He stood, an odd, light feeling in his stomach. Happiness? It could be. “Now I think we can go.”
“You drive,” she said, and tucked the fortune in the diaper bag.
“Hey. What’s it really say?”
“I told you.”
Benjamin inserted the car seat into its base, started the car. He touched Abbi’s smooth knee, beneath her dress. “Thank you. For trying.”
“It’s not much.”
“Yes it is,” he said. “I love you, too.”
Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
There was a knock on the door, and this time it didn’t seem out of the ordinary to Abbi. People had been knocking for weeks—neighbors, church ladies, co-workers from the grocery or her time substitute teaching—all coming to see Silvia. At first Abbi took the meals they offered and, with some excuse about nap time or bottle time, closed the door, leaving them hovering on the patio. The food stopped but the visits didn’t, so she started inviting people in. They held Silvia and between uneasy silences asked the requisite baby questions—“Is she a good baby for you?” “How long is she sleeping at night?”—until eventually words ran out and the guests excused themselves to run to the market, or the hairdresser, or get home to grab the kids off the bus.
Still, they came back. The conversations grew longer and the silences nearly disappeared, and Abbi began to realize this baby that someone didn’t want was closing not only the wounds between her and Benjamin, but between her and the town.
“I’m coming,” Abbi called as the knock came again. Marie Vilhauser, she guessed. The old crone has been coming by every few days with a small basket of eggs. For the baby. “You go ahead and shake up one of these in her bottle,” she had told Abbi. “She’ll grow up strong as a bison.”
So Abbi opened the door with her head tilted down, expecting to be staring at the wrinkled woman’s flaky scalp, but saw instead a gray T-shirt with PENN STATE printed across the chest in blue-flocked letters. She’d seen that shirt more times than she could count, and looked up, her heart pulsing thick and joyful behind her entire rib cage.
“Hi,” Lauren said.
The corner of the metal screen door scraped Abbi’s ankle as she flung herself onto her friend, weeping. Lauren cried with her, hugging back. And they laughed, Abbi smearing the tears over her cheeks as she wiped them away.
“What are you doing here? Come in. Where are the kids?”
“I left them at home,” Lauren said. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing. A little scratch. I just can’t believe you’re here.”
“You’re really bleeding.”
Abbi inspected her leg. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was long with tiny pearls of blood sprouting up every few centimeters. Lauren couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Abbi tugged her sock over the wound. “All better,” she said.
“You nut.”
“Sit, sit. Do you want something? Tea? Anything?”
“I’m good, really,” Lauren said, dropping her long body onto the couch. Long, broad, and flat, that was how Lauren was built. Nearly six feet tall, with wide hips and shoulders, and straight through the waist. But not fat. Flat—no curves in the front or back, and even her face seemed pressed in, with wide-set eyes and a wide, low-bridged nose. She scooped a shredded Kleenex from her pocket. “Here. Take half.”
“It’s paper,” Abbi said.
“Yes, but it’s recycled paper. I wiped Stevie’s nose with it and forgot to throw it out before I washed my jeans.”
“Thanks. I’ll pass.” Abbi sniffed and watched her friend blow into the pre-used tissue. She wanted to tell Lauren how much she had missed her, but it would come out wrong. “I’ve really missed you,” she said anyway, and it was wrong, all morose and accusatory, like telling someone her favorite grandmother died, but wouldn’t have if she’d been there a few hours earlier.
“I’ve missed you, too. I should have come sooner. I wanted to. I just . . . didn’t know how,” Lauren said. She scratched her knee. “I knew you’d do it, eventually.”
“What?”
“Motherhood.”
Abbi glanced down the hallway, where Silvia napped, the baby she was trying not to love. “I’m not a mother.”
Lauren hesitated. “Is Ben at work?”
“Yeah.”
“How is he?”
Abbi couldn’t tell the truth. She had a husband. Lauren did not. Who was she to complain? “Fine. Great. We’re both great.”
