“Genelise?” Abbi asked. No one else called her.
“My mother.”
“Why are you giving me the phone?”
“She wants to talk to you.”
Abbi sat up, took the phone. “Um, hello?”
Benjamin stared at her.
“We need to pray. Now, for Benjamin. We pray every day together,”
Sangita said.
“Okay, I guess.”
Benjamin still hadn’t left the room. He changed out of his clothes, slowly, listening.
“He there. You listen. Tomorrow I call in the morning.”
“That would be better.”
“Now, you listen.” Sangita prayed for her son in a Marathi-English hybrid. Abbi had difficulty understanding the words, but her spirit knew. She closed her eyes until her mother-in-law said, “Amen. Okay, I call tomorrow. Good night.”
“Bye.” Abbi pressed the Off button. “Here.” She tossed Benjamin the phone and fell back onto the mattress again.
“You didn’t say much,” he said.
“You know your mother.”
“What did she want?”
“To pray,” she said, and then added, “for you.”
Benjamin got an odd, crumbly look on his face; he blinked rapidly and then shut his eyes, took a stilted breath. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m your wife. That’s my job.”
“Job,” he mumbled. “Yeah.”
“That’s not how I—”
“It’s okay, really. Trust me, I know I’m lucky to have that much.” He climbed into bed, removed his socks beneath the sheet, balling them and leaving them on the nightstand for the morning. “You coming to bed?”
She nodded. “After I change Silvia.”
“Good night,” Benjamin said, and turned out the light.
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
He’d knocked on every door in Beck County. No one knew where Silvia had come from. Benjamin didn’t know if he should be relieved or not, didn’t want to think about it. Today was one of the hard days, like the ones he had before Silvia, when he had to hide from people so they wouldn’t see him struggling. He straddled the ravine between a civilian’s life and a soldier’s, curling the toes he had left into the earth on either side to keep his balance. But the banks of the ravine kept moving, wide at some points, narrow at others. On the easy days there was hardly a crack between the banks. Today the ravine was so wide, his legs wouldn’t stretch any farther. The doctor said the new medication would help—she wrote him a prescription the day Abbi went to that mothers’ meeting—and it had, until he’d gone into Dunkin’ Donuts this morning for a coffee and bear claw, and the television mounted in the corner showed scenes from Afghanistan.
He’d swallowed the war whole, and then came home and started regurgitating up pieces. He moved his desk into the corner so his back wouldn’t be exposed, and found himself always positioned by doors, just in case. He swerved around trash on the side of the road. He replayed combat scenarios in his head over and over, searching for alternative outcomes. But no matter how many times he watched and rewound, the end stayed the same. Stephen dead; him looking on, helpless. If he’d acted with honor, he’d be dead, too.
I should be.
Benjamin checked into the office. Roubideau looked him over. “We tracked down the McClure girl,” the sheriff said. “With a friend or a friend’s cousin over in Aberdeen. Holbach’s on his way to pick her up.”
“And?”
“She’s not the one who left the kid, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“But she ran.”
“Seems the Grant girl was tellin’ the truth, or some bit of it. Rebecka McClure did find herself pregnant back earlier this year. But she terminated. Left town ’cause she got scared about her parents finding out.”
“They must know now.”
“If they do, it wasn’t from us.”
“Rebecka McClure is just sixteen,” Benjamin said.
“Don’t I know it.” Roubideau squinted at him again. “Take the rest of the day off. You look like you need it. That kid still keeping you up nights?”
Benjamin nodded.
“Better you than me.”
“That’s why you never had children.”
The sheriff chuckled. “Or a wife, for that matter. Or a goldfish. Too much trouble for me. I got all I need with this job.”
