Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  The first thing Robin wanted from Nick was the tapes he made for her. When he was on the road, he wrote scraps of stories on the back of his appointment book; pieces of plot found their way onto napkins in the places where he took his clients to dine. The writing relaxed him, made him feel bound to his daughter, and he felt this odd kind of happiness. He bought a portable tape recorder and began concocting stories in his hotel rooms, in the car as he drove the endless miles homeward. He thought she could listen to his voice now even when he was away. He’d never really leave her that way. Other men might bring their kids teddy bears or rubber balls, but Nick brought tapes, celluloid pieces of his heart.

  Robin grew attached to the recorder, sitting in front of it, amazed and delighted and adoring. But sometimes she seemed to prefer the tape to Nick himself. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about that. He felt stupid going into her room and sitting with her, listening to his own voice, small and tinny in the recorder. He stood outside the door for a bit, feeling like a voyeur, thinking that when the tape was over he would stride in and tell her a fresh story himself. But then he heard the sudden whir and click of the rewind, and there was his voice again, telling the same story. Leslie, gliding past, pins in her mouth, frowned.

  Robin grew up on ghosts. Every year Nick tracked her height, making a small pencil dot over her head on the kitchen wall, but there was no way of keeping track of his presence, no way of being room 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 she’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.

  The first thing Robin wanted from Nick was the tapes he made for her. When he was on the road, he wrote scraps of stories on the back of his appointment book; pieces of plot found their way onto napkins in the places where he took his clients to dine. The writing relaxed him, made him feel bound to his daughter, and he felt this odd kind of happiness. He bought a portable tape recorder and began concocting stories in his hotel rooms, in the car as he drove the endless miles homeward. He thought she could listen to his voice now even when he was away. He’d never really leave her that way. Other men might bring their kids teddy bears or rubber balls, but Nick brought tapes, celluloid pieces of his heart.

  Robin grew attached to the recorder, sitting in front of it, amazed and delighted and adoring. But sometimes she seemed to prefer the tape to Nick himself. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about that. He felt stupid going into her room and sitting with her, listening to his own voice, small and tinny in the recorder. He stood outside the door for a bit, feeling like a voyeur, thinking that when the tape was over he would stride in and tell her a fresh story himself. But then he heard the sudden whir and click of the rewind, and there was his voice again, telling the same story. Leslie, gliding past, pins in her mouth, frowned.

  Robin grew up on ghosts. Every year Nick tracked her height, making a small pencil dot over her head on the kitchen wall, but there was no way of keeping track of his presence, no way of being sure where he was. She was in second grade and it still confused her, having her father’s voice there on the machine, or booming over the telephone wires at her, while all the time his body was somewhere else. Leslie inadvertently made it worse. She was trying to reassure Robin, who was crying, missing Nick. Leslie told her it wasn’t as if Nick were gone, because, really, he left parts of himself behind. No, not just in the machine. Why, if you shut your eyes, Leslie said, you could feel him right there in the room with you.

  She meant it as a comfort, but Robin lay awake in her bed that night, tensed for her father, wondering what he would do when he came upon her, whether this presence would have a body like his or be like the monsters she sometimes saw lurking on TV. She got up and put on her best nightgown, the one with the pink and blue ducks. She tried to brush her hair, and she doused herself with the sweet-scented toilet water Leslie had given her. It was purple tinted, housed in a glass poodle she tilted along her neck.

  She got back into bed and forced herself to stay awake, suddenly afraid, suddenly remembering spirits like Santa Claus, who knew if you were nice or naughty and who withheld gifts; or like God, who wrote down what you did for punishments to come. You couldn’t defend yourself against someone you couldn’t see. Robin bunched the covers about her head so that only her nose poked out. She shivered in her fear.

  In the morning, she was sure she saw proof that Nick’s presence had been at work. A book was in the wrong place, and one of his flannel shirts had fallen into a pile from the hanger. She was afraid of his ghost, afraid she’d do something wrong and the ghost would leave and the real Nick would never come home. When Nick did arrive back, she was suspicious. She waited for him to tell her something bad she had done, and when he didn’t, she tried to relax.

