Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  It surprised her when she came home one day to find a man waiting for her. It took her a moment to recognize Ray, the man who had taken her to the coffee shop that night when she had been running from Nick.

  “How did you find me?” she asked him.

  He grinned. He told her he had looked her up in an old phone book. When he dialed the number, he found it had been changed to an unlisted one, but he had taken a chance that her address was still the same. “So come have another coffee with me,” he said; and simply because she was lonely, she said fine.

  He began coming around. She told him the truth—that she didn’t care whether he came around or not, that she didn’t have anything to offer him right now. “Oh, I don’t think that’s so true,” he said. He came over every Friday; he was polite and unpushy. He brought her comic books and daisies, gifts so cheap, or so silly, that she couldn’t possibly find any reason to refuse them. He treated her hostile moods as nothing more than squalls, which would blow over any moment if he just stuck around and waited.

  “This is never going to work out,” she told him. “So don’t think that it is. I don’t want a relationship. I can’t even handle a friend.” She wouldn’t let him call her during the week, and when she found herself thinking about him, she got her jacket and took a walk. Sometimes she thought about hiring a detective to check up on him and make sure he didn’t have a wife in the background, another woman he liked to bring comic books to. But that would have meant that she cared enough to worry, so she dropped the idea.

  She slept with him sometimes when she was the most lonely, when she was missing Nick, but she would never let him stay at her place, and she wouldn’t go to his. She made him go to hotels with her, the two of them driving in separate cars. He always stood outside with her before she drove away again, and when she bent to open her car door, he gently placed his hand just on top of her head so she wouldn’t bump it when she got in. The gesture touched her so much, she had to bite down on her lower lip to keep from crying. As soon as he removed his hand from her head, she missed it, she wanted it back.

  Nick was getting ready to leave for Brini’s, making coffee, overcooking some brown eggs in a skillet, when the phone rang. It startled him. No one ever called him, except for an occasional wrong number, and then he always had to suppress his instinct to engage the voice in conversation. He lifted up the receiver and there was Leslie’s voice, washing over him like cool water, taking his breath.

  “Is she there?” Leslie blurted.

  Nick sat down, sighing. Oh, Dore, he thought. To think of her as actually here, in the other room, humming as she corrected papers, always grading on how hard she thought the student tried rather than on the actual quality of the work. “If an A student can get an A without even thinking about it, what good is it?” she used to say. She wanted to see originality. She wanted to see risk. Risk—he had shown that.

  “I haven’t heard from her since when,” he said.

  “Oh, God, neither have I,” Leslie said, and burst into tears, surprising him so much, he stood up. It was hard to understand her; she was tumbling out words, saying something about the police being rude to her, about wanting him to help with money so she could hire a detective, and then, in a snag of conversation, he heard Robin’s name, and he realized just who it was that was missing.

  He felt something crumpling inside of him, an implosion. Robin unsafe. “I’ll find her,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t call you except I don’t know what to do anymore. The cops told me to wait another week or so, can you imagine? A week or so, they said. Kids come back, they said.”

  “It’s all right,” Nick said. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll take care of it. I’ll look for her myself. I’ll even hire someone and I’ll call you every week. Every single week.”

  “You’ll let me know?” Leslie said, crying. “You’ll find her and send her home?” She snuffled. “She hates me. I never did anything to her, and she hates me—”

  “No one hates you,” he said. “And I’ll find her. I’ll call you next Monday. At six. Don’t worry.”

  He hung up in a confusion of feelings. First was the deep, raw edge of panic about Robin, the visions of her wandering about in a shabby subway, foraging in dumpsters for something to eat, or, worse, in the arms of some man who had plans. He refused to think of her as anything but alive. “Robin!” he said, as if his voice might position her into place until he could get her.

  He felt helpless, but he felt elated, too, because now he had the right to call Leslie every week. Now she would willingly talk to him, and if he found Robin, if he sent her home, Leslie might be glad enough to actually see him. He’d have the right to contact Dore, too, because Robin had been close to her and might go there. It brought him a kind of twisted joy.

  He wasn’t sure where to start. How did you go about looking for someone who might not want to be found? He took out ads addressed to her, begging her to call him. He put them in papers he thought kids read—the bulletin-board back pages of the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, weeklies in Berkeley. He splurged and took out ads offering rewards for information about her, but all he got were crank responses. He got letters offering other young girls—girls who could use their tongues as instruments, girls who would do whatever he asked as long as he paid attention to their price rates.

  Finally, he went to a detective named Rory Clarkson, who frowned at him and said that Nick would have to let him handle it alone—that if Robin didn’t want to be found and Nick went out looking for her, he’d only end up pushing her farther into hiding. He told Nick that while finding his daughter might be a piece of cake, it might be difficult to get her to return home. “But you leave it to me,” Clarkson said.

  Nick did what he could. He sent Dore a card at her old address, figuring it would be forwarded to her. He got back a plain white postcard, mailed from Vermont; she wrote that she was sorry about Robin, but she hadn’t heard anything. She said if Robin showed up, she would send her home, since Robin obviously didn’t belong with her. Seeing Dore’s writing lit up something inside of Nick.

