The photo albums came out. Heather’s tradition, when she found a man she wanted to keep. Her way of sucking him into the family. She started with Jaylyn’s infant pictures, flipping the plastic-wrapped pages and pointing to each snapshot—“Here she is, three days old. Oh, here’s her first bath. And this is her with her grandmother.”—before passing the book around the circle for everyone else to see. She was on the couch with Walter, Lacie crowded between them, the little girl dipping her hand into Walter’s shirt pocket, for more Mike & Ikes. She liked him. She liked any man Heather brought home, desperate for a father, one who wouldn’t change every six weeks—even though she did see her dad occasionally. She and Skye were full sisters, not like the others, sharing a father who lived four states away but who sent Christmas gifts and made a phone call a couple times a year, and sometimes came by for a week in the summer.
It wasn’t enough.
Skye’s album came around next. Jaylyn tossed it on Matt’s lap, and he was about to pass it on to Sienna when he noticed one of the infant photos. Dark hair, but not much. One unruly eyebrow that fanned the wrong way, reaching across the bridge of her nose. The other neat and growing smooth to the right. Full lips, but small above her square chin—puckered, not spread wide. And thick, stubby eyelashes.
He knew this face.
Silvia’s face.
His suspicion filled his cheeks, hot and pulsing. He turned toward Skye. She was still paging through Jaylyn’s album, her face tilted away from him. But he read her body—back slouched, neck loose, legs splayed on the carpet. Relaxed, unconcerned.
He had to be wrong.
Taking out his notebook, he wrote, You were funny looking, on a half-used page and ripped it from the spiral. He slid the book onto her knees and flattened the note next to the baby photo.
Skye laughed, crumpled the page and threw it at him. “Oh, you should talk,” she said, flipping through the album until she found a picture of the two of them, hanging upside down on the monkey bars, their shirts around their noses, bellies showing. “Look at you. If that’s not funny looking, I don’t know what is.”
Matthew couldn’t stay there. Closing himself in the bathroom, he filled his cupped hands with icy water and splattered it on his face. Think. Think. When was the baby found?
The day before he went to see his mother.
He remembered lying on the couch, TV on, volume off, watching a replay of the press conference on the eleven o’clock news. The heat. The plans for the next day whirling like bumper cars, crashing against one another and the inside of his skull, keeping him awake. And he’d taken the cushions off the couch, moving them to the floor, hoping to be cooler, be calmer about his trip.
Where had Skye been that day? He’d had dialysis. Didn’t see her before then. What about after? Think. Think. He couldn’t recall. No, wait. He could. She didn’t come to dinner that night. Heather called her, and she said she wasn’t hungry. And the next morning she looked tired and drawn, and he didn’t take the time to find out why, because he was annoyed she hadn’t looked at him when she spoke. Because Jaylyn was being such a pain. Because he was distracted with his plans to go see his mother.
The doorknob rattled. He opened it. “Matty, I gotta go,” Lacie said. He held out his arm toward the toilet, bowed a little, like he was presenting something wonderful to her. “You’re crazy,” she said, slamming the door.
In the living room, they’d moved on to videos. Sienna’s dance recital from last year played on the television. Everyone laughed and pointed. Even Skye. Matthew snuck into the kitchen and washed the dishes, scrubbing each plate until his fingers stuck to them when he ran them over the center. He thought of the Palmolive commercial. Squeaky clean.
Skye yanked on his hair. “Jaylyn’s supposed to do that.”
He shrugged, tried not to stare, but his eyes crawled over her anyway. Her face, her stomach. She didn’t look different. He couldn’t believe she’d be able to dump her own child in a field, leaving it to die.
“What’s wrong with you? You look weird. Are you sick or something?”
He shook his head.
“All right,” she said, eyebrows—one still lifting the wrong way— up. “If you say so.”
Matthew rinsed the frying pan, the scalded broccoli pot. He dried his hands, took his pillbox from the cabinet and poured the night’s doses into his mouth, held them there until he could no longer stand the taste, yellow and sulfured on his tongue. He imagined urine tasted this way, spit the pills into the sink, swallowing back the vomit clawing up his throat.
