The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  “Recently released,” Kateri says, leaning. She’s aware that her blouse brushes against Hurt, and she backs away, but it makes it harder for her to see. She squints. “What was he in for?”

  “Fraud,” Hurt says. He scrolls down quickly, and the blur makes her faintly nauseated. “Racketeering,” he says.

  Kateri looks again at the file photo. A thin man with dark hair and deep-set blue eyes, a bluish five o’clock shadow, a sharp jaw. He holds his mouth in a hard, straight line, and still his lips are soft looking, pinkish.

  “Any indication of arson?” Kateri asks. When she closes her eyes, she sees the pieces of bones, smoked and broken, splayed on Dr. Diaz’s exam table. “There was accelerant on the bones,” she says.

  “I left a message with Ferris,” Hurt says. “I’ll ask.” Then he looks up at her, his fingers still on the touch pad of the laptop. “This address is less than a mile from the Jenkins property,” Hurt says.

  Kateri’s scalp prickles. “Do we have a phone number for him?”

  “No,” Hurt says. “But I bet it’s an unregistered track phone.”

  FOURTEEN: SHANNON

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

  I couldn’t quite look Terri in the eye when I told her, “I can’t stay at work today.” I hunched up my shoulders to my ears, and when Terri noticed, she put her hand on my back, rubbing in a circle. Terri was good to me. She knew my mom, and for a brief time had dated Park. Her kids were younger than me.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked me.

  “I have to take my mother to a lawyer,” I said.

  “Today?”

  “Yes, at one.”

  They’d all gone to Jefferson High School together. We never ever talked about it. Not Park, not school, not the fire. But she had escaped what my mother had not. Normal. Unscathed.

  She peered into the kitchen through the round window on the swinging door. “I’ll tell Junior,” she said. “Go if you have to. We’ll deal.”

  * * *

  It was a decent-weather day, and there were people at the park with dogs and babies, birders with spyglasses, runners looking at the changing leaves. I tried to see what anyone might see. Why we would try to save this place. The weathered siding. The slanted porch. The camp chairs with cigarette holes burned into them. Beer cans around the fire pit. I hoped my mother and sister weren’t outside. I was glad it wasn’t summer. Sometimes my mother let Birdie run around naked, in sneakers, in the hot weather. She was a miracle, I thought. I had never felt either that sturdy or that free.

  Inside, I found Birdie at the kitchen table, doing letters, a whole line of cursive capital Bs in a row. Her tongue licking her top lip.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked her, but then my mother came down the hall in an orange T-shirt that was too small and a long hippie skirt, barefoot. She was dirty—no one had washed much without water—but her hair was braided to one side, and it didn’t look terrible.

  “Mom,” I said, trying to sound light and open. “We can fix the power.”

  “Oh, Shannon,” she said, and clapped her hands together in thanks. I wondered if we looked alike. I wondered if this was what I was headed for, fifteen, twenty years down the road, barefoot in a dirty house, with a tattoo on my brow.

  “You have to come downtown,” I said.

  She looked at Birdie and then paced to the window to look out.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? Is someone here?”

  “It’s just me. But we need to take care of the house. I need you to put it in my name so I can have everything turned back on.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her arms dropped. “I get it.” Her face had a sweaty film that said she was an hour or so out of a high. “I’m just going to put you in charge,” she said.

  “Only on paper,” I said. I heard Birdie scrape her chair on the floor and come to look out the window, but I held her back at arm’s length.

  “What are we going to do,” she said to me, nodding at Birdie, “once it’s all yours?”

  I wanted to remind her that she’d been threatening to run for years.

  “It’s just so I can take over the payments,” I said.

  “You want to make the payments?” she said. “Make them. It’s about time you contributed.”

  I bit my tongue. I had been doing everything for her for years. “They need the payment in full,” I said. “I can’t pay that much. If I put the house in my name, I can start over again at zero. I can fix this,” I said.

  She took the edge of her skirt, which had been dragging on the floor and in the dirt outside, and rubbed it on her face, taking away some of the shine.

  “What am I supposed to do with her?” she whispered to me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What you always do with her.”

  * * *

  I wanted to die, driving the truck with my mother riding in the passenger seat. I thought this had become the picture of my life, me driving a shitty vehicle that wasn’t even mine, that sat a little crooked on its axle, like you were sliding off a hill, driving my mother around to appointments I couldn’t pay for. I was afraid to open the windows, and afraid not to because I wasn’t sure which was worse for the smell of her damp, unwashed body: blowing it around, or closing it up with the vents on. I stared straight ahead, and she sat like a pouting child, her arms crossed over her chest. I fidgeted with my fingers on the steering wheel the whole way there, picking at my nails, pulling off the cuticles until a fat bead of red blood appeared.

  There was a paralegal at the table with Dan Sullivan, a young woman who smiled sweetly, but my mother would look only at a fixed point on the wall and refused to make eye contact or acknowledge anyone in the room. We were twenty-five minutes late.

  Dan took the papers one by one from the paralegal and explained them to my mother slowly, in simple language.

