Watch Over Me

by Christa Parrish

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  I have to.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I’m sorry.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen, Matty,” she said, her eyes focused on something off to the side—her burned-out butt, maybe—not on his face. If he could have looked away, too, he would have. “I got pregnant, and then it was just too late to do anything about it, and all I kept hearing in my head was Ma telling Jaylyn and me that we better not bring any babies home, or we could find someplace else to live. I know she meant it. She made Jaylyn get rid of two. And Jared was planning college, and I didn’t want to ruin that for him. I figured Ma or Jaylyn or someone would notice eventually, but no one did.

  “I woke up that morning just feeling . . . I don’t know, kind of sick. Like, nauseous. And I just packed my swimsuit and towel in my backpack, and a lunch, and started walking. I thought it was too early for the baby to come. But I was wading in Hopston’s pond, and the sick feeling turned to pain, and there was blood and water. I sat in the weeds and started to push, and she was there.

  “I cut the cord and tied it with my shoelace, like in the movies. She didn’t even cry. And I . . . I panicked. I can’t even tell you why I thought it was a good idea to leave her. But I did. I put her in my lunch bag, tied the handles, and pushed her into the tall grass. I should have at least wrapped her in the towel, but I was afraid someone would recognize it, like evidence, or something.

  “Then I started walking across the field. Wandering, really. I told myself if she cried, I’d go back for her. But she still didn’t. And this terrible, sharp pain cut through my stomach, and I felt like I had to push again. For a minute I thought I was having twins, but then this blob fell out of me. They don’t show you that part in the movies.

  “I ripped part of the towel off and stuffed it in my underpants, wrapped the blob in the big piece. But then Tallah and her stupid boyfriend showed up, and I got scared, and I left the towel and hid against the closest cottonwood. I watched as Simon tripped over it, and called the sheriff. I watched as the deputy came and found her.

  “Somehow I made it home. I showered. I bagged my bloody clothes and shoes and threw them in the dumpster out back of the school. And I waited for the knock on the door. But it didn’t come. Until now.”

  She sniffed. “I’m going to jail.”

  You don’t know that.

  “Yeah, I do. The Internet’s a wonderful thing.”

  Maybe you’ll get leniency or something.

  “For what? I left my baby to die.” She scrubbed away her tears with her thumb knuckles. “Let’s get this over with. Make your call, or whatever.”

  Matthew nodded, his fingertips skating over her shoulder as he went inside and dialed 711, pressed the phone into the TTY hub. He watched until the red light stopped its lazy blink.

  HELLO RO#45435F HERE, NBR TO DIAL PLS QQ GA, the screen read.

  He typed the number for the sheriff ’s station and waited.

  THK YOU DIALING PLS HD. . . . RINGING 1. . . . 2. . . . 3. . . . 4. . . . HELLO QQ (EXPLAINING RELAY PLS HD) GA.

  I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK TO DEPUTY PATIL, Matthew typed.

  HOLD PLEASE. And then, PATIL HERE. MATT IS THAT YOU QQ GA.

  Matthew typed, YES. METHODIST CHURCH, 30 MINUTES GA.

  The screen read, I WILL BE THERE GA.

  SKSK, he typed, and then he knocked on Jaylyn’s door. I have to go out. You need to make dinner for the girls.

  “Tell Skye to do it.”

  She’s going out with me.

  “Why? What for?”

  Just take care of the girls.

  He wrote a note to Sienna, telling her he was leaving. She didn’t lift her face from the television.

  Outside, Skye was still slumped on the stoop. “They coming?”

  Matthew shook his head. Not here. At the church down the road. I didn’t want everyone to see.

  She touched his arm, almost smiled. “Lacie, get your butt over here.”

  The little girl came running. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Just get inside and wash up for supper. Matty and I gotta run an errand real quick.”

  “I’ll make sure Sienna saves some food for you. You know what a hog she can be.”

  “Yeah, great,” Skye said, and she hugged her. “You be good.”

  “Ow, stop. You’re crushing me,” Lacie said, wriggling away and charging into the apartment.

