Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Isn’t she perfect?” Leslie demanded.

  He lifted up her hand and kissed it. “She’s like no other,” he said.

  SEVEN

  They named the baby Robin, a name Leslie liked. Leslie slept a lot at first, so Nick hired a professional nurse to live in and help out. The nurse was a dour, middle-aged prune of a woman named Aggie Mason, and the very first thing she did was try to coax Leslie into a haircut. She said that now that Leslie was a mother, she’d be too busy to fuss with her hair.

  “But it’s no fuss,” Leslie said. “It’s wash and drip dry.”

  The nurse frowned. She said a mother should look mature and responsible, and not have hair long enough to strangle a baby. “I know a child who was rushed to surgery with stomach cramps and they had to cut her open,” Aggie said. “Know what they found?” She paused, dramatically. “A hair ball. As big as my fist.”

  Leslie stifled a laugh. “My husband loves my hair,” she said.

  “Oh, husbands,” Aggie said, and this time Leslie laughed.

  Nick was grateful for the nurse. He liked it that she was older, that she had looked after countless babies in her time, and that she was overcautious. She liked things running smoothly, efficiently, safely. She stayed in the spare room and kept it meticulously clean. She vacuumed the whole house twice just to get rid of all the pins. She warned Leslie about making the house babyproof, about getting a lock for the sewing room so she could seal it up when she wasn’t using it. “One room for sewing is smarter than using the whole house,” Aggie said. “Especially with a little one.” Leslie told her she was much too weary right now to even think about doing a hem, much less any project.

  Nick liked the nurse more and more. He was sure nothing could ever happen to Robin while she was there. And it was funny, but with Aggie there, he felt safe to go in and look at his girl. Aggie distrusted him, though. Every time he went near the baby, she followed him. She barely let him hold Robin before she took the baby from him, reminding him that it was nap time or feeding time or some other kind of time that he wasn’t supposed to be a part of.

  Aggie was with them for two months. Nick begged her to stay on an extra month or so, but Leslie insisted that she was strong enough to handle things.

  Nick was surprised at how easy it was for Aggie to leave. He had thought baby nurses got attached to their charges. He had read about nurses writing to the kids they had looked after for years after they left, visiting and calling, and even ending up taking care of the kids of their kids. All Aggie did was present Leslie with a list of stores that sold sterilized bottles and carried the right brand of diaper at the right price. She pecked Robin on one downy cheek and then got her suitcase and carried it herself to a waiting cab. Nick wanted to drive her to the train himself, but she shook her head, said she liked to end things at the place where they were ending. Nick opened the door of the cab, and as she scooted in, he said, “You’ll miss her, won’t you?”

  Aggie smiled. “Only until the second I take the new one into my arms,” she said. Then she settled herself in and turned to wave to Leslie, who was standing in the doorway, Robin in her arms. Leslie lifted Robin’s baby hand and waved it. “Say goodbye,” she said.

  Robin didn’t look like either one of them. She had red curls, gray eyes, and skin so fair that Leslie had to put a sun block on her just to carry her out to the car. Robin burned anyway. It made Leslie wince to see a baby all red like that, but Robin was strangely oblivious. She never seemed to mind. She was that way about other things, too. She’d sleep in diapers so soggy that she’d wake chafed and raw. She’d bruise her mouth against the rails of her crib and never cry.

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with her?” Leslie worried to her mother.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, count your blessings,” Leslie’s mother said. “So she doesn’t cry. Big deal.” Then she regaled Leslie with a long and irritating story about what a crier Leslie had been, how she had once stuffed her own ears with cotton just to get a moment or two of peace.

  Robin was, as Leslie’s mother kept saying, a child of danger, a child protected. And she seemed to grow more and more nervy. Before Leslie could stop her, Robin tried to crawl onto the neighbor’s foul-tempered cat, Ralph, who scratched everything he came in contact with. Oddly, Ralph merely yawned and twitched free, leaving the baby surprised and blinking. Robin was curious about all the things she should leave alone—wall sockets, the knife Nick used to carve the meat, Leslie’s endless supply of pins. She reached, she grabbed, she sometimes got, but she was never harmed.

