Family

by Caroline Leavitt

  She had to decide what to do. She couldn’t afford to pay for the studio herself, and she couldn’t ask Douglas for money—she couldn’t continue that tie. And then, too, she was sick. She’d been having night fevers. She’d wake up in a damp tangle of sheets, her head on fire. She’d stumble to the freezer and chip out some ice into a plastic bag and put it to her head. She’d fall back into bed, exhausted, and in the morning the sheets would be soaked from the ice and her sweat. “You don’t look too good,” her boss had told her. “Go home. You’re scaring the people with money.” He was trying to be nice, but still, she burst into tears. She had to be calmed down until she finally let herself be put into a cab home, where she immediately fell asleep.

  The dog kept away from her, which was the thing that scared her the most. And she began to be frightened about the baby again. Maybe the baby was making her sick, maybe God was punishing her for some terrible defect. Or maybe her sickness was killing the baby. The next day she went to the library and looked up pictures of fetuses. What was inside her looked no larger than an insect. She closed the books, dizzy. She couldn’t have a baby. Not at seventeen. She couldn’t be pregnant. She was afraid to go back to the clinic and she didn’t have enough money for a proper doctor in a clean white office. She couldn’t go home to Leslie, and Dore wouldn’t have her.

  She took out the piece of paper and looked at Nick’s address in dazed wonder. Madison. What was he doing there? She could show up on his doorstep and he’d have to take her in. She thought about the whole scenario, and even as she felt her anger freshening, getting sharper, there was something else, too—an undercurrent of longing relief at having someone else telling her what she should do, someone else knowing what was right, taking control.

  SIXTEEN

  Nick never expected Robin to appear. When he thought of her, he thought of a phone call in the small hours of the night, and the voice he heard was always the detective’s, not hers, telling him where she was, how she was, and where she was going. She wouldn’t want to see him. At first, when Clarkson was narrowing her whereabouts down from state to state, Nick had planned to go down there. He thought he could charm her back to him by making dinner reservations for two, by sending her tickets to the ballet and showing up himself. But she was never in one state for very long, according to the detective, and then, when he thought about the reservations, he began to think of himself waiting for her at an empty table while his stomach kicked and growled. He saw himself watching a ballet with an empty seat beside him, not letting anyone from the cheaper seats move down into it, even during the last ten minutes, because there was still a chance she might show up. He always thought of seeing her, but he never thought of it as long-term—he never thought he had the right. He’d take her to dinner and then put her on a plane back to Leslie, back where she belonged.

  He sometimes wrote letters to her, but he didn’t really know what to say to her, and he didn’t know where to mail them, and it usually ended up making him feel that much more alone.

  His one comfort was Madison. He was surprised at the way he was falling in love with the town, the way he was beginning to feel as if he had finally found the place where he belonged. He loved the muggy, still heat of the summer; the bats by the capitol dome and in his attic; the foamy detergent frothing at the edge of one of the lakes. He knew his neighbors and they liked him well enough to invite him to dinner, to come by with tins of home-baked chocolate cookies or potted red geraniums for his windows because they looked too bare. He was kidded about being fixed up, he was told about four sisters, each of them prettier than the next, but no one pushed, no one asked about the photographs of three different women in his house, and when he got strange and silent, they let him be.

  The bookstore, too, gave him more pleasure than he could have imagined. Jack, who had been threatening to retire for years, finally decided enough might be enough. He was going to get a couple of dogs, maybe a cat, and just stay home. He told Nick not to worry, that his job was as secure as any man could ever hope for, and that the new owner was a man he’d respect as much as Jack did. “I’ll be around to visit,” Jack told him. The day he left, Nick took him out to dinner at L’Héritage, an expensive new French restaurant, and when he handed Jack his present, a leather-bound blank book, Jack handed him a sealed white envelope. “What’s this, my walking papers?” Nick asked, and then he unfolded the paper and saw that the shop had been deeded over to him. “Who else was I going to leave it to?” Jack said. “My cat?”

