Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  Now Leslie’s calls softened something inside of her. She sometimes felt like taking the phone and crying; she sometimes wanted to tell Leslie about losing her baby, about losing Douglas.

  But her confusion, her anger, got in her way. How did she know that Leslie wasn’t calling her just to have a good excuse to talk to Nick? Maybe Leslie was wearing down—maybe being alone in the house was making her want Nick back, no matter where his heart really was. How could she know that she wasn’t somehow being used? How could she believe that it was just herself that Leslie wanted now, herself without Nick? I’m here, not you, she thought, as if her mother were her rival.

  She kept track of her mother’s calls, jealous of the way any ring of the phone would make Nick look optimistic. But she noticed that Nick never stayed on the phone with Leslie very long. He said hello, he started to tell her something, and then he was cut off. “All right,” he said flustered. “All right.” He held the phone out to Robin, and when she shook her head, stubborn, he tried to talk to Leslie again, but it was always useless. “She wants to talk to you,” Nick said. “Not to me.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Robin, doubtful.

  And then, one week, the phone didn’t ring at all, and she hated how deserted she suddenly felt, hated the panicky edge forming along her heart. “Well, you never want to speak with her,” Nick said. “What do you expect?”

  “Nothing,” Robin said. “Suits me fine.” But she didn’t feel good at all. Not speaking to Leslie, but knowing that Leslie wanted to speak to her, was a different matter than this silence. And she knew what she expected, all right—that now that her mother didn’t seem to want Nick anymore, there was really no reason for her to want Robin, either.

  SEVENTEEN

  But Leslie did call again. She had had a bad case of the flu, she told Nick, and it had been all she could do to drag herself from the sweaty tangle of sheets to the bathroom. She had unplugged her phone, and all the clocks, too, because even the slightest noise hurt her. She wanted to talk to Robin.

  “Flu,” Nick said, and Robin tentatively took the phone. Nick left the room almost instantly, and Robin sat on the kitchen stool, tense, waiting.

  “Hello, angel,” Leslie said. She didn’t demand that Robin come home. She didn’t mention that legally, she could force it. It wouldn’t count if Robin wouldn’t come on her own, willing to stay. She didn’t pry into Robin’s life with Douglas, she didn’t say that the only thing that was keeping her from pressing charges against him was wanting to protect Robin from any more turmoil. And if she knew about the abortion, she kept silent on that subject, too. She said nothing about Nick at all. Instead, she asked about the dog she heard barking in the background, and she asked how Robin was. Only once did her voice break. “I wish you’d think about coming home,” Leslie said. “You could just visit.” When Robin was silent, Leslie sighed. “Well, thanks for talking to me, honey,” she said. “I love you.”

  When she hung up, Robin burst into confused tears.

  Robin began taking Leslie’s calls, telling herself it was just an experiment, that she’d talk with Leslie only as long as she felt Leslie was really interested in her. She was always a little guarded, always listened intently to what Nick said when he was on the phone with Leslie, and every time Leslie said she loved her, Robin stiffened, suspicious.

  Leslie was always loving on the phone, though, and she always thanked Robin for speaking to her. Yet as soon as they hung up, Robin felt restless and miserable and unsure. She took the dog out and sprinted through the streets, trying to get so tired she wouldn’t feel anything but the ache of her muscles. She knew Nick watched her when she came into the house. He always tried to make her feel better by taking her to the movies or out for ice cream. He never told her that sometimes late at night Leslie would call and weep, wanting to know what was really going on with Robin.

  “She’s not coming home, is she?” Leslie said. “I get dressed up every day, half expecting her to show up, wanting to look great for her. It isn’t fair. It isn’t even like having visitation privileges.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “You want her there, don’t you? This is just how you like things,” and she hung up.

  Before the loss, the grief, could touch him, he saw Robin walking past the back window, dancing a stick in her hand for the dog to wildly leap at, and he went out to the backyard, too. “That dog couldn’t catch his own shadow,” he said, grinning.