  Like the water baby she was, Robin couldn’t get enough of water. She relaxed in her bath, becoming stiff and cranky only when Leslie tried to pluck her out. When it rained, Leslie swore Robin perked up. Leslie would sometimes carry her over to the big picture window in the living room and the baby would stare, mesmerized by the raindrops smearing paths down the blurry glass.

  Leslie adored her daughter, but sometimes she had an uneasy feeling that the adoration wasn’t quite mutual, that Robin could do fine on her own, thank you. It bothered Leslie that the baby never cried out its need for her; Leslie always had to go and check to see if Robin was wet or hungry. It seemed a slight to her.

  Robin wasn’t an affectionate baby, either. All through her pregnancy, Leslie had daydreamed about what a comfort a baby would be when Nick was on the road. But now the house seemed lonelier than ever. Robin didn’t like Leslie’s constant touch; she pulled away from hugs and kisses. Leslie tried to bring Robin into the bed with her, but Robin struggled and screamed; she wouldn’t quiet down until she was back in her own room, alone and content.

  Leslie couldn’t help it—she began to think she had the wrong baby, that the hospital had made some mistake. She had read about such things. Once, in the dentist’s office she had read a whole article in Woman’s Day about such a mistake: two boy babies given to the wrong parents. One of the mothers kept thinking something wasn’t quite right—just a mother’s instinct—and did a little investigating. She found that her baby’s footprint didn’t match the one made shortly after her baby’s birth. There was a big scandal. The hospital was sued, and both babies were returned to their rightful parents, but who knew what damage had been done?

  Of course, that had happened at a tiny hospital in some little headache of a town she’d never heard of. Robin had been born at Magee, the best hospital in Pittsburgh. Still, Leslie kept thinking about it. A loving little girl in someone else’s home, a baby who dreamed of her rightful mother’s kisses, of a lap to cradle in.

  Leslie got up her courage and called Magee. At first she pretended she was doing research. She spoke to someone in PR about the likelihood of such an event, but the woman was annoyed. Things like that happened once in a blue moon, she said, and certainly never at Magee.

  Leslie wouldn’t give up. She took new prints of Robin’s feet, and then requested a set from the hospital. When they came, she saw they were identical. She sat on the couch, missing Nick, lonely for her daughter, and then she bunched up a pillow along her chest, like a baby, and she wept.

  It was different for Nick. He had loved the baby when she was just an idea, just a swelling in his wife’s body. He had fallen more in love with Leslie and his life with her as the pregnancy went along, and if he had been a little unnerved by Robin’s birth, well, Aggie’s rigid control had calmed a lot of his fears.

  Now, though, with Aggie gone, Robin seemed completely left open to life, and he had this vague new fear. He couldn’t admit it to Leslie. He kept trying to remind himself that Leslie’s mother had said Robin was a child protected, but sometimes he’d catch a glimpse of Robin’s fiery hair and could almost swear he saw flame, a whole crazy corona of it about her head. He’d hear her burble, and layered within her small voice he heard Susan. It made him crazy. Late at night, he’d jerk awake, riding on all these mad thoughts about Robin being Susan reincarnated, about it being a new kind of test. He was going to have to make sure nothing bad ev
er happened to this second chance of a girl. He was going to have to be doubly careful.

  He tried. He double- and triple-checked the locks on the doors and the windows. When he rode with Robin in the car, he made sure she was strapped into her car seat in back. When he was away, he’d call Leslie in the middle of the night because he missed her, and because he wanted her to go and check on Robin. “Hey, I do my job here,” Leslie said, and he laughed and made some lame joke; he didn’t tell her that he needed to know that Robin was still alive. When he came home, he was always a little startled to see the baby creeping toward him, unharmed.

