Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Much later, after they’d both slept again, they shared a candy bar, the Milky Way, the one without the nuts. Phoebe went back to sleep in minutes. But Robin stayed awake from then on, although everyone else, except for the driver, seemed to be dozing. Even the old lady had finally shut up. With the dark and quiet world going by in rapid-rewind motion, Robin allowed herself to think at last of Linda, and of Lucy and Carmel, of how she was rushing away from them, mile by mile by mile. And then, for the first time, she thought about Glendale and who she was going to see there.

  31

  Prisoners of Love

  ONCE AGAIN, LINDA WAS beside Nathan in the Z. But this was nothing like the old days, when the car was a speeding chariot and the only emergencies seemed to be sexual. They drove slowly, scouting the streets and not speaking, like a long-married couple who had run out of things to say to one another. They had been driving around the neighborhood for over an hour, and now they were heading toward a local video arcade that was one of Robin’s favorite haunts. Lucy and Carmel had gone with their father to check out the malls, and Jewelle had stayed at Linda’s apartment, in case Robin decided to call home.

  Walking into the sudden, artificial night of the arcade, with its barrage of noise and lights, was like stepping into a war zone. Most of the people seated or standing at the rows of machines were teenagers—their hands gripping the throttles, and their entire selves fixed on the electronic images flashing and stuttering before them. It didn’t take long to establish that Robin wasn’t among them. But Linda continued to study that surreal scene, while Nathan went to talk to the man in the change booth.

  Linda had never been in an arcade before, had never watched Robin sit, like these other children, mesmerized by a blitzkrieg of animated violence. When she’d tried to limit Robin’s visits to this sort of place, she had always lumped it with television, as a general waste of time and bad for the eyes. But she could see that it was far worse than television, or the mindless, deafening music Robin lived by, despite the “participation” here, the clench-fisted manipulation of the bleeping blips on every screen in the room. These kids, with their tensed bodies and vacant eyes, were all shooting themselves in the brain, so they wouldn’t have to think for a while, so they wouldn’t have to even be.

  The man in the change booth hadn’t seen Robin and Phoebe that he could remember, and neither had anyone in the next arcade, or in any of the stores along the strip that catered to adolescent taste in audio and video tapes, in cheap jewelry and grunge clothing. As they walked back to the car, Nathan put his arm loosely around Linda’s drooping shoulders. It was only a sympathetic gesture, but Linda couldn’t stand to be touched, and she stepped out of his reach. “How could she have just gone off like this?” she said angrily. “I’m going to wring her neck when we find them!” She turned and saw his pitying face before he had a chance to rearrange it. “Oh, God, Nathan,” she said, “what if we don’t find them?”

  “We’re going to,” he said gruffly. “Didn’t I promise you?”

  Lee Thompson let them into the apartment, with Lucy and Carmel right behind him. “No luck,” the two men said simultaneously, and Carmel’s eyes glittered with tears. Both girls looked like those teens you see on the evening news, huddling at the funeral of a slain classmate.

  Jewelle came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. “If it was my kids,” she said, “I’d call the police. I’d want all the help I could get, and fast.”

  “But if we sic the police on Robin, it’s liable to help that lunatic’s case,” Nathan said.

  “Lunatic is right,” Lee said. “What is she, one of those baby freaks or something?”

  “Oh, no,” Linda said. “I mean, she wasn’t ever really that affectionate with Phoebe.” She thought about it for a moment. “I think she just wanted to outdo her husband, her ex-husband. He’s going to have a baby, so she wanted one, too, and first.”

  “Well, why did it have to be your baby?” Jewelle asked. “Why didn’t she have one of her own?”

  “Maybe she can’t,” Linda said. “Maybe she’s too old.”

  “It would take too long, anyway” Nathan said. “It’s like impulse shopping, you know? She sees it, she wants it, she takes it.”

  “More like shoplifting,” Jewelle observed.

  “She probably could have adopted a kid,” Lee said.

  “Those two little Guatemalan orphans …” Linda murmured.