  “Can too,” Robin said, laughing, coming over to stand by him, so close he could smell the clean shampoo scent of her hair, feel the rough wool of her shirt. She put one arm about him, just for a moment, and he leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Toby!” she cried, moving away, tossing the stick in an arc.

  Oh, she was so there sometimes, so around him. She could run the shop by herself; he could take the whole afternoon off just to browse in the other stores, to see what the competition was doing, and when he came back, there would be money in the register that hadn’t been there before. She was starting to cook a little more, too, and because she didn’t believe him when he said the food was good, he ate three helpings and asked for the recipes. He liked it, seeing her, knowing she was in the house, and every time he called Leslie, he felt as if he were proving something to her. He wanted Leslie to visit, just so she could see how good he was with Robin now, and how at home Robin was.

  The summer had started turning, cooling toward fall, when Robin turned restless. At first Nick thought it just had to do with the university students pouring back into town, filling up the spaces she liked empty—the banks by the river, the silent parks. They came in station wagons, their parents awkward and boisterous beside them, balancing stereo systems and sets of skis, carrying guitars and computers. They were packed into airport limos, spilling out in front of the sleek steel high-rise dorms, the shabby student housing. They didn’t get their textbooks from a place like Brini’s, but they came to buy the books they wanted for pleasure, and they hung out. He saw how Robin watched them, how she’d shelve books a bit closer to any one group just so she could hear what they were saying. Once, he found her leafing through a course catalog, but when she saw him watching her, she was embarrassed she put it away.

  “You want to go back to school?” he asked her.

  She just shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “You want me to contact the school board for you?” he asked.

  The more he talked about it, the more excited he got, but the more she withdrew. He said she could always go to night school if she wanted, that maybe she could just take her SAT and if she scored high enough, she could go right on to college. “I don’t know,” Robin said. “I don’t know what I want.”

  I know, he felt like saying—I know what you want. But instead he just roughed her hair, just told her tonight was his turn to cook supper, and it would be ready in an hour.

  She was moody a lot. One day in the bookshop she suddenly smelled this kind of piny scent, the same kind Douglas used to douse over his face mornings because he had read in some magazine that pine was the masculine scent of the Eighties. Her whole body had turned inside out when she smelled the pine. She was terrified to turn around, and even when she finally did, and saw a middle-aged woman in a blue dress, she still couldn’t stop the seasickness swelling inside of her. Whenever she thought of California, on the hottest summer days in Madison—California heat—she thought of Douglas; she’d practically see him, talking to his students, maybe catching the eye of someone else who was the way she had once been, young and yearning and hopelessly, helplessly dazzled by love itself.

  She began calling Leslie herself, and one night she called when Leslie couldn’t keep herself from crying. She had just gotten home from a late-night movie, sitting beside a couple who were kissing and nuzzling, practically moving their passion right into her seat, and it had made her feel so alone and miserable that she had angrily stood up, pushing past them, not caring that her popcorn drizzled across them.
“Hey—” the guy had said angrily, standing, white kernels falling from his lap. “Hey up your ass,” Leslie said, and then she came home and there was Robin on the phone and she couldn’t contain how much she needed her.

  “I miss you,” she wept. “Tell me how I was a bad mother and I’ll be better. Tell me what I did. Tell me how you can possibly blame me for Nick. I know you do, I feel it.” She sighed. “Everyone I know is somewhere else,” she said wearily. For a moment she managed to gather up some of her old undauntable cool. “Look, you can stay in a hotel if you think it will make you feel better, if you think it’s somehow—I don’t know—safer. I’ll even pay for it.”

  “I miss you, too,” Robin blurted.

  “You do?” Leslie was quiet for a moment. “You were the absolute loveliest thing about my life with Nick,” she said. “I’d look at you and I’d think, why, you were him and me. Even after everything happened, I’d still look at you, and it was like I was looking at the memory of how happy I had been, and then I was looking at this separate, unique person that I had actually carried and talked to, that I had promised everything to.

