The Watcher Page 3

  “I’ll meet you at Mercy,” Kateri says to Maggie. Her throat tightens and she’s afraid for a moment that she’ll spill. Girls are so tough, she thinks, watching this one, covered in blood, clinging to a moon tattoo on a woman she doesn’t know.

  Behind the house, deputies have upturned rocks and carefully scattered leaf piles. Kateri sees the shape of some of them moving, far off in the trees, the shine of their lights, the flash of a camera. Hurt comes and stands beside her, watching the stretcher load into the van.

  “She mentioned a him,” Kateri tells Hurt. “She said she was waiting for him.”

  “Who?” Hurt says. “The son?”

  “I don’t know,” Kateri says, but shakes her head as if she does. “She called him an angel,” she says. She looks past Hurt at the activity in the woods.

  “Go,” he says. “I’ll let you know what we find here. You belong with her.”

  She hesitates, because from someone else, it would feel patronizing, telling her to look after the child. But Kateri thinks he’s right.

  * * *

  Our Lady of Mercy Hospital is thirty miles away, in the next town over, Mount Snow. It’s just big enough to have a community college and a tiny women’s school, Creveling College, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, and a small Catholic hospital. When Kateri arrives, the girl is in triage in the ER and there’s nothing to do but wait. She can’t sit still on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, surrounded by sick or injured people waiting to be seen, so she walks.

  She spends time in the art deco lobby, looking at the high windows and the inlaid quartz in the floors, the dark wood, the giant chandelier that hangs in the center. And then once she’s walked the perimeter, she ducks into a door that says CHAPEL.

  It isn’t her thing. Even with her saint’s name and her Catholic grandmother, she doesn’t feel any truth to it. Her mother rejected the faith, and what Kateri knows at all was gleaned from her grandmother’s things, her little portraits of the Blessed Mother, the crèche she put out at Christmas, her Lives of the Saints. It all feels like a faraway myth. The room is dim and red and smells like candles and incense, like warm wood and spice. Kateri dips her finger into the holy water and crosses herself as she was taught.

  She sits on one of the six pews, lulled by the warmth and closeness of the room, and feels herself welling up with discomfort and want, with an ache in her core.

  She distinctly remembers sitting on one of the ladder-back chairs in her grandmother’s kitchen, having her hair brushed the morning of her mother’s funeral. It was November, and she wore a dress she hated, and stockings because it was too cold to go bare legged and her grandmother said it was disrespectful.

  She liked the feel of the brush, pulling from underneath. It was eight in the morning on a Saturday, when Kateri wanted to be sleeping.

  “I am never having kids,” she announced.

  Her grandmother stopped brushing and let Kateri’s hair fall, smoothing it with her hands.

  “I know you feel that way now,” she said.

  “Ever,” Kateri said.

  She’d lost both parents in four years, between twelve and sixteen. Heart attack, drug overdose. Her mother just didn’t wake up. They’d been watching TV, and when her mother passed out, which wasn’t unusual, Kateri went to bed.

  In the morning she was in the same spot, cold.

  Her immediate feeling had been rage. It took her years to feel any sadness or grief at her mother’s death.

  Her grandmother kissed the top of her head. “It’ll change,” she said, and Kateri snorted in disapproval and rolled her eyes.

  Now she makes a steeple of her hands and presses them against her face, breathing through them. The room is lined with alcoves of saints, most of them women. Both the hospital and the women’s college were founded by nuns. The stained-glass window behind the altar is a blazing immaculate heart, flowers laced between the swords.

  She stands, woozy from the warmth of the room, and makes her way down each side of the chapel, stopping at each image. Bridget with her bowl of fire and reed cross. Monica, an old woman, the mother of St. Augustine. Bernadette, the girl saint in her grotto.

  * * *

  Kateri remembers that the sisters she failed slept on cheap blow-up pool mats instead of real beds. The two of them side by side on the living room floor, a string of Christmas lights hanging above them.

  They’d been attacked by their mother’s boyfriend.

  She remembers her own mother’s boyfriend grabbing her by the wrist and leaning close to her face with beer breath. “You could make a million fucking bucks,” he said, “with those tits, if you just had blue eyes.”

  Kateri lights the candle underneath the girl saint and lets the red glass glow.

  She doesn’t ask for anything. She doesn’t know how. But she stands for a moment, thinking of little Birdie, with her red hair and her green eyes, and waiting for the ache inside her to go away.

  * * *

  They admit the girl, settle her in a room on the pediatric ward, and give her a sedative. Kateri meets the attending in the hallway. He says the child is in shock.

  “She doesn’t have a great grip on reality,” he says, and then adds, “which is difficult to tell sometimes in a child so young. We’ll run a full psychiatric evaluation tomorrow,” he says, “in addition to some further physical testing. She would not let us do a pelvic.”

  Kateri’s eyes narrow. “Is there something that makes you think that’s necessary?”

  “Well, if you want to rule out sexual assault by an invader,” he says, as if Kateri ought to know.

  “I don’t know that there was an invader,” Kateri says, “and if there was, I don’t know that the crime was sexually motivated. And what do you mean, she wouldn’t let you, if you’d sedated her and she has, as you said, a poor grip on reality?”

