by Tanen Jones
“Daddy and I, we didn’t know where she was for the first few years. We kept thinking she’d come back…Then we thought we’d never see her again. When she was nineteen she called and asked for money to go to business school in Florida. Daddy was thrilled. He sent her the money right away. Then we didn’t hear from her for a couple months, so I called the school and asked them to check on her. They said she’d never been enrolled. After a while a creditor in Louisiana got in touch with us about some debt she’d run up. She called from New Orleans a few times after that, asking for money, which he gave to her, of course. Then saying she was thinking about getting married and wanted his blessing. She was planning to bring the guy home to meet us. But she never showed up. When I got married she left a message for me with Daddy’s home nurse. It didn’t make any sense. The nurse said she sounded drunk. Then we didn’t hear anything from her anymore.”
I picked through my hair, moving locks aside so I could make sure I hadn’t missed a spot. “You don’t sound mad at her.”
Leslie was silent, hands braced on her knees. Finally she said, “She’s dead. It’s useless to be mad at her now.” She looked over at me. “I should let you rinse that out.”
* * *
—
It took almost ten minutes before the water was clear of dye, and even after the second round of chemicals it still felt like sticks. Leslie peered around the door just as I started finger-combing the ends in the mirror.
Her expression went all funny when she saw me.
“What do you think?” I said. “It’s kind of yellowy, but maybe that’ll go away when it’s dry.”
She blinked. “Mary, you…It really looks like her.”
“Robin,” I said. “You should call me Robin.”
“You’re right,” she said, but she didn’t correct herself, just hung there in the half-open doorway. “We should…practice, I guess.”
“Go ahead,” I said, making eye contact with her in the mirror. “I don’t want to slip up later.”
Leslie’s face was pale. “You mean start right now?”
“Hi, Leslie,” I replied, imitating her flat New Mexican accent. “It’s me, Robin.”
She flinched.
“Good?” I asked her, turning around to look at her in person, but she was already disappearing behind the door again.
“Yeah, good,” she said, muffled. “I’m going to pack up. I’ll be ready to go in a minute.”
I turned back to my reflection in the mirror and practiced smiling. Then I stopped. It felt strange to be smiling alone.
13
Robin
We were obsessed with the car, a ’78 Pinto, painted what I called in my head Nineteen-Seventies Orange, straight off the muddy color palette of the decade, so that only a few years into my parents’ marriage it started to look dusty next to the ’80s models on the road, whose yellows and reds had been calibrated for television commercials instead of magazine ads. The interiors were cognac leather, same as my father’s briefcase. It was his commuter car; I imagined him speeding off to work, cradled in his Pinto like an important file.
Mostly we loved the back windshield, which stretched from roof to license plate in a single sheet of reinforced glass as big as a picture window. Had we ever been rear-ended we would have been ribboned, which never occurred to us as we stood backward on the seat to look out at the billboards and gas stations disappearing in our wake. They shrank almost faster than I could fix my eye on them, the way things did when you tried to remember them on purpose.
Before the Grand Canyon we had ridden in the Pinto only a few times each—four times for me, six for Leslie, an injustice—and never on the highway. At sixty miles per hour I thought I might grow wings. That was the year I was four and Leslie was eight; whatever I was, she was double it. I regretted my babyishness bitterly, feeling that I was letting her down. Had I been even two years older I could have been everything to her, as she was everything to me; but as it stood I knew I was too shallow a receptacle for her secret thoughts. It was torture to be aware of these separate chambers of her personality yet too short to access them.
Later, Leslie would say, Do you remember our vacation? and I’d pretend I did, nod along as she told her favorite story from it: Daddy in the Hawaiian shirt and rolled-up khakis, beltless, deck-shoed, as if the edge of the canyon were a prow; his bare ankles were as white as the skin under a cast. Next to him my mother, just after she’d cut her hair, wearing her old shirtdress with the wooden buttons. Let me have your camera, Warren, she said to my father. I want to take a picture of this—motioning at the sunset, whose striations echoed the layers of sediment. He handed it over and she stood on the bars of the lookout point for half an hour getting tan, pointing the camera this way and that, while Leslie and I complained. At last the light faded and she agreed it was time for dinner and held the camera out to Daddy, who didn’t grasp it quickly enough; it cracked to the ground and skittered under the safety fence, slipping over the edge of the canyon with an anticlimactic chhup!
Leslie and I went survivalistically silent. My mother began to apologize. His expensive camera! But he was bare-ankled, in high spirits. Who cares about the camera, he said, and took her in his arms. He bent her over backward, like a ballroom dancer, kissing her against the magic backdrop. Like all good vacations, it convinced us that these versions of ourselves were truer than the others, that the workaday shell of my mother could at any moment spring open to reveal her more buoyant, romantic insides.
I didn’t remember any of that. Leslie could have made it up and I would have believed her. I don’t think she did; she clung to it for years after, never bothering to change it out for a better story. For her it represented a kind of perfect happiness. I wanted to share her happiness, so I lied: Yes, I remember! When my only memory of the trip was of Leslie gifting me her Honey Bun, which I ate facing the enormous picture window, smearing sugar grease on my father’s beloved briefcase seats, licking my fingers one by one as the Pinto lifted off like a plane. Leslie beside me, my mother in front of her, Daddy in the driver’s seat, cameraless: each of us experiencing exactly as much happiness as we could successfully contain.