“Liar.”
“How do you know?”
“Kathy. She talked to Sangita.”
Not surprising Sangita would talk to Stephen’s mom about Ben. “And that’s why you’re here?”
Lauren crossed her legs, her arms over her stomach. “You were there for me, and I left you to deal with this all by yourself.”
“Lauren—”
“No, really. That’s not a best friend. That’s a jerk. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop it. You don’t have to apologize. It was easier for me to be there for you.”
“The last time I checked, God didn’t call us to easy,” Lauren said. She nudged Abbi’s foot with her own. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know. Ben won’t talk to me. I mean, he says stuff. At least he does now that the baby’s here. But it’s not anything about . . . anything.”
“He’s depressed.”
“Yeah, but it’s more than that.” Abbi pulled up her legs, rested her chin on her knee. “I don’t know.” Her thighs pushed against her gut, her diaphragm. She couldn’t draw a deep breath. “That idiotic war.”
“You and Ben were having problems long before he went away, Abbi.”
“Not like this.”
“No, you were the one not talking then.”
Lauren was right.
Every woman had what she believed were the wrong reasons for getting hitched. Money. Pregnancy. Family pressure. Abbi could add her own wrong reason. Love. Ha, ha. Both hers for Benjamin and his for her.
It had been good in the beginning—that first year of marriage while she finished school and he worked at the mall as a security guard. They still played the part of college kids, living in a loft apartment, washing laundry in the bathtub because they hadn’t enough money for the machines, eating off their laps in front of the television. They celebrated everything by making love, from her B+ on an art history test to his finding a deal on a package of clearance bungee cords at Wally World. They saw their friends every day, sipped coffee together and talked like their conversations could impact everything from teenaged apathy to Tibetan independence.
She’d never had a man love her with his abandon. He’d shown her by telling her how he felt—so unlike any other boy or man she’d known, her own father included—which was why his silence now was so devastating. It wasn’t him. He had showed her by doing all sorts of special little things for her, like changing her monitor background to her new favorite painting, or ordering a case of her favorite cherry pie Lärabars, which she couldn’t find anywhere closer than Sioux Falls. And she had loved him because he made her feel like a princess (and she hated to admit that, especially to herself ). She had loved him because he looked at her as if she were the only woman in the world.
And then she couldn’t stand him looking at her as if she were the only woman in the world.
It changed when Benjamin took the job in Temple. She became a deputy’s wife, and people knew her only that way. They had no friends, not like the ones in college, without responsibility to children or career or grown-up obligations. Stephen and Lauren lived twenty minutes away, but they had a real life now, with him working Lauren’s parents’ farm and her pregnant. So it was the Abbi & Benjamin Show. Evenings together. Weekends together. Just the two of them. And Abbi started itching, suddenly allergic to Benjamin’s undivided attention. She spent more time in her studio, out running, on the computer— but with her avoidance came the guilt.
She knew guilt, couldn’t remember a time when she
didn’t feel guilty about something—her weight, her binge eating, the ninth grade boys groping her in the band room. Deceiving Benjamin about the state of her uterus. That only intensified her desire to hide, and her self-loathing.
Her year of laxative abstinence ended, and she set her alarm for three in the morning, taking the pills then so she wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom until Benjamin left for work. She snapped at him more, found all sorts of silly reasons to be angry. And he, feeling her slipping away, squeezed tighter, trying harder to please her, suffocating her. When news came his National Guard unit would be mobilizing, Abbi had been relieved. The two months Benjamin spent at Fort Dix, where she figured nothing bad could happen to him—it was only training, right?—were the best months of her time in Temple. Only after he shipped out to Afghanistan did the shame come crashing down, and hard. What kind of woman wanted her husband in a war zone?
More guilt. More bingeing. More purging and exercise and withdrawing from everyone around her.
She was sick; she knew it. The twisted truth of it all was that she needed to be in control, of her weight, her bowels. Her husband. And when he came home and began treating her the way she’d been treating him, giving her what she had once wanted—space, silence, inattention—she couldn’t handle it.