  “She bit a nurse.”

  He’s still in his twenties, she thinks. Gingery, with a face that will always look younger than his age. She tries to imagine him someplace else, out at a bar, running. He is attractive, and that annoys her further.

  “We tried,” he says. “But she thrashed. If she was assaulted, we are required by law to do a rape kit.”

  “I’ll decide that,” Kateri says. “In the meantime, wait until it’s requested. It’s invasive. I don’t know that it’s necessary.”

  “Well, it’s evidence,” the attending says. “And I would think that anyone who fought the kit that hard had likely been assaulted. It’s not like she didn’t know what we were examining or looking for.”

  Kateri looks at her fingernails and not at the doctor. “Could be,” she says, and then shrugs. “She’s what, five? She may have been taught to fiercely guard her privates. She doesn’t know you. You’re a strange man to her.” Kateri’s lips are tight when she looks up at him. “All your rape kit proves,” she says, “is penetration within the last forty-eight hours. And nothing else if there’s no semen left behind. I’d like to speak with her.”

  “We’re going to need ID and parental or state consent,” he says. “Who did she say she was?”

  “Her name is Birdie.”

  “That’s a pet name,” the doctor says.

  “You don’t know that,” Kateri says.

  “Her mother?” He asks.

  “Is likely dead,” Kateri answers.

  “Is there a guardian?”

  “None specified,” Kateri says. “This is an active investigation.”

  “I understand, Detective.” He looks off down the hall, low lit, where people walk by in pairs or push carts and announcements come on overhead. In a Catholic hospital like Mercy, the day begins and ends with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “I sent her clothing to the lab as you requested,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  He looks quick over his shoulder and then says, “Can I ask you something?”

  Kateri crosses her arms over her chest. “Of course,” she says.

  “Do you think she’s r
esponsible?”

  “For what?” Kateri asks, her eyes suddenly wide.

  “The murder,” he says.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Detective,” he says. “She was covered in blood. She was very close to the crime. Very close,” he says again.

  She feels a headache begin behind her eyes. “Doctor, we have not recovered a body,” she says. “This girl is what, forty pounds?”

  “I’m just telling you what I saw,” he says.

  “Maybe we can concentrate on our own roles in this,” Kateri says. “Unless you want me to conduct the medical testing? And you can investigate the crime scene?”

  He sets his jaw.

  “When can I talk to her?”

  “Tomorrow,” he says, cold. He takes a step back from Kateri. “She’s resting,” he says. He clips his pen onto his coat pocket. “Good night, Detective Fisher.”

  She watches him disappear down the hall, walking into the light, tall, thin, like a skeleton wearing clothes. She takes her phone out and calls Hurt.

  “We haven’t found anything,” he says. “I shut it down for the night. It’s getting dark. We’ll resume at first light. How’s the kid?” he asks.

  “Covered in blood,” Kateri answers.

  “Injured?” he asks.

  “Nothing apparent.”

  “Interesting,” Hurt says. “If she were older, we’d arrest her.”

  “She couldn’t have locked herself in that closet,” Kateri says. “It was locked from the outside.”

  “I’d like to know what she saw,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  Before she goes, she asks the nurse if she can peek in on the child they have labeled Jane Doe. An officer has come to stand guard by her room. A kid, she thinks, just out of training.

  “You are?” the nurse asks.

  Kateri shows her badge. “I’m the lead detective,” she says. “I won’t disturb her,” she adds.

  The nurse goes ahead of her and opens the door, as if it was locked, and stands in the doorway while Kateri goes in to the girl’s bedside. She sleeps sound, small in the bed, tucked in, her hair around her like a halo. The nurse waits. In the hall, a clattering cart goes by, but the girl doesn’t stir. Kateri lays her hand on the girl’s head, her skin cool, her hairline damp, and then leans in to peck her forehead.

  “Try to remember,” she says.

  FOUR: SHANNON

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

  I tried to remember when it was better, when anything was normal. I longed to live somewhere where no one knew who we were. Where no one made jokes about the tiny homemade tattoo on my mother’s face, a blue crescent moon where her widow’s peak met her forehead. Where the cops didn’t come question me about a barn set on fire.

  “Arson’s my father’s crime,” I’d tell them. “Look it up.” And when they finally accepted that I’d been where I’d said I’d been, at work, at home, or nowhere near whatever it was that had burned, they’d give me that flat look of unwilling acceptance. Just checking.

  Everything changed with the baby. My mother didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know for a long time. But when I started to notice, it was unmistakable. The swell of her belly. The way she walked like her hips were unhinged.

  “Listen,” she said to me on the porch.

  “Have you been to a doctor?” I asked. I was fourteen. I thought I knew everything important, and honestly, her body grossed me out, the way it was blossoming, the shape of her hands and feet as she changed.

  “No,” she said. I watched her twirl a long lock of hair around her fingers. “He can never know,” she said to me.

  “Who?”

  “Your dad.”

  “How would he know?” I said. “I can’t even remember what he looks like. It’s not like I go see him on the weekend,” I snipped.

