He had to believe she wanted to be a better mother, but couldn’t.
The sidewalks leading to the emergency room were dusty gray and still ridged with newness. There were prints in the cement, leaf fossils, oblong and pointed at the ends. They must have fallen from the trees lining the path onto the still-wet concrete. Not many, one or two per rectangular slab, but Matthew noticed them because he was looking down rather than ahead. He felt the sting of loneliness. If something should happen to him, who would feel it?
Lacie, of course, for a while. But her attachment to him was like a child’s to a pet gerbil, passionate while the thing lived, weeping during the shoebox funeral in the backyard, then rapidly fading as something new—a guinea pig, a first crush—came along. None of his other cousins, nor his aunt. Not his mother. He was only a blip, a point on an infinite plane. No one would miss him. He knew it but kept putting one foot in front of the other, moving through each day, clutching at his numbers and his Lord, telling himself he needed nothing else.
Three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven five zero . . .
Inside the hospital, Benjamin explained the situation to the woman at the reception desk. He talked with his hand, gesturing, raking his fingernails over the top of his head. “Do you have your insurance card?” he asked Matthew.
My wallet is home.
The receptionist entered Matthew’s information into the computer from the page he wrote it on, and told them to sit and wait. “He would have gotten in quicker if he’d gone by ambulance,” he said to Abbi, perhaps forgetting Matthew would see his words.
“This is better,” Abbi replied, touching Matthew’s knee.
He looked at her and a smile twitched at one corner of his mouth.
Abbi plucked the pad and pen from his hand. You can have the money for your trip. We’ll give it to you.
Matthew mouthed, No, shaking his head.
“Yes,” Abbi said. “I’m not saying you can’t come back and work. But if you can’t . . . If the doctor says you can’t, I mean, then Ben and I will give it to you. We want to. No one should miss their senior trip. It’s your only one, you know.”
He shrugged and nodded a little, and she said, “Good, it’s settled.” And she reached one arm around his shoulder, pressed her other hand against the side of his head and pulled him into her, kissing him on his hair, above his ear. Then she stood and took the deputy’s phone from his belt. “I’m calling Janet. How long do you think we’ll be here?”
Matthew tapped her shoulder. I can wait by myself.
“No, no. I’m just worried she might need more diapers or something. Ben, did you leave the front door open?”
“Sorry. I locked it. Habit.”
“There’s still a key in the shed, though. Right?”
“On the beam to the left of the door.”
She dialed, wandering around the corner. When she came back, she again sat next to Matthew. This time, he touched her hand. She squeezed back, and didn’t let go.
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
After showering and dressing, Benjamin kissed Silvia on the top of the head and said good-bye to Abbi. “Maybe we can go out to dinner after work.”
“A date?” Abbi asked.
“Nah,” Benjamin said. “I’m just tired of tofu.”
He drove to the county building, and before he managed to get inside, Wesley came out. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“The school. Something to do with your case. I’ll drive.”
Inside a classroom adjacent to the front entrance, a teacher was hanging a glittery Welcome Students banner on a pocked bulletin board. A preschool staff day. Benjamin touched the brim of his hat; the woman nodded back.
The principal was waiting for them. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Benjamin asked.
“In the technology lab,” she said, walking briskly down the hall. The deputies followed her into a room with fifteen computers. “One of the students was looking for a Web site she visited a few weeks ago and found something, well, disturbing in the browser’s history.”
“Which was?” Wesley asked.
“I should show you.” She clicked on a window and it opened. “Three weeks ago. Someone was in here looking at this.”
Benjamin scanned the page, a newspaper article dated two years ago, about a teenaged mother who left her newborn in a Nevada McDonald’s restroom. “There must be more, if you called us.”
“Six sites, all about girls abandoning their babies, five of them having to do with sentencing. Plus sites with Baby Moses law information, state law sites.” The principal sighed. “It’s one of our girls.”
“The computers are password protected?” Benjamin asked.
“Well, yes. But I’m sure the student who found this wasn’t pregnant. Kids tell each other their log-in information, write it in the covers of their notebooks. You know. They’re kids.”
“We’ll need a list of everyone who’s used the computers recently,” Wesley said.
She handed him two sheets of paper. “Already done. There’s a list with those who have logged in during the past month, and also a list of those who have signed in at the door saying they’re here to use the lab. But there’s no guarantee she’s on here. Students let their friends in at other entrances. People are in and out. Doors are unlocked all day. It’s summer. Things just aren’t monitored as closely.”
“You checked out all the pregnancy rumors,” Benjamin said to Wesley. “There wasn’t anything on any of them?”
“It had to be someone who hid it,” Wesley said, his monster shoulders heaving up and down.
“Karen, were there any girls who suddenly started wearing baggy clothes, or seemed to gain weight quickly?”
The principal shook her head. “Not that I noticed. I can check again with Pam. And Tina. As guidance counselor and nurse, they’d hear more of it than anyone.”
“I was hoping . . .” Benjamin rubbed the back of his head. Velcro, he thought. He needed a haircut. “I really thought it was someone not from around here.”
