Linda read the letter from William Sterling again and wondered how he’d gotten hold of the other letter, to Cynthia from her lawyer, and the detective’s report. It didn’t matter, though. The main thing was that Cynthia was crazy—dangerously so—and here was further evidence of it. But she had money and power, unlike most crazy people, who couldn’t hire expensive lawyers to plead their case, or to help them steal someone else’s child. Crazy like a fox, Linda’s mother used to say about anyone slyly irrational. The phrase suited Cynthia far better than her platinum hair.
No one had broken into the apartment; only Robin had been here. She had read the letters and the detective’s report, and she’d ransacked the closets and drawers, looking for money. Then she’d gone to Cynthia’s house to rescue the baby—in defiance of the dogs, the electronic gate, of Cynthia herself—an act of such singular heroism Linda’s eyes ached at the very idea of it. She went to the kitchen and looked in the sugar bowl, and as she’d already guessed, the money she kept there for a rainy day was missing. The check from the greeting-card company was gone as well, but she doubted that Robin would be able to cash that.
Jewelle called her own house and found out that Lucy had come in a few minutes before. They had a brief conversation that sounded tense and angry to Linda. It seemed that Lucy claimed, at first, to have spent the afternoon with Robin at the apartment. When Jewelle challenged that story, Lucy backed down. There was something about Carmel, and then something about a boy, but Linda was too distraught to listen, once she realized that neither of the Thompson girls knew where Robin was. Jewelle hung up and went into the hallway to talk quietly with Lee. Their heads were together, he was touching her arm. Linda watched them for a moment with utter envy. Then she dialed Nathan’s number again, and this time he answered, sounding so surprised and pleased to hear Linda’s voice her hope plummeted. “Nathan, have you seen Robin today?” she asked.
“No, of course not. I haven’t seen or heard from her since … since you and I broke up. Why? What’s the matter?”
“Are you sure?” Linda said, feeling a flood tide of fear rising in her chest. “Then where can they be?”
“Who? Who’s ‘they’?”
“Robin and Phoebe!” she cried. “They’ve disappeared!”
“Hey,” he told her, “take it easy. Remember that day at Madman Moe’s?”
How could she forget? She had been lucky that once, a warning from the gods, she believed now, not to be so careless ever again. “This is different!” Linda cried. “She’s run away. She took the money from the sugar bowl. And the check for the glitter job.” She couldn’t seem to stop babbling. “There were all these papers at the house. Letters. Cynthia hired a detective—”
“Chica, listen, I’m coming to you,” Nathan said. “Wait for me, okay? And we’ll find them again, safe and sound, just like the last time. I promise you that.”
But she knew that no one could really promise her anything of the kind.
30
And Leave the Driving to Us
THE BUS HAD ALMOST pulled away—the door had wheezed closed and the motor was thrumming like a giant heart—when someone pounded on the door and the driver opened it again. Robin, who was slumped down in her seat near the rear of the bus, with the baby asleep across her lap, peeked nervously out into the aisle, half expecting to see a cop coming toward her with his gun drawn. But only an old lady carrying a bunch of shopping bags climbed aboard, saying, “Whew! Oh, boy! What a rush! Thank you very much!” in one of those megaphone voices. Yeah, Robin thought, and thank you for nearly giving me a coronary. The old lady took a seat up front, right behind the driver. She was the kind who’d talk to him for the whole ride, annoying everybody, even though there was a sign above the windshield that said: “Do not speak to driver while vehicle is in motion.” Robin let out an exasperated sigh, but she was also weak with relief, and with hunger. She hadn’t had anything to eat since that peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwich, practically a lifetime ago. She should probably try to sleep now, too, so that she could stay awake with Phoebe later. But she felt too keyed up from everything that had happened that day, and everything that lay ahead.
After she’d cleared the gate at Cynthia’s, with the knapsack on her back and the baby in her arms, Robin started running down the street. In Newark, on such a warm afternoon, there would have been about a hundred witnesses to her getaway—people sitting on stoops and cars, or hanging out their windows hoping to grab a little breeze. Whenever something happened in the old neighborhood, a robbery or a fire or a murder, everybody wanted to be on the news that night, blabbing about it. “I live right next door,” they always said. “It’s just terrible,” they’d add, smiling into the camera. Or “I’m shocked. He’s such a nice, quiet guy—you know, friendly, helpful,” while the cops carried the body bags out of the house behind them.
But these streets were almost empty. A black maid in a pink uniform walked a little white poodle, and a couple of gardeners worked on the perfect borders of a perfect lawn with electric edgers. And that was it. Robin slowed down as she went past the gardeners, in an effort to seem normal, casual. She even managed to crank up a smile when one of them smiled at her. The hardest thing of all was not looking behind her as she walked. She knew that she had to get herself to a main thoroughfare, and soon, before anyone got suspicious. If she tried to thumb a ride in this graveyard, she’d probably make headlines.
