Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Yeah, that, too. But it did fall out a few weeks later, right on schedule. Sort of like moulting? And like my hair,” he added cheerfully, patting himself on the head.

  It occurred to Robin that she was deprived forever of any similarly interesting recollections about her own birth. Once, long ago, when she’d asked her father to tell her about the day she was born, he only mentioned the weather, that it was the hottest July 7 since 1898 or something. She supposed that all memories of that event were connected to her mother, and were much too painful for him to recall. Even most of their early family pictures were badly faded or had been lost somehow. When she was little, she was positive she remembered being born, the sound of cheering in the delivery room as she skidded out, like the roar of the crowd at a baseball game when someone slides safely home; the hot, brilliant lights on her naked skin and unused eyes. And her mother’s triumphant, tender, smiling pleasure. But as time went on, she realized she’d made it all up. Maybe her mother had wanted a boy instead, or a different girl, one who was beautiful and good enough to deserve her love, and to keep her home.

  Linda had decided to call the baby Phoebe Ann, which had been her own mother’s name. It was something Robin thought only Jewish people did, naming their babies after somebody dead. “Maybe so,” Linda said, “but it really seems like the right thing to do, doesn’t it? I mean, then something of the dead person lives on after them.”

  Robin wondered, if it had been a boy, whether Linda would have called him Wright. It wasn’t a good name for a girl, of course. In fact, it wasn’t such a great name for a boy, either. Once, Robin’s father told her that when he was a kid and gave the wrong answer to a math problem in school, a mean kid yelled out, “Wright is wrong again!” Everybody laughed, including the teacher, and it became a regular schoolyard chant after that. Robin would have killed that kid if he’d done something like that to her, but her father had done the biblical thing, turned the other cheek. Not because he was wimpy or even that religious, Robin was certain, but because his own parents had been very strict, meaner than that mean kid, and probably would have beaten the crap out of him for fighting, even in self-defense.

  Another time, when she’d gotten a good report card (in first or second grade, when she still got good report cards), her father said, proudly, “You sure didn’t get your brains from me.” He didn’t go any further than that, though, didn’t say who she had gotten her brains from. He seemed to go out of his way never to mention her mother.

  Phoebe Ann. The name was intriguingly new on Robin’s tongue when she tried it out in a whisper in Vicki’s bathroom that night. Manny had told her over their pineapple chunks and fortune cookies that there was a bird called a phoebe, which Robin thought was the most amazing coincidence. She and the baby both had bird names! Until then, she’d been disappointed that Linda hadn’t chosen something more current and popular, Tiffany, or Ashley, or Brittany, or Samantha, which half the girls in school seemed to be called, or something exotically lovely, like the names of some of the black girls—Lateesha, Lawanda, Vondella—that rolled right out of your mouth like music.

  Vicki’s bed was one of those monster jobs, as big as the bed Robin and Linda had shared in their Paradise apartment, so Robin had plenty of room to stretch out without having to get too close. Vicki did some sit-ups, grunting horribly from the floor, a little like the noises Linda had made in the taxi that morning. Then, as she climbed into bed and leaned over to shut off her lamp, she said, “Remember, no snoring, no kicking, and anything I say in my sleep is strictly confidential.”

  Robin was completely bushed from the excitement and from being awake all those hours—she’d only taken a couple of catnaps in the hospital waiting room—but she couldn’t fall asleep right away. The room was too dark, for one thing. She often fell asleep with the light on at home, something she would never admit. And her head was overflowing with images and thoughts: Linda on the toilet seat with the baby still trapped inside her, and the way she’d looked in the taxi, as if she was the one who was trapped. The taxi’s headlights cutting an illuminated path through the dark streets. The good news and the bad news. A cheering crowd. The baby being held up by the masked nurse, and what Manny had said about how they looked alike. Phoebe Ann, little bird. Sister. The boy who had teased her father. The words Wright and wrong, over and over again until neither of them made any sense. Sitting next to Manny in his car and then in the restaurant. The deep soothing tones of his voice, the agreeable scrape of his cheek against her forehead when he hugged her good night. The tiny strip of paper in her fortune cookie that said, “Your file will soon be changed.” Manny saying it was a typo, that it was supposed to be her life that would change, and wasn’t that great? Big deal, whose life didn’t change? The slant of moonlight in the room, and Vicki’s even breathing as she slept, like the comforting sounds of a reliable machine. And then, as Robin finally let go of everything and dozed off, too, the sensation of flying toward sleep, of gliding—dipping one white feathered wing and then the other—so that her passage was perfectly smooth, almost effortless, and her landing guaranteed to be safe.