  Nick closed the shop for two weeks so he could take down all the books, dust the shelves, and put things in the order he wanted. He bought a few cheap, comfortable chairs so people could sit down and read if they wanted. He bought a small stereo so he could play Vivaldi and Bach while people browsed. He turned it on as soon as he opened the shop mornings, flooding the rooms with sound, stopping his routine to conduct or to just stand still and listen to some passage of eerie beauty. He didn’t change the name of the shop, and he didn’t do anything to the floors or the walls other than to rewax and repaint. And only sometimes at night did he wake, panicking, realizing that he owned something named for a woman who had been more loved than most people could even imagine; that he loved the shop, too, and that now it had a claim on him: Now he would have to stay in one place—he couldn’t run.

  He was home from work, exhausted, wanting only to make himself some supper and go to sleep, when the bell rang. He smoothed down the rumples in his shirt, and then he opened the door, and there was Robin, her skin yellow, a big, dirty-looking dog growling beside her.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said defiantly.

  He made her come inside; he backed away from her, half-afraid that if he turned for one moment, she might disappear again. He wanted to touch her, to grasp her to him, but when he moved, she flinched.

  He made her sit on the couch, but she wouldn’t tell him where she had been, by whom she was pregnant, or how she had found him. He felt a quick buckling of irritation at the detective, who should have known, who should have called.

  “You look terrible,” he said.

  “I know how I look,” she said.

  He stooped down toward her. He wanted to place his forehead against hers to see if she had fever, the way he used to watch Leslie do so many times when Robin was little. Later, when Robin was older, when she insisted on a thermometer because it was more adult, he had seen what that had done to Leslie’s face. She’d go and get it, but not before she dipped down and felt her daughter’s head anyway, pretending to be very clinical about it. It was as much of a hug as Robin allowed in those days, so Leslie was always feeling her head, as much as she could get away with.

  Nick hesitated, then put his hand out and touched Robin’s forehead. “Hot,” he said.

  He brought her herb tea. “Listen, we’ve got to get you well first,” he said.

  She blinked at him. “First?” she asked, but she slumped back against the couch, and after a time she slept.

  He sat by her, just watching, just making sure she was really there, and when she woke up, she seemed dazed. She kept looking around.

  He fixed up the spare room for her. He made her a supper she barely touched. Sometimes the mad flutter of the bats trapped in the attic above her would wake her and he’d make a show of getting the broom and going upstairs to swat at them, but he never really did, because he knew it would just make them crazier. He’d stand outside the small musty attic for a few minutes and bang the broom around, just loud enough so Robin could hear it. When he came downstairs, she lifted herself up on one elbow and sleepily thanked him. Later, he took the broom and went up to the attic again, just so he could come back down and collect the look washing across her face.

  She was asleep for the night when he called Leslie to tell her Robin was really there, Robin was really okay. “I can catch the next plane,” Leslie said, and he felt himself brighten, but then she stopped herself. “Oh, God, who am I kidding?” she said. “She’d hate that. If s
he knew I was coming, she’d be gone before I even got there.” Leslie sighed. “Listen, will you tell her for me that I love her? Tell her you called me, and tell her…tell her it’s okay if she doesn’t want to call me back right now.”

  “It’s not okay,” Nick said.

  “Tell her anyway,” Leslie said.

  She wanted to know how Robin was, where she had been—all the details that Nick didn’t know. He told her Robin would probably open up once she felt a little better, and that he would call the detective. He didn’t tell her Robin was pregnant.

  “I’d love to see you,” Nick said, but when Leslie spoke, her voice was bitter.

  “Do you think for one moment that I would be calling you if it weren’t for Robin?” Leslie said. “I want her home, but I wish what happened with Robin would happen to you. I wish you would disappear. I wish you would stop being real.”

  “I loved you,” Nick said. “I love you.”

