The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  “I’m going to order some food,” Bear said.

  * * *

  He left me a pair of pajamas, tags still on, from Nordstrom, and a soft T-shirt that said Utica Club. I threw my work clothes, which I would rather have thrown out, into a glass-and-black washing machine, and in the kitchen, Bear had an open box of pizza and he handed me a bottle of beer.

  I took a long drink. It was amber, a little bitter. “Holy shit,” I said on the other side of the swallow. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” Bear said. I bit my tongue, waiting.

  “So,” I said, leaving the bottle on the counter. “When can I start?” I said.

  “Whenever you want,” Bear said. “Right now.”

  I gave a nervous laugh that was just staccato syllables. “Tonight?” I said.

  Bear cocked his head to the side. “What do you need?” he asked.

  I felt the words jumble behind my lips, my tongue thick and clumsy. “To work,” I said.

  “You can work as much as you want,” Bear said. He leaned against the refrigerator behind him, his eyes a little sleepy from the beer. The light was dimmed just enough to be soft and gold, like it was sunset inside.

  I chewed my lip, and he pushed the pizza box toward me. The pizza smelled delicious. It was not a treat my mother afforded us often. I watched as Bear took his wallet out of the front pocket of his jeans and counted out five twenties onto the counter.

  “Will this help you for now?” he said.

  I swallowed. “I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

  He took out two more twenties. “I trust you,” he said.

  The money just lay on the counter between us, molded to the fold of his wallet. He pushed it closer.

  “I trust you,” he said again, and smiled this time.

  I thought I was going to be an indentured servant forever. But he threw my clothes into the dryer, where you could watch them tumble behind a sleek glass door. With the beer empty and another one open and set right before me, I started to feel bold.

  “You’re going to kill me now, right?” I said, joking. “Now that I’m clean. Prepped,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. I drank again and watched Bear’s eyes flash. He smiled with his mouth open, showing his perfect white teeth. His hair, in its loose bun, bobbled at the back of his head.

  He put his bottle on the stone counter.

  “You could just leave me in one of those basements,” I said. Truth was, I couldn’t think of a better way to die. By someone else’s doing. Giving up control in a long, delicious slide.

  Bear’s laugh was open and warm.

  “You’re much more use to me alive,” he said.

  * * *

  I ended up driving home drunk. I’d certainly been drunker, but I went home from Bear’s that night with my head spinning, from beer, from everything. He’d given me a tour of the house, all the empty rooms upstairs, bedroom after bedroom, a vast playroom with skylights that looked out on the velvet night sky. There were bathrooms in between with beautiful, deep, white tubs and gleaming tile. Everything needed painting. All the walls were just primer white. Dry and chalky.

  I’d waited until the dryer buzzed with my clothes. “I should go,” I said. I had to stop myself from staring. At his clothes, his face. I wanted to bury myself in that long hair. My insides felt tight with desire. Desire that might go somewhere and not lay unresolved, wearing away at me, like it did with Baby Jane. With Baby Jane, it felt like having a crush on the teacher who would never indulge you.

  Bear popped the top off another beer and stood looking at his feet. “Call me tomorrow?” he asked, and then raised his eyes to mine.

  My stomach flipped.

  “Can you drive me back to my car?” I asked.

  He laughed. His whole body radiated warmth, like he held nothing back.

  In the deserted parking lot at the Hub, I got out, shaken down to the bones. I left before I said anything, before he said anything, before there was any awkward pause where I started to look or act desperate, or tried something stupid, like to kiss him.

  Bear rolled down his window to say good-night and waited until I got into my truck, until the engine turned over and was going strong, before he pulled out.

  My hands trembled on the wheel. I wasn’t sure how I made it home at all, except that it was just like driving drunk, or driving a route you’d know with your eyes closed, or through a blinding snowstorm, just hoping you’ll be where you belong on the other side.

  I had a secret. And a hundred and forty dollars in my pocket. I gripped the wheel and had to stop myself from driving out to the twenty-four-hour Walmart to buy clothes. I’d been wearing the same T-shirts since middle school. All at once, I wanted a haircut, new shoes. I had a hunger pang for everything to be completely new and different, and a desire I’d never felt before coiled like a snake in my gut. I couldn’t let my mother know. And I could never bring Bear home, or tell him about Birdie. I thought about the way he seemed to show his whole self when he offered something or laughed, and I thought I would only ever be able to offer a sliver. It felt like separate lives. Like a partition was going up, and I would have to navigate over the wall for different parts of every day. When I added Baby Jane to that, I thought I was a crazy person, popping up in these vastly different places, with different people. Showing each one of them something different. And never, ever the whole truth.

  In the house, my mother was pacing. She had lit candles everywhere, tea lights in jars and pillar candles and tapers. The house was hot and smelled like a bunch of different things, sandalwood and apple, vanilla and trash.

  The power was still out. And the water. I had gone to Bear’s and had done nothing but take care of myself.

  “Shannon,” my mother breathed when I came in. “Where have you been?”

  It was late. But not later than when I came home from sitting in the car with Baby Jane. If I came home at all.