  “Too dark for her money, I’ll bet,” Nathan said. “She saw this pretty, healthy blond baby and figured: why not? But I think you faked her out, Linda. I think she’s afraid to call the police, too. The baby disappeared from her house, remember, and she’ll want to keep her own record clean.”

  Linda nodded absently. Cynthia seemed so remote and irrelevant now. What was a custody case without a child, anyway? By not calling the police, Linda was only protecting Robin, just as Cynthia had accused her of doing. If the girl were caught now, it would be one more strike against her. She might even end up in some juvenile detention center—not for kidnapping her own sister, maybe, but for breaking and entering, or something else illegal she must have done that day, out of desperation. Linda knew that she was the one who should be locked up, for criminal innocence, although she was reformed now, once and for all. After the horse had escaped through the open barn door. She tried to console herself by remembering that Phoebe was with Robin, who loved her, and not some unimaginable stranger.

  Nathan cursed quietly in Spanish as he looked through the detective’s report, but at least he didn’t say “I told you so,” in any language. He just said, “Let’s try to think like Robin. Where would she go?”

  “Back to Newark, maybe,” Linda said. “She always used to threaten to go there when things were bad around here. Maybe we should check the airlines.”

  “That’s a pretty expensive ride,” Lee said. “How much money do you think she has?”

  Linda calculated. “Not much, I guess,” she said. “She was supposed to get her allowance tomorrow. Even if someone was crazy enough to cash that check for her, she’d still only have about forty dollars.”

  “That’s not enough to get her to Newark,” Nathan said. “Unless she tries to hitch her way there.”

  “She wouldn’t, not with the baby,” Jewelle said quickly. “Robin is much too smart for that.” Linda gave her a grateful glance.

  “Do you have all your credit cards?” Nathan asked.

  “I only own one,” Linda said, shuffling through the junk in her wallet, “and it’s still here. But maybe she borrowed extra money from somebody else.”

  “It better not be my girls,” Jewelle said. “They’re in enough trouble with me already.” She glared at Lucy, who lowered her eyes and shook her head.

  “What about some of her other friends?” Lee asked.

  There was a long, uneasy silence. “Well?” Jewelle prompted.

  “Robin’s not really that close to anybody,” Lucy said finally, and that awful but familiar truth struck Linda with new force. She remembered Robin and herself at some amusement park long ago, disappearing together into the pitch-dark Tunnel of Love. Linda had wished fervently, foolishly, for a miracle then—the two of them restored to daylight in a bond of friendship, if not of love.

  “Everybody just sort of hangs out,” Carmel added to her sister’s blunt judgment, a touching and transparent defense of Robin’s separateness, her lack of social charm.

  Still, Linda went to the telephone and tried calling a few kids whose names Robin had spat out derisively over the past months: Stephanie Kraus, Marybeth Nixon, a boy named Richie Darr. As Linda expected, neither Stephanie nor Marybeth had seen Robin recently—except in passing, at school—and the boy claimed never to have heard of her.

  Jewelle had made sandwiches and coffee while the others were out, and now she urged them to sit down and eat something. Linda was surprised to see, by the kitchen clock, that it was way past suppertime. She wasn’t hungry, at least not in the
usual sense—the hollowness at her center was more emotional than physical. She picked up a teething ring from Phoebe’s high-chair tray and gazed at Robin’s empty place at the table, wondering if they had enough food, if they were comfortable and safe somewhere. “Let them be safe,” she said aloud. They were all standing around the small table, and it was as if grace had just been said.

  There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, but Lucy and Carmel shared the step stool, and Nathan perched on the edge of the counter. Lee held a chair out for Linda and said, “You come sit by me.” When she did, Jewelle started coaxing her to take a few bites of a sandwich, saying it would give her the energy she needed to go on with the search. But Linda could only get some milky coffee past the obstruction of dread in her throat. It was getting dark out. Jewelle had put on several lights in the apartment, prematurely, but she couldn’t ward off the night. The sky had already dimmed, and the trees outside the kitchen window were gradually losing their color and definition. It was that time of day when the world is cleanly divided between those with shelter and those without it. For all her bravado, Robin was afraid of the dark. Not that she would ever admit it. But hadn’t she moved a little closer to Linda in the absolute blackness of the Tunnel of Love? And sometimes, when Linda came into her room in the morning to wake her for school, she’d find the bedside lamp still burning weakly from the night before. The memory of such ordinary, unsung mornings was more than she could bear, and she got up abruptly, making the coffee slosh and the silverware jump. “I can’t just stay here like this!” she cried. “I’ve got to keep looking for them.”

