’t common—or uncommon—in his home. His father supported them. He came to all Benjamin’s spelling bees, debate matches, science fairs. He stood on the sidelines in November, shivering, while Benjamin played soccer, and played badly. All good parent things to do. But in that instant he saw the depth of his father’s love for him. The book. A book the man would never have glanced at on his own, but for his son he slogged through it, the archaic language, the poetry, the abstract theological musings he and his plain analytical faith had little use for. O God, this is the love I have for Silvia. Is your love for me really infinitely more than this?

  Why can’t I feel it?

  “Yes, Benjamin. I read it,” Harish said.

  “I’m sinking,” Benjamin said.

  “You cannot sink. Nothing can snatch you from His hand.”

  “What if I let go?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know I won’t. Neither do I.” Benjamin shredded his napkin. “Can we get out of here?”

  “Of course.”

  Harish folded the newspapers, tucked them under his arm and paid. The sun beat on the car, and when Benjamin got in he shivered from the heat, folded his arms behind his back. They pressed into the leather. It burned for a minute, and then his bare skin adjusted, and he closed his eyes so his father wouldn’t speak to him.

  He had found the book at a used bookstore, one not far from the college, a deceptively small storefront, but inside room after room after nook filled with all kinds of printed pages. He hadn’t been looking for anything in particular when he found the coverless paperback, picking it up because the title intrigued him. Dark Night of the Soul.

  He almost put it back when he read the author, St. John of the Cross, was some sort of mystic, and a Catholic at that, but when he skimmed the first line of the poem, it drew him in, and he had to read the entire book, to follow the journey of the
bride of Christ—the soul—to her love, the Lord himself. A journey through darkness to light. A journey home. But in no way an easy journey. In fact, there were times in the night where the soul was desolate, lost, and feeling completely disconnected from God.

  St. John pushed on during the blackness, coming out the other side with a refined faith, an intimate knowledge of the Divine. He saw struggle as a blessing, and Benjamin had prayed for his own dark night, wanting the kind of spiritual awakening St. John had experienced.

  Well, he had what he asked for. What a fool. He wondered if he’d make it out at all.

  Chapter TWENTY

  “Abbi. Abbi, where is your flour?”

  Slinging Silvia, she found Sangita cooking in the kitchen, her hair knotted at the base of her neck, flashing gold and green as she moved around the kitchen in her kurta with gilt embroidery, her red churidar tightly gathered at her ankles. A matching crimson dupatta draped across her shoulders. Abbi had only seen her dressed traditionally, but usually in a more casual cotton salwar kameez.

  Whatever she wore, it hadn’t been enough to keep her from feeling Benjamin’s bones through both their clothes. She’d seen Sangita wince as she hugged him earlier. The woman loved her son—maybe too much, if that was possible. Abbi didn’t know. Benjamin suffered from the opposite affliction she did. His parents heaped all their expectations on him; hers none at all.

  Harish and Sangita had never been anything but kind to her, but Abbi hadn’t been able to find her place with them. She felt as if Benjamin’s mother was always looking at her, wishing she was Maharashtrian, or at least a Republican. Benjamin, of course, told her she was being ridiculous. Whether she was or not, she needed Sangita now, to help her figure out how to help Benjamin.

  “You wanted flour?” Abbi said. “It’s right up here.”

  “I see that flour. It is darker than I need. You have white?”

  “I have spelt in the basement. It’s close in texture to all-purpose.”

  She brought the glass jar up from her cellar pantry, and Sangita screwed off the lid, rubbed the flour between thumb and forefinger. “Is good.”

  “Good. Is there something I can do?” Abbi asked.

  Sangita kept her sleek head bent as she kneaded dough for naan. “You hold that baby too much.”

  “Maybe chop something? I can’t mess that up.”

  “Thank you to ask, but I not need help.”

  “Ben does.”

  The woman made a dry, barking sound, clearing only air from her throat.

  “Sangita, please. I know you don’t like to talk about things, but you’re his mother. And I don’t know what to do for him.” Abbi sighed, shook her head. “I love him.”

  The woman slapped the dough into a disc. “Benjamin go always his own way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He do what he do. That job. That army. You. He have his own mind.”

  “Okay, fine. But what am I supposed to do?”

  “You cook. You wash clothes. You pray.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You are only a wife. You cannot make a husband do what they not think themselves of doing. That is how it is.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not watching him disappear a little more each day.”

  Sangita turned, looked at Abbi. “Not easy,” she said, tapping three fingers just beneath her collarbone on the left side of her chest, her hand fanned out like a star. Her heart. “Not easy at all. I hear in his voice when he calls. My boy is in much pain. I know it.”

  “I know it, too. That’s why there has to be something else,” Abbi said, petulant, like a child who finds only a package of underwear after tearing through the wrapping of her birthday present.

  “If there is, I have not an idea.” Sangita poured a few scattered drops of oil into a bowl, swirled it to coat the sides. She dropped the ball of dough into it and covered it with a plain white dishcloth. “You hold that baby too much.”

  Abbi sighed. Conversation over. “How long until dinner?”

  “Always we eat at five.”

  “I’m going to go take a walk, get Silvia out for some air. Do you want to come?”

  “Nako.”

  “That’s a no, right?”

