Before long, of course, Linda noticed that Lucy and Carmel didn’t come around anymore, and she began to bug Robin about it. “What happened to your friend, Lucy?” she’d ask. “You were so close and now I hardly ever see her. You didn’t have a fight or anything, did you?”
Robin growled various answers as they occurred to her: Lucy was sick, away on vacation, dead. She didn’t think Linda ever really listened to her, anyway.
But Linda put one hand to her heart and said, “My God! What do you mean, she’s dead? What happened to her?”
And Robin had to think fast and say, “What are you, deaf or something? I didn’t say she was dead. I said she’s in bed. She hurt her foot and she can’t walk.”
You could put a lethal curse on somebody that way, Robin knew. A boy in Newark had killed his own grandmother by saying she had pneumonia, just to get himself out of detention. The grandmother, who was as healthy as a horse when he said it, actually got pneumonia the next day and was dead in a week. According to some people Robin ran into, though, Lucy was okay—at least physically. But she and her whole family were really freaked out by the loss of their shop in the riots.
Mr. Thompson stood up and Robin saw that he looked older and shorter and sort of sick. His shoulders were slumped and his usually warm brown skin had a gray tint. Mrs. Thompson came into the kitchen then, hesitating in the doorway first, like someone coming on stage in a play. She was wearing a white uniform that made her look fat. She opened the refrigerator and stared inside before she took out a plate of something and began eating from it absently with her fingers. Mr. Thompson looked at her without saying anything, as if he couldn’t remember his lines. Where was Lucy? Probably down the hall in her room, with Carmel, both of them lying on their beds, listening to music. Robin could almost see that scene, too—the Indian-print bedspreads, the pinkish light, the spill of books and tapes and shoes between the beds—another diorama, of her own past this time, from which only she, herself, was missing. She had a sudden urge to tap on the kitchen window, to say, Hey, it’s me out here, let me in! But then Garvey walked into the kitchen and went directly to the window, as if Robin had actually tapped on it and called out, and she ducked down behind one of the trees and ran back to the street.
It took her forever to walk home, and when she got there, the phone was ringing. Lucy! she thought immediately, and ran to answer it. But as she was about to pick up the receiver, she remembered Cynthia, who’d most likely be shrewd enough to check things out, to make sure Robin hadn’t sneaked home again. So she had to let the phone go on ringing, which it did for a long time (Linda must have forgotten to turn on the answering machine that morning), and when it stopped, the silence was spooky. Robin picked up the receiver and dialed the number on the card Cynthia had given her. She intended to just breathe and moan into her ear, but a strange woman answered, saying “Ms. Sterling’s service. Who’s calling, please?” That rich bitch had somebody else do everything for her, even answer her stupid phone.
Robin dialed a number at random next. After several rings, a man answered in a groggy voice and Robin said, “This is the telephone company. We’re checking to see if your phone is working okay.”
“At … what time is it … almost eleven o’clock?” the man said. “Boy, you people put in some crazy hours. The phone seems fine, though, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” Robin said. “You don’t hear that little humming sound?”
After a pause, the man said, “Well, yeah, I think so, now that you mention it. Sort of like a fly or a mosquito or something?”
“That’s it,” Robin said. “I’m going to hang up now and look into it, and I’d like you to just wait right there until I call you back.”
“It won’t take long, will it?” the man asked. “I was actually asleep,” he added apologetically.
“I’ll get right back to you,” Robin assured him. “Don’t move, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
What a jerk. Robin wondered if he’d sit there waiting until he dropped dead. She wondered if the old lady whose house she’d busted into had a heart attack afterward. It was possible to kill loads of people without ever laying a hand on them. Linda certainly could have died in the accident, and for a few moments there, Robin thought she had. They were taken to the hospital in separate ambulances, for some reason. Robin kept telling them she was okay, she was fine, and that it wasn’t her fault, but she couldn’t stop crying, like some idiot baby, so they made her get checked out in the emergency room. What a nuthouse that was. All those old people with oxygen up their noses, and little kids screaming, and somebody behind a curtain saying “Help me, please help me” over and over again.
“Where’s Linda?” Robin asked everyone in sight, and they all asked her questions back without answering, a tactic of evasion she recognized because she used it so often herself. They asked her shit like “How many fingers am I holding up?” and “In what direction was your car traveling?” If Linda had died, Phoebe would have been a whole orphan then, like Robin. Except that, technically, Robin still had a mother. And Phoebe would always have Robin.
Robin had memorized Lucinda Blake’s telephone number, in case she lost the piece of paper it was written on. She’d called the number a few times, after watching the show (which was taped, according to TV Guide), but she kept getting a busy signal. Still, it thrilled her to know she could dial Lady Audrey Finley directly, that it was her very own busy signal she was hearing. Robin dialed the number again now and this time she heard ringing. Then there was a brief mechanical pause, and a recorded female voice saying, “You’ve reached 984-1218. Leave a message at the sound of the tone.”
