Linda was weary from the excitement of having company, although she began to miss them moments after they were gone. It had made her very happy to see Robin and Phoebe together again, almost as happy as they were to see each other. Nathan had seemed a little sad today, though, or especially thoughtful. He’d sat there for a while, stroking Linda’s hand, before he said, “You’ve got a pretty nice cell here, chica. Do you think they’ll let you out early for good behavior?” He was probably just feeling jealous and lonely. Everything’s going to work out, Linda told herself, with time and patience.
Right before Nathan and Robin left, the girl bent down over Linda, who thought she was being surprised by a goodbye kiss. But Robin only whispered something hotly in her ear: The moon? The room? Maroon? Whatever it was, she wouldn’t repeat it when Linda said, “What? I didn’t hear you, Robin.”
“Oh, forget it,” she said, as Cynthia came in with a fresh pitcher of ice water.
“Leaving already?” she asked. “Well, thanks so much for coming by.”
On the way home, Robin said to Nathan, “Do you remember when I went to get a drink before? Well, I snuck upstairs to see Feeb.”
“Good for you!” Nathan said. “At least somebody in your family has guts.”
Robin didn’t pause to savor the compliment. “But listen,” she said, banging impatiently on his arm. “I couldn’t believe it—there was all this designer baby furniture and wallpaper up there!”
But Nathan was too worked up himself to really pay attention. “I’ll bet,” he said. “Like everything else in that place—her designer water, her designer clothes, her designer goddamn air! Linda just better not get used to all that.”
20
I, You
ROBIN HAD NEVER DREAMED she’d look forward to going back to school, but it was the only place she could get away from Lucy for most of the day. Of course, there were still the long nights and the endless weekends. Not talking to someone was exhausting, especially if that certain someone was always around, flaunting an attitude. All the unsaid words were right there in Robin’s throat, fighting to get out, and she had to hold them back. And she had to hold her hands back from making the gestures that usually went with the words. Carmel helped as much as she could, speaking for Robin whenever she couldn’t speak for herself. Sometimes Carmel seemed like a mind reader, as if she knew at the same moment Robin did what she intended to say. “Do you want the light off?” she’d ask at night, when she and Lucy were reading in bed and Robin was sleepy and bothered by the glare. “More potatoes?” she would say at supper, as Robin eyed the bowl next to Lucy’s elbow. Lucy’s deliberate indifference was driving Robin crazy, but she had to admire her ex-friend’s stubbornness. It was a perfect match for her own.
Once, on their way to California, Robin and Linda had stopped speaking, too, for several hours. For some reason that Robin couldn’t remember now, they didn’t speak to anyone at all. She had decided she would croak before she’d give in, but Linda, usually so spineless, held out also, mile after mile after mile. It got really stupid—they ended up at a restaurant where they had to order lunch by pointing to different items on the menu—but Robin kept her silence, figuring she might eventually be a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records. She didn’t get nearly that far, but she did win her battle with Linda, who finally couldn’t stand it anymore and blurted something out. Lucy and Carmel’s Aunt Ez, on the other hand, had never said anything in Robin’s hearing. She asked Carmel about it one day, and she said that her aunt used to talk, a long time ago, but that something very bad had happened to her down in Georgia, where she once lived, something she couldn’t talk about to anyone, so eventually she quit talking, period.
Mr. Thompson was still out of work. He looked through the want ads every day and he’d signed up at a couple of employment agencies, but it seemed as if nobody was looking for a photographer. He drove Mrs. Thompson back and forth to Brentwood, to take care of that old lady, and once in a while he did an odd job for somebody—working on a paint crew or helping out on a moving van—but most of the time he was home, just hanging around waiting for something to happen. Aunt Ez and Ga did the cooking and the housework, with the girls’ help after school, although Lucy complained to Carmel that it was sexist, that Garvey got away with murder. He only had to take out the trash and do a little yardwork, which he conveniently forgot about most of the time. Robin agreed that Garvey was a pain, although at least he’d stopped focusing his hostility on her. He was hardly able to focus on anything. Whenever you looked at him, he seemed to be half asleep. Robin wondered if he was using crack or something. But when she examined him discreetly for other telltale signs—like the dilated eyes and shaky hands listed in those fliers the school nurse sent home—he checked out clean. Maybe he was just feeling bad about everything that had happened. This was the first year, Carmel told Robin, that their family couldn’t go to the big reunion in Virginia, and Garvey was really disappointed.
