Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

  “Sign this,” he says to her. He’s holding out a postcard. A picture of the rest area and the Parkway. The kind of postcard you see and think, who would buy that? She turns it over, reads the message and smiles. Prodigal children.

  “I know, it’s pathetic,” he says, looking so crestfallen that even though she’s mad at him, she feels the need to reassure.

  “That’s OK, we’re both pathetic, today. It’s the thought that counts.”

  He throws an arm around her shoulder, pulls her towards him, squeezes. Just for a moment, it makes things better.

  It wasn’t fair of her, she knows, to make that crack about Calvin’s movie. Robin doesn’t need Calvin—he just got into that London program. He’ll probably wind up in some costumed Shakespearean tragedy, a doomed prince soaking up applause. Or he’ll catch the eye of some art-film director looking to fill the role of a sensitive American boy. Robin’ll do well. He always does, eventually. His successes have seemed like hers, too, by association. His exploits, for better or worse, have been hers, vicariously. But that’s the problem, right? This—all of this—isn’t his. It’s hers, hers alone.

  She can read him so well, knows his moods, the subtleties of his expression. She’s pretty sure that there’s more on his mind besides her. It’s something about the way his overly responsible attitude reads like a role, like he’s playing the part of big brother—“Big Bother” was a name she’d once called him after he’d grilled her about one of her early dates with Calvin.

  In the car, in the backseat again, moving onto the Parkway, that queasy feeling bubbles up, like the red light pulsing on the answering machine, a message you’ve been avoiding but will be forced to listen to sooner or later. The radio is filling the dead air of the car with another inescapable pop song: I can tell you, my love for you will still be strong, after the boys of summer have gone. What is it about the summer that makes people nostalgic for it even before it’s over? All those romantic feelings, ignited by long days and warm nights—must they all end once temperatures drop and days shorten? And yet she can’t deny that things do disappear. Things you can’t imagine ever not being there can wither, dry out, crumble. Is she going to lose Chris? A year ago, it would have been hard to imagine hating Calvin the way she does now. Not hating, but—what is it? Just having nothing left for him, no patience, no tolerance, no interest, really. It was so easy to watch him walk out the door of that house.

  The music is loud enough that she can’t hear what’s being said up front. But she sees, in the space between the seats, Robin’s hand resting on George’s thigh, lingering there. And then George’s hand falls on his and stays. Both boys stare straight ahead, which only confirms for Ruby that this is more than just a friendly pat. Has she ever seen this kind of touch between them? She’s never even imagined it, in part because George has never really seemed gay to her—not the way Robin does. Robin’s not a flamer, but there’s a pitch to his voice and a fluidity to his gestures, plus his enthusiasm for dance music and fashion and—well, if you can pick up on that kind of thing—if you have what he calls gaydar—you can’t miss it. But George has always seemed so serious, bookish, almost asexual. The gayest thing about him has been his friendship with Robin. Of course, now that she thinks about it, George seems different—he has attitude. He has big arm muscles and fuzz on his chest. The dreads in his hair are so carefully twisted and evenly spaced out that they don’t so much look like a Rasta statement as a fashion choice.

  George is looking at her in the rearview mirror. Caught her staring. “Are you OK?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. Something isn’t right with her stomach. The bacon cheeseburger and Coke were a mistake. Her gut is expanding with what she imagines to be fist-sized bubbles of sugar and fat, pressing against the lining of her intestines. The sensation of trying to suppress it is leaving her light-headed. She closes her eyes, but all she can form is the image of those floppy strips of bacon and that overdone beef patty transforming themselves into noxious gas. And then suddenly it’s upon her, the very sensation she felt back at Alice’s house, and she has cover her mouth for fear that she’ll lose it all.

  “Pull over,” she croaks through her fingers. “I need to pull over.”

  “What?” George says. “Now?”

  “Please.”

