Robin and Ruby

by K. M. Soehnlein

“There’s a phone booth in the corner,” the bartender says, smirking. “Try 4-1-1.”

  “No, I’m looking for my sister, she was here last night.”

  “I didn’t touch her!” He barks out a laugh, then shuts it off impatiently. “Beer? Shot? What? You guys even legal?”

  “Yeah, we’re legal,” Robin says. He hands over his ID.

  The bartender glances at it for a split second and hands it back to him. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “What are you talking about? That’s my college ID.”

  “You bought this at Playland in Times Square. You think I’m new at this?”

  George pushes up next to Robin. “Were you working here last night?”

  “Oh, you brought Beverly Hills Cop along with you.”

  “Excuse me?” George says.

  “Joke, little man. Joke.” He slides down to the other end of the bar to take an order.

  “Hey!” Robin calls out.

  “This guy’s a dick,” George says. He turns and walks back toward the door they came in, moving through the black curtain.

  Robin calls his name, to no avail.

  “Let him go,” Calvin advises.

  Robin nods. He can’t give up on this place yet, asshole bartender or not. He recalls an exercise he was given in acting class: Get the attention of someone ignoring you. The instructor offered three options: go big to intimidate, go small to elicit pity, or become like the person you need to impress.

  So he deepens his voice and calls out, “I hear she was a fucking bitch to deal with. You should try being her brother.” The bartender looks back toward him. Robin pulls out his money clip, bulging with bills. “Man, I gotta clear this up before my mom gets on my case. Anyone here who can help?”

  “Hang on, I’ll call the office.” The bartender picks up a phone mounted on the wall and mutters a few sentences. Then he tells Robin. “Mick is coming downstairs. He was at the door last night.”

  “Thanks, man.” Robin begrudgingly leaves a couple singles on the bar.

  A minute later, a big guy appears from the dark reaches of the club. Robin extends his hand, and the guy grabs it so that only their thumbs interlock, like they’re old pals bumping into each other at a rock concert. “Qué pasa?” he says, though he doesn’t look like he has a drop of Spanish blood in him. He looks more like an Amish farmer, his pale face obscured by a broad, fuzzy beard. His eyes are small, the pupils large, as if he never leaves the club during daylight. Robin can see that the guy is probably only a couple years older than he is, a young face disappearing into hairy manhood.

  Calvin says, “Hey, man.”

  The bouncer takes notice of him. “Oh, you. That’s what this is about.”

  Calvin says, “His sister, my girlfriend, was one of the girls who got kicked out—black hair, blue eyes, kind of pale?”

  “Oh, yeah. The foxy preppie chick. I had to get in there and fuckin’ break shit up, ’cause that other one, the really wasted twat, was wiping the floor with her. Another minute and somebody was gonna get hurt.” Pointing at Calvin, he tells Robin, “This guy was the only one making any sense.”

  Robin is still absorbing Ruby as a “foxy preppie chick” there’s hardly room to imagine her in the midst of a scuffle, much less Calvin stepping in as a sensible hero.

  Calvin says, “The last I saw of her was when she left with two other girls. A fat one and a skinny one.”

  But the bouncer shakes his head, his beard floating in front of him like seaweed on the surf. “Nah, I’m pretty sure those two chicks went one way, and your girlfriend went the other way with some guy.”

  “A skinny, coked-out guy?” Calvin asks. “Dressed in black?”

  “It was new-wave night. Lots of guys fit that description. But yeah, he was skinny. They went—” He points toward what Robin guesses is the south side of town.

  “Are you sure?” Robin asks.

  “That’s what they pay me for,” he says, with obvious pride. “I don’t miss anything.”

  “That fucker,” Calvin says, stamping his foot on the floor and twirling around. Even in the low light of the bar, Robin can see the frustration on his face. And who can blame him, betrayed like that? Maybe the beach patrol was right when they told Calvin that stuff like this happens all the time. Even so, it’s not like Ruby. He tries to imagine the kind of guy who could get Ruby to go off with him. When he tries to picture Chris, what forms in his mind is a picture of Douglas.

