Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  “So did I miss all the news?” asked Katherine.

  “He hasn’t told me a thing yet,” said Leslie.

  Benjamin broke another cookie in half. “There’s not much to tell, really.”

  “You found that baby, didn’t you?” Katherine asked.

  “Well, yeah.” He swallowed. “We’re fostering her now. Silvia. The baby, I mean.”

  “Your mother mentioned that,” Katherine said. “How is Abbi enjoying motherhood?”

  “She’s . . . adjusting. We both are.”

  “It’s a lot, I know.” Katherine swirled the ice in the bottom of her glass. “We just saw Lauren last weekend. Stevie is walking now, and Kate is such the little chatterbox. She said she’s spoken with Abbi.”

  Benjamin nodded. “She came by a couple weeks ago.”

  “Oh good. Good for both of them,” Katherine said. “They need each other.”

  “Any news around here?” Benjamin asked.

  “Tina got engaged,” Leslie said. “A nice boy she met at school. We like him. They’re planning their wedding for the weekend after Thanksgiving. Lance and Brianne are expecting their third. Due in, what? January?”

  “February,” Katherine said.

  “And Phillip. He joined up with the Guard.”

  The ice in the pitcher shifted, tinkling against the glass, sinking below the lemonade. “You let him,” Benjamin said.

  “Not like we had a choice, Ben. He’s a grown man,” Leslie said.

  “He’s twenty.”

  “You and Stephen were eighteen. You couldn’t wait, remember? We’re proud of Phillip wanting to serve his country. What happened to Stephen doesn’t change that. Our son died a hero, fighting for us. That’s the price of freedom.”

  “Is it?” Benjamin asked. He thought of Abbi and her protest signs.

  “Darn right,” Leslie said. “We miss our boy, but there’s no shame in any of it.”

  Katherine touched Benjamin’s knee. “And no blame,” she said.

  He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t fidget with his fingers or hair or the piping on the couch. Looked at his feet. “I need you to forgive me.”

  “Ben, there’s nothing to forgive,” Katherine said.

  “I don’t care if you think that or not. I need you to forgive me for not bringing him home. I need—” He wept, and Katherine held him like only a soldier’s mother could.

  She whispered, “We forgive you,” and his body shook against her in this place he grew up in, a safe place where they believed in what he did, and wouldn’t question his grief or his honor.

  A place without Abbi.

  For all their healing, Benjamin still needed some distance between him and his wife. When that newspaper article had been published, the one with the photo of Abbi at the protest, someone e-mailed it to the guys in his unit, and they said to Benjamin, “What’s wrong with your woman? Can’t you keep her on a leash?” Before then, he’d never wanted Abbi to be any different than who she was—idealistic, passionate, uninhibited. Wild, even. But he also never thought she would flaunt her opposition to all he held firm with such a blatant disregard for his own passions and ideals.

  He returned home torn in two—loving her, wanting her, but also distrusting her. Looking at her as if she, too, was an enemy combatant. How could she be for him and against him at the same time? If he asked her to choose a side, he couldn’t be certain she would pick his.

  When he was dry, Leslie gripped his arm and told him to come back whenever he needed. “Despite what the commercials say, no man is called to be an army of one.” And Katherine said, “We pray for you every night,” and gave him a bag of cookies for the ride home.

  Chapter THIRTY

  After worship, they went to the McGees’ for Sunday dinner. Abbi brought a fruit salad and watched Silas grill thick steaks on the small back deck while Benjamin played horseshoes with the boys in the yard. Silvia napped in the sling. “Don’t worry,” Janet said. “I made a pasta salad.”

  “Thanks,” Abbi said.

  “You can lay the baby down on the bed in A.J.’s room. Window’s right there. We can open it up and you’ll be able to listen in on her.”

  “She’s fine here.”

  “Hon, will you watch the grill?” Silas asked. “Looks like the boys need some help down there.”

  “Go show them how it’s done,” Janet said with a laugh.

  Silas took the horseshoes from eleven-year-old Dillon, forming one team. Benjamin and Silas’s older son, A.J., stood at the opposite post. They all flung the metal U’s around, joking and clanging as Janet turned the steaks.