Robin had called Linda right after their visit to tell her again about the nursery upstairs, but Linda still didn’t seem to get it. “She’s got it all fixed up,” Robin said, excitedly, “like Feeb always lived there!”
“Well, don’t you think that’s nice?” Linda said. “To go to so much trouble to make her feel at home like that?”
“Nice?” Robin said, totally exasperated. “Nice? It’s a fucking Twilight Zone!”
“Don’t use that language with me, miss,” Linda said. “And try to remember how lucky we are, under the circumstances. Instead of being suspicious of everybody, we should just be grateful.” Cynthia was probably drugging her food, too.
One Sunday morning, Mrs. Thompson tried to get Mr. Thompson to go down to their shop with her to clean things up and see if anything could be salvaged, but he said he didn’t feel like it, he had a headache, and what was the use. He’d gone there by himself right after the riots to assess the damage. Mrs. Thompson had wanted to go with him then, but he wouldn’t let her. He kept insisting that it would be too hard for her to bear.
“I looked at my daddy in his coffin,” she reminded him. But he went out alone, and he’d come home, Carmel told Robin, looking like he’d seen a ghost, or as if he’d become one himself. “Gone,” he said. Only that one word, and then he cried, right there in the kitchen, in front of everybody. He made Mrs. Thompson promise to stay clear of the area. There might be more trouble, he said. But she began talking right away about insurance, recovery, starting over again. Carmel said it was as if she was talking to herself. “Gone,” Mr. Thompson said again, and then he refused to discuss it anymore. In some respects, he was as out of it now as Garvey.
“Maybe it’s not that bad,” Robin suggested to Carmel later on Sunday. “Like maybe we could go there and fix it up a little.”
Lucy, who was on the other side of the room, with her face in a book, said, “Hah!”
Could that be considered the beginning of a conversation? Robin decided to take that chance. “Well, why not?” she said, still looking at Carmel, just to play it safe.
“Yeah, why not?” Carmel echoed.
“Are you deaf, girl?” Lucy said, not directly addressing either of them. “Because it burned down. Because it’s gone.”
After lunch Mrs. Thompson announced that she was driving to the shop, with or without her husband. She’d kept her promise to stay away until now, long after his warning made any sense, and she had a yearning to see things for herself. “I need my girls with me, though,” she said. Carmel and Robin, and then Lucy, followed her to the car.
Robin knew that groups of volunteers had gone into South-Central after the riots for a massive cleanup. There was even something on TV one night a couple of months ago, showing movie stars and regular people working side by side, sweeping and shoveling up the trash in the streets. Linda had called her in to watch because Lucinda Blake, and Raoul Forrest, who played Duke on Love in the Afternoon, were there, wearing fatigue caps and coveralls, waving their brooms and smilin
g at the camera. Everything around them still looked like a gigantic mess.
But nothing prepared Robin for the slow drive through the actual streets where it had all happened, for the eerie emptiness, the charred and shattered remains of buildings, sometimes only skeletons, through which she could see other damaged buildings and bits of incredible blue sky, for the rows of burnt-out car frames resting against the curbs like dinosaur bones. Robin was reminded of the ghost town she and Linda had visited in Death Valley on their trip West, not because this actually looked anything like that, but because the same astonished thought had entered her head in both places: People once lived here!