  Outside the club, there’s no sign of George at first; then Robin spots him across the street, waving them over.

  Robin starts an apology, something about the bartender and his insults, but George stops him. “Wasn’t your fault,” he says. “I have an idea. Let’s check out this parking lot.” He points farther down the street, to a sign announcing, PARK HERE FOR CLUB XS, BAMBOO BAR, YAKETY YAK’S.

  The lot is presided over by an old man sitting on a folding lawn chair. He wears dark glasses and a baseball cap and keeps his hands folded over a fanny pack at his waist while Robin asks him questions. Turns out this guy wasn’t on duty last night, but his son was, and if they leave a number, he’ll have him call.

  The old guy looks past Robin’s shoulder. His eyes are on George and Calvin, who are wandering around the cars at the perimeter of the lot. “Hey!” he shouts. “Get away from the vehicles!”

  When Robin joins them he sees that they’ve huddled together over a discovery: a mound of clothing that includes a woman’s shirt, yellow and damp, and a pair of boxy madras shorts, smudged with dirt.

  “She had those on!” Calvin exclaims.

  “They don’t look like Ruby.”

  “She borrowed them from Alice. I spilled a beer on her,” he says, his face going slack, “so she had to change.”

  For the first time since leaving Philly, Robin feels what must be dread: a chill along his skin, a tightness in his throat, sour as bile. “We don’t know what it means,” he says quickly. “She might have just changed when she got to the car.” He finds George’s gaze and holds it, wanting some measure of George’s customary calmness to transfer to him.

  But George seems rattled, too. “If she was just changing her clothes, why would she dump these on the ground?”

  “I don’t even want to say what I’m thinking,” Calvin mutters.

  It’s what they’re all thinking, Robin knows, understanding, too, that it’s time to go to the police. He’s been resisting. To tell the cops means giving in to his worst fears. And it probably means telling his mother what’s going on, too. He had wanted to spare her the anxiety of a missing child. Especially today.

  But he knows he’s in over his head. “Calvin, let’s go to your sister’s house. I want to use the phone there to call the cops.”

  Calvin nods. He picks up the cast-off clothes and tucks them under his arm.

  George suddenly grabs hold of him. “It’ll work out,” he says and surprises Robin with an arm around his shoulder and a comforting kiss planted on his forehead. It feels very public: Calvin is looking back at them, another car is moving slowly past toward a parking spot, and the old guy in the baseball cap is now standing up and waving his arms in the air. “You’re all trespassing,” he yells. “Move along!”

  Then it finally hits him that the person he needs to call is his father.

  They don’t talk much these days, and Robin isn’t sure he knows how to talk to him, not about anything deep. Clark’s expectations have always seemed at odds with what Robin wanted for his own life. While Jackson was alive, the burden of being the right kind of son was alleviated for Robin. He had a brother who could play sports, who liked to roughhouse and tease, who wanted a father’s advice (as opposed to a mother’s, which is where Robin always turned). During those months when Jackson was in the hospital, in a coma, his father dealt with the pall of uncertainty that hung over all of them by knocking out the dining room wall and beginning construction on a new room, built to be the bedroom of a handicapped child. No one used tha
t word, handicapped, but phrases like “diminished motor skills” and “permanent damage” were spoken quietly, and Robin would rehearse the scenarios in his mind, the various ways that Jackson, once the fastest sprinter in his elementary school and the most reckless tree-climber of any kid in the neighborhood, would return to them in some frightening, diminished version of himself. But Jackson didn’t return.

  Inevitably there was an argument between his parents about what to do with the room. Robin listened as they went back and forth. Dorothy had assumed it would make sense as a breakfast nook or a pantry, some expansion of their kitchen, which had never been quite large enough. Instead, Clark announced, “It’s going to be my office.”

  “But you have one at your job.”

  “I’m claiming a little personal space.”

  “Space for what?” Dorothy demanded.

  “For myself.”

