Family Page 17

  In the house, Leslie told Robin she didn’t like him. “A girl as smart as you can find someone better.”

  “I have Rick, I don’t need anyone.”

  “You’re not seeing him,” said Leslie.

  “I am,” said Robin, her mouth tight.

  When Nick came home, the house was quiet. He found Robin in the backyard, in a green dress he hadn’t seen before. “You look pretty,” he said, and then he saw how red her eyes were. “What is it?” he asked, alarmed.

  “Nothing,” she said helplessly, and then burst into tears.

  “Ah,” he said, “that explains everything.”

  He sat down beside her. The only time he could remember really talking to her was when she was just a baby, when he’d liked to whisper his secrets into her crib and just imagine her response; or when he talked to her through his stories, the way he still did—only now she didn’t listen, she didn’t hear him.

  “I hate this,” Robin said abruptly, plucking at tufts of grass.

  “Hate what?”

  She looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know.…Love,” she said.

  Nick leaned his back against the stiff, gnarly bark of the willow. Love. She was in love. He wanted to take her inside, and as soon as they stepped through the door, he wanted her to be five years old again, with a flurry of uncombable curls; he wanted her to be a baby he could rock in his arms and breathe over as she slept so her breathing would match his. He washed one hand over his face.

  “What’s the matter,” she asked. “Are you mad at me?”

  “I was just remembering,” he said.

  “Was Mom your first love?” Robin asked and suddenly Nick felt himself spiraling back, to a long white corridor, a long, pale blonde, blind-man’s-bluffing her way along the wall, catching him so he couldn’t move, so he couldn’t do a single thing but pin himself in place and wait for her to release him.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Really? You loved someone else?” She was charmed, she wanted him to tell her about it; but he just shook his head—he said they were talking about Robin right now, and not him.

  She seemed loosened up. She started hesitantly telling him about this boy she was seeing, about how he made her feel, how confusing it all was.

  The more details she unfolded, the more uneasy Nick became, until he suddenly stopped her speech. “Listen,” he said, “you’re only fourteen.”

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I want you seeing this boy,” he said. She snapped up, like a door slamming. She strode across the grass, around to the side of the house, leaving him alone in the back. Where she had been sitting, the grass was pressed down, still warm, and he placed his hand on it for a minute before he, too, got up.

  When Leslie came home, exhausted, he wanted to talk to her about the boy. He told her he had asked Robin not to see him, and when Leslie heard that, she flung her arms about him. “You did?” she said, smiling. He held her, he kissed her neck, and upstairs he heard Robin’s angry silence, and it made him hug Leslie tighter.

  Rick was used to parents not liking him, used to sneaking around. He knew how to orchestrate meetings with Robin—after school at the coffee shop, early morning before school started, weekends when she was supposed to baby-sit. It could all be worked out, but what he couldn’t get used to was the way Robin was reacting. She cried without reason. They’d be having a perfectly good time just swinging on the ropes by the old school, and then she’d dip her head, and the next thing he knew, her eyes were a blur of tears.

  She was difficult to comfort. He bought her ice cream and windup toys; he skipped classes just so he could eat lunch with her. “What do you care what your parents say?” He smoothed her hair. “What do they matter?”

  He made himself angrier and angrier by scratching away at the situation like it was a rash he couldn’t cure. He told Robin that his father used to be that way, trying to run everyone’s life, and then there had been this thing that happened to him, and after that, things had changed—his father acted like a decent human being now.

  “What thing?” Robin asked. She had heard the story whispered in school, but she wanted Rick to tell it to her, wanted to hear his version.

  He shrugged. He told her that what had happened didn’t matter; what counted was how his father had changed. “We all get along now,” he told her. He kicked at a stone, making furrows in the dirt. He held her hand. “I don’t like anyone making you sad,” he said. “This has got to stop.”

  Robin, looking up, thought he meant her crying, and it made her tense.

  At home, Robin moped. Nick tried to talk with her before he went on the road, but she was curt with him; she nodded and kept her eyes glassy and unreadable. The whole drive out, he kept her photo up against the dash. He tried to imagine her rushing off to a movie with a girlfriend, trying on a skirt in some brightly lit department store—anything, everything, but Robin sleepily wrapped up in the arms of that boy, making her body a secret for him to discover.

  Leslie couldn’t escape as easily. Her daughter was home with her, an open wound she couldn’t get near enough to heal. Robin pushed out of the house. She said she was going to the library, but when she came back home, her hands were empty of books and she was flushed. She said she was going to study at a friend’s. She took her math book, she even left the phone number where she was going to be, and sometimes, hating herself, Leslie would call on the pretense of offering to come pick Robin up. No matter when she called, Robin was always in the bathroom or had just left—there was always some reason why she couldn’t come to the phone. And when Robin got home, she’d walk by Leslie without explanation. “Do you think I’m a fool?” Leslie cried. “Don’t you think I know where you’ve been?”

  “I’ve been at Debra’s,” Robin said.