  She began thinking her father wasn’t the only ghost in the house. She was suddenly convinced that a wild and dangerous pack of wolves lived in the basement. She knew they were invisible; she knew they wore blue jeans and checked red shirts and walked upright on two legs and spat tobacco. And worse, she knew they had guns. When Leslie bounded downstairs to collect the wash, Robin lurked in the hallways, her heart racing. The few times she had to go down to the basement by herself, for her bike, or a doll, she made sure to carry handfuls of the hamburger meat Leslie had planned for her dinner, strips of bologna she was supposed to take to school for lunch.
She scattered the meat in the corners, her peace offering. When the food drew mice, Robin said nothing. Traps were set, the mice were gone, but Robin knew that things had presence. She could go downstairs and still feel those mice, just as she still felt the wolves, just as she felt her father—there and always, just out of her grasp.

  Nick’s schedule kept changing. A buyer would reschedule an appointment and he’d be home two days later than he had planned. A meeting would spill into the night, and rather than drive home when he was so exhausted, he would just stay over in a hotel. Robin didn’t really understand it. She only knew that he wasn’t home when he was supposed to be—that one moment there would be an extra place set for him at the dining-room table, there would be candles, and the next moment Leslie would be taking the plate away, removing the candles, and her face would be sad. Robin wasn’t sure what Nick did when he was away, although he had explained it to her. She only knew that he had said it was fun, and he always had stories about the wonderful places he visited. It suddenly began to worry her. If the places were so wonderful, what would keep him from staying there? What would make him come home at all?

  Robin began getting depressed every time she saw Nick’s suitcase on the bed. “Oh, now, I’ll be back before you even know it,” he told her, but he whistled as he packed. He seemed to have more energy when he was leaving. It was those times he’d want to swoop her into the air, want to kiss and tickle her and sing her wild snatches of song. She’d walk by the living room and see him waltzing with Leslie, dipping her down so low, her hair brushed the rug.

  Robin waited until Nick was in the bathroom, fiddling in the medicine cabinet for his aspirin and after-shave, and then she’d sneak something of hers into his suitcase. A sock, a blue hair ribbon, anything with her imprint on it so he’d remember her. Homing devices. And when he did come home, she felt grimly satisfied. He never said anything to her about her sock or her ribbon or her whatever that had traveled with him. He simply put them back in her room, and if she was there, he dotted her face with a kiss.

  She didn’t trust the sound of his car in the morning anymore. She couldn’t be certain that this wasn’t one of his going-away days. She would dash to follow, the stones in the sidewalk ribbing her bare soles, her robe flapping open, her hair tumbling about her. When he spotted her, he slowed down, unlatching the front door for her to get in. She panted, unable to speak. He didn’t have to ask her what she thought she was doing. He simply waited for her to clutch back her breath and then he took out his appointment book and showed her all his Pittsburgh appointments for the whole week, that he wasn’t going to be out of town once. He watched her, and then he took the pen and wrote, with a flourish, “Tuesday, dinner with Robin.” He looped the car back toward the house where Leslie was wearily standing in the front yard. “Come on, Robin,” she said. She walked around to Nick’s side of the door and kissed him. “Can’t say I blame her,” Leslie said, smiling. Robin scowled and kicked at the bushes.

  It made Nick a little crazy. He couldn’t get in the car without getting right out again to check behind the wheels, to look underneath and make sure Robin wasn’t crouched there. Once, he found her sleeping in the back seat. He kept hiding the car keys, but she always seemed to know where to find them.

  He didn’t know what to do about her. She came home from school with drawings of her family, but sometimes his own face was missing. He remembered the trailer-court drawings with a pang; he remembered Dore’s laughter when she told him how Ruby’s kids had drawn their father in a skirt. He asked Robin why he wasn’t on the page, but she just shrugged. “You’re wherever it is you go,” she said.

  Robin calmed down a little as she grew. Nick watched her, and by the time she was in fifth grade, she had stopped trailing the car, she didn’t put her ribbons into his suitcase as much, and for a while he thought the problem was over. But then, he and Leslie were called to Robin’s school for a conference. Robin was a smart little girl who brought home gold stars on almost all her papers, but Robin’s teacher, a thin young man with blond hair, told Nick that Robin had a problem with telling the truth. He said he had warned her and warned her about lying, but she persisted.

  “What are you talking about?” said Nick. “Robin doesn’t lie.”

  The teacher told him that Robin persisted in telling everyone that she was really an orphan and lived in a cardboard box under a bridge. Nick started. “Are things all right at home?” the teacher asked.

  “Everything is fine,” Leslie said sharply. She wouldn’t discuss it. She told the teacher Robin had been blessed with a wild imagination, and as a teacher, why wasn’t he trying to cultivate such a gift instead of trying to break it down?

  “I’ll talk to her,” Nick said, his voice low. When he stood up, the room seemed to move. Leslie was silent all the way to the car. She slid inside and leaned against her window.