  After the door slammed, Matthew turned and started walking, Skye beside him on his right, out of the parking lot, onto the road. Head down, he watched her feet against the asphalt, heels of her blue tennis shoes dragging.

  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 . . .

  Twilight fell differently on overcast days. When the sun was out, it stretched over the earth, wrapping each tree, each car and house and blade of grass in its pink-orange arms until it tumbled beneath the horizon, the light snapping away in an instant. But when clouds packed the sky and the world was already ashen, the darkness crept in slowly until suddenly it was dark, and no one had noticed it coming. That was how Matthew felt as he and Skye reached the church, sat on the green wood steps leading to the front door—the world went black between Skye’s confession and this place, and he hadn’t realized it until he looked up the road and saw two bright headlights inching toward them.

  The Durango stopped, still idling, and Benjamin stepped from the car. He said something, in the shadows. Matthew couldn’t make it out. But Skye nodded and stood, put her arms behind her back, one wrist over the other, hands forming wings. As Benjamin took handcuffs from his belt, Matthew jumped off the steps, grabbed the deputy’s arm. “I have to, Matt,” he said.

  Matthew gave Benjamin a little shove, yanked his pad from his pocket and fell back onto the steps. He wrote, John 16:33, folded the page over and over until it was more a tube than a rectangle and he couldn’t fold it anymore. Benjamin closed Skye in the back seat, walked around the car. Matthew yanked the handle—please, please—he needed to give Skye his note.

  “You can’t get in there,” Benjamin said, coming back around to him.

  Give this to her. Promise me. Matthew opened the deputy’s hand and crammed the paper ball into it.

  Benjamin’s fingers tightened around it. He scrunched his lips, nodded. “Get in front. I’ll give you a lift home.”

  But Matthew shook his head and ran, down the road alone until the Dodge Durango passed him, and then alone again.

  Matthew entered the house to Jaylyn screaming at Heather, Heather screaming at Jaylyn, Sienna complaining as they kept crossing in front of the television, where Tom and Jerry raced around the globe. Lacie, middle fingers jammed deep into her ears, shouted, “Stop, you two. Why won’t you stop?”

  When they saw him, it did stop, and Heather asked, “Where’s Skye?”

  Sheriff’s office, he wrote.

  “What for? What’s going on?”

  Maybe you should just go down there.

  Heather looked at him, opening her mouth as if she wanted to yell some more, but instead slung her purse over her arm and said, “Put the girls to bed,” before leaving.

  “You better tell me,” Jaylyn said.

  “No,” he managed.

  “I can’t understand anything that comes out of your stupid mouth.”

  Understand this. I’m not telling you.

  “Retard.”

  Jaylyn stomped off to her bedroom, cordless phone in hand, and Matthew sent Sienna with her.

  “It’s too early,” she whined.

  I don’t care. I’m tired and want the couch.

  “You’ve been so mean today.”

  Good.

  “Jerk.”

  “I don’t think you’re a jerk,” Lacie said. “Or a retard.”

  He picked her up and spun her, once, twice, three times, until he couldn’t keep his
balance. Then he helped her brush her teeth and tucked her into Heather’s bed. She slept there now; his aunt needed a warm body next to her.

  But he couldn’t sleep, didn’t try. He waited in the dark, eyes open and toward the door, and when he saw a crack of light, he turned his head into the back cushion, pretending to sleep. Even when the brightness penetrated his closed lids he still didn’t move. Not until someone wrenched him by the arm, onto the floor.

  “Get out,” Heather said. Shouted. He knew by the tendons straining through her neck, the wide-open mouth, like the Munch print Abbi once showed him. He sprung to his feet, and with one hand snapped open his pad. His aunt tore it from him, hurled it across the room.

  “I don’t want any of your notes. I want you out of my house.”

  She hefted his clothing tote from beside the couch and, standing on the stoop, flung it into the night. The girls appeared from their rooms, Jaylyn pale and confused against the white wall, Lacie sobbing, Sienna holding on to her.

  “Now go,” Heather said.

  He went, shoeless, into the playground, and the door shut behind him. He gathered his clothes, pulled on a sweatshirt, and closed the rest in the plastic bin. Then he tried to balance the bin on the handlebars of his bicycle. He rode ten feet before the tote spilled forward. He picked everything up again and, after shoving the bin into the shrubs next to the building, rode down the street toward the church, pedals poking into the soles of his feet.