Standing at a busy intersection about half a mile from Cynthia’s place, she imagined the BMW, with its cool driver, coming by once more and stopping on a dime for her; she even willed it to appear. But fifteen or twenty minutes later, no one had stopped, except at the traffic signal, and they all zoomed right off again as soon as the light changed. Robin could feel her face getting hotter and redder, and there were strands of hair sticking to her forehead and the back of her neck. The baby’s head felt hot, too, like a boiled egg, and Robin had to keep shading it with her hand. By then, she’d have settled for a ride in a garbage truck or in a station wagon full of nuns. What she got instead was a big, rattly old blue Lincoln with someone who looked older than God behind the wheel. He opened his window and peered out at her. “You looking for a ride, young lady?” he asked. No, she wanted to say, I’m just standing here catching some rays. “Yeah, thanks,” she said, and she pulled the passenger door open and climbed in before he could change his mind.
The old guy was the opposite of the BMW lady; he drove about five miles an hour, as if he was keeping time with the Mickey Mouse music playing on his radio. And he started quizzing Robin the second she sat down. “Is that your baby sister?” he asked. “Cute little gal, carbon copy of you.” Like Robin had never heard that before. When she said she wanted to go to the bus station, he asked her where she was off to, and why in the world she was leaving “beautiful, sunny Los Angeles.” He could have been Linda’s grandfather. Robin told him she was going to a family reunion in Montana, a state pulled at random from all the geography lessons she’d ever suffered, although she couldn’t exactly place it on the map or think of the name of a single city there. Then he wanted to know if she was going to a ranch, and if she liked horses. Why not? Robin thought. It was as good as any story she could have made up herself. “Uh-huh,” she said. “I ride all the time. My mother and father are both in the rodeo.” And then this weird thing happened. She actually saw a ranch in her mind’s eye, with people on horseback galloping toward it from a distance, and other people sitting around a campfire, waving to them. Before she could make out anyone’s face, though, the old guy was telling her how he’d once had this little Arab, a real high-spirited beauty. Robin wondered if he was some kind of pervert. Not that she was worried; if he tried anything funny, she’d simply deck him. He was so ancient he’d fall over if you blew on him. The only old person Robin actually knew was Lucy’s grandmother. Everyone else seemed to die or disappear before they had a chance to get old. And Ga was only old in her body. There were times Robin believed she could strai
ghten out her comma-shaped back if she decided to, kick off those ugly orthopedic shoes, and race Garvey around the block and win.
At last they were at the bus terminal and the game of Twenty Million Questions was over, or almost over. “Are you going to be okay, young lady?” the old gasbag asked. “Do you need any money or anything?” Robin would never understand it if she lived to be two hundred herself, but she said, “No, thanks, we’re fine,” and got out of the car.
She waited on one of the ticket lines inside the terminal, her eyes darting restlessly around her. It was twenty of two, just about when Feeb usually woke from her nap. Robin wondered if Lupe had gone in to check her yet, or if she was still listening for waking sounds on the baby monitor. And what did she make of Linda never showing up after announcing herself at the gate? Maybe they’d discovered everything by now and the terminal was surrounded by cops. All the people here, though, seemed to be burdened by crappy luggage or bratty kids, or both. A cop would have stood out in this place like a … rich person.
When it was Robin’s turn at the ticket window, she asked what the fare to Newark was. She had already seen, on a timetable, that an express bus going there would leave in a little less than an hour. Perfect. That would give her enough time to go to the bathroom and change Feeb’s diaper, and to get something substantial—like a hot dog or a burrito—to eat, with time left over to wait on a couple of other ticket lines and leave a phony trail behind her. Robin glanced at the humongous map of the United States hanging on the far wall, for inspiration. She could inquire about tickets to Florida, Minnesota, Kentucky, Vermont … When the cops questioned everybody later, they’d never be able to pin down her actual destination.
“When do you want to leave?” the woman behind the ticket counter asked.
“On the next bus,” Robin said.
The woman punched some computer buttons and then she said, “That will be $159.50.”
Robin was stunned. “But I only want to go one-way,” she said.
“That is one-way,” the woman told her. “The round trip is $319. It’s pretty far, you know. Now if you purchase your tickets twenty-one days in advance, there’s a fifty percent discount, and if you purchase them fourteen days in advance, there’s a thirty-five percent …”
But Robin had stopped listening. She stood there, trying to figure out the difference between the fare to Newark and what she had in her knapsack. She was about $120 short—it was hopeless. And she could still hear herself saying, “No thanks, we’re fine,” to the old guy in the Lincoln. The baby squirmed in Robin’s arms and started to whine, and a booming voice over the loudspeakers called out all the stops on a bus to Sacramento that was ready for boarding. The man behind them on line tapped Robin on the shoulder, scaring the life out of her. “Miss,” he said, “my bus is leaving in a few minutes. Get the lead out, will you?” A couple of other people behind him started grumbling, too, and Robin had to step aside. She walked over to the map and stared up at it. Newark was pretty far from Los Angeles, almost as far as you could go without falling into the Atlantic Ocean. She’d picked it because it was familiar, because you didn’t need a car to get around there, and because it was where she, and Feeb, had first started out. Now she surveyed the country looking for someplace closer, and cheaper, to get to. Her gaze traveled upward from L.A. to Nevada, and further north to Oregon and Idaho. Hey, there was Montana, just above Idaho! Robin looked south from there, across Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico, and then she hung a left and came to Arizona. It was right next door to California, where it had always been. If she could have reached that high and spread her fingers wide, she was sure they’d span the distance from Los Angeles to Glendale. Maybe it was the dumbest idea she’d ever had (except for not taking money from the guy in the Lincoln), but it was fixed in her brain now and she couldn’t get it out.
