Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Oh, stop scaring her,” Robin’s boss said. “Look at her—she’s blue around the gills already.”

  “I am like fun,” Robin said, but she went into the small employee bathroom and studied her reflection.

  She began feeling nauseated in the mornings, as if she were seasick. The dog padded after her, concerned, rubbing up against her bare legs until she shivered. She missed one period and then another, and then she went to the free clinic over on Horatio Street and waited three hours to see a doctor. The doctor looked at her wedding band, but he didn’t really believe she was married, because she was so young. He said he wanted her to tell him the truth. He kept smiling, sympathetic, waiting, and before she left he gave her pamphlets—“Abortion, the Right Choice” and “Giving Your Baby Up for Adoption.” “You think about it,” he told her, but she crumpled the pamphlets in her hand and stuffed them into the trash on her way out.

  She knew Douglas. He’d do what was right. He’d let her have the baby and he’d love it because that was what fathers were supposed to do. The thing that worried her lately, though, was whether or not he’d love her. He had gotten even more distant. Angry when she called him at work to ask if he wanted string beans or limas for dinner, to tell him she missed him in just the two hours he had been gone. “God, can’t you do anything by yourself?” he asked her when she trailed him on his walks, when she wanted to come with him to the tennis courts and watch him hit balls. At night he turned from her when she woke him up wanting to make love. She stroked his penis, but he said he needed his sleep. Uneasy, she touched his belly. “Just tell me what you want,” she whispered.

  “Maybe what I want is just something you don’t have,” he said, punching down his pillow. “I gotta sleep,” he said, rolling from her, leaving her reaching her hands out into the darkness for the dog, for whatever comfort she could find.

  She told herself there was plenty of time to tell him about the baby. She fought her unease by concentrating on the life inside of her, by letting the baby carry her through her days. She talked to it the same way she talked to the dog, so that whenever she was telling the baby how pretty California was, describing the sky and the trees, the dog would perk up his ears and bark happily. She developed a habit of keeping one hand on her stomach, so that her boss began asking her if she had eaten something that didn’t agree with her.

  “No,” she said, smiling, secretive, “I’m okay.”

  “Well, cut that out, then,” he told her. “It isn’t good for business to have you always looking like you got a funny taste in your mouth.”

  It was two days later when the dog started whining and carrying on. “We ought to just get rid of him,” Douglas said, brushing dog hair off his jacket, heading for the door.

  “Oh, we should not,” said Robin, stooping to try to pet the dog, who cowered from her, bunching himself up under the table. She left him a dish of hamburger meat to tempt him, a clean bowl of water, and then she went to work, and when she came home, she couldn’t find him anywhere.

  “Hey, Toby!” she called, clapping her hands. She checked the loose back window the dog sometimes used to get out of the house. She checked under the beds. She went into the kitchen again to make herself a cup of tea, to calm herself down. She was just about to pour herself a second cup when the whole apartment suddenly started to vibrate.

  Robin grabbed the edge of the table, but it shook in her hand; it rattled the teacup and saucer right off the edge so they smashed into pieces, so the tea slid and stained the floor. She crouched down, terrified, beneath the table, holding on to the legs, trying to remember what you were supposed to do, and around her the cups rattled and fell from the shelves, the paperback books she had amassed rained down from on top of the dresser, from the cabinets. When she dared to glance up and saw the stove shivering in place, she started crying. She tried to place her hands on her stomach, to comfort the baby, to comfort herself, but she couldn’t feel anything inside of her, and for the first time she didn’t feel she was any child of danger at all, she didn’t feel safe or reckless, she didn’t feel anything but absolutely and terrifyingly alone. She started crying harder, dipping her body as low to the floor as she could, and then, almost as soon as the tremor started, it stopped.

  She wouldn’t get up from under the table. Gradually, she heard voices outside, steps in the building, and nervous spurts of laughter. Slowly, she started to unpeel herself and stood up.