  She got close to my face and narrowed her eyes. “Huh,” she exclaimed. “You smell like sex.”

  “I smell like beer,” I said. “And clean clothes. Don’t mistake it. Where’s Bird?” I asked.

  “She’s asleep,” my mother said. Her hair was a mess, like she’d taken it up and down twenty times while she paced.

  I looked in the bedroom, and there she was, curled like a bean on my mother’s bed, her arms and legs together, her face round and cool beneath that fiery hair. It was coming to an end. I could feel it. We couldn’t sustain it any longer. It was like sneaking in a kitten and not telling your landlord, and then having that kitten grow up to be a full-grown lion.

  Or a girl.

  * * *

  She begged me to call the power company.

  “It’s midnight, Mom,” I said. “They’re not going to do anything about it now.”

  “It’s an emergency,” she said.

  “Only to you,” I said.

  She nodded at me, cold. “Well, I’m glad you have someplace to go,” she said. She left me with an open phone book, the number for power outages circled in wobbly, hard-pressed ink.

  Everything smelled sour. Someone must have opened the fridge. I wanted to throw the whole thing out.

  Or burn it, I thought, and for the first time, I actually got it, the instinct to burn and run, start over. The clean sweep of a raging fire, everything reverted to ash. I just would never do it with them inside.

  The line at the power company was automated, so I spoke the address, which was barely an address at all—Hidden Drive, Space 17— and the computer voice pretended to look up the file, complete with fake papery sounds.

  “Report an outage,” I said into the phone.

  “Fucking get over yourself,” my mother said to me.

  “I’m sorry,” the computer voice said, “I didn’t quite get that.”

  “Fucking hot shit,” my mother said.

  “Report an outage,” I said louder.

  I watched as Birdie walked out of the bedroom, with her pudgy bare legs
and little brown feet. She rubbed her eye and sniffled.

  “Go back to bed,” my mother said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  Birdie looked at me.

  I said the address again into the phone.

  Birdie’s eyes got wider and she looked at our mother.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her, covering the receiver. But she waited for my mother to pick her up and carry her back to the bed, to lie with her and soothe her until she fell asleep.

  “Representative,” I said to the computer on the phone.

  I thought about Bear’s face. The way his eyes watched me when I spoke. The way he listened to everything I said, not the way some people will nod and pretend and not actually hear anything. The way his eyes smiled even when his mouth stayed straight, pink, slightly cruel. I felt the money in my pocket, guilty. But not enough to hand it over.

  When I heard a person on the phone finally, I saw my mother coming back out, ready to tell me what she thought of me, and I held up one finger to stop her before she said anything.

  I covered the speaker and glared. “Do you want me to take care of this?” I asked.

  She turned away, and I could hear Birdie singing to herself. Something I knew she did when she was nervous.

  “I have an outage,” I said to the representative. “Hidden Drive, Space 17.”

  She repeated it to me as a question.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been turned off for nonpayment,” she said.

  Shit, I thought. I knew it.

  “Okay,” I said. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Pay the bill,” she said.

  “Um, short of that?” I asked. “This is an emergency. It was shut off suddenly,” I said.

  “You were given notice,” the woman said, “posted on your door, ten days ago, stating that continued nonpayment would result in shutoff. Because it’s been shut off,” she said, “the amount needs to be paid in full, plus a reconnection fee, before we can turn it back on.”

  “What’s the total amount?” I asked. I fingered the bills in my jeans.

  “Twelve forty-three fifty-seven,” she said.

  I heard my phone ding before it started dying.

  “Twelve hundred dollars?” I said.

  “Sir, the bill has not been paid since January,” she said. “The note in the file says the house is vacant.”

  “Well, it’s not vacant,” I said. “We still fucking live here.”

  “You can make a payment online anytime,” the woman said.

  “Without power?” I said.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No,” I said, and hung up as the woman was saying, “Thank you for calling National Grid.”

  The house was hot, and I went to the kitchen to open the window above the sink. It had been nailed shut.

  “Mom,” I said into the living room. I checked those windows, beside the front door, looking out to the side yard. Everything had been nailed down.

  This was a new level of paranoia, even for her. I’m not sure who she thought was getting in, or maybe she was just afraid that something wild in Birdie would cause her to flee.

  My mother dropped into the flowered chair that faced the TV. In the candlelight she looked both younger and older. Like she could be sixteen still, in a long skirt and bracelets, her hair down her back. Or she might be ancient. Her red hair some kind of trick she played on your eyes.

  “They left a notice on the door,” I said.

  “I didn’t see it,” she said.

  “Neither did I.”

  “You weren’t even here,” she said.

  “Mom, I have to work.”

  “All night?” she said.

  “Sometimes I go out.”

  “With who?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It sure as hell does matter.”

  “This has to stop, Mom,” I said. “You can’t keep us both here. You can’t patrol who I’m allowed to see or be friends with.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked me.

  “I’m just trying to live my own life,” I said. “And not pay for your fucking mistakes.”

