Tunnel of Love

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Don’t bother. I’ll take you home,” Nathan told her. He turned to Linda. “Lie down while I’m gone, niña, okay?” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I feel terrible about leaving you, Linda,” Jewelle said as she put on her white shoes. “But there’s nothing else to do tonight, is there?” She hesitated, and then she blurted, “Girl, you ought to call the police!”

  Linda slumped in the doorway of the living room, overcome by fatigue, and giddy almost to the point of tears, or hysterical laughter. Her headache was back in full force and her leg was killing her. She wanted to go to sleep, she wanted to wake up. “Jewelle,” she said, “tell me something. Where would you go if you were Robin?”

  Jewelle didn’t hesitate for even a second this time. “Family,” she said with complete conviction.

  Linda moaned and slid down the doorway to sit on the floor. “But Robin doesn’t have any family,” she said despairingly. And then she looked up, blinking in surprise, and said, “Oh.”

  32

  Mother

  THE BUS ARRIVED IN Phoenix on schedule, a little after 10 p.m., and the connecting bus, to Glendale, wasn’t going to leave for more than an hour. Robin watched as other passengers were met at the gate by friends and relatives. All that hugging and kissing—some of them even took pictures—and then they vanished together into the night. There were only a few people left in the terminal, either sleeping on benches in the waiting room or standing around, staring blankly into space. The baby was asleep, too, and Robin shifted her from one weary arm to the other, like a sack of potatoes, which was what she was starting to feel like. Robin had carefully counted out what was left of her money as they were pulling into Phoenix: four dollars and seventy-five cents. She blew all the change on a vending-machine Coke and sat down on a bench to wait for the second bus. While she waited, she ate the other candy bar she’d bought in L.A. and drank the Coke. But her snack didn’t give her the quick sugar high she’d hoped for, and she had to pinch her fingers bloodless to stay awake.

  When the Glendale bus arrived, she climbed stiffly aboard. Only two other passengers, a couple of blue-haired women, got on. They both sat down—near the front, of course—while Robin asked the driver if he knew where Cornelia Street was. He was about to consult a street map when one of the blue-hairs announced that she knew exactly where it was. She leaned over and patted the seat directly across the aisle from hers. “You sit right here, young lady,” she told Robin. “My sister and I live just three blocks from Cornelia Street. We’ll see that you get there safely.”

  “It’s only about a twenty-minute ride,” her sister added. “We’ll be there before you know it.”

  In the meantime, Robin had to endure another series of nosy questions, starting with why she was out so late with such a little baby. This was definitely her day to be bugged by old people. It was too late to pretend she was mute or couldn’t speak English. Instead, she mumbled something about having missed an earlier bus.

  “What a precious child,” the woman nearest Robin remarked, about Phoebe, and the other one said, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  Was she blind? “A girl!” Robin said indignantly.

  “Oh, really? How old?”

  This was turning into a relationship. “Thirty-five,” Robin said, under her breath. How old are you? she was tempted to add, and when did your hair turn blue? But when the same woman offered to hold Phoebe for a while, Robin handed her over, and then stretched and flexed her liberated arms. Of course, that left her open to a whole new round of cross-examination. She was getting better and better, though, at making things up on the spot. This time she and Feeb were the daughters of a very wealthy, recently divorced couple—a doctor and a lawyer. Their mother, the doctor, had just relocated to Glendale from Phoenix, and Robin (a.k.a. Stacy) and her sister (Tiffany Marie) were going to live there with her, after spending several months with their father. Robin could have said she’d dropped in from Mars or the moon and gotten the same reaction, the two women were such pushovers. They clucked in sympathy about poor Stacy and Tiffany’s broken home life, and about how thoughtless their father was, not to drive them to Glendale himself at this hour, or send them in a hired car. Robin toyed with the idea of saying, “Yeah, he’s so thoughtless, he went and died,” but she only shrugged bravely and yawned.