  Leslie didn’t know what to do. Robin looked terrible. She wasn’t sleeping nights. Leslie heard her walking around, making tea, eating cookies. In the morning the kitchen would be seeded with crumbs, and Robin had circles under her eyes.

  One afternoon she simply forbade Robin to go to the library, but Robin stormed past her, breaking the glass in the front door, stepping over the pieces in her defiant hurry to get out. Leslie jumped into the car and tried to follow her. She didn’t care if someone broke into the house and took everything. She drove up and down all the streets she thought Robin might travel, but her daughter seemed to have disappeared. She drove for over an hour. She tried and tried to dredge up that boy’s last name so she could at least call Information from a pay phone and try to get his address. She could drive out to his house and confront him. She could confront his mother; the two of them could stand out on the front porch and wait for him to swagger home. He’d have Robin’s scent on his clothes, in his pores; Leslie would have to place her two hands about his neck and squeeze just to free her.

  Leslie kept traveling the same routes, over and over, until on one street a woman in blue curlers and red stretch pants stepped right in front of Leslie’s car and flagged it down. Leslie stopped, bewildered, and rolled down her window.

  “Are you lost?” the woman asked. “You sure do look it.”

  “No, I … I’m just looking for my daughter,” Leslie said. Her voice foundered; she felt the woman’s palpable interest.

  “Not many kids come by this block,” the woman finally said. “You’d better try Moran Road, just that way.” She pointed. “That’s where they cause their trouble.”

  Leslie continued to drive until the streetlights set a dreamy film of light dappling against the sky. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was 9:30, and that for the first time in her entire life she had missed a fitting. Grace Thomas. She had a temper, too.

  The lights were all off when she got home. She parked the car in the front instead of putting it in the garage, in case she had to go out searching for Robin again. She stayed in the car for a moment, her head resting against the steering wheel, and then, wear
ily, she went into the house. When she clicked on the light, she saw Robin, sleeping on the couch. Leslie was so grateful to see her that she turned off the light and simply sat there in the darkness, watching her. She kept wondering what she could do to make Robin happy, to make Robin at least like her a little. After a bit, she slept herself, but she kept waking—she heard things rustling outside, noises. She blinked in the dark until she could make Robin out again, Robin, who was sleeping as if there were nothing simpler in the world. Gradually the noises faded, and Leslie slowed down into sleep, deep and dreamless.

  The next day was Saturday. Neither of them mentioned the night, not even when Nick called, insisting on speaking to Robin. Leslie couldn’t tell what he was saying, only that Robin kept saying yes.

  All morning they were careful about each other. Leslie waited around for the glass man, and Robin made no attempt to go anywhere, not even outside, but took a paperback novel and sat in the kitchen reading. She hadn’t even tried to call up that boy on the phone, hadn’t once glanced out the window the way she usually did, with eyes focused so far beyond what Leslie could see that Leslie would never be able to follow.

  Leslie decided to do something. When the glass was in, she got the car keys and came into the kitchen and abruptly asked Robin if she’d like to learn to drive. “Just in the schoolyard,” Leslie said. She thought driving was an adult thing, a symbol of her trust.

  Robin looked at Leslie in amazement. “I can’t even take driver’s ed yet,” Robin said.

  “It’s fine,” Leslie said. “I’ll be right beside you. It’ll be my worry, not yours.” She jangled the keys. “It’ll be our secret.”

  Robin hesitated for a moment and then got up. “Deal,” she said.

  Leslie drove them to the old schoolyard. No one would be there. Robin could drive around and around, practice parking and turns. The car pulled a little, and Leslie swore, pumping the gas, turning to smile at Robin to show her the curse had nothing to do with her. She remembered her own driving lessons. Lord. Her father shouting and cursing as she backed into a bus. He had humiliated her by making her get out of the car, right in the middle of the road, while he did the maneuver himself, all the time still yelling at her from his window, drawing everyone’s eyes right to her. She had never wanted to drive after that, and she had refused to get into a car with him. She had taken driver’s ed at school only because she could get a credit for it, and because the instructor was also her math teacher, who always liked her because she got straight A’s.

  “Okay, you take the wheel,” Leslie said. She stopped the car in the middle of the schoolyard. It pulled again, but she figured it was probably due for a tune-up. She scooted across and let Robin take the wheel. “Easy now,” she said.

  Robin was a slow and deliberate driver. Leslie kept telling her how great she was doing, partly because every time she said so, Robin turned and smiled. Teaching Robin also gave Leslie excuses to touch her. She put one hand on Robin’s to help her turn; she sometimes had to touch Robin’s leg to remind her to brake; and never once—oh, the miracle of it—did Robin move from her. She just glanced at Leslie and laughed.

  They must have been out there only about a half-hour when the accident happened. Robin was driving down a long slope when suddenly the brakes failed. She couldn’t move, she panicked, and Leslie crunched her own foot down on Robin’s to pump the brakes. When that didn’t work, she tried to reach the emergency brake, but it was all the way over on the left. The car wasn’t going that fast, and the road was lined with grass, so Leslie opened Robin’s door and roughly shoved her out. Then she jerked the wheel all the way to the right and tumbled herself out of the car.