  He waited. He went to work, but he didn’t tell Jack anything about why he looked so exhausted, why other times he was so wired he couldn’t sit still. Jack, who believed everyone was entitled to keep his wounds private, never pressed Nick for explanations. Instead, he did what he could to change Nick’s moods in other ways. He let him take over ordering all the stock, and when Nick gave him a suspicious look, Jack told him to just keep his spine in joint, that he was giving him the job because he himself was too lazy to fuss with the forms anymore. And anyway, Nick knew the customers as well as he did, and knew the stock even better, since he was the one who took care of all the shelving and returns these days. It did help Nick. He was somehow nourished by the extra work, the responsibility. He’d work long hours, interrupted only when Jack took him for something to eat at Rennabaum’s Drugstore, where, Jack claimed, they served the tastiest liver and onions in the whole town.

  Every Monday, Nick called Leslie, but when he hung up, he always felt dislocated, strange. He had comforted her, and she needed him—she actually thought he could find Robin—but the whole time he was having nightmares about Robin floating facedown in the Atlantic. He’d wake, confusing the salt of his own sweat with the ocean. He saw Robin in every ragamuffin kid begging spare change on the street. He gave them all dollar bills, ignoring their sly smiles, because they could be Robin. And yet, there was something else, too, something he couldn’t explain. He had this feeling that Robin was somehow orchestrating all of this—that she, among all of them, was really the only one who knew what she was doing, the only one who had any sort of control.

  Robin thought that the closer she and Douglas got to California, the more she would shed her family like an extra coat she didn’t need in the sun, and the more bound together she’d feel to Douglas. She kept twisting the gold wedding band he had hastily bought her, kept glancing over at his gold ring, but he was
harried. He didn’t speak to her much. He wanted to put as much distance between them and Pennsylvania as possible, but the traffic was terrible, and every time a police car passed, he seemed to stiffen.

  His mood didn’t lift until the next day, and then he parked the car and took her with him to buy some bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and that night, he drove the car to a park where they could watch the sky. They toasted each other with the wine.

  “Look at you, I can’t believe you’re mine,” he said. “You wait, as soon as we can, we’ll have a real wedding. I’ll buy you a whole new ring. An expensive one.”

  “I don’t need a new ring,” said Robin, stroking hers.

  He bent to kiss her. “You know what? I feel married to you. I am married to you. I can’t help it. I keep thinking of you as my wife, as Mrs. Nylon. I love you so much,” he said, and his eyes were shining, and so starry that Robin shivered.

  He sped toward California. Robin stared dreamily out the window and twirled her wedding band about her finger. Everywhere they stopped, she looked for opportunities to announce herself as Mrs. Douglas Nylon, a name with none of her family in it. She got out library cards she wouldn’t be in town long enough to use; she made dinner reservations she would call to cancel a half-hour later. She called Douglas “my husband” to anyone who would listen. “My husband loves apples,” she informed a vendor on the street. “My husband already has today’s Times,” she told a boy hawking papers. “Okay, okay,” Douglas said, extricating his hand from hers. “Enough’s enough.”

  She began annoying him on the ride. She kept buying books at every place they stopped, paperback classics she’d read while he was driving. “You’re making me dizzy,” he informed her. “How can you read when we’re moving?” She just looked at him for a moment and then returned to her book. She read in restaurants when they stopped for hamburgers; she read before they stretched out in the car as best they could to try to sleep. And when he woke up in the morning, cramped, his legs hurting, she was contentedly reading, unaware of him or the muggy smell of the car, of the long, tedious stretch of highway ahead of them.

  And she read so fast. She’d run into drugstores to find a book and then two hours later she’d be carefully placing it in back among the growing pile, and reaching for another. She told him she always read quickly, but he didn’t believe her—he said she must be skimming, she must be losing half of what she read, and he wanted to quiz her. He picked up Bleak House, which she had read in one day, and held it up. “All right, tell me the theme,” he said.

  “I will not,” she said. “Leave me alone.” She plucked up The Sun Also Rises, and contentedly, she began reading, leaving him to maneuver and drive.

  When they finally got to California, they rented a tiny studio apartment an hour north of San Francisco. It was really too small for two people, although Robin kept saying how cozy it was. They bought a pull-out sofa that took up so much space when it was pulled out that you had to walk right over it to get to the bathroom. The plaster was chipping off in the corners, and no matter how much Robin cleaned, there was always dust. She set up the books she had piled in the car, and she waited for a married routine to start.

  It didn’t take Douglas long to find a job teaching at the local high school, but he didn’t like it. The kids were spoiled. They didn’t listen to him and they made constant fun of his accent, of his pale skin. When he walked into the room, the kids hummed “Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

  “So who wants skin cancer?” Douglas said, and even as he spoke, a girl in the back was adjusting her strap over a tan line, a guy was checking his supply of zinc oxide in his pack. They weren’t interested in science, he told Robin, unless it had to do with setting up home labs to make designer drugs. They didn’t even read unless the book had already been made into a movie.