  Robin is looking back at her in alarm. “Hold on, OK? He can’t just—”

  Oh God oh God oh God—

  The lurching of the car toward the side of the road, the crunching of the pebbly surface beneath the wheels, the rush of air as she pushes open the door while they’re still moving—

  She hears Robin command, “Wait! Until we stop!” but it sounds like it’s coming from very far away, on the other side of a membrane that’s formed between them, and before they’ve completely halted she’s tumbling from the car. She gets knocked to her knees, crawls to get away from the road and then, with a pain like a spear rising up from her stomach, the enlarged bubble forces itself through her throat into her mouth. She tastes it in a hot wet stream rushing across her tongue and teeth. It shoots through the air—splurshhh—a bulging wet beast forcing itself out. Chunks splatter across dried grass and bleached-out garbage and the splintered wooden guardrail.

  Just one big blast. She braces herself for more. Her throat is on fire, her lips sting.

  Behind her, cars zoom by with the speed of missiles.

  Robin is beside her. He’s holding out a bottle of Diet Coke. One perfumey whiff and her throat convulses all over again—why do they drink so much of this stuff?—but this time nothing comes up—a dry heave, like a screw tightening in her skull. Robin comes back a moment later with a different bottle. She gulps warm water from the bottom, then fills her mouth again and swishes out the sourness.

  She can breathe again, deeply. It’s like her head has been released from too long underwater. “I think that’s all.”

  “Take your time,” Robin says. She can hear the concern in his voice.

  She stands up. “We should go.”

  “I should have given you the front,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well…” She’s not feeling particularly forgiving. She knows she could push it if she wanted to, if she had any strength left to argue. So let him feel bad. He could definitely stand to remember that he’s far from perfect.

  The idea comes upon Robin suddenly. “Take this exit,” he tells George.

  “This isn’t ours.”

  “Just—please? I want to make a stop.” He hadn’t been planning on it, but now it seems like a must. Especially after seeing Ruby like that. He feels like he owes her this.

  George decelerates through the toll plaza, aims a quarter into the basket, and then they’re swerving around the off-ramp and onto Route 4 in Paramus. One billboard after another clamors for attention: Visit the Burlington Coat Factory. Jennifer Convertibles: Do You Have One? Wendy’s, still pushing “Where’s the Beef?” This road is as dense as the Parkway was open: department stores ringed in parking lots; multicolored pennants flapping in the wind over car dealerships; the movie theater that used to be ten screens and now boasts fourteen: A View to a Kill, Cocoon, The Goonies. “Do you have any desire to see St. Elmo’s Fire?” George asks him.

  From the front seat Ruby releases an inexplicable grunt.

  “What?” Robin prompts.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where are we going?” George asks.

  “Take the exit by the Fashion Center,” Robin says.

  Ruby spins around, surprised. “Are we? Now?”

  “I figured, while we’re over here…You still want to?”

  She nods and faces front again. She seems to dip down in the seat, making herself small. He can’t quite read her body language. Has she for some reason changed her mind about this? For years, Ruby was the one member of the family who wanted to visit Jackson’s grave. It must have been something that Nana, the cross-bearing Catholic of the fam
ily, put in her mind.

  After they left New Jersey, visiting the grave seemed to become more important to their mother. It became a task for holidays: on a day near Christmas, and again near Easter, and on Jackson’s birthday, too, Dorothy would drive them to the wooded cemetery off Route 4. He can’t remember any conversations they ever had about these cemetery visits, can’t remember voicing the feelings that got dredged up. He remembers that he would sometimes stare at his mother and feel something close to hatred, for dragging them to the gravesite. They were just going through the motions, but toward what end? It occurs to him that they still haven’t called Dorothy; he doesn’t know why he’s avoiding her, now that things have been resolved.