  Personal space struck Robin as an odd fit with his father’s personality. Clark had always been pragmatic, social, and not one for self-analysis. Now he installed a couch that took up an entire wall. It was wide and plush, and it cost, his mother complained to Robin, “a pretty penny.” He would work late at the office, as a sales manager for a Japanese company, in their battery department, a job that Robin never understood. (Battery sales? You just buy them at the store, right?) At night, Clark would close himself into this room. Robin would spy him through the partly opened door, reclining on the couch, some technical manual splayed on his chest. He became a ghost presence, sealed off from the rest of them.

  After the divorce, Robin and Ruby’s weekend visits to Greenlawn had the atmosphere of time spent with a distant relative, more a chaperone than a parent. They shopped for groceries, cooked for their father, ate together in front of the TV. Then they went to their bedrooms to do homework or talk on the phone while Clark retired to his office. It was a kind of limbo. Life as aftermath.

  Right before Robin went away to Pittsburgh for college, Clark pulled him aside and said, “I hope we can be close again one day,” and Robin, at a loss to think of when they were ever close in the past, simply said, “Yeah, sure.” He didn’t really have a sense of what a close relationship with his father would even look like. But eventually, he decided he might test things out. During a phone call, when Clark asked Robin if he had a girlfriend at college, Robin said, “Dad, I don’t think I’m going to have any girlfriends.” Clark seemed taken aback, and managed to say, “Time will tell,” to which Robin replied, “I’m telling you now, I don’t think so.” And that was that. The idea of a renewed relationship seemed to be sucked away into the vacuum of this unspeakable subject. Clark wasn’t invited to the dinner party Dorothy threw for Robin’s eighteenth birthday, and Clark in turn didn’t find a way to make it to Pittsburgh to see Robin onstage in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Clark was contributing to his tuition. But that was the extent of it.

  So when Robin stops at yet another phone booth and places a collect call to Greenlawn, he doesn’t at all know what to expect.

  “Dad?”

  “Oh, hello there.” He sounds a bit groggy.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “We got the news on. They’ve got that hijacking happening over there. Terrible stuff.”

  “I didn’t know you were much of a news watcher.”

  “Well, Annie’s gotten me into it. She’s a real newshound.”

  In the background, Robin hears a woman’s voice playfully interjecting, “Learn a little about the world, why don’t you?”

  Before Robin can ask who Annie is, Clark says, “This is what happens when you date a younger woman, she keeps you on your toes,” and then Annie says something else that Robin can’t make out, though there’s an unmistakable intimacy in her tone.

  He feels swarmed by conflicting reactions: startled that his father is dating someone, perplexed by the offhand way in which this is being announced, and vaguely bothered by the idea of a “younger woman.” Exactly how young?

  As if registering the break in the conversation, Clark says, “So, tell me, what the heck’s going on? Your mother called me—”

  “She called you?” This is not a common occurrence.

  “She was in Paramus,” and here his voice drops tentatively, “at the grave.”

  “Right, because today…is the day.”

  “And she wanted to know, did I hear from your sister, because there was some talk of Ruby going to the cemetery, too.” Clark breathes heavily, and in a noticeably shakier voice, he says, “I gotta tell you, Robin, I couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t get myself there. That tombstone and the ground and…”

  This, too, catches Robin off guard. The nakedness of it. “That’s OK, Dad. I mean, I don’t like going there, either.”

  “Well, sure. The memories.” Clark recedes, and Robin decides to just wait to let him recover. “So, no word from your sister?”

  OK. Here you go. “That’s why I’m calling you. I’m in Seaside Heights—”

  “You are?”

  “I’m with Calvin.”

  “Calvin. Yeah, doesn’t sound like she’s too happy with him.”

  “Ruby said that?”

  “Dorothy did. Your sister doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Robin says, “Well, he called me, because she left this party, and she didn’t come home, and he hasn’t seen Ruby since around midnight last night.”

  “Midnight? Yesterday?” There’s a shuffle on the end of the line; his father is standing up, moving away from the TV.

  “We’re trying to figure out where she went. We’ve been, sorta, retracing her steps.”