  “What do you know about it?” Leslie said, and then she hung up.

  Nick sat down. It wasn’t over with her. Not yet. She’d call him as long as Robin was here. He was the bridge she needed to travel to get to her daughter. It might still be all right.

  He went to check on Robin, who was still sleeping, and then he came back into the kitchen, made himself coffee, and sat down to think. He wanted to call Dore. He had had her number for a while now. The detective had jotted it down when he had gone to ask her questions about Robin, and he had passed it along to Nick, whose sole reason for not dialing it the second it was in his hands was knowing just how much Dore would resent him for intruding upon her, for spying. But it was different now. Robin was here with him. And he somehow wanted Dore to know that. As soon as she answered, he said, “Robin’s here, she’s fine,” so she wouldn’t hang up on him.

  “She’s safe then,” Dore said, relieved,

  “Would you like to see her?” Nick asked.

  Dore was silent for a moment. “That’s not very fair,” she said. “You think that I wouldn’t? That I wouldn’t mind seeing you, either? What I want and what I’m going to do are two different things.” She was silent again.

  “You could come anytime,” Nick said. “You could risk it.”

  “You know how some people believe in reincarnation?” Dore said. “Some of my kids do. They have all these crazy Edgar Cayce books and they try to hypnotize each other in study hall so they can get back into whatever past lives they’re sure they’ve had.” She laughed, and Nick laughed, too.

  “Well,” she said, “sometimes I feel as though I’ve been reincarnated three times just in this one stupid life—that I’ve had three lives, all of them different, and all of them defined by you. One before I met you; one when we were living in the trailer, when we were happy; and now I’m starting my third life, without you. And you can’t mesh different lives—that’s how come people supposedly forget who they were in the past. It’s a safety valve, it protects you.”

  “Dore,” Nick said, “we’re not talking about kids’ theories—”

  “I know what we’re talking about,” Dore said. “And it hurts. I don’t know how you got my number, but please, please, don’t call anymore. I’m glad you called about Robin, because I would have worried, but I don’t want to hear any more about you. I’m in another life now. I’m getting as happy as I can again.”

  “My phone number is 608-775-6681. Madison, Wisconsin,” Nick said.

  “Goodbye, Nick,” she said, very gently, and she hung up.

  He felt lost in the sudden still of the house, and he automatically picked up the receiver and dialed Rory Clarkson. He told the detective that Robin has shown up at his doorstep. Clarkson didn’t seem surprised. He said he’d found her two days ago and decided to give her a few days to go home on her own. He’d had a hunch she would, seeing how things were with her.

  “What things?” Nick asked.

  Clarkson said he’d found Robin in California, living with her old science teacher, a man named Douglas Nylon. The two had split up and she was clearly scared. “I gave her your number, and she took it.”

  “You should have called me the second you saw her. You should have let me know,” Nick said. “What the hell kind of a detective are you?”

  “I guess not yours any longer,” Clarkson said. He told Nick he’d mail out the report right away, and if Nick ever needed him again, he knew how to get in touch.

  “I won’t need you,” Nick said.

  He felt empty. He went to sit down beside Robin. She was here, but she wasn’t, not really, and he had this overwhelming feeling that he had lost everything he possibly could. He reached out and took Robin’s hand, and she woke, startled. She roughly pulled her hand from his. He didn’t care. He reached for her hand again; he told her how glad he was that she was there.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “How about love for a reason?”

  She sat up, kicking the blanket from her. “As soon as I’m okay, I’m leaving,” she said, her eyes serious.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll help you get well.”

  She didn’t talk to him much. Not at first. She never berated him for hiring a detective to follow her; she never asked if he was calling Leslie with news of her, if he had called Dore. And because of that, he in turn never approached her with what he knew about her running away, her California life. He gave her her secrecy, her distance, out of a kind of respect, and, too, because he didn’t feel he had any right to pry.