He couldn’t believe it. Not Skye.
“Matt,” Heather said, coming beside him. “Skye says you’re sick. Should I call the doctor?”
A show for Walter, the concern. Matthew shook his head. My pills went down the wrong pipe. I’m okay.
“Well, okay then. Whip and I are going out for a bit. Make sure Sienna and Lacie are in bed by nine.” And she squeezed him, an odd sideways hug, her head bumping against his shoulder.
He nodded and, after she and Walter left, counted out his medication again and took it with water.
The albums were on the coffee table, the little girls transfixed to the television. He found Skye’s book, the blue one with silver edging, and wiggled the baby picture from the plastic page, into his back pocket.
He managed to somehow get through the weekend, and when school came Monday, Ellie took one look at him before homeroom and asked, “What’s wrong?”
I don’t know.
“Are you sick?”
He shook his head.
“Matt, you promised.”
I know. But I can’t talk about this yet.
“When can you?”
I don’t know.
“Matt—”
“I don’t know. Okay?”
She flinched at the sound of his voice. “Okay. Sure. Whatever.”
On Tuesday, he and Ellie barely spoke. And when the final bell rang, he took the bus home, and then pedaled over to the Patil house.
Silvia slept in her basket, and as soon as he walked in, Abbi went out to the shed. He didn’t want to pull the photo from his pocket, but had to. Holding it above the baby’s face, he saw Skye’s head on Silvia’s body. He closed his eyes, praying he was wrong, and moved the picture aside. Looked down. And he saw two Skyes looking back at him. Same eyes and eyelashes, same crooked eyebrow, same chin and mouth. The nose was different, Silvia’s smaller and flatter, pushed into her forehead.
He rocked back, landing hard on his tailbone, his spine against the couch. And he sat there, staring at Silvia from between his knees. Sat there until his feet tingled and Abbi and Benjamin walked in through the sliding back door, laughing. He tickled her side, she wrestled his hand away, twisting his arm around her. “She’s still asleep?” Abbi asked. “Did she even wake up at all?”
Matthew shook his head.
“She’ll be up all night. Do you want to stay for dinner? You’re welcome to call Ellie to come, too.”
He stood, stomped his feet on the floor. Things to do.
“Okay, then. We’ll see you Thursday,” Abbi said, and he nodded and left, flinging one leg over the seat of his bicycle. He stopped, got off the bike, let it drop onto the driveway, walked two steps back to the door. Stopped again. His hands were balled in fists at his sides.
He opened them, flapped them, turned to the bicycle, then back to the door. And then to the bicycle again. He climbed on and pedaled away.
Chapter TWENTY-NINE
Benjamin had a feeling.
He couldn’t explain it, more a hunch than anything else. But he drove to the field where he found Silvia, stood where he first saw
the bag. When he’d gone over his notes again this morning, something so simple had occurred to him. Silvia had been approximately three hours old when she arrived at the hospital—an hour drive from Temple. So, that made her two hours old at the time he pulled her from the plastic.
How far could a young mother get
two hours after giving birth?
A thin creek ran from Silvia’s pond to another about thirty yards away. Three more cottonwoods guarded that one, though the grasses weren’t nearly as high. He paced the distance off. What if the girl had been there all along? He snapped on a pair of latex gloves and combed the weeds. Near the trunk of one tree he found a patch of loose earth, brushed it with his fingers and saw the tiniest fleck of silver. He picked it up, wiped it on his pants. An earring. The stud kind, with a skull-and-crossbones design. Maybe it had nothing to do with the case at all, but Benjamin didn’t believe that. He was almost positive the mother had watched him pull Silvia from the bag. She’d most likely been startled by the teenaged lovebirds and hid. Had she put Silvia in the bag before she’d seen them in the distance, or after? Maybe she hadn’t been trying to asphyxiate her baby at all but only wanted to hide her until Simon and Tallah passed through.
Now I sound like Abbi, defending the person who tried to kill my daughter.
And in doing so, trying to defend his own actions.