  Sangita nodded once, wiping her just-washed hands on her apron. She reached out, touched Abbi’s sleeve. “Kanyaratna, I know what it is like to be part of hard marriage. But Benjamin, he is not hard man. Have thanks for that.”

  Abbi shook her head. “Ben always told me you and Harish—”

  “Not Harish. My first marriages. They were to . . . hard men.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. These things make me what I am. Make me look not to men but to God. Is good, and is past.” She lifted the pot’s lid, stirred. “I make amti bhaat bhaji.”

  Lentil dal, rice and vegetable. “My favorite,” Abbi said.

  “I know it.”

  She pondered Sangita’s words as she walked with Silvia, unhappy with the advice. She wasn’t a sit-and-do-nothing type person. Her initial instinct was always to act, then consider the consequences. Benjamin liked to talk first. She wished he’d open his mouth and tell her what happened in Afghanistan, but she figured she’d lost that privilege, to be in that part of his life.

  Others wondered, when they first married, how a soldier and a pacifist could live beneath the same roof of their tiny loft apartment. But Benjamin wasn’t really a soldier then, and she a pacifist in name only. He went off to shoot at things one weekend a month, coming home afterward to shower away the smell of mock combat, wash and roll his fatigues into a bag he kept in the trunk of his car until the next training exercise. And she spouted the flaws of the just-war theory and “blessed are the peacemakers” from a comfy armchair at the coffee shop two blocks from the college. Neither thought they’d be forced to become who they said they were.

  And then the war started.

  For two years they waited for Benjamin’s deployment, knowing it would happen. After he left, Abbi drove three hours every Tuesday to Vermillion to stand on the corner of Cherry and Pine with a smattering of college kids and retired professionals, carrying a red tagboard sign reading What Would Jesus Bomb? on one side and Peace Takes Brains on the other.

  When the local newspaper learned she was a soldier’s wife, they asked to profile her, and she agreed, not taking a moment to consider Benjamin’s feelings. Or anyone else’s.

  She didn’t tell Lauren about the story, and when her friend saw it, glaring above the front-page fold of Sunday’s thick edition, she met Abbi in the church parking lot and dumped the newsprint pages on her feet. Sale circulars cartwheeled across the gravel, glossy full-color tumbleweeds.

  “This isn’t helping them,” Lauren shouted, and then hugged her fiercely, fingers digging into her upper arms. “You’re not the only one who wants them home.”

  Abbi knew she wasn’t. One weekend she traveled to a protest in Washington, D.C., stood shoulder to shoulder with wives and girlfriends and sisters. Mothers. Daughters. So close she smelled their angry breath—some coffee-coated, some fruity, some tinged with nicotine or alcohol—as they shouted their pain to anyone who would listen. They used blame as their balm of Gilead, their way to keep from going mad, to make sense of the empty pillow next to them, the unused car keys hanging beside the front door. It helped—some.

  People were supportive of her, for the most part. A few—like the neighborhood egg lady, Marie Vilhauser—believed Abbi’s pacifism betrayed not only Benjamin and the other soldiers, but America, and Jesus himself, but the rest came alongside her and, despite their disagreeing beliefs, worked hard to see her as Abbi and not as that left-wing commie liberal.

  She, however, was less than charitable toward them, becoming distant and snappish. She hated that they carried on with their farming, and shopping, and whatever else they did, maybe offering up a prayer on Thursdays and Sundays for Benjamin’s safety, but otherwise totally
unaffected by the happenings on the other side of the globe. They turned off their televisions, but it was in her living room, her bedroom, her heart every single moment of every single day.

  By the time Benjamin returned home, she had wedged the war between her and everyone else. And now, as she tried to retrace her steps, to mend the holes she had poked through her relationships, a tired embarrassment kept her from fully reconciling. She just was too ashamed of her behavior. Self-loathing, she was good at. Apologizing, not so much.

  Silvia’s cries pierced Abbi’s thoughts, and she jogged home, the bouncing calming the cranky baby. Benjamin sat on the front steps, waiting for her. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You spent the afternoon with my mother. Alone.”

  “She’s hungry,” Abbi said.

  He took the baby. “I’ll go feed her.”

  “Ben, wait,” she said. “What does kanyaratna mean?”

  “Daughter. But in an endearing way, like saying “she’s a gem.” Mom called you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You must have done something right, then.”

  “That’s a change.” She smoothed Silvia’s hair. “Are you okay?”

  They stood close, only the baby separating them. Benjamin touched Silvia’s head, too, but avoided Abbi’s fingers. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he said. “I’ll see you inside.”

  She was exhausted from the short weekend visit, mentally more than physically, and Sunday night she flopped back on the bed with a sigh, her feet still on the floor. She listened to Benjamin rattling through the refrigerator, the cabinets. His parents had left after church, a small blessing that they decided not to stay for lunch. Abbi had spent the afternoon and evening in her studio, coming in only when the dim light gave her a headache.

  The phone rang.

  “Abbi, you getting that?” Benjamin called, but she ignored him. The answering machine kicked on, and she heard a voice through the walls, then Benjamin said, “Hello. Wait, hold on. You there?” He carried the cordless receiver into the bedroom, held it out to her. “It’s for you.”