  He was startled when Robin refused to go back to high school. “Why should I?” she asked. “I have responsibilities.” She had all these ideas of how a married woman starting out acted, and not one of them had anything to do with Leslie. She went out and got a part-time job waitressing at the local Arby’s, and on her way home she’d stop and buy one of those women’s magazines so she could figure out a recipe for dinner. She carried Ladies’ Home journal and Woman’s Day under her arm, unbagged, so everyone could see.

  Douglas didn’t like it that sometimes when he left school he’d find Robin waiting outside for him, looking younger than some of his students. He didn’t like coming home to a five-course dinner he didn’t feel like eating because it was just too hot outside. She wanted to make love all the time. She kept her hands on him even when he was sitting outside at night, trying to get cool because they couldn’t afford anything better than a fan, and all that did was stir up the dust. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Robin said, leaning her head against his shoulder, shyly taking his hand, but all he could think about was the clean, quiet lab in Pittsburgh, the air-conditioning in his old apartment.

  They kept to themselves. Robin didn’t mind; she liked it that she seemed to be the center for him, that he never even wanted to go out with anyone else. He didn’t tell her that he turned down invitations from other teachers because he was afraid they would judge him. He felt as if he were waiting for Robin to turn eighteen so they could get married, so he could feel respectable. On her sixteenth birthday, even though it was just the two of them, he wouldn’t let her put any candles on her cake because he didn’t want to be reminded.

  It was easy enough to go from spending time just with her to spending time by himself, easy enough to hang out alone without her asking him fifty times if he loved her, without her always touching him, always watching him, her eyes so needy he felt as if she were drinking him right down. He’d come home and she’d be silently waiting for him on the porch, and then he’d see how beautiful she was and his insides would rush into water; he’d remember how he had felt about her before, how her innocence and her need had intoxicated him then. He’d sit down beside her and take her head in his hands and kiss her nose. “You’ll never leave me, will you?” she said. “Never, ever.”

  He sighed. “No, never.”

  “You’ll always love me,” she said. “You’ll always take care of me.”

  “Always,” he said, his mouth dry.

  “You’ll always need me,” she said, and this time he stretched up; he told her they should go inside and get something nice and cool to drink.

  She wouldn’t let herself get lonely, wouldn’t let herself think one single thing could be wrong. She never worried that Nick or Leslie would show up. She knew she was bound to Douglas now and had nothing to do with either of them. She worked at making herself and Douglas as much of a family as she could. She thought families should have dogs, something she had never been allowed because Leslie didn’t like them, and she went down to the Animal Rescue League and picked out a small yellow mutt. Douglas gave her a look when he saw the dog, but because it made her so happy, because it took some of the focus away from him, he agreed they should keep it. “Next, we need a baby,” she said, wrapping her arms about his neck. “Like we need a hole in our brains,” he told her, but he nuzzled her neck and suddenly wanted her so much, he dipped her down to the floor.

  She named the dog Toby. It thrilled her to come home and see the dog prancing around waiting for her—she swore he barked out her name. Toby followed her around, adoring. He slept at her feet at night, and when she woke, hot, and padded into the bathroom to lie on the cool white tiles, she’d wake to find the dog there with her. She found herself thinking about the dog all the time. She stole treats for him at Arby’s, long strips of lean roast beef, hamburger meat. When she took her lunch break, she’d walk home in her uniform with a sandwich and share it with the dog, one hand ruffling up the yellow fur on his back. When she had to leave to get back to work, Toby whined and tried to leave with her.

  “I’ll be back,” she soothed. “I’ll always be back.”

  She and the dog would go and meet Dougla
s after school; they’d shadow him to the beach and to the market. “Can’t I have some time to myself?” he asked. “Give me a kiss,” she told him. She was upset when he was late, and she worried when he came home silent, when he didn’t want to tell her about his day. “You’re shutting me out of your life,” she said, but he shook his head; he said the problem was more that she was taking over his life. Wounded, she drew back; she went to take Toby for a walk.

  She told herself their life was stabilizing. She tracked the months they were together in the studio, chalking up six months, then a year, then a little more. There were long periods when he seemed less than delighted with her, true, but there were also stretches when he surprised her with flowers, when he tumbled her to the floor to make love. And when she turned seventeen, he seemed visibly happier—he even let her put candles on the cake he bought for her. “One more year and we’ll be home free,” he told her, and she relaxed, because it was future talk.

  She was sure what they needed to really cement their life together was a baby. If she got pregnant now, it could be born by the time they married for real. But when she broached the subject to him, he laughed. “You’re the baby around here,” he told her. She didn’t tell him when she started coming to bed without her diaphragm. She made a show of going into the bathroom, where she daubed a swirl of Ortho cream about her vagina where he would taste it, so he would never suspect.

  In the spring, the weather started changing. It was earthquake season, people said. Robin blamed the weather for the way Douglas was acting again—his distancing himself from her, his silence. She asked one of the other waitresses at Arby’s, who claimed to be an expert on earthquakes, if the weather could do things to people. The girl laughed. “Oh, sure,” she said. “It makes my cat crazy.” She told Robin to get some bottled water to keep in the house, to hit the ground if she felt a tremor.