The cleanup crews had made only a dent in the rubble of South-Central; the streets were still piled with junk. Mr. Thompson’s word seemed to echo through them: gone, gone. Henrys, where they’d eaten lunch that other day, in March, had burned clear to the ground. The big Coca-Cola sign, the sizzling griddle, the red vinyl booths, and the chrome counter stools, where Carmel had spun herself dizzy waiting for their change. All that was left of the shoe store where they’d window-shopped were the empty windows, the gutted room beyond them. And Robin couldn’t even locate the jewelry store. The three girls gaped out the car windows like tourists, pointing, exclaiming. Mrs. Thompson made little anguished sounds as she drove, hunched over and clutching the wheel.
The sign above the Thompsons’ photo shop was badly scorched, but you could still make out the “I” of “Images” and the word “You.” I, You. Like cavemen talking. The door to the shop was completely gone. You could step right inside, the way you did at the stores in the mall, the way Robin stepped out into space sometimes in her dreams. Mrs. Thompson had a flashlight in her handbag, but they didn’t need it, with that big hole in the roof. Rain had come in, on other days, where sunlight did now, and a sludge of half-dried mud glazed the layers of debris on the floor. The shop, without any counters or shelves, and with only a partial ceiling, looked much bigger than Robin remembered. She thought briefly of the skylights in Cynthia’s house, and of how it had felt walking in here that other time.
Mrs. Thompson found her voice. “Be careful,” she said, because it was slippery and there was broken glass underfoot, and because it was what mothers said. She had brought gloves for everyone, and she made the girls put theirs on before they touched anything. She had a few garden tools in the trunk of the station wagon: a weeding fork, two spades, and a hoe, which she distributed, too, so they could rummage around to see if anything of value was left. But pretty soon they realized that all the cameras and frames and film had either been destroyed in the fire or stolen. There was nothing to save, nothing to reap in this dead garden, except for the burnt and trampled remnants of photographs that were strewn everywhere. Brides separated from their grooms, blackened babies, headless bathing beauties. Robin remembered how upset one customer had been back in March because her pictures were late coming back from the lab. “I just hope they’re not lost,” she’d said anxiously to Mrs. Thompson. “They’re the only pictures I have of my engagement party.” Now Robin poked her hoe through the litter, and uncovered the ruined evidence of other special occasions, of weddings and anniversaries and christenings. She looked for the family-reunion portrait of the Thompsons she’d studied so hard that other day, and although she could see it clearly in her mind’s eye—the smoking barbecue, the battling cousins—she couldn’t find the photograph itself, or any part of it.
Finally, Mrs. Thompson said, “What are we doing here? This is hopeless. Let’s go home.”
Robin and Carmel were glad to give it up, to get away, but Lucy, who was caught somewhere between rage and grief, unable to surrender to either, kept digging through the wreckage, as if she were searching for the final, lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Carmel had to call her name a few times before she looked up from her work, startled.
Nobody said much in the car on the way home, so Lucy and Robin’s war of silence wasn’t as obvious. Halfway there, Carmel fell asleep between them, her head lolling from side to side. She seemed to still be trying, even in her sleep, to be impartial. When they got to the house, Mr. and Mrs. Thompson went into their bedroom together and shut the door. Garvey flopped across Lucy’s bed, but she kicked him out of the room and threw herself facedown in the rumpled depression he’d left in the covers. Carmel turned on the stereo, but Lucy barked at her to shut it off. In the sudden quiet, Robin felt herself writhing with everything she wasn’t saying. Carmel was lying on her bed, pretending to read a magazine. The turning pages snapped like somebody’s bubble gum. Robin had no choice but to stretch out on her cot and gaze up at the ceiling. If she stared at its roughly spackled surface long enough, looking for the shapes of animals and trees, it might calm her. But then she suddenly remembered what Linda had said to break their silence that day in the car in Kansas or Iowa or somewhere. “Shall I close the window?” she’d asked. “Is it too breezy for you?” Only a little while before that, Robin had tried to send a telepathic command directly from her brain to Linda’s, to see if it was possible to communicate without speaking. The order she’d beamed Linda’s way was to close the very window she was now offering to close! It might have been a coincidence, but Robin was positive at that moment that it wasn’t. She thought she had powers she didn’t fully know about yet or understand, and that would help her to survive this hard part of her life. Later, after they were in L.A., she tried to send other messages to Linda the same way, but they never seemed to get through. Maybe the smog interfered, or maybe Linda was just a lousy receiver.