  He took up her hand and laid it against his cheek, and then she turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “I’m with her all the time,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always gone. You don’t see how she gets when you’re gone, how she pines.” She took her hand from him. “You don’t see how I get, either.” She sighed. “Can’t you work here in Pittsburgh? Do you dislike the city that much? Can’t you be plain old nine-to-five?”

  Nick rested his head on the steering wheel. “I don’t know,” he said. He was silent for a moment, remembering what it was like to be in a hotel room, lying across a crumple of sheets, shaping his pillow as though it were Leslie against him, missing her so much it was sometimes like a disease eating away at him. He couldn’t tell her how things had changed; how when he was away, he convinced himself nothing could happen to them. When the phone rang in his hotel room, he never once thought it was the police wanting him to come identify some bodies. It was as if being away from his family was a weird kind of protection for them and for him. Home, he’d watch Leslie, worrying that she was ruining her eyes squinting over a sewing machine, uneasy when she didn’t come straight to bed but puttered around downstairs. It was at home that he thought to lean over and place a hand on her chest to make sure it still beat; at home that he felt the dangers lurking, waiting for opportunity.

  Leslie moved closer to him, scooting across the seat. Her hair smelled piny. Last week it had smelled of vanilla. She was a fanatic about shampoos. She had fifteen or sixteen different plastic bottles lined up along the slippery edge of the tub. He never knew what her hair would smell like, and it was a surprise about her that he loved. He bent and kissed her hair, her neck, her face. “I love you,” he said, as if that were an answer.

  He didn’t talk to Robin—he wasn’t sure what to say to her. For a while he simply watched her. She read a lot, so quickly she went through a book a day. He’d come home and find her in the backyard poring over a book. She read at dinner if he and Leslie let her; she was reading in her bed when he came to tuck her in. It never bothered him, but Leslie claimed it was too much escape. She yelled at Robin to get outside and play in the sun, and not to do it with a book, either. She told Nick that Robin’s teachers didn’t believe the level of books she read. They were too old for her, too demanding.

  Nick didn’t mind. He had always brought her books from his job. Now he brought home selections from the adult lists, which she grabbed up and polished off in hours.

  Once, he took a day off from work and showed up at her school. He told the principal there was a dire family emergency and he had to get Robin out of class. It wasn’t such a lie when he thought about it. The principal was about to wave a monitor over to fetch Robin when Nick interrupted. He wanted to know if it was possible for him to go to the class and get Robin himself. He said she was a nervous girl, that it would reassure her to see him right off. The principal said the best he could do was to allow Nick to go with the monitor, but Nick would still have to wait outside. “It’s just less disruptive,” the principal said. “You understand.”

  Nick walked down the hall with a ten-year-old boy co
vered in freckles. The kid didn’t say one word to Nick, and refused to even look at him as he strode purposefully down the hall, swinging his arms as if he would strike anyone in his way. When they got to the class, he pivoted to Nick. “Wait here,” he said, in a voice so military that Nick felt like saluting. But he waited, and he peered through the glass ribbon along the door, and there was Robin, in the second row, her hair coming out of its braids, the ribbons undone, her dress rumpled. When she spotted him, he made a big production of waving so the other kids would see. Robin blinked. She got up and slowly came out with the monitor, and when the door opened, Nick waved at her teacher.

  They didn’t say a word until after they had left the monitor, and then Robin squinted up at Nick, uncertain. “So how does lunch sound?” he said. “I thought you and I should have a whole day to ourselves.”

  She seemed to switch on. She kept asking him was he really serious, were they really going someplace or was it just to the dentist? She didn’t calm down. Not when he took her for hot dogs, not during some silly kid movie about a talking typewriter that solved mysteries. He drove back toward the house. “Mind if I pick up your mother and we all have dinner?” he asked. She gave him a doubtful smile, but she said nothing.

  He got Leslie. They went to a family-style place, with lots of red plastic baby chairs, a big messy salad bar with kids milling around, throwing lettuce at each other while waitresses gave them beleaguered smiles. He held Leslie’s hand, he winked at Robin. He kept looking at all the other families, grinning, letting them grin back, telling himself that he fit into a place like this just as well as anybody else; that anyone here could take one look at the three of them and not think anything was a bit out of place.

  He told himself that from now on he was going to take Robin with him someplace one day each month. He had plans. He got tickets for the aquarium; he brought home tennis rackets and reserved court space, telling Robin to think how surprised her granny would be to hear she was playing.