  “I’m not fucking retarded,” my mother said. Her brow was dripping, and she snatched a box of tissues from the middle of the table and blotted at her face.

  “I just need to make sure that you’re in full understanding of each one of these,” Dan said, and she signed what was in front of her.

  “Can I use the ladies’ room?” my mother asked, and I glared at her.

  “Of course,” Dan said. “Shelly,” he said to the paralegal, “would you show Mrs. Jenkins to the restroom?”

  My mother stood up, wearing a little velvet bag that hung crossways over her body, over her tiny orange T-shirt. I swear I heard the bag rattle with pills.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, and smiled a little, like I was the one who was ridiculous.

  After that, she looked around the room while Dan went through the rest of the papers. She watched a cat cross the street outside; she focused for a few minutes on the sweep of the second hand on the clock above the archway. She traced imaginary shapes with her finger on the glossy surface of the table. And she started to fall asleep.

  I whispered and pinched her arm under the table. “Mom.”

  She drew in a sharp breath.

  “This last one is an affidavit,” Dan said, handing her one more sheet, “just stating that you understand.”

  “Oh my God,” my mother exclaimed, and started laughing, her voice like a bell, her mouth wide and wet and happy. “I fucking understand,” she said.

  I had to sign underneath her on all the pages, as the grantee, and my handwriting looked like a little kid’s. Like a boy, forging a man’s name.

  We left the office at three thirty. It was my job to get my mother out of there before she started asking questions or fell asleep at the table so hard I couldn’t move her. I took her outside, where we each smoked a cigarette, side by side next to the truck, and she wouldn’t say a thing to me.

  I dropped her at home, where she rushed inside to see if Birdie had stayed put, but I backed right out, heading straight for the power company and then the water authority, where I had to show copies of the new deed and schedule
to have service reinstated.

  “It can take three to five days,” the woman at the desk told me.

  I thought about standing outside the bathroom at Bear’s house. All he had done was touch my elbow, through my shirt; I had felt his fingers go in a circle around the bone. I straightened up at the counter. “It can also be done right now,” I said back to her.

  I felt a blush spread on my cheeks, and I thought I had never known how to ask for what I needed, but I raised my eyebrows at the woman, and she came back with an approval for turn-on that evening.

  In fact, I left both places with the services restored, the water, the lights, and the heat, even though we didn’t need it just yet.

  * * *

  I left them inside, happy for the moment; Birdie needed a bath, and she would get one. My mother was already messing with the TV surveillance. I heard her voice but couldn’t make out what she said, and then I heard Birdie’s little laugh.

  They were fine, I thought. I got back in the truck before my mother noticed that I’d kept the keys on me, and headed out.

  FIFTEEN: SHANNON

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

  I pulled into Bear’s just past sunset, the field out back black against a purple sky, a few lone, dark clouds drifting above the horizon. Bear turned on the recessed lights in the living room, dimmed them, opened a beer, and then started to work on a fire, a wadded bunch of newspaper going hot and fast underneath the logs.

  “Where do you want to start today?” he asked, with his back to me. When he turned and looked me over, I thought I looked okay. I hadn’t been at work very long at all. When I’d gone home to get my mother, I’d thrown on one of Bear’s own shirts.

  I stood stuck in the place between the kitchen and, as he called it, the great room. I was like a rabbit when you come upon it in the woods, when it stands real still like you can’t see it. Its eye big, its little heart racing.

  He opened the fridge for another beer, handed it to me, a little close. His eyes scanned my chest. “Did you work today?” he asked.

  “Not in this,” I laughed.

  The room smelled like dry, seasoned wood and burning paper, like clean floor and oiled leather, the hint of hops from the beer. Nothing at all like my house. I hoped no one tried to open the fridge tonight.

  Behind Bear were open frames on the counter, the kind a regular house would have filled with photos of babies and dogs, family outings, a wedding. There was a slim laptop, plugged in. Everything else was generic, staged in a way that left no trace of personality, just opulence and comfort. I started to feel like I was nowhere, the way it felt sometimes in the woods, in the car with Baby Jane, like the world outside there had disappeared and I was floating and nothing around me was real anymore.

  I could feel Bear’s breath.

  His eyes crinkled with amusement. He licked his lips and pulled the tie out of his hair, letting it uncoil to his shoulders. “Are you going to allow yourself a day off?” he asked.

  “It’s not really a luxury I have,” I said.

  “It is if you make it,” he said.

  He fingered the edge of my sleeve, by my bicep, not enough to touch my actual arm but enough to send a charge through me. I jumped, and reached instinctively for my cigarettes.

  “You want it back?” I said, half laughing.

  “Not right now,” Bear answered.

  I started toward the patio door.

  “Here,” Bear said, and handed me a pack of American Spirits. “At least smoke better while you’re here.”

  I took it, polite, and we stood on the covered patio watching the last of the light fall over the field, the swimming pool. There was a reason I liked my cheap reservation cigarettes. You had to pull like a bitch on an American Spirit to get a good drag.

  I looked out at the expanse of yard. “Do you even play tennis?” I asked.

  Bear shook his head.

  “What’s all this for?”

  “I’ll tell you about it someday,” he said.