All this time, Benjamin had been ready to condemn the person who’d abandoned Silvia. But when the sandstorm cleared and he shed the protective jargon of the battlefield, he wasn’t any different. Both of them cowered in the distance, looking on. Both of them waiting there for someone to die, too afraid to do the honorable thing. Stephen was his Silvia.
His squad had been returning from a convoy escort, Benjamin riding shotgun in the second of three armored Humvees. Ahead of him, he watched Stephen’s head and torso shimmy on the roof of the first Humvee, hunkered behind the mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Other than the rumbling of their vehicles, the streets of Kabul were quiet.
And then the road ballooned up under Stephen’s Humvee with a thundering roar, a furious elephant rising from the pavement. The vehicle flipped, and Benjamin watched the blast toss his friend’s body low through the air, bouncing off the road. Glass and debris hailed over his windshield as SPC Groves, Benjamin’s Humvee driver, swore and maneuvered around the wreckage, then stopped.
Small-arms fire crackled, and Benjamin scanned the buildings to the left, looking for insurgents. In his peripheral vision he saw a flash; a rocket-launched grenade plowed into the ground in front of his vehicle. More gunshots, also from in front of them. “Out,” Benjamin ordered, and they opened the doors, using them as shields as they scampered behind the Humvee. They returned fire, one sniper falling from a window above them.
He saw Stephen then, in the middle of the street, a hole ripped in his gut. He had his hand pressed into it, the blood soaking his uniform, a seeping black stain on the fabric. But his hand was red, a deep raw-meat color, and thick, clinging to his fingertips. Pomegranate juice. That was what it looked like, and Benjamin closed his eyes and saw Abbi, cutting fresh pomegranates, plucking the seeds out of the rind with her ruby-stained fingertips. Oh, Lord, Benjamin thought. Let him be dead.
But Stephen moved, curling his head up enough to see the pit in his stomach, patting the shallow pool of blood between his hipbones, with almost childlike wonder, as a toddler would splash in a puddle. Then his head lolled to one side; his eyes found Benjamin’s, and he managed to scoot his arm from his belly to the dirt, dragging it up toward his shoulder, the wing of a sand angel, reaching toward Benjamin. Blood trickled from the corner of his lips as he moved them open and closed.
Benjamin didn’t know if words came out; if they did, he couldn’t hear them amidst the shouting and the gunfire. But he understood what Stephen asked. Come get me. Pull me out of here. Don’t let me die alone.
And he didn’t go. He was scared of dying himself.
A spray of bullets pinged against the Humvee and thumped across the ground, kicking up dust. Benjamin covered his head, and when he looked again at Stephen, his friend’s face was pocked with lead, one eye still open. The other had been shot away.
Another explosion, near Benjamin’s feet, and that was the last he remembered. He regained consciousness sometime later and was airlifted to Landstuhl. Groves had been killed in the same blast that took Benjamin’s toes. Toes, for crying out loud. That was it. Stephen dead. Groves dead. Another of his unit DOA at the hospital, a fourth man paralyzed from the chest down.
And there he was, medically retired because he couldn’t run without a limp, slowly putting the pieces of his life back together when so many others had no pieces at all. Survivor’s guilt, maybe. But also complete discontent with “the Lord’s ways are not our ways” platitudes of those around him. Yeah, no kidding. He got it. But he didn’t have to like it. It brought no comfort, having a God he couldn’t understand.
He walked back over to Silvia’s pond, picked up a rock and smashed it down into the water with all his strength. The surface waved and bubbled, humps of muddy water rising, reaching up over the banks. At the center of the rippling he saw a face. Stephen’s face.
Hey, said the ripple man.
I don’t need this right now.
Then don’t talk to me.
If I stop, I’ll have no one.
There’s your wife.
Yeah. Benjamin looked into the sky, dropping his head back as far as it would go; he felt the stretch in his throat. I’m afraid she’s going to leave me.
You’re afraid of a lot of things.
Shut up.
If you don’t want her to leave, don’t make it easy for her to go.
Benjamin stared into the water again. I don’t need advice from you.
The ripples thinned as he heard his words in Stephen’s voice say, You don’t need me at all.