  “You know, when I was carrying you, I used to read all these books about parenting. I’d read them all the way through, right up to the chapters on adolescents, on young adults. It was always so sad, so odd to get to that chapter, to have all that growth abruptly stop, like your child’s life ended when she hit eighteen, like you were supposed to just disappear.

  “Anyway, I read them, I swore to myself that when you turned eighteen—when you turned sixteen—I wasn’t going to be the kind of clutchy mother they warned about—I wasn’t going to hold you back from anything. I did some things right. I never made you clothing identical to mine, though I certainly could have. I had clients who used to offer me all sorts of money to do it for them and their daughters, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. It was just one of my principles.

  “Oh, I was so determined not to cling, never. But the thing was, I never had you, I never did, so how could I let you go? How could I be magnanimous about any of it?” Leslie started to cry again. “I’m your mother. I don’t care what the books say, I can’t be your friend. Not if I stood on my head. I love you. Can’t you just come home to try it out, to test the waters? You’re going to be living on your own soon enough, lost in all that space after the chapters of those child-care books end.” She stopped for a moment. “You can be with me, can’t you? You can come home. And, baby, I promise, you can go back to your father if you want.”

  “You hate him,” Robin said.

  Leslie sighed. “No, I don’t hate him. Not really. How can you hate someone you loved, someone you lived with? And anyway, it doesn’t matter what I feel—it doesn’t have to have anything to do with what you feel.”

  “I don’t have Douglas anymore,” Robin said. She started to say something about the baby, about the abortion, about how she couldn’t even walk past the doctor’s street anymore. She folded inward around the pain. “Like mother, like daughter,” she said.

  “No, it isn’t like that at all,” Leslie said. “My pain is my pain and don’t you take it from me.” Her voice softened a little. “And yours is yours,” she said. “Listen, you think on it. Call it a visit, a trial run, whatever you want.”

  Robin was torn. She kept thinking about going home, about how it would be to live in the house again, to stay in her old room, with her old things, to be surrounded by all the trappings of her old self. She could feel fifteen again, couldn’t she? And she kept thinking about Leslie, and the more she thought about her, the more she missed her mother. She could try to go home, couldn’t she? She could look at it as just the next step in her experiment with Leslie, working things out, a day at a time if she wanted.

  She was scared, though, to tell Nick she wanted to go home. She was afraid that all she had to do was say that she wanted to be someplace else—even for a while—and he’d withdraw, he’d change. She could go to Pittsburgh, but what if she wanted to come back to him as soon as she set foot in Leslie’s house? What if she hitched all the way back to Madison and found the house sold, empty—found Brini’s suddenly renamed something trashy and foreign, remodeled with white Formica shelves, the display windows thick again with dead flies? What if she were never able to find Nick again?

  She kept her fear lodged inside of her, hard as a nut, until one night, choking, she burst into tears.

  “What is it?” Nick asked, alarmed, moving to her, making her flinch away from him, knowing if he so much as touched her, she’d never get the words out, never be able to risk saying anything. When she stammered it all out, he stiffened. He was the one to step back. “For good?” he asked.

  “No, not for good,” Robin said, sluicing back her tears. “Just for a while. Just for now. I … I miss her.”

  He was so still, so silent, it made her afraid. “I’m going to start missing you as soon as I leave,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I want you to miss me. Then you won’t be able to help yourself, you’ll have to come back.”

  She looked up at him. “Is it all right?”

  He touched the side of her face. “Why wouldn’t it be?” he said, and then he drew her to him, he rocked her, and let her weep in his arms.

  When Robin left, she left as if it were just a vacation, with no permanence attached. She cleaned up her room, but only a little. She left her old sheets rumpled on the bed, her paperbacks scattered on the dresser, their pages open and laid facedown because she never could manage to find a bookmark, their spines hopelessly cracked. She left her favorite denim shirt in the closet, her beaded belt that said TEPEE TOWN across the back. She also planned to leave the dog.