  She was poked awake at Glendale and led blindly off the bus, the way her father used to lead her to the bathroom at night when she was little. Before she dozed off, she’d sent a repeated ESP message to the blue-haired sisters: Shut up. Shut up. Shut up … And out on the sidewalk in Glendale, when they started to escort her to Cornelia Street, she insisted she could find it herself. They argued and fussed and finally gave in. But after they’d pointed the way and gone off around the corner in the opposite direction, still calling their goodbyes, Robin wanted to run after them, like some brainless baby duck chasing its mother.

  She had been around here once before, but somehow nothing looked familiar. Of course that other time was more than a year ago, and she and Linda had arrived by car on a bright Sunday afternoon. She remembered a group of children running through a sprinkler on one of the front lawns and a man reading a newspaper on his porch. You could sense it was Sunday, the way you always can, no matter where you are. Now it was about midnight; the street lamps were pretty dim, and there were lights on in only a few of the houses.

  Robin was freezing. Wasn’t the desert supposed to be hot? And it was so quiet, everybody had to be either asleep or dead. Phoebe was awake again, wide awake. She screeched like a set of bad brakes and pulled on the reins of Robin’s hair, commanding her to go. “Shhh, ouch!” Robin cried. Then she wrapped the blanket around the baby’s shoulders and started to gallop with her, chanting softly as she went along: “Giddyap, giddyap, giddyap, horsey.” Phoebe laughed merrily and jiggled in her arms, still gripping the reins of hair. The moon seemed to be keeping pace with them, bouncing over the rooftops and trees. After a minute or so, a dog started barking somewhere, making Robin pause breathlessly, but it sounded safely distant and too shrill to be very big, so she resumed her gallop all the way to Cornelia Street.

  “Well, here we are, Feeble,” she said in a whisper. The baby yanked hard on her hair again, but Robin eased it out of her fist and walked slowly up the pathway of the two-story, white-shingled house: number 1418. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized she knew the address by heart. There were no lights on inside, at least none that she could see, but the moon had faithfully followed them here, and it threw its pale, silvery glow over everything. The last time, there was a neat yellow Corvette in the driveway, with one of those canvas bug-covers over the front end, but now there was only a naked white Taurus parked there. Maybe the Vette was in the garage or out being fixed. Or maybe it was the wrong house. She walked back to the street to recheck the number painted on the curb. It was the right house. Robin approached the front door, hoping they hadn’t decided to get themselves a dog since the last time she was here.

  The last time, he came to the door in his bathrobe, looking like a handsome gangster, with his great tan and that big head of styled gray hair. Her mother’s husband. He thought that Robin and Linda were a couple of religious nuts trying to convert him. “Forget it, sisters,” he said. “We’re already saved.” He almost slammed the door in their faces, but Linda stopped him. Robin couldn’t say a word; she was so weak she could hardly stand up. She could still remember the way the chest hairs sprang out of the gap in his robe, and the neck chains and turquoise rings he wore. Linda said some stuff to him about who they were and he let them into the cool, shaded entry of the house, calling upstairs that they had company.

  Minutes later, she came slowly down the stairs, rumpled and drowsy. She was wearing a loosely tied green silk bathrobe, just like his. They had been in bed together, Robin understood, and they hadn’t been sleeping. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did, and with horrible certainty. Her mother was like no one she had ever met or even
imagined in all those years of imagining. She was too short and young to be anyone’s mother, and she wore glasses. Robin didn’t look anything like her. Her name was Miriam, but he called her Mim.

  She was perfect.