  “I can’t believe how big the boys are,” Abbi said. “I feel old.”

  “Don’t give me that. In ten years, maybe you can start complaining. We’re going to eat inside,” Janet said. “Don’t call the guys yet. I need to finish setting the table.”

  “I’ll help.”

  Abbi folded a paper napkin beside each plate as Janet mixed the pasta and poured milk into all the glasses. Abbi kept her mouth shut.

  “So,” Janet said, “Ben seems well.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “He seems it. Not so, oh, I don’t know. Not so down, I guess.

  He’s seemed a little . . . down lately.”

  You think? “He’s good.”

  “That’s good. I mean, we all know it can be hard getting back on your feet after what Ben went through. Well, not that we know it. Obviously. But, you know.” Janet fumbled through the refrigerator, emerged with several bottles of salad dressing. “And you’re okay?”

  Abbi posed. “What you see is what you get.”

  “Oh good. Good. The ladies started working through Proverbs a couple weeks ago. You probably read that in the bulletin. You can bring the baby, if you want. No one will mind.”

  “Hmm. You made a ton of food,” Abbi said, dodging the need for a response.

  “I cook when I don’t know what else to do.” Janet dropped mismatched forks and knives on each napkin. “Abbi, we . . . I mean . . . Boy, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like your mother, but we really hope you’ll come back to Bible study.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Well, the ladies. As I said before, we miss you and your, you know, unique perspective.” Janet pressed her thumb down on each finger until it popped. “And, I mean, now that Ben is doing better—”

  “Was there something wrong with him before?” Abbi asked, her words tinged with the frustration of the past year. Now Janet came to her with an Oh, we knew something was wrong with your husband, but now that he’s not a basket case, c’mon back to Bible study. Why couldn’t she have said something eight months ago?

  Janet pivoted her wrists, cracking them, too. “Well, you know. He seemed to be kind of . . . down.”

  “Down,” Abbi whispered. Then the tears came, and she couldn’t stop them; she yanked a napkin from under the flatware, knife bouncing on the linoleum, and ground the paper against her eyes. “Is not speaking to his wife, down? Not touching her? Losing thirty pounds. Sleeping in his car. Overdosing on—” She stopped. She hadn’t meant to reveal that much.

  “Abbi, we didn’t know,” Janet said.

  “Please, don’t.”

  “You never told us.”

  “Ben was a walking neon advertisement for, well, for something a whole heck of a lot more than just down. And, I mean, you live next door. I know you saw his car missing at night—saw, heard, I don’t know. . . . What did I need to tell you?”

  “The truth, for one. Every week at church someone has asked you if things were okay. You said yes.”

  “But you could see him.”

  “Abbi, you said nothing was wrong. Ben said nothing was wrong. What were we supposed to do?”

  Silvia woke, looked up at Abbi and smiled a gummy baby grin, and Abbi shifted her into her chest and hugged her, the top of her head warm under Abbi’s chin. Abbi wiped her wet cheeks on Silvia’s hair. “I needed someone to say it first.�
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  “I thought about it. I think we all did. But I was afraid if I tried to push a little more, you’d just dig your head deeper into the ground. I mean, come on. We couldn’t even get you over for dinner. And you practically stopped talking to me. To anyone. It hurt, Abbi. I thought we were friends.” Janet ran her fingers over the creases at the back of Silvia’s neck.

  “I guess I did it to myself.”

  “No, no. I’m sorry, too. It wasn’t all your fault. But how do you help someone who acts like they don’t want help? How do you say the hard things out loud? None of us were really prepared for Ben to come home and hurt like he did.” Janet sniffed away her own tears. “We all messed up.”

  Abbi shrugged. “So, what now?”

  “Well,” Janet said, lifting the lid off the steak. “I nuke this meat, you call the guys in, and we eat.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “And I promise I won’t talk around things with you. If I want to know something, I’ll be direct and ask.”

  “I can’t promise I’ll answer,” Abbi said. “But I’ll make an attempt.”