  “Someday when?” I asked.

  “When we’re not here.”

  My eyes got wide. It jolted me all at once, like flying apart, arms and legs off, the notion that the world didn’t have to be unknown. That there was more than Spring Falls. That I would see other places, maybe live in them. With someone else.

  “You don’t have to stay in Spring Falls,” Bear said.

  I’d only ever been across the border to Canada, with my mother, to buy painkillers.

  He noticed the way I pressed my lips together hard, the clench of my hand on the beer bottle, and laid his hand at the base of my neck.

  “You okay?” he asked, tentative.

  I couldn’t think of anything greater than the warmth and the weight of his hand, right then, on the back of my neck, touching my skin. The hair up the back of my head felt electric.

  Inside, I stepped out of my shoes and went to where he stood by the fire. “The thing I told you, about”—my voice dropped—“about my sister. You can’t say anything about that.” He looked puzzled and waited.

  My shoulders sank. “I can’t explain it,” I said. “It’s just—today has been such a long day.”

  “Is she yours?” he asked me.

  “What? No,” I said, and shook my head. “Oh my God, no.” I faced the fire, where one log burned fast in the middle, about to give way.

  I heard Bear behind me, and without saying anything else, I felt his breath, his lips on the edge of my hair, on the back of my neck. He put his hands on my biceps, and my head got light and woozy, my sight went dim around the edges, and I jumped, hard, nearly off my feet, and Bear’s hands sprung off me.

  I was afraid to turn around.

  I was afraid it hadn’t happened.

  “I don’t know if I get you,” Bear said then.

  My heart was loud, hammering in my ears. I turned and tried to shrug. “What’s to get?” I said. My lips felt tight and my jaw hurt.

  But Bear tilted his head and laughed at my attempt to be cool, to be unaffected. I had never seen anyone so comfortable in his own skin.

  Please stop talking, I thought.

  Bear let his hands drop down at his sides, his chest open, his palms turned out.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said automatically.

  “Nothing?” Bear said. His eyes lit up.

  I got out from in front of him so the fire was no longer roaring up my back. “Nothing,” I said again. I started to stammer, my stomach knotted tight. “I told you,” I said. “I just need to work.” I fumbled in my pocket for the cash he’d given me. I was just going to give it back.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Bear said. “Don’t give that back to me,” he scolded. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said again, “at all.”

  In the dim room, his eyes looked darker. He got closer, close enough for me to smell his spicy, exotic scent, which I imagined was thatched right into his hair. On his head, everywhere. I pictured an arrow of hair, like a feather, coming together below his navel, and I just about blacked out.

  “What do you want?” Bear said again.

  I felt my lip twitch in a nervous tic. I tried to look away, out the window, but it was completely dark out there, and all I saw was a reflection of the room, the fire, the couch where Buddy was curled and sleeping, the two of us toe to toe.

  Bear took my jaw in his hand and kissed me.

  A real kiss. Not a shy peck to try things out, something that might be misconstrued and explained. He started slow, and when I didn’t freak out again, he went right for it, his hand on the back of my neck, my lips apart. I felt his teeth and his tongue.

  I made a sound like strangling. Like gasping.

  “What do you want?” Bear said again, with just enough space for breathing.

  I shook my head. My whole core trembled. I was my own earthquake.

  He bit my bottom lip, playful, and I felt like I’d collapse, my knees giving way, m
y body like a pile of silk on the floor.

  “I want you to say it,” Bear said.

  I can’t, I thought. I couldn’t articulate anything. He had me by the back of the skull, but he let go and tucked his fingers behind my ears. His body curved like a muscular dog, hunched and ready.

  He moved just the dry tip of his tongue around the outside of my ear.

  “You want me to fuck you,” he said.

  “Oh God,” was all I could say.

  “Say it,” Bear said. He put his knee between mine, a wrestling move, like he was ready to take me down, onto the soft butter couch, or right onto the floor in front of the fire. I didn’t have any fight in me. I wanted it. My voice felt stopped, dry.

  “Shannon,” he said, his forehead pressed to mine.

  “Fuck me,” I said, and my knees felt like water.

  His laugh was delighted. I thought if he didn’t go ahead, I might die right there on the spot. I dug my fingers into his forearms. “Please,” I whispered.

  * * *

  I almost ruined it. When we were tangled up on the couch, kissing, and Bear undid his pants and put his hand on the back of my head and my whole body lurched in panic.

  “I can’t,” I said, breathless. Oh my God, I thought. Is this what he’s paying me for?

  He backed up, hands off. “It’s okay,” he said. But then he got up, and I thought it was over, that that was as far as it would ever go and I would have to spontaneously combust from shame. But he held out his hand and led me back to the bedroom.

  To the master suite, where I’d showered in the massive white bathroom, where there was a huge white bed and another fireplace, this one gas, which Bear flicked on with a remote control. There was nothing over the windows, the panes just wood framed, tall, thin, bare to the outside. Anyone out there could see everything inside. The high ceiling. A sleek, three-blade fan, far above, that I kept my eyes on a lot of the time.

  The bed felt like silk, like glass.