Free The Keeper by Sarah Langan Page B

he’d wanted to follow her there in his mind.
    After she threw up, the pangs started. She called them pangs. Told him it came from the drinking. She tried to take a nap, sleep it off, but wound up sitting on the toilet for five hours, full of cramps that came in waves. Never labor pains, she never called them that. The thing came out and she told him it was too big to flush. What was it? He asked. Nothing, it was just a lump, she told him. No matter how many different ways he asked, she always said the same thing: It was nothing.
    She put it in a Hefty bag and buried it in her backyard. Managed, tiny as she was, to dig right through that frozen dirt behind her garage. She told him it was born dead. And he believed her. Well, why not believe her? What would have been the point in doubting?
    He married her twenty years later. She was a gossipy town librarian who’d never been able to get past more than two months dating a man before her phone stopped ringing, or some fight brewed and she wound up saying the kinds of things that most people can never forgive. She had a habit of running off at the mouth and making comments, delivered innocently enough, that you could never quite shake off. “You really shouldn’t eat so much,” she told him on their first date at the Beefsteak Charlie’s that was now a Weathervane in Corpus Christi, “You’ve got a belly as it is.”
    Never the most clever of men, a man who admittedly could not follow half of what Paul Martin was saying on any given day, Danny had still learned a few things by the time he took April out to dinner. He understood that she did not mean to cut him down. It was how she made conversation. People who say the wrong kinds of things are not always bad people. Sometimes, and this was a feeling with which he could identify very well, they were just lonely, and so unaccustomed to having people look them in the eye that they got overwhelmed. “Glad you noticed,” he told her. “I was hoping you’d be looking at my belly.” She blushed that day, and it had surprised him that, aside from when he spilled food on his shirt or licked his fingers in public, he could make any woman blush. They were married within the year.
    Since she was in her mid-thirties and he in his late forties, they immediately tried to conceive a child. When nothing happened, she told him the story of her pregnancy. He was the only person she’d ever told. Not even Kevin Brutton knew that buried behind her parents’ old house was a child that with one spank might have cried.
    After that, they just kind of gave up on kids. April never went to a gynecologist, and he never pushed her because he knew she didn’t want to have to explain. She did not want to know for sure what had happened to her body that day she drank too much and hurled herself out a window.
    So it made him feel pretty low when she got back every year from taking care of those spoiled kids in Saratoga Springs who complained about her cooking and laughed at her Maine accent. It made him feel pretty low. If they’d had kids of their own, April would never have let anyone treat her that way.
    When she got back last night, April had been pretty upset. She’d talked about the kids, how they were growing up, how one day she expected they’d get married and have children of their own. He’d tried to keep the news from her but it had been impossible. “Where’s Benji?” she’d asked.
    “Taking a stroll,” he’d told her.
    “Where?”
    “I don’t know.” Too tired to accompany the old mutt, he’d let it out the back door earlier in the day to conduct its business, and mysteriously, the damn thing never returned. Five minutes later they were wandering the streets searching for Benji. April shouted his name until her throat was hoarse. They didn’t get home until after midnight. If he’d slept peacefully straight after that, he might not be feeling so badly today. But April had tossed uneasily next to him for a good couple