  Nathan stood, too. “Let’s go,” he said, putting his cup in the sink. “We’ll start at the bus station, where the fares are cheapest. Who knows, she might even be planning to sleep in their waiting room tonight.”

  “I’ll take the girls home and then go to the airport,” Lee said. “Just in case.”

  Again, Jewelle volunteered to stay at the apartment and cover the telephone.

  As soon as Linda and Nathan walked into the bus station, a baby started to cry, making Linda stop short and spin around. But it was a tiny black baby, worn like a flower on the shoulder of a young man waiting on a long ticket line. He patted and patted her without noticeable effect. It was much too bright in that big room. Linda had a headache, and a loud, staccato announcement coming over the P.A. seemed to be hammered directly into her skull: “The bus for Salt Lake City, with stops at San Bernadino, Barstow, Baker, Las Vegas, and Provo, is now boarding at Gate 5.” All of them places where Robin and Phoebe might or might not be. And the enormous map on the wall offered a bewildering feast of other possibilities. Linda had to hurry to catch up with Nathan, who was making his way rapidly past the map to an office in a far corner of the terminal. Her limp had deepened in the past few hours, and her whole leg felt strange, numb and painful at once.

  The agent at the desk inside the Customer Service office was attending to someone else when they got there, a woman whose luggage was apparently lost. She was filling out a claims form and remembering aloud the contents of her suitcase. “My good blue dress,” she said mournfully. “The shoes I borrowed from my sister for the wedding. My bathrobe. Oh, and my slippers.”

  My children, Linda thought, with a fresh wave of misery. She had the wild notion that she might have to fill out a form, too, that she’d be asked to provide detailed descriptions of her missing items. A parade of pictures marched through her throbbing head: Phoebe’s lopsided and swollen beauty, moments after she was born; Robin’s rare smile, lighting on her face like a bird on a branch before it flew off again; the way both girls looked asleep, and just coming awake.

  When it was their turn at the agent’s desk, Nathan flashed his open wallet and said, “Ed Riley, Paragon Investigators. We’re looking for a runaway kid.” He went on to describe Robin in practical detail: age, height, weight, coloring. He said she had a baby with her, and that they might have been in the terminal sometime in the afternoon. Linda looked up at the clock on the office wall just as the minute hand moved. It was nine thirty-seven. She thought of that opening to the evening news back in Newark: It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

  The agent picked up the telephone and typed something into his computer with his free hand. Linda heard him murmur an echo of Nathan’s description into the phone as he typed. Then he said, “It will take a little while. You might want to get yourselves a cup of coffee or something.”

  There was a coffee shop right in the terminal, but they went around the corner to a quieter, darker place and sat in a booth. Linda put her head down on the table between them. “How did this happen?” she asked. It was a genuine question, and a complicated one. She meant this current crisis, but also everything that led up to it. She wanted to be comforted, but not absolved.

  Nathan seemed to understand. “Lousy luck,” he said. “A few wrong moves. Fate. The story of everyone’s life.” He put his hand out to touch her hair, and it hovered briefly above her head before he drew it back again.

  The black coffee and the doughnut they shared dulled Linda’s headache a little, and she was better able to tolerate the cruel lights of the bus terminal when they returned there, if not the disappointing news. The agent told them that a girl fitting Robin’s description had inquired about the fare to Newark, at about one-thirty that afternoon. The ticket seller remembered her because she looked something like her own kid. The girl didn’t buy a ticket, though, and her trail ended there.