  George steers into the cemetery, and they make their way along a curving drive to the newest section, where Jackson is buried. The three of them walk silently through rows of granite stones, new enough to reflect glints of sunlight dappling through the overhanging trees. In the background are the mausoleums and ostentatious monuments of the past: weeping angels, lions in repose, a larger-than-life crucifix featuring a Jesus whose agonized face is coated in years of soot. And then they come upon the simple rectangle that marks Jackson’s burial.

  JACKSON LEOPOLD MACKENZIE

  JUNE 16, 1967—DECEMBER 15, 1978

  SON, BROTHER, SLUGGER

  “Leopold” for Dorothy’s father; “Jackson” for some whim of Dorothy’s, enforced from birth by the edict that he never be nicknamed “Jack,” as “Robin” was never to be called “Rob” or, heaven forbid, “Bobby.” “Slugger” was Clark’s touch. Robin remembers Dorothy in tears begging Clark not to include it, insisting it was undignified and sentimental, to which Clark, his eyes hardened, his jaw set, hissed out the words, “Deal with it, Dottie.” Arguing for an hour over their dead son’s tombstone. Dorothy: “Couldn’t we go with athlete?” Clark: “He was the Little League home run champ!”

  George, at Robin’s side, says, “I forgot all about that: December 15th.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  December 15, Robin’s own birthday, the cosmic unfairness of it never lost on him. Even now he feels a clench in his gut, the way he’s been marked doubly, not just by loss but also by blame. And mixed in with it all, the residual resentment, as if the timing had been by design, as if Jackson chose to pass over from coma to death on that particular day so that Robin’s progress through life would be inextricably linked to Jackson’s erasure from it.

  Ruby has kneeled down at the base of the grave, her hands raking stray leaves. She must be praying.

  Robin lowers his head and tries to come up with something appropriate. Dear God, please look over Jackson, wherever he is. The thought can hardly take hold: Look over him, where? He doesn’t exist anywhere but right here at their feet. His body, damaged, withered and shrunken after all those weeks in the coma, and then buried in this spot, has rotted away to nothing. Food for worms. Nutrients for the cemetery lawn. Flesh into dust.

  A residual terror starts his legs trembling. It’s not just the vision of Jackson there, buried in the earth, decomposing; it’s the understanding that this is what’s waiting for him. Death is hissing all the time from the shadows, and in those moments when he lets himself confront this darkness what he sees is a scene from a science fiction movie, a parade of once-handsome lovers gone blotchy and skeletal, like the survivors of an atomic bomb exploded in the air over Manhattan. Not dead but dying; ill; infected—that horrible, spiky word. It is the horror of this suffering that has struck him with such great force over the last few years, a suffering that it seems he might not be able to avoid, because he’s done the same things that all those men did, not knowing the consequences. But until now he has never let himself follow these cluttered, terrifying thoughts all the way to this final truth: the image of a grave with his own name on it, perhaps right here, next to his brother’s. Involuntarily, he gasps for air, so audibly that Ruby turns around to look at him. And then he wonders if perhaps she hadn’t been praying, because her attention seems elsewhere, her eyes are darting around, as if she’s on the lookout for something.

  She says, “Did I ever tell you about the last time I was here?”

  “You mentioned it, in Seaside.”

  “Clark and I came here together, and there was a woman visiting another grave, just over there. She told us she saw a groundhog—I mean, she said it was a groundhog, but I don’t know. Could have been a mole, or some other rodent. So she went and told the workers, the groundskeeper guys. They went looking around for it, and they found it, not very far from here. And then one of them whacked it on the head with a shovel.” Then she says, “Whack-A-Mole,” and lets out a strange, bitter laugh. Her expression falls, and she begins twisting the toy ring on her finger.

  “That happened right in front of you?” he asks.

  “Yes. I’m not sure they realized that we were here, but I screamed, and they stopped. And then we could see the poor thing stumbling around half-dead. I didn’t see blood, but the guy had hit it really hard. Clark just started yelling at them. ‘Don’t let it suffer!’ And the guy went back over with the shovel. We watched them bash it to death.”