  “Okay.” Janet gave her a quick hug, baby between them, only their shoulders bumping.

  The men and boys trampled through the kitchen, tracking dirt and grass from their sneakers, and dropped into their chairs. “Wash up,” Janet said, and they groaned but soaped in the sink and sat again. Silas said grace, all of them holding hands, Abbi and Benjamin peeking before the amen, legs tangled under the table. Dillon complained the milk was warm, and plunked ice cubes into everyone’s glass without asking. And Benjamin raised his eyebrows as Abbi sipped the milk and tried to pick around the cubes of cheese in both the green and pasta salads. Still, several pieces ended up on her plate, and she cut them small enough to swallow without chewing.

  After putting Silvia to bed, Benjamin and Abbi snuggled on the sofa, her legs over his, and they talked the way they used to, when they first met—one of them choosing a random word, and the other recounting a memory the word conjured. Abbi surveyed the room. “Lamp,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’ve told you the broken lamp story,” Benjamin said. She shook her head. “When Stephen and I were, oh, I think nine, maybe ten, we had both signed up for little league. Well, we were playing ball at my house. No, in my house, in the living room, which was a huge no-no. But we were. And I ended up knocking over my mother’s lamp, the one she brought with her from India when she first came here. It broke, and Stephen knew I would be in major trouble, so he told my mom he did it. He even gave her all the money he’d been saving for a new bicycle to pay to fix it. ‘I’m taking one for the team,’ he said.”

  And then Ben winced, as if everything he remembered about Stephen came roaring to the surface, a sudden jolt of pain, like a brain freeze after sucking down a Slush Puppie. He smoothed his hand over his head. “Your turn.”

  “Okay.”

  “Umm. Kumquat.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Why on earth do you think I have a kumquat story?”

  “I just like to say it. Kumquat. Kummmquaaaat. You try. I bet you can’t say it without laughing.”

  “Kum—” She giggled.

  “You lose.”

  “No, no. Let me try again.”

  “Go ahead. You can’t do it.”

  She laughed before the first syllable was out of her mouth. “No fair. You planted the laughing seed.”

  “I’d like to see that tree.”

  “Stop. You know what I mean. Just pick something else.”

  “All right, fine. How about dot.”

  “Dot, as in, dot, dot, dot?” she asked, stabbing the air with her index finger three times.

  “Dot, as in, ‘circle, circle, dot, dot, now I have my cootie shot.’ ” He nibbled her earlobe. “I hope you have yours.”

  “Oh, groan.”

  “I’m waiting. Dot, dot, dot . . .”

  “Okay, this one’s easy.”

  “Not like kumquat.”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Sorry, sorry. Go right ahead.”

  So she told him how, when Lauren first mentioned him, she told Abbi he was Indian, “With a dot, not a feather. And really nice.”

  “If he’s so nice, why aren’t you dating him?” Abbi had said.

  “I might be, if I hadn’t met Stephen first.”

  “He’s in the Guard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not really into soldiers. Give me a nice beat poet any day.”

  Lauren snorted. “Oh, you’ve had lots of luck with the beat poets.”

  “What did you tell him about me?”

  “That you’re a hippie wannabe and a pacifist. And you don’t shave.”

  “Hey. I shave sometimes.”

  And then Abbi told Benjamin how she met him and tried not to love him from their first date, when he took her to that vegetarian restaurant thirty minutes out of their way, and choked down a seitan and mushroom stir-fry. She had tried not to love him, had reminded herself of his ripple-edged ears, and his buttoned-down shirts and leather belt. “But it was too late,” she said. “You’d infected me.”

  “Really?” He grinned, cheeks puffed with pleasure.

  “Really, really.”

  “It must have been the cooties,” Benjamin said.

  “You’re impossible. Do you want a word, or not?”

  “Of course.”

  She saw Silvia’s rattle on the floor. “Baby.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “The day I found her, I called you. After I brought her to the hospital. I wanted to hear your voice. You weren’t here. I just listened to the answering machine and hung up.” He traced her collarbone, one finger on either side. “We wouldn’t be here without her.”