  “But if she was right here,” Linda pleaded, “a girl with a baby …”

  The agent held up his hands, as if to demonstrate that they were empty. “Lots of girls,” he said. “Lots of babies.” He conceded that Robin might have gone to another window and bought a ticket for somewhere else, but if she paid cash for it, there wouldn’t be any way to trace it. And maybe she decided to just leave the terminal, he said, and spend the night somewhere in L.A.

  “That’s true,” Nathan said. “She could have done that.” He leaned dejectedly against the wall.

  “Look,” the agent said. “I know what you’re going through. I’m a father myself.”

  “Hey, I’m not the father,” Nathan told him.

  “Sure,” he said, “I almost forgot. You’re Eduardo Riley, private eye. Maybe it’s none of my business, pal, but why don’t you have the police doing this for you?”

  “It’s a long story,” Nathan said. “But listen, man, thanks for your trouble.” He straightened up and shook the agent’s hand. “Come on,” he told Linda. “I have an idea.”

  He drove them only a few blocks to an all-night movie house, and parked at a meter just down the street. Linda glanced up at the marquee in horror. It was a double bill: The Pink Panter and Pussy in Boots.

  “They wouldn’t sell Robin a ticket to this place,” she said, “would they? I mean, she’s a minor.”

  “Are you kidding?” Nathan said. “They’d sell one to Phoebe if she had the dough.”

  Nathan said something to the ticket-taker, and he let them inside. They walked up and down the aisles together, scanning each sparsely populated row. The men sitting there, most of them alone, slithered lower in their seats and averted their faces. All that time, a pornographic struggle was being thrashed out on the screen, accompanied by assorted gasps and moans—from the sound track, and from the audience. For some crazy reason, that song “Prisoner of Love” started playing in Linda’s head, and she couldn’t stop it until they were out on the street again. She felt so discouraged she wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and bawl, like that baby in the bus station who would not be soothed by her father’s gentle patting.

  Nathan walked Linda to the car and locked her inside, while he went to check a couple of other theaters of the same ilk, on the same street. She did scream a Little after he left, tentatively at first, and then really loud—a kind of savage howl—like someone being murdered. She was astonished that several people walked right by the car without seeming to notice or h
ear her.

  When Nathan came back, they rode around near the bus terminal a while longer, stopping to look into laundromats and fast-food places. Then they drove all the way west on Wilshire to the Santa Monica Pier. Linda remembered taking the children there last winter, and how they’d all ridden the carousel, with its thrilling lights and music and speed.

  The carousel was still and dark now, and most of the concession stands were shuttered. A man who sold souvenirs said it had been pretty slow for a Friday night—there was too much of a breeze—and he didn’t remember anyone resembling Robin and Phoebe passing by. Linda sagged with disappointment, and Nathan said, “Let’s try the beach.” He didn’t sound very hopeful, though, and Linda guessed he was just trying to keep her going.

  They took off their shoes and walked onto the damp, cold sand. The chill seemed to travel from the bottom of Linda’s feet to all the bones in her body. As they walked among the blanket-wrapped figures lying there—the homeless and the fugitive lovers—she felt like an intruder in someone’s bedroom. And the sight of one blond girl (not really like Robin) entwined with a dark-haired boy squeezed her heart shut. “They’re not here,” she said wearily. “They’re not anywhere. Let’s just go back.”

  At the apartment, Jewelle was sitting on the sofa with her shoes off. She had the dazed and disheveled look of someone startled awake. Nothing had to be said; she and Linda each read the absence of news on the others face. For the first time that day, Linda realized that Jewelle was wearing a white uniform, that she must have just come in from work when Linda called her, all those hours ago, begging to be picked up at Cynthia’s. “It’s past midnight. You must be exhausted,” Linda said. “Do you have to go to work tomorrow?” She spoke in a hushed voice, as if someone else in the apartment was still asleep. Her mother had worn a uniform like Jewelle s whenever she went away, and when she came home again.

  “No, no,” Jewelle said, speaking softly, too. “The weekend woman is on.” She yawned and shivered. “I’d better call Lee to pick me up.”