Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Amy, she thought. Betrayer. She thought the girl had loved her a little. She thought they had a real connection. But all those questions, all those calls—they took on a different meaning now. Who knew how she had found out? Who knew how careless Nick was? But there it was. Amy, a lying little heart, small and hurting as a cramp, pulling her life and her past from her for nothing at all.

  Oh, Lord, she used to think how Nick might like Amy, how maybe Amy could be their bridge to another child of their own. What a fool she was. And Nick, sad and silent, gutless at giving. “He’s not worth you,” her mother used to say about boys she disapproved of. “He’s hardly your kind.” She’d said it about the butcher when Dore was seventeen. She’d said it about Nick when she found out they were living in a trailer court, a time when Dore’s heart had kept expanding because she was so happy. Why had she kept thinking he’d change, be different?

  She thought suddenly, What if she never had anyone else to love in her life, anyone else to love her back? It was difficult, being a teacher. She heard the talk in the teacher’s room, the stories, the fix-ups that didn’t quite take, the lives going nowhere, the kids in your classes always the same age, year after year, while you just got older and older. Whom did you meet teaching kids all day long? Divorced, unhappy parents trailing into the PTA twice a year. Other teachers, most of them women.

  It was a fluke, her meeting Nick. She remembered the other teachers talking about it, joking about how they were all planning to pretend they’d misplaced their glasses, even when their vision was so perfect they could spot a kid chewing gum a mile away. They all wanted a catch like Nick. Oh, yes, what a catch! Tumbling right out of her hands, taking pieces of her right along with him.

  It was fate, all fate and all timing. One minute more and she never would have met Nick at all, her life would have wound its way into something different. One minute less and Susan might still be alive. In another few minutes, she wouldn’t have been home to get that call from Leslie, she would have been at the market, buying wine, squeezing fruit. She wondered what would have happened then—whether Nick would have divorced Leslie and married her; whether he ever would have admitted that she wasn’t his first-and-always. Maybe things would have just stretched out along the same path until she got fed up.

  Married. How could he be married to someone who wasn’t her? She tried to frame a picture of Leslie in her mind, but the only face she could conjure up alongside Nick’s was her own. Maybe Leslie would be the lucky one, maybe she’d never even realize whom she had been talking to, or maybe it wouldn’t even matter. An old girlfriend always mattered less than a wife, didn’t she?

  She crouched in bed, miserable. She remembered Leslie mentioning Pittsburgh, and she called Information and got the number, planning to confront Nick. But the first time she called, Amy—Robin—answered, and, stunned, Dore hung up.

  She tried calling him at work, and in the end he just showed up. “I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.

  She bolted back. “Don’t you try talking to me!” she cried.

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do.” She decided she couldn’t speak, and she was too angry to stay still, so she went outside and started walking. Nick walked along with her, a little in front of her, so she’d have to see him just by looking where she was going.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Speak.”

  “Leslie called me,” she blurted, and as soon as she had that name in her mouth, it was as if she had bitten down on rusty tin. “Your daughter, Amy—Robin—was here,” she cried.

  He froze in the middle of the sunny sidewalk, his face changing. “Here?” he said. He washed one hand over his face, looking at the sky, the walk, anywhere but her. “Dore—”

  “Shut up,” she said. “You have a wife. You have a daughter. You have what I’m supposed to have, what I’m supposed to be, and you think you have any right to come here and talk to me?”

  “I have a right,” he said, grabbing her arm. “What did they tell you?”

  “I hate you,” said Dore. “I’m right here and you’re talking about someone else. You’re so anxious to know, you ask them.”

  “I love you,” he said, his voice fierce. “I loved you the day I saw you struggling in that hall. I loved you when you shut me out with nine million students, when it was all I could do to get you to look at me, let alone talk, and I love you now.” He pulled her roughly in front of him. “You listen,” he said. “I was fucked up, I was wrong. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you—I was afraid of what you’d think, I was afraid you’d disappear. I’ll marry you now. I don’t care about anything, just don’t leave, just don’t.”