  “I know.”

  “I want more.”

  “Than what?” she asked, though she understood him perfectly.

  “No. More babies. More children.”

  “Ben, everything’s so up in the air with Silvia as it is. I couldn’t even—”

  “I don’t mean right now. Just, sometime. Do you think you might be open to considering it sometime?”

  “Yes,” she said. And she meant it. Not because she thought Benjamin would leave her if she said no, or because of her guilt or a desire to appease him. But because she wanted to. She enjoyed being a mother, after all.

  Chapter THIRTY-ONE

  He waited on the stoop until he saw Abbi’s green bumper-stickered car kicking up dust as she turned the corner and pulled in front of the apartment. Matthew sprang to his feet and yanked the passenger-door handle. Abbi turned off the car, stepped out. “I know, I’m running late. Silvia had a really awful diaper right as I was walking out the door. I had to bathe her.”

  He made quick circles with his hands, pulled on the door handle again.

  “No, don’t worry. It’s not that kind of thing. We have time.” She lifted the baby from the back seat. “Your aunt’s inside?”

  She knows I’m going with you. You don’t need to see her.

  “Matt, I’m not leaving without saying hello. Which one?”

  He pointed to the middle door, wiped his palms on his pants.

  Abbi knocked, and Lacie answered. “Who are you?”

  “Is your mom here?”

  “I guess,” Lacie said and, leaving the door wide open, spun into the apartment.

  A moment later, Heather stepped outside. “You taking him now?”

  Abbi nodded. “We shouldn’t be later than dinner. But I’ll call if we will be. And I promise I won’t bring him home hungry.”

  “Fine by me.” Heather lit a cigarette, took a drag and held it up near her shoulder. “That her? The one from the field?”

  “Yes, this is Silvia,” Abbi said, turning the baby around so Heather could see her. Matthew stopped breathing, realized it only when waves of tightness pulsed in his chest, down his arms. Any moment his aunt’s memory would click in, and she’d run
inside and grab Skye’s photo album, flip through the pages to find the picture, the carbon copy of Silvia. But it wouldn’t be there, because he had it in the pocket of his good pants, folded at the bottom of his clothing tote.

  He stepped backward, dizzy, as Heather dropped her cigarette on the stoop and stepped on it, took Silvia’s feet in her hands, knocking her tiny heels together. “How are you, pretty girl? I had babies like you. Yes, I did. Yes, I did, sweet feet.”

  Silvia broke into a gummy smile and drooled, bringing her fists to her mouth.

  The blinds rippled in the front window, fingers separating two of the thick vertical strips. Fingers too large to be either of the littler girls, and Jaylyn wasn’t home. He and Abbi needed to leave before— What? Would Skye come out? He couldn’t give her that chance.

  Matthew nudged Abbi with his toe. When she looked at him, he tapped the back of his bare wrist.

  “Oh, right. We’re going. Thanks for letting me borrow him,”

  Abbi said.

  “He’s all yours,” Heather said, and shut the door.

  They drove to Ellie’s house, and Abbi went inside to talk to her mother, too, asking Matthew to watch the baby for a sec. When they came out, he gave up the front seat to Ellie. “I don’t mind the back,”

  she said, but with a crinkle of his lips and a jerk of the shoulder he climbed in back next to Silvia.

  Ellie and Abbi talked as they drove, and laughed. He had no idea what they were saying. Every so often a weird feeling crawled over him, and he looked up to see Abbi’s face smiling at him in the rearview mirror. Otherwise he kept his eyes on Silvia; he couldn’t stop seeing Skye in her. And he thought of his cousin, not a friend really, but a cohort. They had grown closer these past five years.

  When he’d first come to live with them, the girls had been inseparable—both a bit chubby, both brunettes, Jaylyn’s hair more cocoa, Skye’s a deep mahogany. And both miserable toward him. Hiding his shoes before the bus came, forcing him to wear too-small girl’s sneakers to school. Dropping his hearing aids into the toilet for him to fish out. Sprinkling cayenne pepper in his peanut butter sandwiches.