  The building was unlocked; he knew it would be. He thought he’d sleep on a pew but must have made more noise than he realized. Perhaps the door hinges gave him away, squealing in the night, or his bike when he dropped it in the gravel. Whatever it was, the pastor found him and, without a question, guided Matthew to the back bedroom in the parsonage.

  Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

  They stood together just inside the door of the family services office, Abbi’s body rigid, Silvia caged against her, tears dripping silently off her jawbone and onto the sleeping baby’s head. Benjamin, no more than a hand’s length away, didn’t dare reach for her.

  Four days. It had taken only four days to undo the past four months.

  He didn’t have a chance to explain to Abbi, to soften the blow. He had called her to say he wouldn’t be coming home until late, and as soon as she heard his voice, she understood.

  “What’s going on?” she had asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You know enough to be at work still.”

  He sighed. “We have Silvia’s mother in custody.”

  “Just her mother?”

  “Abbi.”

  “No. No, no, no. You fix this, Ben, I mean it. You don’t come home until you fix it.”

  But when he had walked into the living room a few minutes after one in the morning, Abbi was sitting in the chair facing the door, Silvia sleeping in her lap. He bent down to hug her, but she said, “Don’t touch me.” So he went to bed alone, in his clothes, watching fuzzy gray spots spark as he stared at the ceiling in the darkness, until the first splashes of sun spilled over the windowsills and he abandoned all hope of sleep, only to find Abbi still in the chair, still stiff and alert, eyes on the door.

  “No one’s coming today,” he said, and she wept, clamping her torso to her knees, gulping and wheezing and pressing the baby into her belly until Silvia, too, began to wail. He’d never seen Abbi break down like that before. If she ever cried, it was a few tears and done. “No sense wasting time on the wet stuff,” she’d always said.

  Now he took an envelope from his shirt pocket, handed it to Cheyenne. “We wrote a few things down for the Whalens. About Silvia. Things they might find helpful to know.”

  “I’ll make sure they get it,” she said.

  “We’d like to see him.”

  “Ben—”

  “Just ask.”

  She nodded and left the room, returning minutes later with a lumpy, dark-haired boy and a lumpier woman, both of whom Benjamin had met numerous times since he’d moved here. The boy wore a clip-on tie and cleared his throat several times before shaking Benjamin’s hand. “I don’t suppose there’s any good thing to say right now,” Jared said.

  He’s been told. One of the other deputies, or Cheyenne—someone— let this kid know Silvia had been loved.

  Benjamin knew a few things about him, too. Knew he was the first in his family to go to college, accepted to a handful of schools but chose Dakota State University to be close to his mother. Knew his father had died when he was in junior high. Had a Marine for an older brother, a sister who married right out of high school, with three kids and a husband who worked as an assistant manager at Taco John’s. Decent people. Salt of the earth.

  Salt in his wounds.

  “I suppose not,” Benjamin said.

  Jared looked at Abbi, at Silvia. “She never told me. Skye, I mean. I didn’t . . .” He unclipped his tie, rolled it into his pants pocket. Opened the top button of his shirt. “I wish she just would have told me.”

  “Well, you know now.” The words came out ugly, sponging up the bile in his throat. He was the sore loser.

  “She’ll have a good home, I promise you that. My mom’s gonna move to Madison, watch her when I’m in class. And I’ll do . . . whatever I need to do. I know how to do that. My dad, he was a good man. He showed me what it means . . . to be a man.”

  Yeah, right. The kid turned eighteen a couple of months ago, and Benjamin was back to feeling old, ancient, really. He expected Jared, after a few sleepless nights, would feel the years piling on, too.

  They stood around trying not to look at Abbi, at the baby in her arms. The grandmother whispered to her son.

  “Well,” Cheyenne said finally, “the Whalens have a bit of a ride home.”

  Benjamin popped his jaw, stretching it as far to the right as it could go, nodded. He turned to Abbi, slid his arms against hers, beneath Silvia. Abbi wouldn’t let go. Her hazel eyes held his—they seemed gray today, matching her shirt and her mood—pleading with him, accusing him. She blamed him, for bringing Silvia into their home, for letting her leave.