  Robin rang the doorbell. The chimes pealed out, startling Phoebe, who stiffened and whimpered. “Take it easy,” Robin told her, told herself. There was no barking and there were no footsteps—only silence and the tinny echo of the chimes inside Robin s head. She tried to look through the peephole, but all she could see was the reflection of her own eye. She was positive she’d see him—Tony—again, as if he was the butler or the doorman and it was his job to open the door. It would probably take him a while to get there, but she was marking the seconds, using the pulsebeat in the baby’s temple, and this was taking much too long. Robin was shivering from the cold, and maybe a little from nerves, too. What if they were on vacation? What if they’d moved? She didn’t know why this hadn’t occurred to her before, with the wrong car in the driveway and everything. She pushed the bell again, hard, several times. The chimes kept going, like a thousand Avon ladies calling. In the middle of all the noise, the porch light suddenly flicked on and the door opened. Robin almost fell inside. But it wasn’t him standing there; it was her, without her glasses. She looked older, less glamorous. Her dark hair was cut short, like a boy’s, instead of shoulder length. It was flattened on one side and stood up in horns on the other, probably from sleeping on it. She was wearing a different bathrobe, a kind of ratty blue one, and she had a pistol in her hand, aimed shakily at Phoebe.

  “Don’t,” Robin said, backing away and trying to shield the baby at the same time.

  Her mother lowered the pistol. “God,” she said, softly. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” Robin croaked.

  “What in the …” She came closer and squinted at Robin and then at Phoebe. “Oh, boy” she said, shaking her head. “Just what I needed.” She hustled them inside, switching on an interior light, and shut the door behind them. In the little vestibule, she gave them another once-over. “She’s yours, all right,” she said. “Who’s the father?”

  Robin was completely confused for a moment, before she understood with a terrible jolt what her mother meant. During the last few miles of the trip to Phoenix, she’d worked up an alibi to explain her surprise appearance here. She was going to say that Linda had died, of some brain disease, leaving Phoebe and her alone in the world. In a sense, Robin decided, it was actually true. But this was an even better story, she realized. Linda hardly had to come into the picture now, and Phoebe belonged to Robin in every possible way. Her mother was standing there with the drooping gun in her hand, waiting for an answer. “I don’t know,” Robin said, finally.

  Her mother let out a long, whistling breath and then she turned and went into the living room, beckoning Robin to follow her. This was the room where they’d all sat that June afternoon, when Linda told Tony and Miriam about her short marriage and about Wright’s death, expecting them to welcome Robin into their lives with open arms. It would have been a whole lot easier for her to get into heaven. Not that they said no, exactly. It was more that they, that her mother, didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the prospect of Robin staying. She acted like somebody trapped by a really slick door-to-door salesman. She might buy the set of encylopedia he was pushing because she didn’t know how to resist the sales pitch, but she would never look at it once it was on her shelf. Robin was stupefied: she had fallen in love and been jilted, all in a matter of minutes. And then, to make things worse, her mother mentioned that stuff about Tony’s son having lived with them for a while. That was when Robin came to sudden, agonized life. “I wouldn’t stay here if you gave me a hundred million dollars!” she yelled. Like they were offering her a bribe to stay At least Linda went along with her, for once, babbling about how they’d really just dropped by to say hello. And then she took Robin’s hand in hers and they walked out of there.

  Out of here. This was the same room, and these were the same white couches, only they were a little soiled now and a little less plump. And he was missing—her mother’s henchman, her doorman, her partner in crime. Robin looked nervously toward the stairs, expecting him to come lumbering down them any minute. Fee, fi, fo, fum! She remembered how big and muscular he’d seemed next to tiny Miriam, how deep his voice had been. There was still no sign of him; he was probably sleeping. But wouldn’t her mother have woken him up when the doorbell rang this late? He was so protective of her last year, like Robin had busted into her life just to ruin it. Of the two of them, wouldn’t he be the one packing a gun? Maybe they’d split up since Robin was here. That idea cheered her considerably. In her old dream of being reunited with her mother, it was always just the two of them. It would be a lot easier to accommodate Phoebe into the revised dream than Tony. Robin put the baby down on the blond carpet and relaxed into the sofa cushions. Phoebe took off at a high-speed crawl toward a low table loaded with breakable stuff.

  “Where is … what’s her name again?” Robin’s mother asked. “Donna? Rhoda?”

  “Linda,” Robin said. “I don’t live with her anymore.”

  “Do you mean … because of the baby?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well,” her mother said. “Like mother, like daughter.”