Instead of going home, Benjamin went to the library, and the books welcomed him. He hadn’t been born a reader. As a child, his parents assumed he would follow his father into the sciences, and he thought the same because they did. But they didn’t know such things—titrations and quadratics and dissections—didn’t come easy for him. He excelled because he worked harder than anyone else, the pages in his loose-leaf binder constantly reinforced with white donuts of gummed paper and smudged with graphite marks. And his father patted his hair and brought home back issues of Biomacromolecules and Organometallics, which Benjamin faithfully slogged through, dizzy with jargon by the time he finished. He never allowed himself to consider he hadn’t an interest in any of it.
When he was fifteen, he had to read The Great Gatsby for English class. Mrs. Grace dropped a pile of thin books on each of the front desks, and the students passed them over their shoulders with groans and protests. Benjamin ran his hand over the cover. Bigger than the shiny pocket-paperback size, and matte, and bound tight, it was the first brand-new book, without a crease or sticky fingerprint, he’d ever received in school.
He opened the book wide enough to see the words, but not so wide as to damage the spine, and he read.
After that, he always kept a book with him. Sometimes he read at night with a flashlight, and when the batteries died, he left his bedroom door open so the light from the hall bathroom fell on the end of his bed, and he’d put his feet on his pillow and squint at the type. Other times he’d hide the book between his legs, beneath his desk during history, and Mr. Scott ignored him as long as he scored nineties on his quizzes.
His father said science tied people together—everyone had the same cellular components, the same DNA—but books, Benjamin thought, formed tighter, more intimate connections. He walked the mall, the campus, the airport, looking at those who passed, trying to decipher the words within the person. Which words did they share? Had that mother comforting her crying toddler read Anna Karenina? Did The Count of Monte Cristo stand sentry on the bookshelf of the businessman in the food line, the one whose shirt poked through his pants zipper and who still had a ball of toilet tissue stuck to his face, below his ear, where his razor cut him? What about titans of the past—presidents and kings and explorers? What books had they experienced along with him, an insignificant Desi boy who still forgot to throw his dirty clothes in the hamper?
Now he read to fill his head with other things, the words and plots shoving out the past, for a moment at least. He couldn’t read and think at the same time.
The library, recently remodeled, had three restrooms—the men’s and women’s near the circulation desk, and a small bathroom in a back corner. It was there he read; he felt safe in the cramped space. Rarely did anyone come to use that bathroom, and if the doorknob rattled and a knock came, he said, “One minute,” hiding his books beneath his shirt and exiting to sit at the table near the door until the room was free again.
He took two books—a John Grisham novel and a nonfiction one about money management he grabbed from the To Be Reshelved pile— back there now, and locked the bathroom door. His first thought was the same thought he had every time he was in there—What was the designer thinking? The top half of the walls were built with some sort of modern brick, white and full of holes, most of which were now plugged with pen caps and chewing gum, cigarette butts, and tubes of rolled paper. He had fished one of those papers out once, using the tweezers from the Swiss Army knife on his key ring. I want to die, it had read.
He hadn’t looked at another.
The hardcover in his lap wore a clear plastic w
rap. It crinkled as he opened it, and he played the Who Read This Last? game, looking for clues in the pages. Sometimes it was a certain perfume, and he wondered if it was an old lady’s scent or a young woman’s. Other times it was cheesy fingerprints marching in the margins, some snack-food junkie. Today he found scribbles. Dozens of stray pencil marks. He stared at them, imagined them beginning to move. It looked like a person. Like Stephen.
Hey, the doodle man said.
Why won’t you leave me alone? Benjamin thought.
I’m not asking to be here.
Then go away.
Man, you got it all wrong. You won’t let me go.
Benjamin blinked. I killed you.
Nah, I was dead already.
No. I heard you screaming. I saw you. Your eyes were open; they were right on me. And I . . . Oh, God, I didn’t move.
You were scared.
A soldier isn’t allowed to be scared.
You’re not a soldier anymore.
Shut up, Benjamin thought, and slammed the book closed. He washed his face and looked in the mirror. He needed to run the clippers over his hair; it was longer now, furry almost. He liked to keep it short, rough, like a cat’s tongue. “Get it together, Ben,” he said. He knew Stephen wasn’t there, that he was talking to himself. He did it anyway.