  She looked around the studio, keeping one hand braced along the wall. Other than the smashed plates and glasses, there wasn’t much damage. If you didn’t know what had happened, you might just have thought there had been a fight going on, people throwing things out of rage.

  She made herself move to the phone to call Douglas. She made the principal call him out of class, and as soon as she heard his voice, she started crying again. “Hey, hey,” Douglas said. “Come on, it was just a tremor.” He told her they hadn’t even stopped class for it. He tried to cheer her up by telling her how all his students made fun of it, how they called it a “tourist quake” meant to impress anyone not smart enough to know it was nothing at all.

  “I don’t care about that,” she said. “Come home.”

  She didn’t clean up anything. She wanted him to see how terrible it had been for her. She sat quietly under the table, and when she remembered, she got up and called for the dog.

  Douglas didn’t come home until four, his usual time, and as soon as he saw her face, and the apartment, he took her in his arms and rocked her; he made her come and sit on the sofa bed with him.

  “Listen, I just couldn’t leave. I had to take over another class, and then I had to give a test.”

  “But I asked you,” she said.

  He was silent for a minute, and then he looked at her and told her that was the trouble, she was always asking, and he couldn’t keep answering her the way she wanted. She was too young and he was too tired of it. “I think we should get you back home,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “you don’t think that one bit.”

  “I do,” he said. “I must have been crazy running away with a student, thinking it would work. And now that we’re out here, I see how things are, I see how they’ll get.”

  “You love me,” she said. “I know you do.”

  He put his head in his hands, pushed his hair back with his fingers. When he looked up at her, his face was crumpled. “Look at you,” he said. “You should have a high-school diploma. You should be thinking about college.”

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know at all.” She stood up, suddenly fueled by anger. She plucked up her sweater from the floor, still damp from the tea that had spilled across it. “Who says?” she said. He started telling her something about the rent being paid up for the whole month, about his staying someplace else, but she concentrated on the sound the lock made as she opened it, on the sudden sharp slam of the door against him.

  There was a note when she got back home, wrapped about $250 in cash. “Go home, Robin,” it said. There was an address, too, one of the cheaper hotels in the city and a phone number. He didn’t come back, but the dog did, two days later, wagging his tail. He wouldn’t eat the food she set out for him. “Traitor,” she said, thinking he must have let someone else feed him, must have let someone else wrap their arms about his neck and hold him close. She cleaned the studio. She left the sofa bed open all the time for the dog to sleep on, and she began working later hours so she wouldn’t have to come home and see just how alone she was.

  She began to be scared about having a baby, about having to take care of it and raise it. She wished she could get back one of those pamphlets about adoption, about abortion. Douglas would hate her for doing either; he wouldn’t think it right. She kept walking the dog past the clinic, kept thinking how simple it would be to go in again, to have someone tell her exactly what it was she should do, and how she should go about doing it. She thought about the doctor she had seen before, how he had smiled at h
er, and finally, on one of her walks, she stitched up her courage and walked hesitantly toward the door.

  Just as she reached it, a woman sprang up in front of her, jabbing a pamphlet at her. Robin took it automatically, reaching one hand for the door. “Read it,” the woman said, unsmiling. “You take yourself a good long look.” Robin glanced at the pamphlet. On the front was a color picture of a baby, swaddled in a bloody towel, stuffed into a trashcan. “Abortion is murder,” the woman told Robin. She lifted up one hand, perhaps to make a point, and the dog gave a sudden wild bark, making her step back, alarmed, giving Robin time to turn around and bolt.

  She and the dog ran all the way home. He thought it was a game and didn’t want to stop when they finally got there, but kept frisking about her, yapping, tugging at her shorts, until she burst into tears. She sat down on the front steps. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

  She stopped talking to the baby out of terror. She wouldn’t look down at her stomach, wouldn’t place her hand there. “Glad to see that habit stop,” her boss informed her. I’m seventeen, she told herself. I’m seventeen. And all the while her jeans were getting tighter and tighter, her shirts didn’t look right anymore, and at night she dreamed she was giving birth to wild animals, to insects with red, glittering eyes, insects that stung her as soon as they fluttered from her, divesting her of any motherhood she might have felt.