  At night he slipped into her room to make sure she was still breathing. He’d crouch over her crib, watching her small chest rise and fall. He’d place one finger near her damp mouth to feel her breath. He wanted to sleep beside her so he could match his breaths to hers, so the strength of his heartbeat might feed hers.

  She let him pick her up. She yawned like a cat. In the middle of the night, he sat in the rocker and whispered to her and sang. She curled around him. He was half-asleep one evening when he saw Leslie. At first he thought it was just a dream. She was naked, shadowed in the doorway, her hair a wash of ink over her pale skin. “Leslie,” he said, and then Robin stirred and he set her gently back in her crib.

  “I bet she didn’t want to be put back there, did she?” Leslie said. “Not by you.”

  Nick stroked Leslie’s hair from one shoulder and bent to kiss her bare skin.

  “I love you more than she does,” Leslie said.

  Robin grew. She was astonishingly healthy. She turned three, then four, escaping mumps and measles, chicken pox and the flu; even the few colds she did contract seemed to evaporate within days. But the funny thing was, the healthier she became and the firmer her hold to life, the more uneasy Nick was. He couldn’t help thinking of it as borrowed time; he couldn’t quite believe that she was really his for any sort of duration. The more birthdays she celebrated, the surer he was of their impending end. He told himself she had passed the danger point. She was older now than Susan had ever had a chance to be. He should relax now, loosen up, but he found himself still apprehensive.

  He didn’t want to be a bad father. He didn’t want his wife wondering about him, his daughter scarred. He took her to the playground and tried not to see the rusty nails studded into the swings, the germs on the slides. At the zoo, he worried about the bears escaping; on trains, he saw gunmen. He couldn’t enjoy himself; he kept hurrying Robin, until she got cranky.

  He punished her only once. She was playing with matches, oblivious to his approach, and he yanked them from her fingers and smacked her so hard that she tumbled against the wall, hitting her head. She didn’t cry—she seldom did—but she wouldn’t approach him for days afterward. He couldn’t bring himself to apologize, and he scoured the house for matches, tossing them all out, pack by pack. Later he heard Leslie speaking quietly to Robin, calming her with some story about Mr. Fire and Silly Milly, and he loved her for doing what he himself could not.

  He did tell Robin stories, though—his father’s tales about strange lands. He’d feel himself reeling right back through time. He’d remember the raw, scratchy feeling of Tom’s shirt, the way his father’s aftershave smelled. He made up his own stories for Robin, too—tales involving the two of them. They went on wonderful adventures to strange planets; they could change themselves into animals just by twitching their noses.

  It was so easy being father and daughter in those stories. It was simple to face dangers, because he could control them all, he knew just how everything would come out: He and Robin were always rescued “just in the Nick of time.” Oh, how he loved that phrase! It made him feel like he had some secret rule over the whole universe. He created dangers and then bottomed them out into amusements. He had villains, but they all secretly yearned to be heroes, and indeed turned into heroes at the slightest provocation. He loved making up stories for Robin, and she was enchanted. She would sit still and silent for hours, letting him transport her into his secret worlds.

  Robin loved having her father home. If there was any problem at all for her, it had to do with her mother and not with him. With Nick around, Leslie suddenly seemed to stop seeing Robin. The kisses that were sometimes so rough that they made Robin feel wounded, the love nips and tickles and songs, all suddenly seemed to stop.

  At first, Robin didn’t mind much. She was glad enough to spend all day in her room looking at the colored paper maps Nick brought her, tracing the blue lines he had drawn of his routes so she’d know where he went. But then, when she was tired and wanted her mother, when she felt like a hug, Leslie was preoccupied, cooking something strange for dinner, dressed in something she didn’t want Robin to wrinkle. Robin stood in the hall watching her, confused. Usually, all she had to do was just be in the house and Leslie would seek her out, pinpointing her location, finding her in seconds even when Robin was hiding. But now Robin had to stamp her feet or clap her hands just to get her mother to turn around and see her.