“Keep your ear to the ground,” Wesley said to Karen. “Teachers, too. Can’t imagine a secret like this staying bottled up for too long. Especially with school starting in a couple of days.”
“I’ll call if I hear anything,” she said.
Without speaking, the two men walked down the hallway, Benjamin running his hand over the shiny metal handles protruding from the blue lockers—empty now, but on Wednesday they’d be filled with books, decorated with photos and stickers, a multitude of teenaged angst padlocked away. Wesley waved at the main office secretary on the way out the door, and as he climbed into the Durango, said, “This will get around. Someone will talk.”
“Whoever she is, she’s feeling remorse,” Benjamin said. “If she didn’t care, she wouldn’t be looking at all that.”
“Unless she thinks she’s about to get caught,” Wesley said. “And it could be the father checking things out, not the mother.”
“I hate this. Now every time I see a kid, I’ll wonder, Did she do it? Did he?” Benjamin counted the names on the lists. “I’ll divvy these up between the three of us. Holbach will take some. There are no addresses, though. We’ll have to get those from Karen.”
“You hungry?”
“It’s barely noon.”
“I didn’t have breakfast,” Wesley said. “Like salmon stew?”
“No.”
“I do,” Wesley said, and he turned left, then right, then right again and pulled into his driveway. “Renée makes it twice a week.”
Inside, Wesley filled two bright turquoise dishes with the leftovers, stuck them in the microwave one at a time. He dropped a bargainsized bottle of ketchup on the table along with a jumble of flatware and napkins. “Water okay?”
“Whatever.”
“
Ignore the blue plates. Reenie read some article says blue plates make you eat less. Ugly as dirt, but she had to have ’em. Says she lost ten pounds since she got ’em. I don’t see a difference.” Wesley stripped off his uniform shirt, hung it on the back of his chair. He sat in front of his meal in his undershirt. “I’m a slob when I eat. I know it. Can’t keep food off myself to save my life.”
Wesley paused—giving thanks, maybe—before stabbing a hunk of fish and chewing it. He shook on salt, garlic powder, and stirred. Then he squeezed ketchup over the plate, threads of red zigzagging across the potatoes and celery. Like blood. He whipped it all together. “Eat, eat,” he said.
Benjamin tried a carrot, not chewing but mashing it with his tongue against the roof of his mouth before swallowing. He sprinkled on some salt, too.
“I know,” Wesley said. “I love her, but my wife loves her stuff bland as bread. Still great, though.”
“Wes, did you . . . kill anyone?”
Wesley wiped his mouth. “Not exactly mealtime conversation.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Wesley’s stew, the ketchup mixed with the gravy, all muddied and brown. Like Stephen’s blood in the sand. “Me, too.”
“That’s war.”
“How can you be so cavalier?”
“I choose not to think about it.”
“Because you don’t, or because you don’t want to?”
“Ain’t no difference.”
“It’s a lot different, Wes. Either it just doesn’t come to mind, or you fight to keep it out of your head.”
“You’re trying too hard to figure it all out. Leave it be. Whoever is dead, is dead. Whoever’s living . . . Well, you got it. That’s just the way it is.”
Benjamin poked at his stew, fork scraping against the dish. “How many?”
“Don’t know,” Wesley said, his broad shoulders moving up and down.
“Honest.”
“As the day is long. Not like I counted. I got off thousands of rounds and watched dozens of men fall. My bullet, someone else’s. Don’t matter.”
“I know who I killed.”
“You know their names? Birthdays? Favorite colors?” Wesley wiped his mouth. “You don’t know a darn thing.”
“I know his face,” Benjamin said. “The first one. We were in the street in Kabul, and he looked at me, and he was terrified of dying. I saw it, clear as daylight. He looked at me like, ‘What am I doing here?’ and I thought the same exact thing. ‘What am I doing here, with my gun pointed at some stupid kid?’ He was a kid—just had this fuzz on his lip, couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Then he reached for his weapon and I shot him.”
His finger twitched with the memory, and he grabbed one hand in the other, squeezed. Just a little pressure and bam. That’s all, folks. He was there in a bright red puddle with half his skull imbedded in the wall behind him, and I’m feeling like the big man. Oh yeah. All righty.
Until later, when the adrenaline had sweat out, and it grew quiet and dark, and the springs of his cot squawked beneath the weight of his guilt each time he moved. And he did too much moving that night, and the nights after, flopping from back to stomach, knowing some mother would be waiting forever for her boy to come home. He hadn’t realized it would be so hard, when ideologies turned to people, and people bled.
“So, what are you saying? You wish you never went over there? Wish you were never a soldier at all?”
Benjamin couldn’t say that. If he did, it would be admitting the futility of it all—Stephen, his foot, his decaying marriage, that dead boy, those bodies he unloaded. All of it for nothing. “No.”
“Then stop your complaining and start living.”
“It’s not that easy.”
Wesley plucked a fleck of fish from his undershirt. “I know.”
Abbi wore a dress, the one he liked, the one she bought when they first married, beige with a bold fern design and sleeveless, swishing just above her knee. It tied at the side, as if it wrapped around her; but it didn’t really, he knew. He had tried to open it that way once.