  Sometimes she thought about calling Douglas, asking him what she should do, what was right. And, too, she missed having him in the studio. Without him, there didn’t seem to be a good enough reason to sweep the dust from the corners, to clean the grease from a plate. She showed up at the school one day, but when she saw him walking out, he was taking the arm of a woman who was old enough to be a teacher. She had curly black hair, a green plaid dress that covered her knees, and she was telling Douglas something, leaning toward him, and he was laughing and laughing, delighted. He reached up one hand to brush at something in her hair, and Robin felt her heart cramp. She turned away.

  She didn’t know when it was she started thinking about Dore again. At night sometimes she’d concoct conversations in her head where Dore would tell her exactly what to do, where Dore would hand her a palmful of green herbs that could rid her of a baby in such a way that it would seem the baby had never really been at all.

  She called information and got a whole series of numbers in Boston that might be Dore’s, and then there was one the operator said she couldn’t give her because it was unlisted.

  “That’s the number I need,” Robin said. She begged the operator to call Dore for her. “It’s an emergency,” she begged. “Just give her my number then,” Robin said. “Let her call me.”

  The operator paused. “We’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “But then, I’ve always been a fool, so why break the pattern now? You hang on.”

  Robin was startled when she heard Dore’s voice on the wire, cool, detached. “Your parents are looking for you,” Dore said. “Don’t you think you should contact them?”

  Robin started crying. The dog, curled beside her, looked up expectantly and then curved himself closer to her. “I contacted you,” Robin said.

  “Why?” asked Dore. “To torment me?”

  “I never did that,” Robin said.

  “Oh, please,” Dore said, her voice edging. “And what was that fake name? What was the spying for your mother?” She paused. “I thought we were friends,” she said. “No, that’s not right. I thought we were…more than that—that we were special.”

  “If you had known who I was, you wouldn’t have talked to me,” Robin said. “I was afraid. You were the only one who listened to me, the only one who was there.”

  There was silence for a moment. “I was there,” Dore said. “Sometimes I even kept the phone by the bed because I worried about you at night—I wanted to be sure to get the call if it was you. Every time I went shopping, every time I picked up a sweater, I’d think about how you would look wearing it, how it would get you to smile, how it would make us closer.” She sighed, and when she spoke again, her voice was so soft that Robin had to press the receiver close against her ear to hear. “What is it?” Dore asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I want to come there,” Robin said. “To stay with you. I could keep house for you, do errands.”

  Dore laughed. “You haven’t seen my place recently, have you?”

  Robin was about to blurt out that she was pregnant when Dore interrupted her. “I used to think about your living with me,” Dore said. “If you knew how I rearranged my apartment in my head, how I planned it so there’d be an extra room for you, an extra place at the table. I planned meeds for you. I made you an orphan, just so you could be my daughter, just so Nick and I could adopt you and all be together. God.”

  “I could be your daughter,” Robin said.

  “No,” said Dore. “All we’d be is just two outcasts from the past, that’s all. And anyway, if I were your mother, you know what I’d be doing right now? Letting you go. Pushing you out into the world on your own.”

  “I’ve been out in the world,” Robin said. “And it stinks. Please. You helped me before—”

  “Did I?” Dore said, surprised, thoughtful. “I guess I did. I really did, didn’t I?” She was silent again, and in the silence Robin heard another voice, a man’s voice. “You look like a girl who could use some cookies,” he said, and then his voice dropped down and Dore’s voice wove into it, and then Dore came back to the phone.

  “Who was that?” asked Robin.

  “Not Nick,” Dore said. “That’s all you and I have to know. He’s not Nick.”

  “Are you happy?” Robin asked.