Then the surface of the pond went silent, and his friend’s absence pushed through his thoughts. Benjamin had always had Stephen, since their mothers were pregnant together. He knew he was a fool for pretending to have these conversations, but he didn’t want to give Stephen up now.
He went to the school with the earring and showed it to the principal.
“I don’t recognize it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Are there any students who would be more likely to wear something like this?”
“I can think of a few off the top of my head.”
“Girls?”
Karen shook her head. “Boys, mostly. But maybe one of their girlfriends. You want me to ask around?”
“No,” Benjamin said. “Not yet. I don’t want to spook anyone. Just keep an eye out.”
“Will do.”
Benjamin planned on going back to the office, but instead of pulling off the highway at Temple, he drove past the exit, kept driving. He knew where he was going but thought about anything else until, nearly two hours later, he pulled into the driveway of a white raised-ranch house.
He knocked on the door, and Katherine Duhamel answered. Her eyes widened, and she said, “Benjamin,” and hugged him tightly. Her wig scratched his cheek; it didn’t feel like real hair at all, smelled sort of synthetic—or maybe he’d imagined it. For years, Katherine had carried an extra sixty pounds smeared over her thighs and middle, the remnant of five kids in eight years, and late-night snacking to stave off sleep as she made lunches or finished laundry. After Stephen died, her weight fell off, and so did her hair.
“Mrs. Duhamel. Sorry I didn’t call first.”
“My goodness, Ben, you’re twenty-six years old. It’s Kathy.”
“I don’t think you’ll ever be anything but Mrs. Duhamel.”
“Fine, have it your way. But don’t ever think you need to call before coming over.” She opened the basement door and called, “Les, come up here.”
“Hon, have you seen my wrench? The one with the blue tape on the hand— Ben.” Leslie Duhamel grabbed Benjamin by the back of the head and embraced him, pounding him on the shoulder a couple of times. “It’s good to see you, son. It’s been too long.”
“Are you sure?” Benjamin asked.
“There’s no reason to stay away from this house.”
“How’s that pipe coming?” Katherine asked, poking Leslie in his fleshy st
omach.
“I’m a physicist, not a plumber.”
“He says that every time, Ben. But does he call someone? Nope. I think he takes delight in having a reason to bang on things.” She lowered her voice. “And do some swearing.”
“Oh, stop,” Leslie said. “Don’t listen to her. Come on, sit down. Tell us what’s going on. How’s Abbi? She’s not with you?”
“No. I just . . . thought I’d come by.”
“Ben, can I get you a drink? Coffee? Lemonade?” Katherine asked.
“Don’t trouble yourself. Just whatever you have made is fine.”
He sat with Leslie on the floral couch in the sunny, mismatched family room, across from a wall of photographs. Benjamin had never seen more pictures in one place: yellowing, candid shots of Christmases and birthdays, of weddings and graduations, posed family portraits, and others of no particular occasion. And pictures of Stephen—in his Class A’s, black tie slightly off-center. And of Ben, too. There were more photos of him hanging in the Duhamels’ family room than in his own home.
He wasn’t being fair. His folks weren’t the Duhamels, no matter how much he had wished they were while growing up. What did children know about the pain they caused their parents? His never took him aside to explain things, to speak with him about culture or tradition. He hadn’t understood them, and he’d wanted what Stephen had. Man, that must have hurt, and hurt deep.
Katherine returned with a clear glass pitcher of lemonade rattling with ice and slices of citrus. She plucked a mint leaf off the sprig on the tray and dropped one into each glass, then filled them. “Here you go, Ben,” she said. “Help yourself to a cookie, too. Oatmeal raisincranberry. I know you like them.”
She frosted her cookies with a confectioner’s glaze, and he bit into the soft disc of cinnamon and dried fruit. He’d forgotten how much he missed real cookies, having eaten Abbi’s vegan cardboard for so long. She did bake for him, but never followed the recipe, always trying to substitute applesauce for oil, or halving the sugar. “These are so good,” he told her, catching crumbs as they fell from his mouth. “Sorry.”
Watch Over Me Page 19