  “What?” Robin said, startled.

  “I had you when I was young, too. Not as young as you, though. And I was married, by the skin of my teeth. But my mother was ready to throw me—no, no!” she said to Phoebe, who was on her knees next to the table, reaching for a little glass candy dish.

  Phoebe screwed her face up to cry, so Robin grabbed the baby blanket and tossed it lightly over her head. “Where’s my Feeble?” Robin said. “Where’s that little punk?” It was a game they’d played on the bus, and Phoebe still remembered it. She pulled the blanket right off and crowed with delight at the magically returned room. Robin threw the blanket over her again, with the same happy results. Using her other hand, she removed the candy dish and put it on a higher table, out of Phoebe’s sight and reach. Then Robin scooped her up and, turning to her mother, said, “Do you have any milk? And a place where I can change her?”

  “Into what?” her mother asked. But then she said, “Come on, we’ll fix her up.” And she took them into the kitchen for the milk, and then ushered them up the stairs. Halfway to the top, Robin heard something odd, over Phoebe’s contented sucking, a kind of gurgling sound, like the filter in a fish tank. Her mother hurried ahead of her and shut the door facing the landing, but not before Robin caught a glimpse of a room faintly lit by an orangy night-light and a hospital bed with somebody propped up in it. That’s where that weird noise was coming from; you could hardly hear it now through the closed door. She didn’t say anything about what she’d seen and heard, and neither did her mother. She led Robin into the small room next door and put on the light. There was a daybed in there, a small table with a digital clock on it, a pinball machine, and an exercise bike. The carpeting was green and shaggy, like an overgrown lawn. Was this where Tony’s son had slept when he lived with them? Robin put the baby down on the daybed and began changing her diaper.

  “You can sleep on that tonight,” Robin’s mother said. “But where will we put her?”

  “She can sleep with me,” Robin said. “We always sleep together.”

  “If you say so,” her mother said. “The bathroom’s down the hall on the left. Are you hungry? Do you want anything to drink?”

  Robin shook her head. “Could you just hold her for a couple of minutes?” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Her mother took Phoebe from her. “So now I’m a grandmother,” she said, in amazement, returning the baby’s frank scrutiny. “What next?”

  A few seconds passed before Robin realized what she’d said, and that it wasn’t true, that it could never be true; you had to be a mother first. She went to the bathroom and emptied her bowels and bladder. After she’d washed her hands and dried them on t
he lone skinny towel hanging there, she found a tube of toothpaste in the medicine chest and rubbed a dab of it over her gritty teeth with one finger. She stared at the closed door near the landing before she went back into the little room. If that was Tony on the hospital bed, he had to be really sick. It was true that Linda had used a bed like that for only a couple of broken bones, but in the moment before her mother shut the door, Robin got the impression of serious gloom. The gurgling, that funny orange light, and especially the motionless figure on the high bed. She couldn’t bring herself to ask about it, though, and her mother still didn’t volunteer anything. She merely handed her a pillow and an afghan, and said, “Good night, Robin. Sleep tight. We’ll discuss all this in the morning.”

  Her name spoken in her mother’s voice was a pure wonder. Robin supposed she should call her something back, like “Miriam,” or “Mom,” or even “Mother,” but she couldn’t manage to get any of those words out. So she said, “G’night, Mmm …” as if she were only humming to herself, or falling asleep standing up, before she could finish her sentence. She was actually pooped enough to drop off like that, but after she lay down she kept thinking she was still on the bus. There was a persistent replay of rushing landscape behind her eyelids, and she’d jerk awake before the bus could crash into something. The daybed was much too narrow for two people, even if one of them was a midget, and she’d left the back cushions in place as a bumper for Phoebe. “Now remember, don’t smother yourself,” Robin had told her as they settled in together under the afghan. It was scratchy and it smelled of mothballs and old sleep. In the creepy silence, Robin thought she could hear that gurgling noise again, and she pressed her ear against Phoebe’s murmuring chest to drown it out.

  33