  It was as if she had become invisible. She’d line up all her plastic animals across her mother’s side of the bed, but when Leslie came into the room, it was to spritz more perfume across the back of her neck, or run a comb through her hair. She stared dreamily past her. When she left the room, she casually ruffled Robin’s hair. “Look at my zoo,” Robin said, but Leslie was gone, and suddenly Robin didn’t feel like playing with her animals anymore. She cried, a little hurt, but Leslie had gone outside to get something from the car and didn’t hear her.

  At dinner, Robin tried to talk, and then deliberately spilled her milk into a drippy white puddle on the cloth, but Leslie didn’t scold her the way she usually would. “Oh, Robin” was all she said, and then she mopped it up, telling Nick a story about one of her clients, her eyes dancing.

  Leslie’s affection didn’t disappear—she never less than adored her daughter. But Robin was with her all the time. Nick’s presence was rarer, and she channeled all of her energy into charming him so that he might stay a day or two longer, so that when he was on the road, he might remember just how lovely it had been with her at home, and come back to her that much sooner.

  Sometimes they took family vacations, usually at the shore. Robin would play outside the cottage, and when she came back in, Leslie and Nick would be sipping iced coffee at the table, bent toward each other, talking so quietly that Robin would suddenly shout. They both looked over at her then. “Well, what’s this?” Nick said, beckoning her to him, but Leslie told her to scoot and wash up for dinner. Leslie danced with Nick in the kitchen. She tucked Robin into bed and kissed her tenderly goodnight, but then she locked the bedroom door behind her and Nick so Robin couldn’t come in mornings.

  Things changed almost as soon as Nick left for business again. Leslie got very quiet. She spent a day or so by herself in her sewing room, she fed Robin dinner and put her to bed, but it wasn’t until another day had passed that she suddenly seemed to see Robin again. And then she wouldn’t let her alone. She wanted to be with Robin all the time. She wanted to take Robin to the park, she wanted the two of them to bake cookies. She hugged and kissed Robin, she sang songs, but Robin, remembering how cool Leslie had been to her, how hurt and shut out she had felt, was wary. She expected every hug that Leslie gave her to suddenly stop; she couldn’t trust the stories or the kisses.

  It always took Robin a while to warm to Leslie when Nick was gone, and Leslie told herself that was natural, that she just missed her father and it had nothing to do with her. Leslie worked to reclaim her daughter, praising her drawings, buying her blocks and paper dolls.

  Robin, despite herself, would gradually creep into her mother’s lap when she felt blue. She crawled into bed with her when she heard strange noises, and sometimes she would throw her arms about Leslie for a hug. But even so, it somehow wasn’t enough for Leslie. There was always something in Robin that pulled away from Leslie before Leslie was ready to let her go. She’d be holding Robin and then s
he’d feel Robin start to pull away, and she would automatically tighten her grip, but Robin would always struggle free, always leave her. When Robin closed the door to her room, she didn’t like it when Leslie opened it again, and she was upset when Leslie followed her into the backyard, behind the shrubs.

  “It was my secret place!” Robin complained.

  “Well, now it’s ours,” Leslie said, but she noticed that Robin never went back there again.

  Leslie told herself that it wasn’t just her. She had seen Robin with her friends, telling them in a serious adult voice that they had to go home because she wanted to play alone now. Leslie, watching the baffled faces of the other children, felt like inviting them in and making them brownies, felt like telling them, “I know how you feel.”

  It made her angry sometimes. She was lonely. She missed Nick so much. She should have had at least the comfort of a loving daughter. When she saw Robin pulling away, she snapped at her, finding the soft spots that were easy to wound. Tugging a brush through Robin’s hair, she groaned, “Where did you get such a mop?” She said it couldn’t come from her or from Nick, that it was orphan hair, belonging to no one, and Robin, stung, snapped away from the brush.

  It bothered Leslie, too, the way Robin pushed past her to rush to Nick when he came home. But then Nick would come up the walk, smiling at her, and sweep her so close to him that she could hear his heart, and then she’d see nothing, no one, but him, and it would be all right.