He dumped the books on the windowsill next to the bathroom door and got in his car. He couldn’t go home, not feeling the way he did. He thought of Silvia; she wouldn’t know if he didn’t go home tonight. She didn’t need him. Someone, yes. A warm body to feed and clothe and cuddle her. But any arms could do that. Abbi’s, another foster family three counties away, whoever. It didn’t matter that he found her; she was nothing to him.
He’d seen pieces of dead children in Afghanistan, after the detonation of suicide bombs or IEDs. And that boy, about eleven, who’d walked by near the end of a firefight. He stepped over the body of an insurgent and hesitated, his foot against the man’s AKM assault rifle.
Don’t touch it. Just keep walking, Benjamin had thought. Oh, Jesus, please let him keep walking. And Stephen, beside him, had whispered, “Don’t pick it up, kid.” But the boy bent down, wrapped his dusty hand around the barrel, and then jerked backward, hit by a smattering of gunfire, falling onto the dead insurgent.
Somehow, Silvia had become matted into his war, a sweet, bright face in the tangle of sand and smoke, the one who made it, despite being left to suffocate in a grocery sack. The one he’d found, and saved.
He ordered battered fish, fries, and a Dr. Pepper at Phil’s, took the food to his car and picked at the meal. He hated the bouncing up and down, the mood swings. They controlled him.
After listening to some ball game for a while, he went back to the county building, to the familiar confines of the holding cell. It was where he belonged, alone. He sat with his head in his hands, in his undershirt, his bare feet on the floor, and heard the office door open. Benjamin didn’t move. Where could he go?
Footsteps, and then, “Come home.”
He lifted his head. Abbi stood there, in the doorway of the cell, Silvia asleep in the car seat hanging against her thigh. She set the baby on the floor.
“The door . . . I locked it. I know I did,” he said.
Abbi held a ring up, jingling it at eye level, two silver keys twitching. “Your spares. From the junk drawer.”
“How did you—?”
“I drove around looking for you the first few times you didn’t come home. And other times, when I couldn’t sleep. You were always here.” She stepped toward him, her feet in sandals; she’d wear them until the first snow, or the second. When she reached him, she took his head in her hands, fingers touching at the nape of his neck, and rubbed her thumbs along the rims of his ears. She always teased him about the ripples in the cartilage, saying it looked like little mice had nibbled on them while he slept.
“Come home,” she said again.
“Abbi.”
“Silvia and I, we need you.”
“You don’t need anyone.”
She didn’t. She was like the sunflowers he occasionally saw while driving down I-90, not on the side of the road but in it, the only bloom for miles, growing from a crack in the pavement, thriving despite the heat and fumes.
“How can you say that?” Abbi asked.
“It’s true.”
“Ben, I’m a train wreck.”
“Stop.”
“I am. But I’m worse without you.” She sighed. “And I’ve been without you for a long time. Too long.”
He pulled her close, face pressed into her belly. Abbi squeezed tighter, arms around his head; she bent down and kissed his hair, his forehead, his nose. “Come on. I’ll follow you,” she whispered.
He slipped on his shirt and shoes, stuffed his socks in his back pants pocket, and smoothed the blanket on the bunk. He drove home, Abbi’s headlights behind him, and when they pulled into the driveway he took Silvia’s seat from the car and brought her inside.
They stumbled against each other and, leaving Silvia strapped in the carrier near the sofa, they found the bed and made love, awkwardly and still dressed. Afterward, they untangled their jeans and dumped their clothes over the side of the mattress, and lay on top of the sheet, legs scissored together, her face in his neck, her arm across his chest, their fingers twined. Then Silvia began crying, and Benjamin said, “I’ll get her.”