She didn’t sound like Lady Audrey; she didn’t sound English at all. And she never said who she was. It could have been a wrong number. Robin might have made a mistake when she copied it down, she had done it so quickly. Maybe it was off by only one digit, and she’d have to spend the rest of her life trying to figure out which one it was, and what it was really supposed to be. While she was thinking all this, the tape at the other end of the line ran out. There were three consecutive beeps and then a dead sound. Robin hung up; she would try again some other night.
Linda’s personal telephone directory was on the table next to the phone, and she began browsing through it. All these people back in Jersey she never saw anymore were in it, and there was Robin’s father’s old phone number at work. Under the Gs she found Manny still listed, too. It was typical of dopey Linda to keep dead people in her phone book. Like if they ever came back, she could call them.
The first name in the H section was Robin’s mothers, Miriam Hausner. It was shocking to see it written out like that in Linda’s familiar, cramped handwriting. Miriam’s address, in Glendale, Arizona, and her phone number were right under her name. Robin remembered the day, just about a year ago, when she and Linda pulled up to that house and rang the bell. Robin had no real memory of her mother then, only a mess of imagined scenes from her own babyhood, in which both her parents appeared in conventional roles. Her father never helped her embellish those scenes with details from his own memory. Her mother was gone and that was that; he didn’t want to discuss it. But he hovered over Robin as if she, too, might take off and leave him one of these days. All that love and attention drove her crazy, but when Linda came along and took some of it for herself, it was even worse.
The person Robin had invented as her mother was both more and less beautiful than the real thing. Miriam Hausner wore tinted glasses, for instance, that hid her eyes from Robin’s searching glance, and she seemed at a loss on the occasion of their reunion. Once in a while, on TV, on Geraldo or Oprah, other mothers and children were reunited, and they always ran into each other’s arms, bawling like babies. Oprah cried, too. Adults who’d been abandoned, kidnapped, or just misplaced somehow, when they were little, were all ready to forget the trauma and forgive the parents who’d managed to lose them. Robin noticed that they were often fat, as if they ate a lot
to make up for the normal childhood they didn’t have. The mothers were usually thin.
In Glendale, Linda explained about Robin’s dad, and how this had seemed to be the logical place to bring her under the circumstances, while Robin’s mother and her second husband, Tony, sat there like a couple of statues, as if they were being hustled by some pushy salesman to buy something they didn’t need or want. But what had Linda expected, barging in on them like that, with an overgrown teenager who had nothing to do with the baby Miriam had left behind all those years ago? Robin could have been anybody, a total stranger trying to stake a false family claim, except that she looked so much like her father, probably the last person Miriam wanted to be reminded of.
The blinds in the house were drawn against the desert sun that Sunday afternoon. It was dark and cool and uncluttered inside. At least there were no other, replacement children there, but Miriam admitted at some point that Tony’s son from his first marriage had lived with them for a while. She might as well have stabbed Robin or shot her. She felt wounded, in her chest and her stomach, and she could have reeled around that big living room, whimpering and bleeding all over the white furniture and the fancy rug. Instead, she just yelled something at them, at the top of her lungs. Then Linda started acting like she’d never meant to leave Robin there, like they’d just stopped in to say hello because they happened to be in the neighborhood. Yeah, what a coincidence. But Robin’s mother looked relieved, and she thanked Linda for coming by and reminded them both to keep in touch. Of course, that left Linda and Robin alone together, which didn’t thrill either of them. And today Linda had almost died.
Robin picked up the telephone receiver again. She knew what she was going to do, but she didn’t let herself think about it too much before she punched in the numbers. The ringing sounded far away much farther than the very next state, and it went on and on. They probably weren’t home, and she was half glad, half disappointed. As she was hanging up, the ringing abruptly stopped and a breathless voice near Robin’s hip, that could have been coming from the pocket of her jeans, said, “Hello. Hello?” It was her. Robin brushed her hair back with her free hand and slowly raised the receiver to her ear. “Hello!” she heard her mother say again. “Hey, is that you, Brandy? Quit kidding around, will you. Don’t I have enough on my mind without this? Hello?” And then she hung up.
Robin wondered what was on her mother’s mind. And she wondered who Brandy was, and if she made crank calls, too. The only Brandy Robin had ever known was a large German shepherd some neighbors in Newark owned when she was about three or four years old. The neighbors, a batty old couple named Klyster, kept that Brandy chained in their yard all day, and there were signs posted on the fence and the house warning you to beware of the dog. Robin was too young to read, but she was afraid of Brandy, anyway. She looked like the wolf in fairy-tale picture books, and she lunged to the end of her chain, barking furiously, choking and slavering, whenever Robin came anywhere near the Klyster house. There was a sick joke going around that Brandy had eaten a few kids in the Klysters’ last neighborhood; that was why they’d had to move here.