  “You didn’t want to give any of it up, did you?” said Dore. “You didn’t want to marry me at all. It was just a daydream, like winning the lottery.”

  “Jesus, I love you,” said Nick. “How many more times do I have to say it?”

  “What about your wife? You love her? What about your daughter?” She yanked herself free. “I’m second-best to you, and you’re crazy.” She swiped at him.

  “Listen to me,” Nick said; but she broke free, she shouted at him that she never wanted to see him or his family again, that he had better not come around, because she would call the cops, she would create a scandal that would bruise more lives than her own. He called her name, he came toward her, his face miserable, and she started running, staring straight ahead so she wouldn’t have to notice whether or not he was following her, wouldn’t have to face the possibility that he wasn’t.

  She wasn’t sure where she was going. She heard his steps, his voice, scraped from his throat, but she kept taking shortcuts on him, sprinting across lawns, through bushes, into alleys he knew nothing about, and then she entered a neighborhood that was unfamiliar, and when she glanced back, he was gone. Sometimes a car would beep at her, but mostly she felt as if she were running hidden, and she stopped only when her side stitched up on her, and she leaned against a pole.

  When someone touched her, she jerked up, her hand raised to strike, but it wasn’t Nick, it was a man in black sweats, asking her if she was okay. “You’re nuts to run in boots,” he said. He made her breathe in and out deeply. He said he got cramps all the time when he didn’t pay attention to how he ran, and then he introduced himself. His name was Ray and he taught anthropology at B.U. and he said she ought to rest. He knew this coffee shop. She didn’t know why, but she let him take her, and when she was sitting in the booth, exhausted, when she managed to look up into a strange, bright face, she thought only that it wasn’t Nick’s. And she knew suddenly that Nick’s face would be one she would miss every morning and every evening of her life from now on, and there would never, ever, be anything she could do about it.

  Nick sat on Dore’s front stoop, sure she would come back if he stayed there long enough. She’d be exhausted, her pain would be dulled, and he’d be able to talk to her. Her love might refuel—everything might be all right.

  He was losing everything. He didn’t have his family the way he used to, he didn’t have his work the way he used to, and now he didn’t seem to have Dore. He thought about Robin being with Dore, and it chilled him. He couldn’t imagine how she had known, why she had kept calling, and what he was going to do about any of it.

  The afternoon light was dying. Men and women were coming home with briefcases, stepping over him. He got up. He thought about leaving Dore a note, but he couldn’t find a pencil, and, too, he kept having visions of Robin finding his words on Dore’s mailbox. He traced his hand on her mailbox, on her name that she had handwritten, and then on impulse he dug the name out and put it in his pocket like a lucky charm. He had thought that once—he had thought nothing could go wrong as long as she was in his life, as long as someone was. He remembered his dizzy relief whenever he came back to Pittsburgh and there was Leslie, among her pins and her patterns, getting up to fling her arms about him. And he thought about Robin, how he wanted her frozen in time.
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br />   He suddenly thought of this one boy from the home. Mike, who had actually lived with foster parents for so long that everyone was certain he’d be adopted. After he’d been gone two years, they all stopped talking about him; they let him fade into memory, into a kind of dull hope that what had befallen him might befall anyone. And then, one day, he was returned to the home, driven up by a cheerful, tanned couple who said nothing was wrong, he was a wonderful boy, but they had simply changed their minds about having a boy around.

  Mike kept running away, running back to the people he insisted were his family, and each time they brought him back, until finally they called the school and told them to pick him up because they didn’t want to waste the gasoline. Mike had stopped running after that. The kids had befriended him, but Nick remembered how he had never been able to look at Mike without feeling a deepening chill, without craving warmth.

  He walked down the block to his car. He felt a terrible, dangerous tide moving in toward him, tugging, pulling him back toward what he was, what he had always been, an orphan, belonging to no one.