Now Robin turned her attention and her mental concentration to Lucy. Look at Robin, she demanded. But Lucy lay there without moving. It was even hard to make out the rise and fall of her breathing. Look. At. Robin.
Carmel groaned and threw down her magazine. Lucy rolled over onto her side, facing in her direction, and Robin’s. Look at me, Robin implored. Please. “Please,” she said aloud, surprising everyone, especially herself. “I hate this, Lucy,” she said then, the words flying out of her mouth like a flock of doves. “I really hate everything.”
Lucy looked at her, coolly, appraisingly. She was a much tougher opponent than Linda would ever be. For the first time, Robin believed she felt the way Linda often did, urgently having to speak, to say almost anything, just to fill in the dangerous holes of silence around her. “I’m sorry,” she said. But what did she mean by that? Was she sorry for her ancient argument with Lucy, which she could hardly recall? Sorry for the loss of the shop? I, you. Or sorry about something else she didn’t know how to express, or even gather up into an exact thought? Lucy certainly wasn’t going to help her figure it out, and Carmel, sitting between them, seemed to be less of a neutral country now, no longer a dependable refuge from the enemy. She and Lucy both gazed steadily at Robin, and the desire she’d had to be noticed, to be recognized, became one of those trick wishes in fairy tales that end up working against the wisher. “It’s not my fault,” Robin said, her old standby, which sounded both true and false to her this time around. “I mean,” she said, “I didn’t ask to be white.” As soon as she said it, she knew that, given the way things were, and if there actually had been a choice, she probably would have asked to be white. Just maybe not this white. She also knew that she, personally, hadn’t beaten anybody up or burned and trashed South-Central, but the whole long, stupid, complicated history of trouble and blame was more than she cared to think about. Still, Robin had spoken first, had apologized for something she couldn’t really name and probably hadn’t done. Well, she wasn’t going to make things worse now by starting to grovel. “Black people aren’t perfect, either, you know,” she said.
“African-Americans,” Lucy said sternly.
“Okay,” Robin conceded, hardly able to contain or disguise her joy. “Okay!”
21
Convalescence
THE FULL-LENGTH CAST ON Linda’s leg was covered with inscriptions and drawings. Cynthia had written “Break a leg!” in her bold hand, with a black laund
ry marker, and Nathan drew two linked hearts toward the inside of Linda’s thigh, bearing his own initials and hers. She could swear she felt the strokes of his ballpoint pen right through the plaster. Linda showed Cynthia the hearts that evening, hoping she’d be won over by Nathan’s romantic gesture. It was awful when people you cared about didn’t like each other. “How sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling. “And how corny.” Then she asked, “What’s his name again? Nathan? That’s strange. There’s no th sound in Spanish, you know. Is that his real name?”
Robin wrote “Good luck from Robin” on the cast, as if she were signing the autograph album of a classmate she hardly knew. But she drew a happy face underneath her name, which Linda decided was a sign of affection and optimism.
For an invalid, Linda was kept very busy. There were all those books she was supposed to read, the vocabulary list she was reviewing, the laptop computer she was learning to operate, and the daily exercises she did to maintain the muscle tone in her uninjured arm and leg. Cynthia was determined not to let her stagnate during her confinement. She insisted that every new day offered fresh opportunities for self-improvement, even when you were wearing two heavy, bulky casts. First of all, she discouraged Linda from watching so much television. “Believe me, you wouldn’t touch this junk,” she said, “if you saw how it was made.”
Tunnel of Love Page 23