One day, when Robin was playing inside her own tiny yard, with its chain-link fence, Brandy got loose. She must have pulled the lethal-looking, spiral steel stake right out of the ground, because she was dragging it behind her on the end of that long chain when she suddenly showed up right outside the Reismanns’ fence. Robin’s father had just gone into the house to make lunch for the two of them and Robin was alone, digging in the dirt with a teaspoon. She heard the low growling first, and when she looked up, Brandy was pacing outside the closed gate, with her head down between her muscular shoulders, her fur bristling, and her tail drooping moodily behind her. Robin tried to call to her father. The word “Daddy” was in her mouth—she could feel its particular man-shape and sound there—but it wouldn’t come out. He would be looking through the window any minute now. He was always checking up on her. The dog flung itself against the fence and Robin dropped the spoon and covered her eyes. But she could still hear the hungry growling and the sound of shuddering metal. Brandy was going to eat her! She would be packed inside that swollen belly with all those other unlucky victims, with Red Ridinghood and her grandmother and the foolish little pigs. Robin’s father would come outside too late, and find the dog smiling and licking its chops, and nothing left of Robin but her inedible shoes and the abandoned spoon. Brandy rammed the fence over and over again, until Robin found her feet and her voice at the same moment. She ran to the kitchen door and threw herself against it, the way Brandy was throwing herself against the fence, and she yowled to be let in. But when the gate gave way at last under the dog’s obsessive butting, Robin was still working on the kitchen door, screaming now, a whole opera of terror and rage, and she was wetting her pants. Her father had left her here for good—for bad—and the dog, the wolf, was biting at her heels, her behind, her legs! And then the door opened suddenly under her limp weight and she was yanked inside, leaving Brandy out there, barking and panting for her lost meal.
The bites weren’t very deep; Robin’s thick denim overalls had protected her from really serious injury. But she had to go to the dreaded doctor to have her wounds cleaned, and to get a shot. Her father was beside himself with worry and remorse. He’d been in the bathroom when it happened, and he cursed his own stupid bowels as he held her down on the doctors examining table to be tortured.
After that, Robin couldn’t even look at a dog without feeling a rising panic. Even the playful puppy her father bought for her the following Christmas was terrifying, with its unpredictable moves and aggressive little needle teeth. Robin locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out until he promised to take it back to the pet store. As she got older, she learned to mask her fear in front of other people, to cross the street when she saw a dog coming, to shut her eyes and clench her teeth, to say she was allergic. She did have trouble breathing when she was scared, which made the allergy alibi sort of true. Of course, she often worried that the fear itself would give her away. Animals were supposed to be able to smell it on you, even when people were fooled, and it was supposed to make them go nuts. Linda was always petting vicious-looking dogs, and trying to get Robin to do it, too. That day at Cynthia’s, Robin almost had a hemorrhage, she was so freaked by those two big attack dogs. She was sure they could smell her fear right through the sealed car, and that maybe they could eat their way through all that steel and glass. What were their names? She couldn’t remember, except that they both began with a B. Like Brandy. Maybe her mother’s friend by the same name was a human reincarnation of that long-ago she-wolf. Then, in a rush, it came to Robin that her mother had a whole life she knew nothing about: friends she hung out with, favorite colors and songs, foods she’d eaten and movies and shows she’d seen, the bed she slept in, clothes, work, habits, and the way everything looked to her through her glasses. It was like another diorama Robin could only be on the outside of, peering in.
She was much too hyper to sleep now, or to even watch TV, so she went into Linda’s room to snoop around. Aside from some wild lace panties tucked between her regular cotton ones, the only thing of interest Robin found was a pair of love chains, with Nathan and Linda’s names engraved on them, in the night-table drawer. She brought them to her own room to compare them with the ones she kept hidden in her dresser drawer. Linda’s bracelets were probably sterling silver; Robin’s pair looked corroded next to them. It was just as well she and Lucy had never worn them. They both could have gotten blood poisoning.
She took the one with her name engraved on it, unclasped the chain, and looped it through Linda’s bracelet, which was already attached to Nathan’s. She yanked on the outer bracelets and the chains held. Then she added Lucy’s bracelet to her own and yanked again. What if everyone was chained together like this, the way you were once attached to your mother before the cord was cut? Then you couldn’t lose anyone your whole life, no matter what happened, an idea so dazzling she had to
sit down on her bed with the connected bracelets gathered in a heap in her lap. It was odd that she’d never seen Nathan and Linda wear their love chains, had never seen them before at all. She sat there on the bed, joining and separating them, joining and separating them, until she suddenly realized how they were probably used.
19
The Secret Room
THE MORNING AFTER THE accident, when Linda was still in a fog of painkillers, a social worker came to her hospital room and asked a series of questions in a weary, bored voice, as if he’d asked them hundreds of times before. Married? Children? Parents? Disability insurance? Savings? He wanted to know if she had any other close relatives, and if she was eligible for unemployment benefits. Linda wished she had better answers, as the social worker grimly shook his head and scribbled inside his manila folder. Then he closed the folder and explained that foster care was available for Robin and Phoebe until Linda recovered. He said it would be about ten or twelve days before she could go home, or to a rehabilitation facility, and she would need physical therapy and household help for several weeks after that. “You’d better apply for welfare assistance right away,” he advised. “They take about a year and a day down there just to process the papers.”
Linda was in tears when Cynthia walked in. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “What’s going on here?” The social worker began his recitation again, in the same rehearsed manner, but Cynthia stopped him in mid-sentence. “Ms. Reismann is not a welfare case,” she declared. “I’m responsible for her and her family.” She signed some papers to that effect and the social worker left.
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