  Robin, terrified, stayed up in her room, the door shut. She had come home to find Leslie with the phone bill fanned in one hand, her face terrible. “I spoke to your Dore,” Leslie spat out, saying the name as if she knew everything connected to it. Robin hadn’t even thought to lie. She had just sat there on the couch opposite Leslie, spilling out the story, crying, half in fear, half in relief, and when she finally looked at Leslie, Leslie’s face was bleached of color and her hands were shaking.

  Leslie got up slowly. She acted as if she didn’t even see Robin anymore. As she walked, her fingers seemed to read the tables, the walls, and when she got to the door, she quietly stepped out.

  Robin didn’t move. She sat on the couch for over three hours, trying to figure out how she should be positioned when Leslie came back in. Should she be slumped over and miserable? Should she be erect and stoic? Should she even be still sitting right where Leslie had left her?

  When Leslie finally did walk through the front door, Robin bolted upright. “What’s the matter with me?” Leslie said quietly. “I’m your mother. Didn’t you care how I might feel? I don’t understand. Just who were you trying to protect?” She was so still, it frightened Robin.

  “You know what?” Leslie said. “I went and called her from a pay phone outside. I didn’t want to call her where you could hear, where you might get hurt. Isn’t that funny? She didn’t want to talk to me, but she didn’t hang up, either. I kept thinking she was lying—maybe she was some crazy client who just had a crush, who made up a life with your father.” Leslie straightened. “She slipped out a few details—things no one else could know unless they were close. She said—” Leslie’s voice cracked. “She said, ‘How’s Robin taking this?’ And that’s when I did to her what she did to me before. That’s when I hung up.” Leslie looked at Robin. “She has my husband,” she said. “But I swear to God, she isn’t getting my daughter.”

  Leslie had to call three locksmiths before she found one who would come over right away. He was just a young kid in jeans, and he told her he was really a writer, that he just did enough lock jobs to keep himself going. He tried flirting with Robin, who got flustered, and then Leslie marched him to the back to start him on the dead bolts. She changed front and back door locks; she put in window locks, too, and would have installed a whole alarm system except it would have taken much too long and cost too much. When he was finally finished, she made Robin come with her to try out the keys.

  She called the phone company and told them she was getting obscene phone calls and had to have a new, unlisted number immediately. She said she wanted the new number under her name and wanted no one, under any circumstances, to have access to it, no matter what they said, no matter how much they might beg and say it was an emergency.

  Nick was expected home past midnight that evening, and Leslie grew increasingly nervous. She wasn’t sure he couldn’t get in if he really wanted to. The locksmith had told her stories about thieves swinging like chimps from window to window, about iron bars being sawed. Rick might do anything. Oh, the house was hers, but he could still call the police and make her open the door. He could take Robin. Then again, he might not show up at all. He could have found out that she knew from Dore, and he could just count that as a finish, leaving her standing in the darkness by the window, night after night. That way he’d never know how hard she had tried to keep him away.

  But at three, she heard his car. She couldn’t bring herself to actually look out the window at him. She didn’t want to see his face, his body; she didn’t want his scent loosening her anger. She heard his steps coming up the walk, his key jamming in the lock, not fitting. The bell, when it rang, hurt her ears. She listened to it, over and over, not sure what to do, and then she heard him calling her name. It seemed to scorch from his throat—he cried it like a cat—and when she turned away from the door, her arms cradling her ribs, she saw Robin poised in the light on the stairs, in a thin cotton nightgown.

  He shouted her name. She could almost feel the lights switching on about the neighborhood, the faces staring out. Then he shouted Robin’s name, and without turning, Leslie shouted back, “I know everything.” There was silence, then his steps fading back down, the car turning on, and Leslie locked eyes with Robin, who slowly turned from her, who went back into her room and shut the door, leaving Leslie alone in her locked house, in her darkness.