  She was suspicious about him. She stiffened when the phone rang. When the paperboy came to the door, she went into a back room. She couldn’t help going through the mail, sifting through Nick’s bills and sweepstakes offers, peering anxiously at the names she didn’t know.

  When she finally approached him about helping her find a free clinic because she needed to do something about the baby, he shook his head. “We’ll get you a private doctor,” he said.

  “I don’t have that kind of money,” she said, so seriously he almost laughed.

  “I do,” he said.

  She dug her hands into the pockets of her jeans, swaying on the heels of her sneakers, and then suddenly she started to cry. “I don’t want to have this baby,” she said. “I do and I don’t. I do and I can’t,” she said, and this time, when he touched her, she let herself lean against him.

  “I know how it is,” he told her, and then she pulled away, averting her face.

  At night he sat up, just listening to her soft prowling about her room, the scrape of furniture being moved, the opening and closing of the sticking drawers. He kept thinking about her. She couldn’t sleep either. It would be easy enough to walk past her room on some pretext, needing water, wanting a cool shower because the house was so hot. He could knock on her door and tell her he was making iced coffee and would she like some? He could knock just because he was her father. He sat up straighter in bed, but he didn’t get up. He kept thinking, thinking. His baby having a baby. His baby losing a baby, choosing to lose it. It made him half-mad, and sometimes, very late at night, just before the sun shimmered into the sky, it made him see Susan, reborn in the shadows just under his door, always disappearing into mist as soon as he stretched out his hand.

  He thought about Robin’s California life. He tried to piece it together. What the hell kind of a man was this Douglas Nylon, leaving Robin to struggle with this on her own? What the hell kind of father? He felt like phoning him and yelling. He thought of all the ways you could harm someone—the curses, the mad violence you might do. He could see him in jail if he wanted to put Robin through that, if he wanted to risk her running away. And then he thought, well, who was he to talk? Who was he to judge anyone?

  He never slept until the noises from Robin’s room stopped, and even then he drifted, and in the morning, when the alarm bolted him awake, he sometimes felt as if he were still dreaming.

  It took him only two days to set up an appointment with a doctor for Robin. He thought a woman might make her more comfortable,
but he didn’t know whom to get, whom to even ask for referrals. He didn’t want to tell his daughter’s business to his neighbors or his staff; he didn’t want her to feel her privacy was invaded. So he went to the library one morning while Robin slept and he leafed through the reference books on doctors. He picked out the ones affiliated with hospitals, the ones who had gone to the best schools, the ones who were young. When he finally narrowed his choice to Elizabeth Nagle, it wasn’t just because of her credentials, but because she listed that she coached tennis, and it reminded him of Leslie’s mother, and he saw it as a good omen.

  He drove Robin to Dr. Nagle’s office for her first visit, prepared for a battle about his coming into the waiting room with her. But she didn’t fight him. She stood outside in the sun, scared, blinking, waiting for him to follow.

  He felt funny in the waiting room. It was painted bright pink, and taped all over the walls were crayoned drawings by children, self-portraits that an adult hand had carefully signed each child’s name to. There were other women in the room: one swelling with child, her hands folded over her stomach; another woman, long and lean, nipping kisses at the man seated beside her. Everyone looked up at Nick and Robin. Robin, in blue jeans and dirty white sneakers, selfconsciously flinched down into one of the red leatherette chairs.

  It didn’t take long. Elizabeth Nagle came out herself to greet each patient, her pale brown hair in a lank ponytail, a white doctor’s coat thrown over a brilliant red jumpsuit. She called Robin Mrs. Nylon, which made Robin start. Dr. Nagle acted as if having a pregnant seventeen-year-old in her office was perfectly normal, and when Robin stood up, Dr. Nagle gently placed one hand on her shoulder. “We’ll just do some talking today, do a quick exam,” the doctor said. Robin turned back to look at Nick, her eyes haunted, before she disappeared behind the door with the doctor, and it was all he could do not to get up and follow her.