Abbi laughed at his confusion when the dress didn’t fall off, and said, “It’s a faux wrap dress. Faux being the operative word.”
He pouted. “How am I supposed to get you out of it, then?”
“Try the zipper,” she had told him.
He smiled tenderly now, watched her with a toothbrush hanging from her mouth, filling baby bottles. She said, “I’m almost ready,” through the white foam, and scooted down the hallway. He followed her to the bathroom. She spat, rinsed. “What are you grinning at?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Well, stop it. You’re making me paranoid. Go get the baby.”
Benjamin strapped Silvia into the detachable car seat and dangled a plush monkey above her. “One little monkey jumping on the bed. She fell off and bumped her head. Mama called the doctor and the doctor said, ‘No more monkeys jumping on the bed.’ ” He bent down to her, wriggled his face against her belly, dotted her bare legs with kisses. “Are you my little monkey? You are. You’re Daddy’s little monkey.” She giggled and kicked him in the eye.
“I’m ready,” Abbi said, tugging a green sweater over her dress. A jade donut-shaped pendant hung on a cord around her neck; his eyes slipped down from the necklace over her body, down her legs, to the knots of muscle balled in each calf, more pronounced by her hemp platform sandals. Her skin glistened, and he smelled melons. Sweet, sugary melons.
“You shaved,” he said.
“You like it.”
They took the Volvo, and Abbi drove. They ended up in a tourist town, the main attraction a neo-Moorish building covered in ears of colored corn and other grains that created themed murals. “Want to stop at the Corn Palace?” Benjamin said as they passed. “Silvia’s first tourist trap.”
Abbi rolled her eyes.
“Just asking.”
He carried the baby into a Chinese restaurant, and he and Abbi took turns sitting with her as the other plated their food at the buffet. They ate for several minutes in silence, then Benjamin said, “We had a bit of a break in the case today,” and he told her what he could while she listened, twirling lo mein on her fork.
“What does it mean?” she asked finally.
“That at least one of Silvia’s parents goes to school in Temple. Or maybe someone who knows who her parents are. Most likely it’s the mother, though.”
“Poor girl.”
“I know you didn’t just say what I thought you said.”
Abbi sipped her iced tea through a straw. “I did.”
“Look at that child on the bench next to you. How can you even—?”
“Because I do. Have you even considered how scared and confused this girl must have been to do what she did?”
“Or maybe she just wanted to get rid of her kid. You hear about teenagers at their proms, giving birth in a toilet stall and dumping the babies in the trash before going back out and partying.”
“Which is my point. What healthy, sane person thinks no one will find a newborn in a school bathroom?”
“And if Simon Wayne hadn’t been trying to make out with his girlfriend, no one would’ve found Silvia. She’d be dead, Abbi. It was just dumb—”
“Don’t you dare say luck.”
Benjamin swished his soda. “Your problem is you think everyone is basically good.”
“No,” Abbi said, “I think we all bear God’s image. It’s not the same thing, but it’s why I try to give people the benefit of the doubt.”
He’d forgotten how to do that, trust people first and think later.
A man who did that in a war got his head blown off. “You’re such a bleeding heart. Let’s just gather for a big ol’ group hug and the world will be a better place.”
“Not a bad idea,” she said, and she laughed. “Remember our first date?”
“That vegetarian place. Gag. You made me eat wheat meat.”
“
I didn’t make you do anything, Benjamin Patil. You choked that down all by your little lonesome. And, if I remember correctly, it was your idea to take me there.”
“To impress you. It didn’t work. We argued the whole meal.”
“Like this,” she said.
A grin pulled at one corner of his mouth. “Yeah. Like this.”
“And I did come back for more.”
“Masochist.”
“Takes one to know one.”
The waitress appeared, gathering their dirty plates. “You finish?” she asked. They both nodded, and she slipped the check onto the table, two fortune cookies on top. Benjamin held one out to Abbi, the plastic wrapper crinkling as she took it from his hand, her fingers gliding over his wrist and palm. “You first,” she said.
He cracked his cookie open, like an egg, on the side of the table.
“ ‘You display the wonderful traits of charm and courtesy.’ ”
“They obviously haven’t lived with you lately.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry,” Abbi said quickly. “I didn’t—”
“No, I deserved that.” He yanked a napkin from the metal dispenser, swept the crumbs and greasy bits of fried rice onto the carpet. “I am trying.”
“I know. I am, too. I think I am, anyway. Sometimes.” She sipped her drink again, now watery from the melted ice, wrinkled her nose. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait. Your fortune.”
Abbi ripped open the wrapper and broke her cookie into two neat halves. Read the slip of paper.
“Come on. I told you mine,” Benjamin prodded. “What’s it say?”
She looked at him. “I love you.”
The words hung there between the clattering silverware and jumbled conversations around them. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d said that to him, or he to her. And he couldn’t remember why he’d stopped saying it. But it was back now, fluttering like an exotic bird, one everyone had thought extinct but was really only hidden in the thick, dark canopy of angry words and bruised hopes.
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