  All the next day, they both stayed in the house. When Leslie spoke to Robin, her voice was so soft, Robin wasn’t sure it was her mother’s voice at all. For a while, Nick kept driving by the house, sometimes parking, sometimes getting out to try the door Leslie refused to answer. Robin watched him from her window. He ate hamburgers out of white paper bags that he basketball-tossed into the back seat; he smoked whole packs of cigarettes; and once, he said something to a neighbor passing by, and they both stopped talking to look over at the house. He even sent a few telegrams that Leslie was at first fooled into opening. “Forgive me,” they said. “Let me talk to you, let me explain. You’re my wife.” Leslie began refusing them, but they still came.

  He left finally, the car disappearing for one day and then another, and it was Robin who got furious. She was angry with Leslie for not somehow being able to fix things, for not softening enough to give Nick his chance to explain, to lie even, to do whatever he could to bring things back to where they’d been. And, too, she was angry with Nick for the seeming ease with which he gave up, for the way the car just glided out of her sight, and for the way he sent every single one of those telegrams to Leslie, and none of them, not one, to her.

  Leslie might not have spoken to Nick, but she did have conversations with him in her mind. She asked him why he had done this, why he hadn’t told her about his past. And when he answered, she could see him so clearly, feel his breath right on her neck, but the answers he gave her were blurry, the language garbled. It was a while before she realized it was she who was blurring things, she who was stubbornly refusing to hear what she most wanted.

  Leslie refused to talk about anything that had to do with Nick, but she did things that showed how she felt. She came home one day and started gathering up all of Nick’s things—his clothing, his papers, the endless little gifts she had given him just for loving her—and she gave them to Goodwill, keeping only one old blue flannel shirt that she sometimes slept in when she was feeling most lost. She knew how he was about his possessions—his things—but she didn’t care. She wanted him to know what she had done, to know that he wasn’t the only one who could give away what he wasn’t supposed to, what he had no right to let go. And she watched Robin’s reaction, almost daring her to object, to say one word, but all Robin did was turn her white, baffled face away and go back upstairs to her room.

  Leslie took her wedding band to sell, and the thin gold chain she had never liked because it made her feel like Sammy Davis, Jr., the same chain she had never once taken off because it had been
an anniversary present from Nick and he had taken such shy pleasure in it—and in her. She had a few more gold pieces, a few silver ones, and she walked into the first store downtown that bought metals. The man at the desk told her airily that gold wasn’t doing so hot right now, that in his opinion she’d be better off waiting. When she insisted, he just shook his head. “It’s your funeral, lady,” he said.

  He gave her just twelve dollars for everything, for pieces that were each worth four or five times that much, and as soon as Leslie felt the press of bills in her hands, she started crying. “Look, maybe I can get you four more, five tops,” the clerk said, a little startled, but Leslie pushed her way outside, struggling free of the pull of a present she was doing her best to turn into a past.

  She was going to do everything differently. She turned the bedroom into her sewing room; she spent four days cleaning out the sewing room, and she slept in there. She threw out everything Nick had ever given her, and she thanked God that the house had always been hers. She pierced her left ear and wore a tiny green stone in it. She stepped up her business and learned to keep dry-eyed with her clients because her tears made them suddenly remember that they had to be home early, or had to go into the other room and make a phone call. When she walked at night, she called out to the neighbors who had always watched her. She was suddenly invited up onto cool front porches, offered limeade and packaged cookies. She found out about their lives, their families—all the details she had never cared about before and only half-heard now. It was just the sound of all those voices, the caress of the cadence, that lulled her into a kind of comfort.

  She and Robin, though, moved like ghosts past each other. Robin never said one thing, just looked at Leslie hard-eyed when she thought Leslie wasn’t noticing. The more Robin pushed out of the house, the more Leslie wanted her home. She wouldn’t drive her to the “Y” to swim nights—she said there was something wrong with the car. She wouldn’t let her study at a friend’s because she wasn’t feeling well and might need Robin to run to Walnut Street and pick up a prescription. When Robin reminded her that they delivered, Leslie told her to watch that mouth of hers, to stop being so fresh.