14
Leslie
Even with stops for gas, a new phone for Mary, and brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts (traditional on road trips, she told me), the trip home seemed half as long as my drive to Vegas. I kept swallowing nervous spit as we crossed into Albuquerque. “Birthdate,” I said.
“May…twenty-second?” Mary said. “Um, 1992,” she added, more confidently.
“Good,” I said. “What’s your father’s name?”
“Walter Voigt.”
“Warren.” I gripped the steering wheel.
“Warren. That’s right.” She leaned down to unzip her duffel and took out a tube of strawberry Chapstick. “Want some?” she asked as she rubbed it over her lower lip.
I shook my head. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“You didn’t tell me that.” She capped the Chapstick and put it back in the bag.
“It’s Stetson,” I said, feeling sick.
“Like the hats?”
I smiled perfunctorily.
It was the worst time to drive. The sun blinded me in one eye as we entered the foothills. Every so often it gained the perfect angle and turned the dust on the windshield totally opaque.
“What have you been doing in Vegas?” I asked.
She looked blank. “Waitressing. You know that.”
“No—Robin-you. Dave will ask.”
Mary shrugged. “She could be waitressing too.”
“I guess that’s true.”
Mary turned her head to stare out at the trickle of the Embudo arroyo. “I’m good, you know. I’m not going to freak out.”
“Okay.” I blew out a breath. “I guess we’ll see when we get there.”
I turned the radio on. “You Light Up My Life” immediately oppressed the car.
Every time I glanced over to check on Mary, the color of her hair startled me a little—that and the slight pink fleshiness of her arm resting against the divider. She was real, meaty in a way that Robin’s body hadn’t been. With her hair lighter, closer to the color I remembered from childhood, she seemed more like my sister than my sister had.
“What’s that?”
“Lynnewood? Just a park.”
“It looks like it was air-dropped in from Connecticut.”
We went slowly north, following the mountains, the sun sinking over the tops of the adobe roofs.
“You live way out here, huh?” Mary asked.
“Kind of,” I said. “It’s a nice community.”
“I thought you said your husband was a firefighter.”
“Fire safety engineer,” I said. “It’s different.”
“Must be.” She stuck her finger in her mouth and ran her nail along one of her molars.
I turned in to our neighborhood and drove down High Canyon Trail. Mary rolled down her window and lit a cigarette. It was twilight now and cool. The hairs on my arms rose. “Please don’t smoke in the car.”
She looked at me and ashed into the wind. “We’re almost there, right?”
I didn’t answer. Eventually the silence made her put the cigarette out.
* * *
—
We pulled up to the house a few minutes later, the grit on the driveway crunching beneath the tires. My ears felt stuffed with cotton after eight hours of engine noise. I paused in the driver’s seat as Mary put her shoes back on and glanced up at the house. For a moment we were both staring at it. When we’d first bought it I’d felt exultant every time I looked at it. Mine, ours: the superclean, near-white stucco façade; the arched, shining window over the reclaimed-wood front door; the long, lazy concrete walkway, which wound like a stream from the front door to the driveway, suggesting that the people who lived there had eons of time on their hands.
The porch light flickered on. After a moment, Dave opened the door and came hurrying out. He was in his new jeans, the effect of which was ruined by the combination of his old thin Tweety Bird T-shirt and flap-soled sneakers, and the familiar warmth at seeing him crept into my fingertips. He was still beautiful, the porch light separating the lines of his face into smooth, rounded planes. Just behind that, equally familiar, I felt the flood of nausea as he approached.
I can’t do it, I thought suddenly. He’ll know right away.
I couldn’t get out of the car.
“Lights,” Mary said nonsensically beside me. I looked wide-eyed at her. “Camera. Action!” She gave me a smile. At some point she’d put lipstick on. When had she done that?
Dave had reached the driver’s-side door. He pulled on the handle, then knocked on the window and waved at me. I fumbled to unlock it. “Hi,” he said when he’d gotten it open, giving me a quick kiss on the lips. “How are you?”
I tried to focus on what I’d say if I were coming home alone. “Tired,” I said, touching his cheek. His stubble scraped my palm. “Hungry.”
“Good. I made chili. You must be Robin,” he added, coming around the car to take Mary’s duffel bag from her.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said. She was doing the same accentless voice she’d used earlier, in the mirror. It sounded fake to me, but Dave seemed undisturbed. “Are you Dave? It’s so nice to meet Leslie’s husband.”
“Yeah, you too,” Dave said, heaving the duffel on his shoulder. “Come in, you can get something to eat. How was the trip?” he asked over his shoulder as he led the way to the front door.
I tensed.
“Nothing to tell,” Mary said. “I ate a lot of Pop-Tarts. Your house is so fancy,” she exclaimed as she stepped over the threshold.
“Thanks,” Dave said. “We like it.”