  I’m sorry, he mouthed, pressing his arms up into the infant’s body until he was supporting all the weight and Abbi nothing at all. She dropped her arms and went. He listened to her footfalls down the hallway. One door crashed open, then another, more quietly than the first. He heard both snap closed.

  I’ve lost her.

  He couldn’t bear to wake the baby. “Good-bye, sweet kanyaratna. Me tujhashi prem karto,” he whispered, kissing her on the forehead before holding her out to Jared, like a doctor in the delivery room. “Here.”

  The boy untangled his hands from his pockets and took the small body against his, bumping and shifting her until she was settled in his arms. Silvia arched her back, ballooning her lips in a sleepy pucker before rubbing her face and sighing, nodding off again. “She’s heavy,” Jared said.

  “Sixteen pounds.”

  “I didn’t expect . . .” The boy’s voice disintegrated as he looked down on her. He sniffled, turned his head and wiped his eye on his shoulder. “She looks like her mother. Good thing.”

  “Just . . . enjoy her,” Benjamin said.

  “Mr. Patil, we, I mean, my mom and me talked about it, and this isn’t anywhere near anything much, but, if you want to, we’d like you and your wife to come visit sometime. If you want to. And we can send pictures and stuff. E-mails, or whatever. To let you know she’s doing good.”

  He meant it sincerely, Benjamin knew. But it burned, seeing his daughter in another man’s arms. Just like he still woke some mornings and—throwing back the blankets and settling his feet on the cool wood floor—was startled to see his deformed foot, he expected he’d be reaching for Silvia in the bed at night, brushing the back of his hand in the air where the bassinet had been, frantically wondering where she’d gone before realizing he never had her to begin with.

  His, but not his.

  “I appreciate that,” he said. “Really. But
I think I’ll have to talk to Abbi and let you know.”

  Jared nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “You and me both.”

  When they pulled into the driveway she was out of the car before he had a chance to switch it off, and he didn’t, leaving it to idle as she hopped the two patio steps in one stride. At the front door, she turned back to him, and he opened the driver’s side door and stood behind it, guarded, one foot on the blacktop, head above the window. “I’m going to . . . take a drive,” he said.

  She stared at him for a moment, then shut herself in the house.

  And he drove, sped, needle close to one hundred. The highway stretched before him, billboards cluttering the side of the road. Free Donuts for Newlyweds at Wall Drug. Wall Drug—80 Ft. Dinosaur. Have You Dug Wall Drug? He passed half a dozen lonely cars, glancing in at the drivers. No singles. All had at least two passengers, most with children in the back seats.

  He hurt all over—not physically. His bones had been jarred when Stephen’s Humvee overturned, every muscle fiber bruised by the blasts around him. But this wasn’t the same. Now he was all dry veins and dead space inside, as if even his cells knew Silvia had kept him alive, and now they desiccated in mourning.

  Badlands 12 miles.

  The rocks rose up around him, and after parking the Durango, he walked, wearing his church shoes and dress pants, straight out to the first hill. He climbed it, the setting sun’s shadows making it difficult to discern the rolls and dips in the terrain. His shoe snagged in a divot, and he fell forward, skinning his palms, listening to the familiar sound of loose stones cascading over the ledges. He examined his hands, pinpricks of blood in the dust, shook the sting away. Then he ran with his imperfect gait—a limp, a shimmy—down the footpath, between the towering mounds, kicking through low brush, ignoring the threat of rattlesnakes.

  The cool autumn air scraped his windpipe, and he swallowed to alleviate the metallic dryness. He stopped, looking up at the steep face to his left. He began his ascent, arms quivering as he lifted his body over shelves and outcroppings. Sweat and dust burned his eyes. He lost his footing, slipping down the rocks on his belly, fingers grappling for any hold, and when the friction slowed him, he flattened his cheek to the rock, arms spread wide, hugging it, breathing deep, his heartbeat the loudest sound around him. His muscles twitched from the fear surging through his blood, until finally he calmed and began to climb again.