How dare he pull away? He’s supposed to love me. He’s supposed to look at me like I’m the only person in the world who matters to him.
She wanted to be left alone on her terms.
She wanted to be loved on her terms.
I want, I want, I want.
“You’re right,” she told Lauren.
“I know I’m right.”
“You don’t have to be so smug about it.”
“What are friends for,” Lauren said.
Silvia, on the kitchen table in her basket, began to cry. Abbi picked her up, and Lauren said, “Oh, let me hold her.”
“Go right ahead. You’re the baby person.”
Lauren cuddled her, cooing and kissing and making faces. “What did you name her again?”
“Silvia.”
“I bet Ben regrets ever making you read The Bell Jar.”
“Not that Sylvia. The one from Shakespeare. Spelled with two I’s.”
“She’s beautiful,” Lauren said. “I miss this. I want ten more.”
“One will be the death of me.” Abbi gave her friend a warm bottle. “Do you really think you’ll have more?”
“If I get my way. Don’t know what God’s plan is, but I can’t say I have any intentions of becoming a nun anytime soon.”
Abbi leaned back cross-legged on the couch, watching Lauren acting motherly, and asked, “Are you doing okay?”
“I am. Really. Sometimes I miss him. At night, mostly. But I have so much to be thankful for.”
“That didn’t just come out of your mouth,” Abbi said with a snort.
Lauren kicked her, laughed. “I know, I know. It sounds trite. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
They visited awhile longer, until Lauren needed to get home to her children. Abbi hugged her again, not wanting to let go. Lauren shined. The first day they met, in the dorm, Abbi had seen that glow about her, and it convinced her to go to that first Campus Crusade meeting. And after everything, Lauren still had that shimmer. Abbi silently admitted her envy. She wanted that kind of faith.
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
He wasn’t in homeroom with Ellie. The forty-three seniors, divided in half, alphabetically, the H’s and S’s split. Matthew found his desk, class schedule waiting for him, and saw calculus in the first-period slot. Glanced at the clock above the door. Seven minutes until the bell.
Lord, I’m so nervous. Am I allowed to feel this way about a girl?
He hadn’t seen Ellie since that night at the movies. She never did show up at the apartment, not that he honestly expected her to. He hoped, yes, but with a kind of futile hope more like tossing pennies in the fountain at the shopping mall. He’d loved doing that as a little boy. And when he didn’t have pennies—which was almost always—he would grab a handful of gravel and stick it in his pocket, and wish on the pebbles he threw in the water. Wishes for his mother to get clean, for his hearing to come back, to find the Godzilla Rampage game under the Christmas tree.
He didn’t need wishes now. He could pray. But he wouldn’t pray for silly, inconsequential things, and making some girl like him fell decidedly into that category.
He’d considered sacrificing his hair for Ellie, biking over to the one-chair salon her mother had in their garage for a trim, but he didn’t have the guts; it would have killed him to show up and have Ellie treat him like just some geek in her calculus class. If she’d wanted to see him, she would have.
In homeroom no one talked to him.
The bell rang; he knew because everyone suddenly jumped from their seats and scrambled out of the room. Matthew waited a minute more before venturing out to the hallway. Ellie stood near the door, dressed in a pink blouse and pleated plaid skirt. White tights. Black buckle shoes. And those braids. “I thought I’d walk with you,” she said.
He smiled a little, not wanting to hope, and wishing he’d bought a new shirt for the first day of school, or at least worn one without dark grease splotches staining the front, Lacie’s buttery handprints from her hug that morning.
They slipped into the mathematics room. Ellie took a seat front row center, spilling her books and folders onto the desk before smoothing her skirt under and sitting. Matthew hesitated, and she said to him, “You’re not going to stand there all day, are you?”
So he sat next to her and dropped his books, exposing his forearms. The gauze seemed so much whiter with Ellie staring at it; he’d hardly noticed it this morning.