  She told herself the dog had a whole green backyard to play in, and that he’d be company for Nick, but really she wanted the dog there so Nick would remember her every time he filled the dog’s water dish, every time he let Toby in and out the back door. There was also the fact that Nick wouldn’t be able to leave Madison without telling her, because the dog was still hers and she would have to be the one to decide what to do about him. When she cried now, she told Nick, fiercely, that she was crying because she had to leave the dog, because Leslie didn’t like pets.

  “Don’t you leave that mangy thing with me,” Nick said.

  “Why not?” she asked, startled.

  “He’s a one-person mutt,” Nick said. “And anyway, if I’m going to have to miss one of you, I might as well miss both.”

  So she made plans to take the dog, but still, she continued to leave pieces of herself all over the house. Books and clothing, a splash of perfume on the hallway rug. He knew perfectly well she didn’t have to leave one thing for him to fill with her presence, but he never stopped her—he’d take as much of her as she’d leave him.

  When Nick called Leslie, it surprised him that she thought he had been the one to prod and encourage Robin to go back to her. She kept thanking him, laughing and talking, full of plans. “I love you for this,” she said. She said that now she would be the one to call with progress reports, and that he was free to call Robin anytime he liked—it would be all right; they could all be civilized. “She can visit you anytime she likes. Anytime,” said Leslie.

  Nick kept silent. He didn’t tell her that he hadn’t done one bit of pushing; that if anything, he had begun to think of Robin as truly and miraculously his.

  He was the one now to sit in the kitchen when Leslie called, the one to listen while Robin now did the talking, her voice low and halting. “I will,” she kept saying, and he wondered, I will what? He listened to her reciting back the plane reservations Leslie had made and paid for, the time schedules, but he kept his feelings against his chest, tried to casually sip his coffee, to nod happily at Robin when she shyly looked over at him.

  When she got off the phone, she sat beside him, she started to say something, and then stopped, biting down on the corner of her lip. “Listen, I could go for a good stiff ice cream,” she said. “Want to walk to the s
tudent union with me?”

  He didn’t want ice cream, didn’t want to have to get up and stretch his legs into movement, but he wanted to be with her as much as he could now, so he stood. He went with her and got two scoops of ice cream he never even tasted before he threw it, melting, into the trash.

  The night Robin left, she made Nick promise to disappear. She didn’t want him driving her to the airport; she didn’t want him around when her cab came. “No goodbying,” she said. “That isn’t what this is about.” She didn’t want to think about his standing there in one place while she was moving on to another. She wanted Nick to go out, and when he came back, when she wasn’t there, he could imagine she’d just slipped out to the market for something for their dinner, he could imagine her returning any moment.

  So he gave her that last gift. He walked all over the city, forcing himself not to think, not to look at his watch and measure out the minutes, thinking this is when she’d catch her cab, this is when she’d get her boarding pass, this is when she’d be in the plane. He walked to the capitol, and then to the student union, and then into the suburbs, dark and silent with night.

  At one point, he stopped at the Regency, the old movie theater that he and Robin used to frequent. It never seemed to show anything but the cheapest kinds of horror movies, and although he preferred the foreign films and classics the student co-ops showed for a buck, he’d come here every time the movie changed because his daughter loved to be scared, and because she liked him to go with her. They didn’t change the movies very often, and the film that was now playing—Night of the Famished Dead—was the last film he had seen with Robin. Splashed across the poster in front was a warning: You couldn’t get in without a special vomit bag the usher would hand you; and once the film started, you couldn’t leave lest you reveal one terrifying second of the plot. He remembered the usher had completely forgotten the vomit bags—Robin had had to remind him. The movie hadn’t been scary at all, but Robin had brought home both vomit bags and kept them in her top drawer.