  The car dented against a tree. Nobody was hurt. Leslie’s jeans were ripped at the knees; Robin had one long scratch running across her cheek. Leslie, startled by Robin’s crumpled shoulders, put her arm about her and rocked her a little. “It’s not your fault,” she said. She pulled her up and led her back to the road, brushing off the back of her sweater, which was seeded with dry, dying leaves. They disintegrated the moment she touched them. “Come on,” Leslie said. “We’ll go call a tow truck.”

  It didn’t take the mechanic very long to figure out that the car had been tampered with. When he came out to talk to Leslie, wiping his greasy hands along a spanking-white jumpsuit, Leslie was sure he was about to scold her for not taking regular care of her car. Instead, he kept watching her, studying her curiously as if he couldn’t quite believe a young suburban wife would have this much menace in her life. He told her how lucky she was that she hadn’t been on the highway and hadn’t been driving fast. And then he told her what an expert job had been done on her brakes. He said he couldn’t remember seeing anything like this, and if he were her, he wouldn’t do any driving for a while; he would watch himself.

  “Tampered? What are you talking about?” Leslie said. She wouldn’t believe him; she thought he was just some stupid kid—what did he know? She left the car there and took a cab home, but during the whole ride back, she felt vaguely uneasy. She kept thinking about that one night when she had left the car out in front of the house; she kept remembering the noises. And then a sudden queasy intuition made her straighten up, so violently that the cabbie twisted around to ask if she was all right, if she wanted him to pull over so she could catch her breath.

  Robin, lying on her back in the grass beside Rick, holding his hand, was telling him the accident story, embellishing it so it seemed she had practically died. She made him trace the scratch on her face; she added bruises and cuts she now claimed had miraculously faded; she made up a visit to the emergency room, a ride in an ambulance. She thought he’d pamper her silly. Instead, he unlaced his fingers from hers and sat up, stitching his brow. When he stood up, she pulled him down, but he wouldn’t look at her. “You sorry I’m alive?” she asked. She was only kidding, but he jerked toward her, his eyes aflame.

  He didn’t make sense. He started talking about how he wanted to live in the country, how even Pittsburgh, dinky as it was, was too much of a town for him. He wanted to be somewhere surrounded by silence, where all you saw in the distance was one red light blinking out civilization, and even then it would be too far away to touch you. He’d have cars to work on, maybe a small shop with a few customers he knew.

  “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?” Robin asked. “I nearly died.”

  She told him how great her mother had been about it, how they had both agreed not to tell her father, because anything like that would set him off for weeks. “You wait,” she said to Rick. “I bet she has you over for dinner soon.” She nestled up against him. “God, I love you,” she said.

  He twisted her to face him. “Listen,” he said, “when people love each other, they can tell each other anything, right? They can forgive.”

  She blinked at him. “You want to tell me what’s going on with you?” she said.

  “You’re like a volcano in my blood,” he said, and she giggled until she saw his face; then she felt the breath rush out of her. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You haven’t been with anyone else, you don’t know what it’s like for someone like me to love someone like you, what it’s like not sleeping with you because I don’t want you thinking that’s the only reason I’m with you. I’m the one that’s doing the waiting, that’s making the sacrifices—I’m the one who knows just what it is I’m missing out on.”

  He got up; he stormed in place. “Sometimes, in the night, you know, all that wanting just wakes me up. I feel like I’m burning alive. I have to go to the kitchen and chip ice out of the freezer and swallow it just to cool down. It never helps.”

  He said sometimes he tried to call her, even though it was late, and then her mother’s voice, so hard, so cold, made him so angry, he’d just hang up on her. He said he knew her father didn’t have any use for him either. He had never even met him, but fathers were always funny about their daughters.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “But it
seemed so crazy. I mean, here we were, loving each other and not being able to be together when all the time we’ve been—I don’t know—innocent.” He licked at his lips.

  “At first, I was just going to go over to the house, trickle stones at your window, and get you to come out with me for an hour. I didn’t though,” he said. “I didn’t even tell you how I was suffering, because I didn’t want you thinking I was weak, a pussy.”

  “You should have told me,” Robin whispered to him, but he didn’t hear her, he was riding on his story.

  “And then, that day you came to see me, crying about the broken door, about your mother—you remember that?”

  Robin nodded. He had bought her a Coke and told her everything was going to be fine. He had kissed both her eyes. One, then the other, so gently, she could feel his lashes dust her skin. He had made her go home, had told her they would have to be sly and bide their time.

  “I came to talk to your mother, to have it out,” he said. “The car was in front.”

  Robin sat up.

  “I was going to go to the door, I was going to, but then I kept hearing in my mind just how it would go, I kept thinking what a waste it would be—she’d be more angry at me than before. It made me so mad I couldn’t see straight. I decided to go home, cool off, and then think what to do, but by the time I got home, I was even madder. I kept thinking about your mother, keeping you from me, making you break the goddamned front door just because you were trying to get to me—to me—and the next thing I was doing was getting some tools, going back to the car—”