  “You know,” she started. She had a look of confidence. It was the calm face she gave me when she knew she didn’t have to yell to make a point—when she didn’t swear, just spoke the truth. Her eyes were soft, her cheeks settled, her mouth relaxed. “You know that you are just as guilty as I am.”

  I gritted my teeth.

  “It can’t go on like this,” I said.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. It wasn’t my decision. She’s not my kid. We’re your kids.” I felt like I was breaking into pieces. I was afraid I was going to cry, but I was damned if I would do it in front of her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “Your life was set into motion as soon as that fire hit your skin.”

  “Mom,” I said, pleading.

  “You feel that?” she asked. “That gnawing inside you that says you want to be free, that you want to live your own life? That’s the fire. It’s trying to burn its way out.”

  ELEVEN: KATERI

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18

  Shannon asks her if he’s under arrest. He has his head down, his hoodie pulled tight around his neck like a cowl. He looks at his feet like a kid who has always been in trouble. Not a kid who’s nervous. A kid who’s been here before.

  “Am I under arrest?” he says.

  “No,” Kateri says.

  “Can I come tomorrow? After work?” he asks.

  She hems. He gave her the DNA sample and showed up when she asked him to.

  “I will,” he says. “I just …” He breathes out hard, blowing through his nose.

  “It’s a lot,” Kateri says. “I’m sorry.”

  “I need to … I don’t know,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” Kateri says. “You need to process. You need to grieve, and that’s going to take longer than any interrogation or arrest.”

  His eyes dart to the side, wet, and he looks off in the distance, behind the station, to the tall trees that have recently gone bright crimson red.

  “Do you have a place to stay?” Kateri asks.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “You can’t go back to the house on Hidden Drive,” she says. “It’s a crime scene.”

  He swallows and then rubs his jaw. “Okay,” he says.

  “You also can’t leave the county. Or the state.”

  He huffs, annoyed.

  “How long do you work?”

  “Until three,” he says.

  “Can you come in at three thirty tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  She puts her hand on his upper arm, padded with the sweat shirt and flannel underneath it. He feels willowy, younger than nineteen. She fights the urge to comfort him further.

  “If you don’t come,” she says.

  “I’ll come,” he says.

  “If you don’t,” she says, “that’ll read as suspicious. And I’ll have more of a reason to pursue an arrest.”

  “I know,” he says.

  She holds out her hand, businesslike, and he shakes it, more confident than she might have expected. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she tells him.

  * * *

  The day has felt like two days, starting in the predawn with the body in the swamp, the press conference, her trip to the morgue. At home, she stands under a hot shower for a long time, allows herself the luxury of a sweet-smelling, oily body wash, and wraps her hair in a yellow towel after. She’s dressed and drinking tea when Hurt calls.

  “I thought you were meeting me,” he says.

  She looks at the time on her phone. She thought he might have forgotten.

  “I updated the investigation room,” he says. “And I have some details, if you want them.”

  He’s still in the office. She feels a pang of guilt at having gone home, showe
red, begun to relax. She squeezes the towel at the base of her neck and then again at the top of her head.

  “I can meet you,” she says. “It’s going to take a bit.”

  He breathes into the phone in a way that makes her think he’s smiling. “You don’t have to put on makeup for me, Fisher,” he says.

  “I’ll meet you at Sweetwater,” she says, droll, and hangs up.

  The Sweetwater is the nicest of three bars in Spring Falls. It’s a narrow brick building from the 1800s and feels like it belongs in a bigger city. She’s gone there before, when she first started, with Hurt and Whittaker for beer and to see if she could throw darts. She can. That night she paced herself very slowly with beer. She hadn’t even felt the beginning of a buzz by the time they all left.

  It’s a cold night. She dries her hair as best she can with limited time, smoothing it out with a paddle brush and the hair dryer, but it’s still wet underneath. Outside, she tries to ignore it, but she’s sure she saw flurries, floating, not landing in the air outside the bar. The bartender makes her a dark Manhattan, with two deep-red Luxardo cherries. When she takes that first sip, she thinks, I’m back at zero, the way AA teaches you. There’s no trophy for the days in between.

  Hurt is already there, drinking a gin and tonic. He tries not to look at her regular clothes, her V-neck sweater and jeans, her hair, down and loose and shining. She had not put on makeup. So he looks, and doesn’t look, or looks without meeting her eye, trying not to be detected. In the dark bar, the black sweater does a decent job of hiding the fullness of her breasts, but it’s not loose. He looks down at his drink and sips.

  “Water in the lungs,” he says, pulling them back into focus. The dead cop. The missing girl.

  The drink immediately makes her face warm, which she’s sure shows in pink spots on her cheeks. “He went in alive,” she answers.

  “Diaz called with cause of death—drowning,” Hurt says. “The parents had to identify,” he adds.

  On the TV behind the bar, a baseball game plays, muted. The cherries in her glass knock around at the bottom like a pair of kids’ play balls.

  “Probably right after you left with Jenkins,” he says. “Long day,” he says. “It’s why Diaz gets a BMW.”