She took her place at the end of another, shorter ticket line. At the window, the man said she’d missed the only direct bus to Glendale for the day, but that she could go to Phoenix and make a connection there. The one-way fare was $32.50. The next bus was leaving in fifteen minutes. Robin bought her ticket and hurried to the bathroom, where she peed, with the baby sitting on her lap. Then she changed Feeb’s smelly diaper on the changing table, clearing the room of the women combing their hair and gabbing at the mirrors nearby. There was no time afterward to make any phony inquiries about other buses, or to get anything to eat, except for a couple of candy bars from a vending machine. At Gate 7, the driver stood next to the sleek silver bus marked “Phoenix.” Cupping Robin’s elbow in his hand, he helped her aboard.
Nobody took the seat next to her—that was the beauty of traveling with a baby—although the bus was almost full. Robin couldn’t have stood it if she had to make conversation with one more stranger today. She and Feeb were finally alone, the way she’d always dreamed. It was much harder and scarier than she had imagined, though. As if she’d had the same thought, Phoebe grabbed one of Robin’s fingers and held on, a source of comfort to both of them. Robin began to think of all the things she hadn’t taken with her and wished she had, a list she knew would keep getting longer as the trip progressed: baseball caps to cover their conspicuous hair, her watch, her Walkman, a toothbrush, a jacket, some grass, some gum, a pacifier for Feeb, more food … The knapsack was on the empty seat and she reached across the baby and took out the orange and began to peel it. The juice ran down her fingers, stinging the skin around her bitten nails, and her stomach growled in anticipation of being fed. The trip was going to take over eight hours—she guessed her hand couldn’t really have spanned the distance between LA. and Glendale—and she had to make her provisions last. She intended to save the cookies and candy for much later, although it would be hard to eat them in front of Feeb, who had a big sweet tooth already and shrieked when she wanted the cake or ice cream you were eating. She had finished a whole bottle of milk before she conked out. Robin was thirsty, too, and dying for a Coke, but she was going to have to settle for some pukey water from the fountain next to the closet-sized bathroom in the very back of the bus.
The orange was gone in only a couple of minutes, and it hardly made a dent in her appetite. She found herself scraping off the bitter white part inside the rind with her teeth and eating that, too. She decided to just count the cookies, but she discovered that they’d been reduced to a pile of crumbs by the stuff she’d wedged on top of them. There was no point in saving crumbs, so she began picking at them, popping them into her mouth until they were all gone. She shook the knapsack, unable to believe she’d eaten every last little bit. Suddenly self-conscious, Robin glanced across the aisle to see if anybody had been watching her scarf down the orange and cookie crumbs like that. But the couple sitting directly opposite had a big coat thrown over them, and were doing something underneath it Robin didn’t want to know about. She looked out her window, instead, at the moving landscape. Trees, signs, cars, other people’s houses. They were still in California and all she had left to eat were the two candy bars. And to make things worse, everyone else on the bus, it seemed, was busy unpacking a five-course meal. Various smells, of garlic, onion, pizza, egg salad, and coffee, mingled and wafted their way to Robin. She wanted to rush up and down the aisle and grab anything she could and gobble it down, even the egg salad. Instead, she clamped a corner of Phoebe’s blanket over her nose and shut her eyes.
Robin didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but when she woke, Phoebe was sitting on the adjoining seat, screaming her head off. The bus was dark, except for the little beams of the reading lights above some of the seats. Over the baby’s screams, Robin could hear the old lady up front telling the driver the long, boring story of her life, and a child somewhere in the middle of the bus chattering in Spanish. Phoebe’s diaper needed changing again for sure, but Robin decided she’d better feed her first. She reached into the knapsack for a jar of mashed bananas. It took her only a couple of seconds to realize she’d never packed a spoon—another item for her list o
f left-behinds—but Phoebe was working up to a major fit by then. Robin twisted the cap off the bananas, stuck a finger into the jar, and held it against Phoebe’s lips. “Here you go,” she said. “Yummy yummy, down the tummy.” Where did that come from? Robin wondered. Maybe she was getting to be a poet.
With hardly any hesitation, Feeb sucked the finger clean and then opened her mouth for more, like a baby bird waiting for the next worm. She did it so matter-of-factly she might have always eaten this way. Robin stuck her finger into the banana mush again and again. She could feel the pull of Feeb s sucking all the way down to her toes; did nursing feel something like this? When the jar was empty, Robin said, “All gone!” as cheerfully as she could. Phoebe’s mouth and chin began to tremble immediately, but before she could let go, Robin took out the second bottle of milk and stoppered her with it.
Tunnel of Love Page 33