Abbi slipped beneath the blanket, and he returned with the baby, bottle in her mouth. Silvia finished the formula, and he burped her, rocking her and singing until she fell asleep. Instead of moving her to the crib, he tucked her into the bed between them, no longer a stone buffer but an anchor, holding him and Abbi steady through the storm.
They floundered in the morning, not uncomfortable but clumsy, like grade-schoolers with crushes, pulling hair and kicking each other under the lunch table. They sat across from each other, Benjamin sneaking glances at his wife through the steam floating above his coffee mug, each one longer, until their eyes met and he smiled quietly. Looked into the black liquid, and then back up at Abbi, waiting for her to look up at him. He liked how her eyes felt on him.
He had no idea where to go from there, with Abbi. She seemed nervous and unsure, too, tapping her grapefruit spoon on the edge of the plate. Twice she stretched her hand out, her fingers as long as she could make them until they nearly touched his. Both times she hesitated, then picked up her glass instead.
“Any plans for the day?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Not really. No. You?”
“Work, obviously. Then home.”
“For dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he said, standing. He leaned across the table, his body stopping and starting, stopping and starting as he went in for a kiss. Their lips touched, flattening like pillows—soft, clean, flannel-cased pillows. “I’ll be home before six.”
She looked at him now, and he held her gaze. It was the longest they’d seen each other, and her eyes said she wanted to trust him, but didn’t. He knew the feeling. His eyes probably said the same thing.
He waited until school was over, drove to Matthew’s home. Inside the apartment he heard shouting, and the door flew open with a “What?” from an overweight teenaged girl. She stared up, and he noticed an eruption of pimples in the center of her forehead. She’d tried to conceal them, but the makeup had crumbled away sometime during the school day, and now they peered out at him, seven fiery mounds with white eyes.
The girl seemed nervous; her fist tightened on the doorknob, skin thinning over her knuckles, and she swallowed, saying, “I didn’t know you were a deputy.”
“I’m looking for Matthew Savoie.”
She blinked. “Matty?”
“Is he here?”
“Skye, you trying to cool the neighborhood? Close the darn door already. I—” The woman stopped next to the girl. She grabbed a handful of hair at the back of her neck, lifted it into the air and let
it fall. Again. And tossed her head. “Oh, Deputy, can I help you with something?”
“I’m looking for your nephew.”
“Is there some sort of problem?”
“No, no problem. I just need to speak with him for a moment.”
“He’s at dialysis now. Won’t be home until eight-ish.”
“Dialysis?” Abbi hadn’t told him the boy was sick. Did she know?
“There’s a center in Hollings.”
“Thanks for your time, Ms. Benson.”
“Why don’t you leave your number, and I’ll have him get back to you,” the woman said. She tugged at the bottom of her shirt, pulling the neckline down to reveal more cleavage. Beside her, the girl snorted and rolled her eyes, fading back into the apartment.
He scratched his chin—rubbed it, really, his palm flat against the pointy bone, his wedding ring clearly visible. “It’s fine. I’ll just take a ride over to see him now.”
At the dialysis center, a nurse pointed to Matthew, eyes closed in a recliner-type chair, two thin tubes snaking from his arm. Benjamin wheeled a small stool beside the boy’s station and waited, unsure if he was asleep or resting but not wanting to disturb him. And to check, Benjamin would have had to touch him. He felt oddly discomfited doing that; a touch meant more to him than to most people.
A book tented on the boy’s lap—something about the seven most famous unsolved mathematics proofs of the millennium. Benjamin shifted on the stool, listening to the hissing and whistles in the room. At one time, he would have prayed in stretches like this, in the waiting. Stephen told him he was better at the empty moments than anyone else, and there had been many of those in the desert. The other guys had played cards and had spitting contests, pocking the sand with foamy blobs of saliva and mucus and Skoal. They had drunk vodka colored blue and shipped in mouthwash bottles by Sergeant Wilkinson’s mother. Or they’d complained—about what they missed from home, about what they wouldn’t miss from Afghanistan.
Watch Over Me Page 14