  “What a nightmare.”

  George asks, “What happened to that other woman?”

  “She had already left. So we were the only witnesses.” Ruby glances at the tombstone. “I haven’t been back here since then. Nearly two years.”

  Robin pictures his sister two years ago. It’s easy enough to strip away the black hair dye and the gothic wardrobe; it’s not so easy to remember her without the new attitude she wears, the toughness, her quick suspicion of things others take for granted. Two years ago she was so much less burdened. “Was that when you stopped going to church?” he asks.

  She nods. “For a while I thought that God had shown us that mole getting killed as a sign—a sign that if Jackson hadn’t died, he would have gone on suffering, which would have been worse.”

  “I think about that a lot, too,” he tells her.

  “But then I thought, no, it’s not a sign. God doesn’t care about sending me signs. It was just an example of cruelty.” She is silent for a while. “That was also right around the time I was with that guy, Brandon, the one I had sex with? He was such an asshole. And I think I just started to feel bad about everything.”

  “I never put all that together.”

  “You were leaving for college.”

  George takes his hand and squeezes tightly; it’s only then that Robin realizes that he has just shivered. Their fingers braid together. The sensation of it briefly sends Robin back to the night before (was it only last night?): the two of them holding hands in the bushes, amid the broken moonlight, waiting out the police, scared shitless. He had suggested “surrendering,” just another word for giving up. Such a cowardly thing to say.

  He meets Ruby’s eyes, pale and blue and watery with grief, and something inside him splinters, and his eyes well up and overflow, too. Because he sees not the young woman who has frustrated him all day long but the little girl who stood in this very spot with him on a cold December day eight years ago, both of them trying to face the incomprehensible truth that their brother was gone forever, and that they were in some way a part of that, witnesses to the accident if not actually responsible for it. Both of them trying to face the truth of capital-D-death, of once-and-for-all finality, which even now, even still, is the greatest mystery. So here it is again, that eternal resemblance, the way her life will always reflect his, not only on her face, but beneath that, too, in the knowledge that they share.

  And then Ruby steals a glimpse at where his hand is intertwined with George’s; she doesn’t appear to be surprised, and if anything, some sadness seems to clear from her face for a moment. This feels to Robin, in some small way, like a blessing.

  At last he knows what he wants to convey here, in his thoughts.

  Not a prayer for his brother, dead and gone, but a wish for himself and his sister, to find a way out of the past, once
and for all.

  To find forgiveness.

  Greenlawn. The leafy elms and oaks that line Valley Road. The split-level homes and two-story colonials flying American flags from their porches. Pairs of joggers running in the road, skin varnished in light sweat.

  Through the open backseat window, Robin takes in the humid breeze, carrying honeysuckle and cut grass and barbecue smoke. He knows every structure along this route, the configuration of every corner, so that when something new appears, he can’t help but comment out loud.

  “The Continental House is now called the Tuscan Caffé?” he asks, as they pass the place once known for hiring all the local fifteen-year-olds for their first jobs bussing tables. “With two f’s?”

  “My dad says that there are a lot of investment bankers and junk-bond types moving here from the city,” George replies.

  “Greenlawn is getting fancy.”

  From the passenger seat, Ruby mutters, “That’ll be the day.” Her first words since the cemetery. She clears her throat as if ready to say something more, then seems to think better of it.

  He wonders if she’s saving her strength for whatever awaits at the house. He wonders, too, if he should be rehearsing his own speech for his father. How much scrutiny will he face for his actions? Will they say he waited too long to contact them? That he was irresponsible not to call the cops?

  As George makes one turn and then another, bringing them closer to the house, the balmy summer sweetness splits apart like skin on ripe fruit, and beneath it Robin feels once again the pit of dread that is always part of coming back to Greenlawn. He moved away at fifteen; when he returns, he is fifteen again. Coma Boy’s Brother.