  “Of all my kids, you were the only one who ever asked me questions like that,” Dore said. “I think that’s why you got to me the way you did.” She paused. “Listen, you can’t call me up anymore. It isn’t fair. It just stirs up old pain. You need to get on with your life, the same way I do, and to do that, you just have to let go of the past. You can’t keep trying to replay it, even the good parts.”

  “You hate me,” Robin said.

  “Who said I hate you?” Dore said. “Oh, maybe. For a little while. But then I let go of it. I forced myself to forget everything I knew or felt about you and your family. It was like going insane for a while, but I’m okay now. I have a life, I have a beginning going toward a center again. And then this call… I don’t know, it touched me, I guess, like you can’t imagine, your calling me now when you don’t have to, not really, when there’s no longer any connection for me with your family, when all this call has to do with is me.

  “Oh, Lord, this is starting to hurt a little, and I really want to hang up before it starts to hurt a lot. Robin, the last thing I can do for you is tell you to go home where you belong. Call your mother. Call Nick, Robin.” There was a pause. “Isn’t that funny?” she said. “That’s the first time I ever called you by your real name. Robin,” she said, and then she hung up, gently, leaving Robin with the phone cradled in her hand, the dog, rolling away from her in his untroubled dog sleep.

  Lost, lost, she thought. Every time she stepped outside the studio, she was sure she wouldn’t be able to find her way back, sure that something terrible was just waiting to happen. She tried to stay with what was familiar. The place where she worked, the streets she knew, the café down the block, so close to her apartment that she could see her whole front window from any of the tables.

  She was sitting at the café one day sipping iced tea, feeding bits of her pastry to the dog, who had settled under the shade of the table. The Great Gatsby was cracked open in front of her. A man suddenly sat down opposite her, waiting. She glanced warily at him. He was older than she was, older than her father, with white hair and a blue sportcoat. “I’d like to be alone,” she said politely.

  “Your parents are looking for you,” he said. “Most people would have given up after two years, but not them.” He paused for a moment. “Now, doesn’t that tell y
ou something?”

  She tensed for a moment, before she remembered to keep her face impassive, to give it the curious bland stare of a stranger caught in a misunderstanding, blameless.

  “You’ve got the wrong person,” she said.

  He shrugged and then pulled out a card and handed it to her. “Detective,” she said. “Well, anyone can get those printed up. I could get one for myself if I wanted.”

  “Robin,” he said. “Your parents gave me pictures of you. They gave me the fingerprints taken when you were a baby because your father was worried you’d get stolen. I asked a whole lot of the right questions to trail you here.”

  “That’s not my name,” she said. She held up the gold band she hadn’t been able to take from her finger. “Mrs. Douglas Nylon,” she said.

  He sighed, fidgeting for something in his pocket, pulling out a stubby yellow pencil, a scrap of paper. “I’m not a cop,” he said. “As much as I’d like to, I can’t force you to go home.” He scribbled something on the paper.

  He handed her the paper. “It’s your father’s new address and phone number,” he said. “So you can call if you like, at least to let him know you’re okay.” He put the pencil back in his pocket. “I’m going to tell them you’re okay. Why should they worry, right?”

  Robin stood up, tugging on the dog’s leash. “You don’t even know if I’m Robin,” she said. “Do you?”

  “You took the phone number,” he said, and she flushed, turning from him.

  Robin sat in the muddle of the studio fingering the piece of paper the detective had given her. He must have been Leslie’s idea, she thought, her mother’s surrogate, trailing, spying, a kind of carrion bird feeding on bits of her life. She was furious with Leslie, furious with Nick, too, but for different, more confusing reasons. If he was so concerned about her, why hadn’t he ever shown it before? It was like him, too, to send a detective—to send anyone but himself. She bunched up the paper and threw it against the wall, and then, later, she got up and smoothed it out, folded it in half, like a small, closed mouth, and put it into her purse.