“Are you okay? Your arm . . .”
Touching the bandage, he shrugged off her concern, a quick jerk of the shoulder, a wrinkle of the nose.
“Matt, really.”
It’s nothing.
“Would you tell me if it was?”
Mr. Brandt entered and handed out syllabi and classroom policies to the three students in the class, and gave Matthew several more pages. Notes for the week. All the teachers provided notes for him. While he lectured, Mr. Brandt occasionally remembered to speak toward the class, but mostly he talked into the blackboard, whirling every few minutes to say, “Oh, Matt, sorry. Did you get that?”
Matthew gave a thumbs-up.
They had time at the end of class to work on their homework assignment. Ellie leaned over and tapped his arm. “When do you have lunch?”
5th period.
“Darn. I have it sixth. But I have English next,” Ellie said. “How about you?”
Same.
“I’ll walk with you. I just have to stop at my locker first.”
I don’t need a babysitter.
Ellie tugged on one of her braids, wove it through her fingers. Over, under, over. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
You’re a smart girl.
She shook her head. “Fine,” she said, and swished out of the room.
In English, she sat between her friends—who wasn’t her friend?— and didn’t look at him. He couldn’t concentrate at all, scribbled in the margins of his notebook. In fourth-period history, she ignored him again.
At lunchtime, Matthew picked a plate of goulash from the cafeteria line and took his tray outside. He straddled the low wall, in front of the gymnasium, and poked at his canned peaches. His stomach burned.
Someone touched his shoulder.
“Hey,” Ellie said.
You said you had lunch next period.
“I’m skipping Spanish.” She sat beside him, crossed her legs, tucking her skirt between her thighs so it wouldn’t blow up. “I thought you might, you know, stop by.”
I thought you might.
“I couldn’t. My grandmother got sick and my folks went out to see her. I had to take care of my little sister. I asked Jaylyn to tell you.”
When?
“When I called.”
When was that?
“The day after we went to the movies.”
He wanted to strangle Jaylyn. She didn’t tell me.
“Really? Oh, that’s good. Well, I mean, it isn’t good, but it’s better than what I figured.”
Which is?
Her ears turned pink; she pulled on one, twisting her lobe, stretching it like Silly Putty. He thought she was blushing, but couldn’t be certain beneath all those freckles. “That you don’t like me.”
You’re crazy.
“It’s a simple categorical syllogism. People don’t come over when they don’t like you. You didn’t come over. Hence . . . Well, you’re a smart boy.”
That doesn’t work. Your middle is undistributed.
“Now you’re just showing off.”
Yeah. I am.
They sat without talking, and he watched the wisps of hair shivering around her face, the ones that had escaped from her braids. I thought you were seeing Teddy Derboven.
“Seriously? Come on. He flunked Algebra One. And Two.”
All the girls drool over him.
“I’m not all the girls,” she said, and she wriggled a black-and-white-marbled composition notebook from the bottom of her pile. “This is for you.”
Matthew looked at her, shook his head slightly. Ellie opened the cover, and turquoise words twirled across the first page, and the second and third, each i dotted with a daisy, each t crossed with an ocean ripple. “I thought we could write to each other. Like, instead of a phone call, if you think of something you want to tell me, you can write it down. I have one, too. We can switch them every day.”
He wanted to kiss her.
It was more than a crush, though. More than a pretty girl paying attention to him. For the first time in five long years, someone wanted to climb into his head and know him, peer into all the not-so-silent corners. Nothing was quiet about him, not when she was around.
He pinched the corner of the surgical tape holding the gauze pad over part of his access, pulled it up slowly, his skin releasing from the stickiness, exposing a small incision, scabbed over and greasy with Neosporin. His fistula bulged, like a garden hose snaked beneath his skin. Ellie reached down to touch it, traced the bulge with her soft fingers, inner elbow to wrist, then slipped her hand into his.
Watch Over Me Page 17