  Across town, in the hospital, Linda slept, too, the serious, hard-earned sleep of new mothers. Down the hall, in the nursery, Phoebe Ann sucked her fist under the merciless lights and dreamed of floating in darkness. And at the Liquor Barn, as he was getting ready to close up for the night, Manny heard the jangle of the sleigh bells on the door, and turned and said, “How are you tonight, my friend?” and took a bullet through his left eye.

  6

  The Scene of the Crime

  SOMETIMES LINDA LOOKED INTO the baby’s indelible eyes and asked, “Who are you, really?” She didn’t expect an answer, of course, but she was truly mystified by this sudden, intimate connection to a stranger. For some reason, her connection to Robin was clearer, if not nearly as satisfying. Robin still considered her the wicked stepmother—minus the crucial, interesting wickedness—which deeply wounded Linda’s feelings. She was doing the best she could under the circumstances. And hadn’t she saved that ungrateful girl from a worse fate, from some institution filled with other angry, abandoned teenagers? But Robin’s disdain seemed to bear out Linda’s own darkest fear about herself, that she was a seriously flawed—no, worse!—an unfinished person, someone not adequately prepared to live in the world. Yet how could anyone be prepared for so many terrible surprises?

  Robin had actually seemed to be softening recently, smiling more often, and helping a little around the apartment. One day, a few weeks before the baby was born, she even brought two friends home from school with her. They were sisters, tall and slender black girls named Lucy and Carmel Thompson. Linda had been resting, but she got up to greet them, and she tried to draw them into conversation. Did they live nearby? Were they all in the same grade? Would they care for a snack? The sisters answered politely—“Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, thank you, ma’am”—but they kept exchanging furtive, amused glances with Robin, and soon they all escaped into the bathroom, where they slammed the door and locked themselves in. Linda stood outside and listened hard for a while, but all she heard for her efforts was the flushing toilet and an occasional scream of laughter. When they finally emerged, reeking of sweet smoke and Linda’s White Shoulders, they began whispering to one another, just out of earshot. Linda hadn’t experienced such social loneliness since her own adolescence. What if you never outgrew it? The important thing, she kept reminding herself, was that Robin seemed much happier and more relaxed.

  But she’d gone back to being her old miserable self again after Manny’s death, which, like Wright’s, she simply refused to discuss. Once more, Linda had to break the bad news to her, a task she dreaded but couldn’t let anyone else assume. She decided to take her cue from Rosalia and Troy, who’d come to the hospital to tell her about Manny the morning after he was killed. She would never forget their faces, the way their eyes had skittered around the room before they looked directly into hers. “I have to tell you somethin
g very bad, Linda,” Rosalia said. “Manny is gone. In a shooting, a robbery at the store.”

  Linda gasped, then lay very still, but Troy began sobbing as he related his side of the story. As Linda knew, either he or his cousin William would hang around the store until closing time to help Manny lock up. But that night there had been a family party, an aunt and uncle’s silver wedding anniversary, and Manny told them both to take off early and have a good time. Rosalia was there when the guy came in, Troy said, but she was in the back, in the lavatory. Otherwise, she would have been killed, too. He cried even harder after he said that, as if he’d just envisioned that narrowly escaped double tragedy.

  Rosalia had worked for Manny for twelve years, and had loved him, she said, “just like mi familia,” but her voice was calm and she kept patting Troy’s hand, and Linda’s, as she spoke. “I was in the bathroom,” she said, “doing my business, but I heard the bells. You know how loud they are. It was past ten already, but Manny hadn’t put down the gate and locked the door yet, or even turned the sign around. Then I heard him say something—you know, ‘How are you tonight, my friend,’ and all that. And then, madre de Dios, I heard this bang.”