I followed them into the house, glancing up at the wrought-iron chandelier in the entryway as I almost never did. I hadn’t thought of it as being fancy in a long time.
“So Leslie said it took her a while to find you,” Dave said, coming back down the stairs and heading for the kitchen. His tone was casual, but I could read the sliver of his face visible over his shoulder as he opened one of the cabinet doors.
“Oh, do you have wine?” Mary asked.
There was a brief pause before Dave followed her gaze to the cabinet, which held a line of Viognier glasses. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, sure. White okay?”
“That’s fine.”
He went to the refrigerator as she sat down at the breakfast nook. I leaned against the island countertop. “Yeah, she was kind of in the middle of nowhere outside of Vegas,” I said. “No cellphone or anything. I had to call the landlord.”
“Oh, but it was so funny,” Mary broke in, accepting her glass of wine and grabbing Dave by the arm. “She had been hanging out at my place all day waiting for me, and when she finally got tired and went to get a bite to eat, guess which place she chose.”
“Your restaurant,” Dave said, going to the counter for two more glasses and brushing against me.
“Yes! Well, not exactly, but it’s the one my boyfriend works at, and I was just there keeping him company. We ran into each other outside. You should have seen her face.” Mary re-created the face for him.
Dave glanced at me and I tried to smile. “You guys had a good time, huh? You went out drinking?”
“Oh my gosh, you should have seen her,” Mary told him. “Does she drink a lot at home? No, right? You guys have glasses for wine and everything. Well, she matched me shot for shot.” She gave a hoarse chuckle that was nothing like her ordinary laugh; it was carefully unfeminine, designed to contrast with her lipsticked exterior. I realized all at once that she wasn’t doing an impression of Robin. She was waitressing. It was that simple.
The tension seeped out of my shoulders.
Dave was grinning as he handed me my glass of wine and took a sip himself, settling into the breakfast nook next to Mary. “Nah,” he said. “I’ve only seen Leslie do a shot once. And I knew her in college.”
“You knew me in grad school,” I protested, coming over to join them.
“Oh, were you the tequila champ of ’09? I just missed your partying days?”
I laughed. Mary glanced between us. When she caught my gaze, I saw a triumphant flicker in hers, which disappeared as Dave spoke again.
“No phone, huh? Are you against technology?”
“Technology is against me,” Mary pronounced, pressing her free hand to her chest. “I cannot hold on to a mobile device. I’ve dropped them, put them in the washer, flushed them…I mean.” She sipped her wine. “Leslie bought me a new one,” she added, as if it had just occurred to her. “On the trip. It was really sweet.”
“Not a smart one,” I said, as Dave looked at me. “Just an old flip one. It wasn’t much.”
“Yes it was!” Mary exclaimed. “It was really—Oh, sorry!” She interrupted herself as Dave shushed her. “Is someone else here?”
“Just Eli,” Dave said, lowering his voice. “We don’t want to wake him up.”
“Who’s Eli?” Mary asked, looking from me to Dave.
Dave laughed. “No—Eli! Didn’t Leslie…”
Mary frowned.
“You didn’t tell her about Eli?” Dave asked me.
“I didn’t have time,” I said.
“Who’s Eli?” Mary asked again.
“He’s our kid,” Dave said. “It’s past his bedtime, so…”
Mary was quiet for once.
I took a long sip.
“You have a baby?” she said at last.
I nodded.
“How old is he?”
“A year,” I said. “It was his birthday a couple of weeks ago.”
“Wow.” Mary sat back in her chair. “Wow. I didn’t know.” She looked at me, her face a little pink. “I mean, I guess I just didn’t think.”
“You’re an auntie,” Dave put in. “Bet you didn’t think of that.” He was being a little forceful. I touched his knee.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, you had to find out sometime.”
“Wow,” Mary said again. “I mean, congratulations. What’s he like?”
Dave relaxed. “Well, he just learned ‘Yikes,’ which I didn’t even know he knew. I was going to tell you about this on the phone,” he said, turning to me. “You must have taught him that, or Ma. I was making the chili earlier today and I put some red chile in it, and he was in the kitchen playing pots and pans and just demanding to have a piece. He was losing his shit. So I gave him one, and he goes—” Dave imitated Eli’s squeak, making Mary stifle her laughter behind her hand.
“He’s not going to ask for that again,” Mary said.
“Sure he will. His first word’ll be chile if I have my way.” Dave stretched, and stopped in the middle. “Hey, do you guys want some of it? The chili? I forgot all about it, I’m sorry.”
“Oh my God,” I said, realizing as I said it. “Yes. I’m starving.”
“Okay,” Dave said, getting up. “Robin, you want some?”
The sound of her name still startled me, but Mary answered to it easily. “Yes, please,” she said.
“Two bowls. Actually, I want seconds. Three bowls,” Dave said, crossing the room.
“How am I doing?” she asked me quietly. Her hair had dried in a staticky, fluffy halo around her face.
I put my hand over hers on the placemat and squeezed it, once. She grinned.
“I want sour cream on mine,” I said to Dave, whisper-shouting across the room.
15