  She pressed her lips together. I thought she was trying. She had seemed less high most days. But I didn’t know what she did while I was at school.

  “I’m sorry it’s your burden,” she said then.

  “Yeah, me too,” I answered.

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  I didn’t have to tell anyone. Everyone in this town already knew who we were. That my dad was in prison for trying to kill us. Sometimes I told people he was dead, that he’d died in prison years ago instead of living on, cared for with meals and books to read and card games while we had to figure everything out on our own.

  My mother rubbed her belly in a circle, and the light caught her tattoo, and I thought she looked like some kind of medieval witch sitting there in a long hippie skirt.

  “Are you going to keep it?” I asked.

  “Her,” she said. “And yes.”

  “How do you know if you haven’t been to a doctor?” I asked.

  “Don’t question things you’ll never understand,” she said.

  * * *

  I never knew what kind of agony she went through in deciding to keep her, because she never told me. We accepted each other as who we were and didn’t ask questions. She assumed I wasn’t interested in women having babies or why or how, and she was right.

  I was already taller than her. She put her hands on my arms and gripped her fingernails into my skin while she squeezed her eyes shut with pain. We had lived all this time like adults, even when I was little, like equals. We didn’t have shit. She was terrified of Park getting out of prison. Every week, she counted out cash for me so I could pay the bills in town, riding my bike to the grocery store service counter. And whatever was left was for food.

  “I need you to help me right now,” she said through her teeth. She stopped breathing for a moment, holding her breath, gripping my arms. And then it seemed like a wave passed and she started again. “Help me,” she said.

  She had me get towels and water. She had me place a cold cloth on her head.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked, stupid, but I didn’t know. It seemed like we needed a doctor. Or maybe a wise woman, but my mother was the wise woman. I guessed if anyone could do it on her own, my mother could.

  We had no phone at all by then. I wasn’t old enough to get my own cell phone, and my mother wouldn’t get one for herself. She didn’t want to be tracked. The landline had been shut off years before that.

  It was the middle of the night in her bedroom, in November, and my mother stripped herself naked in front of me, her body blooming itself inside out like some kind of weird night flower, reds and purples and things I’d never ever seen before, and wouldn’t again. Her belly moved from the inside like she was possessed. She was sweating, her deep-red hair down around her shoulders and stuck to her face. For a while she got down on her hands and knees and lowed like a cow, rocking back and forth, her head hanging down.

  I could see her muscles working. Could watch the contractions as they tightened her lower back, the scar from her surgery like a dark seam in her skin, writhing. They came quicker and quicker. And then it got so painful she couldn’t speak.

  I had been born at Mercy Hospital when my mother was seventeen, and Park was signing paperwork when the nurse came out and told him he had a son.

  When Birdie came, my mother had candles lit, and sage and sweet grass burning, and bowls of salt water in the corners of the room.

  “Come here,” she said, and I got down on my knees in front of her and held her hands and she pressed her sweaty forehead to mine, her shoulders round and slick with perspiration, her breasts already milk-engorged and standing out from her rib cage.

  “Mother Mary,” she muttered and stopped. Breathed and stopped, like something strangled her from within.

  Then she told me she needed to be alone.

  * * *

  The baby was fat and gray skinned until my mother toweled her off, rubbing her to get her blood going, to turn her skin to a pinkish brown. My mother put on a loose nightgown that was black and covered in stars and made her look like a fortune teller. She wound her hair up on top of her head and
stuck the baby on her nipple. When the baby was done drinking, my mother handed her to me, wrapped tight in a pink towel.

  She was heavier than I thought, and smaller, like a dense little bean. I rubbed at her hair because it looked bloody, and I thought it was still caked from birth, but that’s just the color it was. My mother wafted sweet grass around the room and then rubbed a small spot of sandalwood oil on the baby’s head.

  “Sparrow Annie Jenkins,” she said. Her face was beaded with sweat, and her eyes had a glaze that I’d come to know. She’d loaded up on oxys after the birth. I couldn’t really blame her—I’m sure she hurt like hell—but I wondered if she could do what she needed to take care of the baby.

  “I can’t promise you that we won’t just run,” she said to me.

  “Run?” I said. The baby made a gurgling sound, and I jostled her in my arms. “What about me?” I asked her.

  “You’re his,” she said. “She’s mine. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.”

  “What if I don’t want to be his?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to be,” my mother said. “You just have to be you.” She closed her eyes and swayed on her feet. She’d stay the next week in her bed with the baby, sweaty and under with fever and so much blood, the baby just nestled into her, drinking when she wanted.

  “I have to protect her,” my mother said. “At all costs.”

  After, she never left my mother’s side. She lived her life on my mother’s hip, or in my mother’s lap, and she was a big, fat sass of a baby with a wicked laugh and hair like copper springs.

  I loved her.

  But every day, my mother and I seemed to just check on each other, to see if the other was still there. I left school and I started working, and I’d drive my mother’s truck out to Walmart to buy diapers with cash. Where no one knew to ask me who I needed them for.

  * * *

  Baby Jane never asked me anything. He just let me talk, so much that sometimes I felt like I was unraveling.