  Linda was sobbing along with Troy by now. Rosalia continued: “And I knew right away—no backfire, no box falling off a shelf. I was sitting there, excuse me, with my underwear down, but I stood right up, maybe too fast, and then I guess I must have passed out. When I came to, the guy was already gone. Both cash drawers were open and empty, and Manny was lying there. I took my compact and held the mirror to his mouth, just praying, praying, and then I breathed into him, but it was only my craziness, it was already too late.”

  When Linda was able to compose herself, she asked them not to say anything to Robin until she had a chance to talk to her, and they promised they wouldn’t. She extracted the same promise from Vicki when she called that afternoon. If there was anything about the holdup in the newspaper, Linda was pretty sure Robin wouldn’t see it; she hardly ever read anything but the comics, the advice columns, and her daily horoscope. She’d phoned in Phoebe’s very first reading before breakfast: Capricorns, watch out for ambitious business associates, and avoid unnecessary travel.

  Linda and the baby were discharged from the hospital two days later. Vicki had brought Robin to visit the night before, and when the girl remarked on Linda’s dismal face and puffy, red eyes, Linda said, “Oh, I’m just feeling kind of blue,” and Vicki added, with a dismissive wave, “Post-partum depression, it happens all the time. She’ll be fine as soon as everything snaps back into place.”

  Robin had made a welcome-home sign for Linda and Phoebe, using Magic Markers and a magazine photograph of a mother and baby, and she’d readied the crib in Linda’s room with a fitted sheet and the pink-and-blue bumper. Various stuffed animals were arranged in the corners of the bumper and a musical mobile was clamped to the crib’s railing. When she came home from school that afternoon, Robin went right past Linda to the bedroom. “How you doing there, Feeble?” she asked, and she set the mobile spinning out of control over the sleeping baby.

  Linda had trailed in after her. “It’s Phoebe,” she said automatically, reaching to still the mobile. And then she said, “Robin, honey, listen …”

  Robin looked up sharply, the way she had just before Linda told her about Wright, as if she had an instinct for bad news. If it were possible, she grew even paler than usual. “What?” she asked, but her shoulders hunched against the anticipated blow of Linda’s answer.

  “It’s about Manny …” Linda said. “There was an accident at the store the other night. I mean a holdup. He was shot. Oh, Robin, it’s awful …”

  “You mean he’s dead, don’t you?” Robin said, with a queer little smirk.

  “Yes,” Linda admitted, and she rummaged in her head for some way to moderate the dreadful, final fact of it. But what could she say? That he didn’t suffer? It was what she’d told Robin about her father, whose hospital bedside Linda happened to be attending at the moment of his death. It seemed like the truth when she said it—Wright had looked a lot more amazed than agonized. But she didn’t know that for certain about Manny. And what else could she say? He’s at peace now? Manny was one of the most peaceful people she’d ever known. And death had never seemed that peaceful to Linda, anyway. She imagined it, when she could bear to, as a permanently restless state, a desperate, thwarted yearning to come back. How could anybody ever be reconciled to all their unfinished business among the living? “Robin,” she said, which was the best she could come up with, but Robin had already left the room and disappeared behind the locked bathroom door.

  Manny’s three daughters came from three different cities, in the East and the Midwest, for his funeral. Under other circumstances it would have taken place much sooner—that was Jewish law—but with the scattered daughters and the police and coroner’s work, he was dead almost a week before they buried him. Linda hoped Robin would go to the graveside services with her, that something might be said there that would ease their hearts and minds. But when Linda approached her about it the night before the funeral, Robin said, “No way, I’ve got school tomorrow.” You’d think she was a dedicated student, that Linda hadn’t already received a few notices from the attendance office at Northside High about her repeated cuts and lateness.