  “You talk to the police?”

  “That’s probably what I should do. She might have gone off with this guy—”

  “What guy?”

  “A boy from the party.”

  Clark raises his voice. “I don’t understand why you waited this long—”

  “Well, I used to disappear on you and Mom, and I always turned up.” Robin immediately understands that this was not the right thing to say; he meant it as a bit of levity. In the silence that follows, the gravity of the situation tugs at him, and he feels suddenly ashamed. He’s been handling this all wrong, ever since Calvin’s first phone call this morning. He’s been taking it on himself, instead of getting help. He isn’t up to this responsibility. You’ve made it all worse.

  Clark says quietly, “Go to the police. Or call them. Have them meet you.”

  “OK,” Robin says.

  “And then call me again. I’ll deal with your mother.”

  “OK.”

  “Call me soon, whatever you find out,” Clark says.

  It’s only then that Robin remembers that today is Father’s Day, but it’s too late to say anything, because Clark has hung up.

  When she looks up to the black sky, she can no longer find the moon. She has lost all sense of time since they left the beach. By now it must be Sunday, a new day on the calendar, though she feels herself deep in the middle of the same endless night, as if floating far out in the dark ocean, all civilization—life as she knows it—left behind.

  Chris, at the wheel of the BMW, brakes suddenly, shouts “Holy fuck,” and Ruby is yanked back into the moment. A dumbstruck boy stares through the windshield, red-rimmed eyes and slack jaw. A startled drunk, awash in their headlights. He mutters something she can’t hear through the glass and gives them the finger. Chris steers around as the guy stumbles away, another Seaside Heights party casualty trying to find his way to bed. A reminder that they are nearly back at the center of town, at the boardwalk.

  “I think it’s just a few more blocks up ahead,” Ruby says.

  It was her idea to go to the Surfside Motel. Earlier tonight, the sign out front advertised vacancies. It seemed worth a try.

  But now, nearly there, the suggestion seems almost sacrilegious. To walk through the door with Chris, when her memories of the place were of her family on vacation—all five of them, all those years ago, intact—she might as well be taking h
im back to Greenlawn to have sex in her parents’ bed.

  As they approach the front desk she can tell right away something is off. The small lobby smells too strongly of cigarettes, and beneath that, the musty wetness of mildew. A stoned-looking guy—he’d be right at home at the Deadhead party next to Alice’s—stands behind the desk staring at a small television with a horror movie on it. A man with a chainsaw pursues a screaming girl until she hurls herself from an open window to the ground far below. The Deadhead asks them if they want to look at the room before they pay. Chris says, “I’m sure it’s fine,” but there is something in the way the guy pauses, as if to allow them a chance to reconsider, that makes Ruby speak up.

  “Actually, I’d like to see it.”

  He leads them down a corridor, a tunnel of dingy yellow light. There is noise from behind doors—music, laughter, gleeful screams. It’s like the party at Alice’s all over again. The guy stops and swings open a door, and her gaze immediately lands on an air conditioner across the room, missing a cover, its mechanical guts exposed, duct tape fixing its edges to a grimy window. A stained couch has a slash in it, revealing the foamy stuffing. One of the pillows on the bed doesn’t have a case. The other has a cream-colored stain the size of a dinner plate. “The bathroom’s through there,” the guy says, though she doesn’t make a move. What would be the point? Reflexively, she turns back to the guy at the door, as if to gauge how he is reacting to her. He pulls some kind of rag out of his back pocket—she had seen him grab it as he left the front desk, and now she knows why. He swats at the wall. She sees a dark, narrow spot go scurrying down toward the floor.

  “Was that a roach?” she asks.

  “Water beetle,” he says. He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one.

  She looks at Chris, incredulous. She can’t read his face. Blank. She wants him to be outraged.

  Ruby says, “I stayed here when I was a little kid, and it wasn’t like this.”

  The Deadhead says, “There’s one more empty room, if you wanna check it out.”

  “But this is the better one, right?” Ruby asks. “Or you would have shown us that one first?”