  Linda took the baby with her to the cemetery, carrying her from the parking lot in her Snugli. It was too soon for them to be apart, even for a few hours, and she derived a sense of consolation simply from holding her, from having something to do with her hands besides wring them. She had not been in a cemetery since the week before she left New Jersey, when she’d made a solo trip to Pennsylvania to visit her parents’ graves. After all, California was so far away. There was a thick, spiny weed in the sparse grass on her father’s side of the family plot, and she knelt to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge. She pulled harder, scratching her hand on the spines, and it still wouldn’t come. She had the unsettling idea that he was holding on to it from the other side, the way he used to hold on to something she wanted, a toy or a piece of candy. Did people only become more themselves after they were dead?

  Manny’s family had chosen a plain pine coffin, and when Linda got to the grave site, the daughters and their husbands were surrounding it like a human fence. She recognized them from the photographs Manny had shown her. A few other mourners—men wearing hats and women in dark dresses—listed toward one another, the way some of the older tombstones around them did. Linda stood to one side, near Troy and William and Rosalia, while the rabbi spoke briefly about Manny in what seemed like pretty general, impersonal terms. He said that he’d been a loving father and a respected businessman, cut down by senseless violence in the prime of his life. He urged the bereaved to put violence out of their own hearts and find peace there instead, as Emanuel Green had. Then he said some prayers, first in Hebrew and then in English, and finally he recited the Twenty-third Psalm. When he got to the part about the valley of the shadow of death, Linda noticed her own elongated, motionless shadow lying across the grass. It was like a negative image of the chalked figure the police had left on the floor of the Liquor Barn. She had gone there a couple of days ago, in the middle of business hours, to see for herself if Manny wasn’t really still alive, if the whole thing wasn’t some kind of horrible hallucination or hoax. The store was gated and padlocked, and there was a sign on the door that said: CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER. L.A.P.D. She shaded her eyes and looked through the grillwork into the window. All the lights were on, as they always were, but there wasn’t a living soul inside. Only that crude outline of Manny on the floor between the cash registers, to show where he’d fallen.

  At the cemetery, Linda shifted her feet a little just to see her own shadow move. As the Psalm ended, one of the daughters glanced over her shoulder at Linda, and then she poked her nearest sister, who looked back for an instant, too. Only the shortest daughter, whose face was hidden in a wad of Kleenex, seemed entirely absorbed by her grief.
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  The very last thing the rabbi said was that the family would be receiving visitors at the home of the deceased, immediately following the interment. The coffin was lowered, in slow, swaying motions, by four men manipulating two heavy straps, and then everyone stepped up to the grave, one at a time, and threw a shovelful of dirt into it. When it was Linda’s turn, she stood clutching the baby and the shovel with its moist clump of earth, and studied the double gray-marble monument. The left side was engraved with Manny’s wife’s name, Esther, the words “Beloved Wife and Mother,” and the span of her years. The right side was blank. Linda hadn’t meant to, but she looked down into the hole as she tossed the dirt, and suffered a moment of vertigo. Then she found herself thinking of the space between Manny and Esther as the narrow aisle between twin beds. If she had married him, too, would they have lain three abreast someday? But that was idiotic; the family would have been scandalized by such a notion, and it was a Jewish cemetery, anyway—they probably wouldn’t even have let her in. She felt a sharp pang of exclusion as she passed the shovel to the next mourner and started walking down the path toward her car.

  Twenty minutes later, she drove up to Manny’s house and saw a pitcher of water on the front steps, and everyone rinsing their hands before going inside. Linda hesitated at the steps—was she about to wash her hands of Manny forever? The short daughter came up behind her and touched her arm. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to. It’s only a custom.”

  There was a lavish buffet waiting in the dining room, and the family and friends quickly surrounded it, as they had surrounded the grave. Linda went down the hallway to use the bathroom, stopping briefly at Manny’s closed bedroom door. She almost expected to see another sign like the one on the door of the Liquor Barn, CRIME SCENE. DO NOT ENTER. As if love was the criminal act that made you mortal. She thought again about his chalked ghost on the floor and imagined lying down on it, fitting herself into his body as he had fitted himself into hers.